Instead of living under a dictatorship of one man, we have a dictatorship of a majority manipulated by Hollywood, the mainstream media, and obscure elites.
Reviewed by Anthony Hilton
Many of us remember getting the message about Social Darwinism during the Franz Boas-dominated second half of the 20th Century. According to Boasians, the behavior of humans is remarkably exempt from biological forces and is instead governed mainly by social constructs. Thus humans can achieve utopian peacefulness and universal altruism by developing the appropriate cultural mores. In contrast, Social Darwinism was the idea that nature was “red in tooth and claw,” so that we might as well go along with it, along with all the other animals, and be as ruthless as we like: kill, kill, kill!! Ruthlessness would be a natural, thoroughly acceptable lifestyle since it is part of what we inherit rather than learn, and it would be unnatural to keep trying to override such built-in tendencies. If we inherited them, they must be adaptive and therefore good.
But the social learning advocates explained to us that just because, say, a tornado, was natural didn’t mean we had to like it. That would be the flawed logic of confounding the empirical with the moral — confusing “what is” with “what should be.”
It was also pointed out that much of Darwinian evolution occurs not through bloody battles but via such non-violent processes as mutations for, say, better digestion of milk in adulthood and better immune systems. No “red in tooth and claw” there. “Survival of the fittest” was declared a tautology, meaning only that those organisms that ended up having the most surviving and reproducing offspring were, in modern biology’s jargon, the “fittest” — but only because “fittest” no longer meant that the “fittest” somehow deserved to survive, or might be expected to survive, but only that they in fact did survive.
The book under review, Might Is Right…, (MIR), would certainly be considered by many to be the reductio ad absurdum of 19th-century Social Darwinism. “Ragnar Redbeard” (RR) was evidently greatly enamored of Darwin’s theory of natural selection including sexual selection (in which choice of mate by both males and females influences which genes are propagated) despite the fact that he, like Darwin, could not have known about genes or modern molecular biology. Nevertheless he manifested an intuitive understanding of one important modern term, “inclusive fitness”: “A man’s family is … part of himself. Therefore his natural business is to defend it, as he would his own life” (p. 49).