IMPACT OF SOCIAL DARWINISM ON GEOGRAPHY

IMPACT OF SOCIAL DARWINISM ON GEOGRAPHY

                                                                                                                                Laltanpuia

                                                                                                                                Roll No. – 22
                                                                                                                                M.Sc
                                                                                                                                Dept. Of Geography
                                                                                                                                Mizoram University

Social Darwinism is an ideology of society that seeks to apply biological concepts of Darwinism or of evolutionary theory to sociology and politics, often with the assumption that conflict between groups in society leads to social progress as superior groups out compete inferior ones. The term Darwinism had been coined by Thomas Henry Huxley in his April 1860 review of On the Origin of Species, and by the 1870s it was used to describe a range of concepts of evolutionism or development, without any specific commitment to Charles Darwin's own theory. The first use of the phrase "social Darwinism" was in Joseph Fisher's 1877 article on The History of Landholding in Ireland which was published in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. Fisher was commenting on how a system for borrowing livestock which had been called "tenure" had led to the false impression that the early Irish had already evolved or developed land tenure. Despite the fact that Social Darwinism bears Charles Darwin's name, it is also linked today with others, notably Herbert Spencer, Thomas Malthus, and Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics. In fact, Spencer was not described as a social Darwinist until the 1930s, long after his death. Darwin himself gave serious consideration to Galton's work, but considered the ideas of "hereditary improvement" impractical. Aware of weaknesses in his own family, Darwin was sure that families would naturally refuse such selection and wreck the scheme. He thought that even if compulsory registration was the only way to improve the human race, this illiberal idea would be unacceptable, and it would be better to publicize the "principle of inheritance" and let people decide for themselves.

Herbert Spencer, a 19th century philosopher, promoted the idea of Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism is an application of the theory of natural selection to social, political, and economic issues. In its simplest form, Social Darwinism follows the mantra of "the strong survive," including human issues. This theory was used to promote the idea that the white European race was superior to others, and therefore, destined to rule over them. At the time that Spencer began to promote Social Darwinism, the technology, economy, and government of the "White European" was advanced in comparison to that of other cultures. Looking at this apparent advantage, as well as the economic and military structures, some argued that natural selection was playing out, and that the race more suited to survival was winning. Some even extended this philosophy into a micro-economic issue, claiming that social welfare programs that helped the poor and disadvantaged were contrary to nature itself. Those who reject any and all forms of charity or governmental welfare often use arguments rooted in Social Darwinism.

The name Social Darwinism is a modern name given to the various theories of society that emerged in England and the United States in the 1870s, which, it is alleged, sought to apply biological concepts to sociology and politics. The term social Darwinism gained widespread currency when used in 1944 to oppose these earlier concepts. Today, because of the negative connotations of the theory of social Darwinism, especially after the atrocities of the Second World War (including the Holocaust), few people would describe themselves as Social Darwinist and the term is generally seen as pejorative. In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex of 1882, Darwin described how medical advances meant that the weaker were able to survive and have families, and as he commented on the effects of this, he cautioned that hard reason should not override sympathy and considered how other factors might reduce the effect.

At its worst, the implications of Social Darwinism were used as scientific justification for the Holocaust. The Nazis claimed that the murder of Jews in World War II was an example of cleaning out the inferior genetics. Many philosophers noted evolutionary echoes in Hitler's march to exterminate an entire race of people. Various other dictators and criminals have claimed the cause of Social Darwinism in carrying out their acts. Even without such actions, Social Darwinism has proven to be a false and dangerous philosophy. Scientists and evolutionists maintain that this interpretation is only loosely based on Darwin's theory of natural selection. They will admit to an obvious parallel between Darwin's theory of Natural Selection and Spencer's beliefs. In nature, the strong survive and those best suited to survival will out-live the weak. According to Social Darwinism, those with strength (economic, physical, technological) flourish and those without are destined for extinction.
It is important to note that Darwin did not extend his theories to a social or economic level, nor are any credible evolutionists subscribing to the theories of Social Darwinism. Herbert Spencer's philosophy is only loosely based on the premises of Darwin's work. However, according to evolutionary theory, nature is a "kill-or-be-killed" system. Those that cannot keep up are either left behind or cut off. If evolution, through chance, is solely responsible for life as we now know it, why should that process be countered? If "survival of the fittest" or "kill or be killed" cannot apply in what we define as "decent society," then, which is wrong, society or evolution? If neither, then how do we explain morality, charity, and compassion? Why drain resources from the strong to support the weak? Certainly, we should be charitable and help those in need. Though Darwin did not promote Social Darwinism, basic evolutionary theory raises some nagging questions.

 

IMPACT ON GEOGRAPHY

In geography, Darwinism was interpreted primarily as evolution, in the sense of a “continuous process of change in a temporal prospective long enough to produce a series of transformation”. Darwin was primarily concerned with the mechanism of the change or, As the Origin was subtitled, ‘The Preservation of Favoured Races In the struggle for life’. This ‘Element Of struggle’ was applied in a deterministic way, particularly in human geography, at about the same period. In both physical and human geography, supposedly Darwinian ideas were applied in an 18^th rather than in 19^th century fashion, and geographers were still applying essentially Newtonian views of causation well into the 28^th Century. The Darwinian evolution seemed to have provided fresh incentive to concepts of biological origin which take back to Ritter and before, and the subsequent development of ecology led to new insights in some branches of geographical scholarship.

Stoddart (1965) suggests that the following four main themes from Darwin’s work are to be taken as significant to the contemporary geographical thought from biology.

1.      the idea of change through time or evolution;

2.      the idea of organisation and ecology;

3.      the ideas of selection and struggle;

4.      the randomness or chance character of variations in nature.

1.                  The Idea of change through time or evolution: The strongest and the most explicit impact of the idea of change through time or evolution was in the study of landforms, a field in which Darwin had work during the “Beagle Years” when he developed his famous ‘subsistence theory’ regarding the coral reef formation. The initial deduction and subsequent development of this theory closely resembles the later development of Darwin’s biological ideas and it could serve as the archetype for the ‘cyclic’ ideas later developed in geomorphology. Though Huxley wrote on the new subject of ‘physiography’ in the 1870s, but it was W.M Davis who considered evolution to be the source of his inspiration in the idea of the geographical cycle.

In his first article on the development of landforms, Davis referred to a cycle of life and used such term as birth, youth, maturity and old age, and which he channelised into the restricted field of denudation chronology (Sauer, 1925, 32). Closely similar views were being developed at about the same time in plant geography and particularly in ecology. Plant ecologist and pedologists followed Davis biological analogy for change through time. They have also adopted terms such as ‘infancy’, ‘youth’, ‘maturity’ and ‘old age’ to describe development through time. The botanist Geddes’s work on cities influenced early ideas on ‘urban geography’. Taylor applied developmental principles to the study of race and cultural history and Beaver and others attempted to introduce cyclic ideas into the interpretation of economic landscapes though with little success.

Change through time has been a dominant theme in much geography, particularly in the work of the Barkeley school on the settlement of the American south west and other areas here Sauer’s influence has been a dominant factor and it is interesting that he himself worked at Chicago under Salisbury and Cowles. Another pupil of Cowles, who also studied under Davis and published in both geomorphology and plant geography, was the historical geographer Ogilvie who carried their emphasis on time into regional studies. The influenced of plant ecology and the historical viewpoint was also clear, both in concept and language, as also in Whittleseys’ ideas of sequent occupants in the development of landscape (Stoddart, 1965). 

2.      The idea of organisation and ecology:  Darwin’s second major theme which made significant contribution to geography was the idea of organisation and ecology which dealt with the interrelationships and connection between all living things and their environment. This theme developed in Haeckel’s new science of ecology (Haeckel, 1869). Darwin seemed to have been impressed by the exquisite adaptation and interrelationship of organic forms in nature and the theme of ecology is implicit in many of his writings. Perhaps Darwin’s most significant contribution to ecological thinking was to include Man in the living world of nature. Huxley in his ‘Man’s Place in Nature’ (1863) attended tempted to show how man had amphatically become a subject for scientific speculation, and Darwin treated modern man on the same level as other living things.

             The term ‘ecology’ was used by Haeckel in 1869 and from about 1910 ‘human ecology’ was used for the study of man and environment not in a deterministic sense but for man’s place on the web of life or the economy of nature. Park defined the scope of human ecology as dealing with the web of life, the balance of nature, concepts of competition, dominance and succession, biological economics and symbiosis- all concepts taken from plants and animal ecology (Stoddart, 1965, 58). Human ecology seemed to have investigated the process involved in biotic balance in which “man interacts with nature through culture and technology”.

            For Barrows, “geography is the science of human ecology”, Geography will aim to make clear the relationships existing between natural environments and the distribution and activities of man, the centre of geography is the study of human ecology in specific areas. Ecology has, however become increasingly empirical in method. In doing so, it has run counter to, and superseded, the synthetic geographical tradition of explanation by analogy, which attempted to understand the complexity of living organisms, in geography as a whole the organism analogy operated on three distinct levels- those of earth, its regions and its states- and on each level it uses long predates of the Darwinian theory. The idea of the organic unity of the earth basically manifested the Ritterian tradition in geography, because to him, the earth was an organism, with a divine intent, to fit the needs of man to perfection.

            For both Ritter and Humboldt, unity, harmony and interdependence of parts constituted the organic analogy. Half a century later Vidal De La Blache arrived at a similar conclusion and recognised his debt to Ritter both at the earth and at the regional level (Stoddart, 1965). The major objection to the organic approach in geography is methodological, for it is a synthetic notion which gives no assistance in actual investigation, and is an essentially ideographic concept in an increasingly homothetic science. The concept is thus reduced to a metaphor of dubious value, hinging on gross formal and functional comparisons between living matter and complexly interrelated facts in areas, and as such has dropped out of geographic work since 1939, except in occasional mention of Herbertson and Vidal De La Blache.

            3. The ideas of selection and struggle: Darwin’s third major theme, selection and struggle, was much more influential than his other themes as it did lead towards both ‘scientific determinism’ and ‘possibilism’ in the contemporary geographical concepts. The philosophy of selection and struggle seemed to have been based on cause effect relationship, as it talks about the environmental influence, selection and adaptation, depending upon the way of life. Most Darwinian writers on the effect of environment were content to look for cause effect relationships without enquiring too closely into the process the theme of the effects of environment on the course of human activities was taken up by Ratzel in the first volume of Anthopo-Geographie, and later developed by his pupil Miss Semple and Demolins. The theme of ‘selection and struggle’ also found mention, of course in a different manner in the possibilist philosophy of Vidal De La Blache who treated it in the light of the ‘genre de vie’ or the way of life of the people.

            It was in political geography that the theme of ‘selection and struggle’ found its legitimate expression because it led to the ‘increasing space consciousness and conception’ on a national level. In 1896 Ratzel developed his seven laws of the growth of states, from which he derived the powerful concept of ‘lebensraum’. “Just as the struggle for existence in the plant and animal world always centres about a matter of space, so the conflicts of nations are in great part only struggles for territory”. It is clear that the organic analogy for Ratzel not only provided a simple and powerful model in analytical political geography, but also an apparently scientific justification, in Darwinian selection, for political behaviour.

            Mackinder remarked “though the steppe there came from the unknown recesses of Asia, in all the centuries from fifth to the sixteenth, a remarkable succession of Turanian nomadic people, against the settled peoples of Europe. A large part of modern history might be written a commentary upon the changes directly or indirectly ensuing from these raids”. This argument of Mackinder also reveals the idea of struggle and selection on a super-continental level, that the Asiatic nomads attempted to expand their space through a series of raids upon the fringes of the pivot to which they belong.

            Ratzel’s concept of ‘Lebensraum’ and Mackinder’s ‘Heartland’ thesis appeared to have formed a symbiosis which led to the development of the Geopolitik in Europe between 1919 and 1945. The political usage made of the organic view of the state, and the ideas of struggle and Lebensraum, brought the subject into intellectual disgrace in 1930’s, and modern political geography is at pains to dissociate itself from any kind of organic analogy (Stoddart, 1965).

4. The randomness or chance character of variations in nature: The theme of “randomness” or “chance character of variation in nature” appears to have made no significant contribution to the geographical thought. No agreement was reach as to whether variation and development occurred by chance or were determined. Any discussion of the biological impact on geographical thinking must hinge on the central question: Why was Darwinism, a theory for the selection of randomly occurring variants, interpreted in a deterministic and not a probabilistic sense? Why was chance omitted in geography? The question is of more than historical interest, for a century later after The Origin, geographers are beginning to recognize the importance of stochastic processes in the nineteenth century was by no means limited to Darwinian biology. “The study of this blind chance in theory and practice is one of the greatest scientific performances of the nineteenth century” (Stoddart, 1965)

In both the natural sciences and social sciences, the “probabilistic sense” found its legitimate expression. Why, then, in such an intellectual atmosphere, was the geographical interpretation so deterministic?  Darwin’s theory made a clear distinction between the way in which evolution was effected and the course of evolution itself; geography emphasised on the latter and ignored the former. Darwin began with the idea of the selection of chance variations, which are undoubtedly, govern by ‘laws’ which he failed to point out or discover. Nowhere does he use the word ‘random’ and in the fourth chapter of The Origin he points out that the use of word ‘chance’ is wholly incorrect. He explained the adaptation in nature by variation and natural selection, but he could not offer explanation of the basic variation.

The theme of random variation remained neglected in the contemporary geographical tradition because of religious and scientific reasons. It is interesting to note that the method which includes and incorporates randomness is now increasingly used by geographers.

Darwinism caused a methodological shift in the contemporary geographical thinking, especially in the field of human geography. Darwin set up a sphere of scientific enquiry free from a priori theological ideas in which he made man a fit object for scientific interpretation. The geographical thinking since the mid-nineteenth appears to have very much relied on the Darwinian tradition as it laid the foundation of “Scientific Geography”.

However, Darwinism had no impact on the contemporary Russian geography. The four basic themes of ‘The Origin’ were more influential in Britain, Germany and France, but were perhaps less intoxicating in Russia because of the earlier studies of the evolution by the Russian biologist, K.F. Rul’ye. In any case the Russian rejected the more extreme forms of environmental determinism stemming from Herbert Spencer and also the use of the biological analogy to describe sequences of landforms as suggested by the American geographer Davis.

REFERENCES

 Sudeepa Adhikari, 1999: Fundamentals of Geographical Thoughts, Third edition.

 Majid Hussain, 2002, Evolution of Geographical Thoughts, Fourth edition

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism

 http://www,allaboutscience.org/what-is-social-darwinism-faq-htm

 http://library.thinkquest.org/C004367/eh4.shtml

 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/551058/social-Darwinism

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