Tale A of Two Worksites Stephen Jay Gould Christopher Wren, the leading architect of London's reconstruction after the great fire of 1666, lies buried beneath the floor of his most famous building, Saint Paul's Cathedral. No elaborate sarcophagus adorns the site. Instead, we find only the famous epitaph written by his son and now inscribed in the floor: si monumentum requiris, circumspice "if you are searching for his monument, look around." A tad grandiose perhaps, but I have never read a finer testimony to the central importance one might even say sacredness of actual places, rather than replicas, symbols, or other forms of vicarious resemblance. An odd coincidence of professional life recently turned my thoughts to this most celebrated epitaph when, for the second time, I received an office in a spot loaded with history, a place still redolent with ghosts of past events both central to our common culture and especially meaningful for my own life and choices. In 1971, 1 spent an academic term as a visiting researcher at Oxford University. I received a cranny of office space on the upper floor of the University Museum. As I set up my books, fossil snails, and microscope, I noticed a metal plaque affixed to the wall, informing me that this reconfigured space of shelves and cubicles had been, originally, the site of the most famous public confrontation in the early history of Darwinism. On this very spot in 1860, just a few months after Darwin published the Origin of Species, T H. Huxley had drawn his rhetorical sword and soundly skewered the slick but superficial champion of creationism Bishop "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce. As with most legends, the official version ranks as mere cardboard before a much more complicated and multifaceted truth. Wilberforce and Huxley did put on a splendid and largely spontaneous show, but no clear victor emerged from the scuffle, and Joseph Hooker, Darwin's other champion, made an even more effective reply to the bishop, since forgotten by history. (See my May 1986 essay, "Knight Takes Bishop?")
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I can't claim that the lingering presence of these Victorian giants increased my resolve or improved my work, but I loved the sense of continuity vouchsafed to me by this happy circumstance. I even treasured the etymology for "circumstance" means "standing around," and there I stood, perhaps in the very spot where Huxley had said, at least according to legend, that he preferred an honest ape to a bishop who would use his privileged position to inject scorn and ridicule into a serious scientific debate. Last year, I received a parttime appointment as visiting research professor of biology at New York University. I was given an office on the tenth floor of the Brown Building on Washington Place, a nondescript, earlytwentiethcentury structure now filled with laboratories and other academic spaces. As the dean took me on a casual tour of my new digs, he made a passing remark, intended as little more than tourguide patter, but producing an electric effect upon his new tenant. Did I know, he asked, that this building had been the site of the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911? My office occupied a corner location on one of the affected floors in fact, as I later discovered, right near the escape route used by many workers to reach safety on the roof above. The dean also told me that each year on the March 25 anniversary of the fire, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union still holds a ceremony at the site and lays wreaths to memorialize the 146 workers killed in the blaze. If the debate between Huxley and Wilberforce defines a primary legend of my chosen profession, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire occupies an even more central place in my larger view of life. I grew up in a family of jewish immigrant garment workers, and this holocaust (in the literal meaning of a thorough sacrifice by burning) had set their views and helped to define their futures. The shirtwaist a collared blouse designed after the model of a man's shirt and worn above a separate skirt had become the fashionable symbol of more independent women. The Triangle company, New York City's largest manufacturer of shirtwaists, occupied three floors (eighth through tenth) of the Asch Building (later bought by New York University and rechristened as Brown, partly to blot out the infamy of association with the fire). The company employed
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some 500 workers, nearly all young women who had recently arrived either as Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe or Catholics from Italy. The building, in addition to elevators, had only two small stairways and one absurdly inadequate fire escape. But the owners had violated no codes both because general standards of regulation were then so weak and because the structure was supposedly fireproof as the framework proved to be (for the building, with my office, still stands), although nonflammable walls and ceilings could not prevent an internal blaze on floors crammed full of garments and cuttings. The Triangle factory was, in fact, a deathtrap for fire hoses of the day could not pump above the sixth floor, while nets and blankets could not sustain the force of a human body falling from greater heights. The fire broke out at quitting time. Most workers managed to escape by the elevators, down one staircase (we shall come to the other staircase later), or by running up to the roof. But 146 employees, nearly all young women, were trapped by the flames. About 50 workers met a hideous, if dramatic, end by jumping in terror from the ninthfloor windows as a wall of flame advanced from behind. Firemen and bystanders begged them not to jump, and then tried. to hold improvised nets of sheets and blankets. But the men could not hold the nets against the force of fall, and many bodies plunged right through the flimsy fabrics onto the pavement below, or even right through the "hollow sidewalks" made of opaque glass circles designed to transmit daylight to basements below, still a major (and attractive) feature of my SoHo neighborhood. (These sidewalks carry prominent signs warning heavy delivery trucks not to back in.) Not a single jumper survived, and the memory of these forced leaps to death remains the most searing image of America's prototypical sweatshop tragedy. All defining events of history develop simplified legends as official versions primarily, I suppose, because we commandeer such events for shorthand moral instruction, and the complex messiness of actual truth always blurs the clarity of a pithy epigram. Thus, Huxley, representing the righteousness of scientific objectivity, must slay the dragon of ancient and unthinking dogma. The legend of the Triangle fire holds that workers became trapped because management had locked all the exit doors to prevent pilfering, unscheduled breaks, or access to
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union organizers leaving only the fire escape as a mode of exit. All five of my guidebooks to New York architecture tell this "official" version. My favorite book, for example, states: Although the budding was equipped with fire exits, the terrified workers discovered to their horror that the ninthfloor doors had been locked by supervisors. A single fire escape was wholly inadequate for the crush of panicstricken employees." These official legends may exaggerate for moral punch, but they emerge from a factual basis of greater ambiguity and this reality, as we shall see in the Triangle case, often provides a deeper and more important lesson. Huxley did argue with Wilberforce after all, even if he secured no decisive victory, and Huxley did represent the side of the angels the true angels of light and justice. And although many Triangle workers escaped by elevators and one staircase, another staircase (that might have saved nearly everyone else) was almost surely locked. If Wilberforce and his minions had won, I might be a laborer or a linguist or, God forbid, a lawyer today. But the Triangle fire might have blotted me out entirely. My grandmother arrived in America in 1910. On that fatal March day in 1911, she was a sixteenyearold seamstress working in a sweatshop but, thank God, not for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. My grandfather, at the same moment, was cutting cloth in yet another nearby factory. These two utterly disparate stories half a century and an ocean apart, and maximally contrasting an industrial tragedy with an academic confrontation might seem to stand as the most unrelatable of items: the apples and oranges, or chalk and cheese (the British version), of our mottoes. Yet I feel that the two stories share an intimate bond in illustrating the opposite poles of a central issue in the history of evolutionary theory: the application of Darwinian thought to the life and times of our own troubled species. I claim nothing beyond personal meaning and certainly no rationale for boring anyone else in the accidental location of my two offices in such sacred spots of history. But the emotion of a personal prod often dislodges a general theme worth sharing.
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The application of evolutionary theory to Homo sapiens has always troubled Western culture deeply, not for any reason that might be called scientific (for humans are biological objects and must therefore take their place with all other living creatures on the genealogical tree of life) but only as a consequence of ancient prejudices about human distinctiveness and unbridgeable superiority. Even Darwin tiptoed lightly across this subject when he wrote the Origin of Species in 1859 (although he plunged in later, in 1871, with a book entitled The Descent of Man). The first edition of the Origin says little about Homo sapiens beyond the cryptic promise that "light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history," (Darwin became a bit bolder in later editions and ventured the emendation, "Much light will be thrown ......) Troubling issues of this sort often find their unsurprising resolution in a bit of wisdom that has permeated our traditions from such sublime sources as Aristotle's aurea mediocritas (golden mean) to the vernacular sensibility of Goldilocks's decisions to split the difference between two extremes and find a solution "just right" in the middle. Similarly, one can ask either too little or too much of Darwinism in trying to understand "the origin of man and his history." As usual, a proper solution lies in the intermediary position of "a great deal, but not everything." Soapy Sam Wilberforce and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire gain their odd but sensible conjunction as illustrations of the two extremes that must be avoided for Wilberforce denied evolution altogether and absolutely, while the major social theory that hindered industrial reform (and permitted conditions that led to such disasters as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire) followed the most overextended application of biological evolution to patterns of human history the socalled theory of social Darwinism. By understanding the fallacies of Wilberforce's denial and social Darwinism's uncritical and total embrace, we may find the proper course between. They didn't call him Soapy Sam for nothing. The orotund Bishop of Oxford saved his finest invective for Darwin's attempt to apply his heresies to human origins. In his review of the Origin of Species (published in the Quarterly Review, England's leading literary journal, in 1860), Wilberforce complained above all: "First, then, he not obscurely declares that he applies his scheme of the action of the
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principle of natural selection to Man himself, as wen as to the animals around him." Wilberforce then uncorked a passionate argument for a human uniqueness that could only have been divinely ordained: Mans derived supremacy over the earth; man's power of articulate speech; man's gift If reason; man's freewill and responsibility; man's fall and man's redemption; the incarnation of the Eternal Son; the indwelling of the Eternal Spirit, all are equally and utterly irreconcilable with the degrading notion of the brute origin of him who was created in the image of God, and redeemed by the Eternal Son. But the tide of history rolled over the good bishop. When Wilberforce died in 1873 from a head injury after a fall from his horse, Huxley acerbically remarked that, for once, the bishop's brains had come into contact with reality and the result had been fatal. Darwinism became the reigning intellectual novelty of the late nineteenth century. The potential domain of natural selection, Darwin's chief explanatory principle, seemed nearly endless to his devotees (although not, interestingly, to the master himself, as Darwin remained cautious about extensions beyond the realm of biological evolution). If a "struggle for existence" regulated the evolution of organisms, wouldn't a similar principle also explain the history of just about anything from the cosmology of the universe to the languages, economics, technologies, and cultural histories of human groups? Even the greatest of truths can be overextended by zealous and uncritical acolytes. Natural selection may be one of the most powerful ideas ever developed in science, but only certain kinds of systems can be regulated by such a process, and Darwin's principle cannot therefore explain all natural sequences that develop historically. For example, we may talk about the "evolution" of a star through a predictable series of phases over many billion years from birth to explosion, but natural selection a process driven by differential survival and
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reproductive success of some individuals in a variable population cannot be the cause of stellar development. We must look, instead, to the inherent physics and chemistry of light elements in such large masses. Similarly, although Darwinism surely explains many universal features of human form and behavior, we cannot invoke natural selection as the controlling cause of our cultural changes since the dawn of agriculture if only because such a limited time of some ten thousand years provides so little potential for any general biological evolution at all. Moreover, and most importantly, human cultural change operates in a manner that precludes a controlling role for natural selection. To mention the two most obvious differences: first, biological evolution proceeds by continuous division of species into independent lineages that must remain forever separated on the branching tree of life. Human cultural change works by the opposite process of borrowing and amalgamation. One good look at another culture's wheel or alphabet may alter the course of a civilization forever. If we seek any biological analogue for cultural change, I suspect that infection will work much better than evolution. Secondly, human cultural change runs by the powerful mechanism of Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characters. Anything useful (or, alas, destructive) that our generation invents can be passed directly to our offspring by direct education. Change in this rapid Lamarckian mode easily overwhelms the much slower process of Darwinian natural selection, which requires a Mendelian form of inheritance based on smallscale, undirected variation that can then be sifted and sorted through a struggle for existence. Genetic variation is Mendelian, so Darwinism rules biological evolution. But cultural variation is largely Lamarckian, and natural selection cannot determine the recent history of our technological societies. Nonetheless, the first blush of high Victorian enthusiasm for Darwinism inspired a rush of attempted extensions to other fields, at least by analogy. Some proved fruitful, including the decision of James Murray, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary first volume published in 1884, but under way for twenty years before then), to work strictly by historical principles and treat the changing definitions of
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words not by current preferences in use (as in a truly normative dictionary) but by the chronology and branching evolution of recorded meanings (making the text more an encyclopedia about the history of words than a true dictionary). But other extensions were both invalid in theory and (or so most of us would judge by modern moral sensibilities) harmful, if not tragic, in application. As the chief offender in this category, we must cite a highly influential theory that acquired the inappropriate name of social Darwinism. (As many historians have noted, this theory should really be called social Spencerism since Herbert Spencer, chief Victorian pundit of nearly eveything, laid out all the basic postulates nearly a decade before the Origin of Species in his Social Statics of 1851. Darwinism did add the mechanism of natural selection as a harsher version of the struggle for existence that Spencer had long recognized. Moreover, Darwin himself maintained a most ambivalent relationship to this movement that came to bear his name. He took the pride of any creator in useful extensions of his theory and he did hope for an evolutionary account of human origins and historical patterns. But he also understood only too well why the mechanism of natural selection applied poorly to the causes of social change in humans.) Social Darwinism often serves as a blanket term for any genetic or biological claim made about the inevitability (or at least the "naturalness") of social inequalities among classes and sexes or military conquests of one group by another. But this usage is far too broad although pseudoDarwinian arguments were prominently advanced to cover all these sins. Social Darwinism, rather, usually operated as a more specific theory about the nature and origin of social classes in the modern industrial world. The short Encyclopaedia Britannica article on the subject correctly emphasizes this restriction by first citing the broadest range of potential meaning and then properly narrowing the scope of actual usage: Social Darwinism: the theory that persons, groups, and races are subject to the same laws of natural selection as Charles Darwin had perceived in plants and animals in 8
nature.... The theory was used to support laissezfaire capitalism and political conservatism. Class stratification was justified on the basis of "natural" inequalities among individuals, for the control of property was said to be a correlate of superior and inherent moral attributes such as industriousness, temperance, and frugality. Attempts to reform society through state intervention or other means would, therefore, interfere with natural processes; unrestricted competition and defense of the status quo were in accord with biological selection. The poor were the "unfit" and should not be aided; in the struggle for existence, wealth was a sign of success. Spencer believed that such harshness must be advocated in order to allow the progressive development that all "evolutionary" systems undergo if permitted to follow their natural course in an unimpeded manner. As a central principle of his system, Spencer believed that progress defined by him as movement from a simple undifferentiated homogeneity, as in a bacterium or a "primitive" human society without social classes, to complex and structured heterogeneity, as in "advanced" organisms or industrial societies did not arise as an inevitable property of matter in motion, but only through interaction between evolving systems and their environments. These interactions must therefore not be obstructed. The relationship of Spencer's general vision to Darwin's particular theory has often been misconstrued or overemphasized. As stated earlier, Spencer had published the outline (and most of the details) of his system nearly ten years before Darwin presented his evolutionary theory. Spencer certainly did welcome the principle of natural selection as an even more ruthless and efficient mechanism for driving evolution forward. (Ironically, the word "evolution," as a
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description for the genealogical history of life, entered our language through Spencer's urgings, not from Darwin. Spencer favored the term for its vernacular English meaning of "progress ,in he original Latin sense of evolutio, or "unfolding." At first, Darwin resisted the term he originally called his process "descent with modification" because his theory included no mechanism or rationale for general progress in the history of life. But Spencer prevailed, largely because no society has ever been more committed to progress as a central notion or goal than Victorian Britain at the height of its colonial and industrial expansion.) Spencer certainly used Darwin's mechanism of natural selection to buttress his system. In fact, it was Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the term "survival of the fittest," now our conventional catch phrase for Darwin's mechanism. Darwin himself paid tribute in a sentence added to later editions of the Origin of Species: "I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection. . . . But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient." As a mechanism for driving his universal "evolution" (of stars, species, languages, economics, technologies, and nearly anything else) toward progress, Spencer preferred the direct and mechanistic "root, hog, or die" of natural selection (as William Graham Sumner, the leading American social Darwinian, epitomized the process) to the vaguer and largely Lamarckian drive toward organic selfimprovement that Spencer had originally favored as a primary cause. (In this porcine image, Summer cited a quintessential American metaphor of self sufficiency that my dictionary catch of phrases traces to a speech by Davey Crockett in 1843.) In a postDarwinian edition of his Social Statics, Spencer wrote: The lapse of a third of a century since these passages were published, has brought me no reason for retreating from the position taken up in them. Contrariwise, it has brought a vast amount of evidence strengthening that 10
position. The beneficial results of the survival of the fittest, prove to be immeasurably greater t an [I formerly recognized]. The process of "natural selection," as Mr. Darwin called it . . . has shot n to be a chief cause . . . of that evolution through which all living things, beginning with the lower and diverging and rediverging as they evolved, have reached their present degrees of organization and adaptation to their modes of life. But putting aside the question of Darwin's particular influence, the more important, underlying point remains firm: the theory of social Darwinism rests upon a set of analogies between the causes of change and stability in biological and social systems and on a supposedly direct applicability of the biological principles to the social realm. In the Social Statics, Spencer rests his case upon two elaborate, analogies to biological systems. 1. The struggle for existence as purification in biology and society. Darwin recognized the "struggle for existence" as metaphorical shorthand for any strategy that provides increased reproductive success, whether by outright battle, cooperation, or just simple prowess in copulation under the old principle of "early and often." But many contemporaries, including Spencer, read "survival of the fittest" only as overt struggle to the death what Huxley dismissed as the "gladiatorial" school, or the incarnation of Hobbes's bellum omnium contra omnes (the war of all against all). Spencer presented this stark, limited view of nature in Social Statics: Pervading all Nature we may see at work a stern discipline which is a little cruel that it may be very kind. That state Of universal warfare maintained throughout the lower creation, to the great perplexity of many worthy people, is at bottom the most merciful provision which the circumstances 11
admit of. . . . Note that carnivorous enemies, not only remove from herbivorous herds individuals past their prime, but also weed out the sickly, the malformed, and the least fleet or powerful. By the aid of which purifying process . . . all vitiation of the race through the multiplication of its inferior samples is prevented; and the maintenance Of a constitution completely adapted to surrounding conditions, and therefore most productive of happiness, is ensured. Spencer then compounds this error by applying the same argument to human social history without ever questioning the validity of such analogical transfer. Railing against all governmental programs for social amelioration Spencer opposed statesupported education, postal services, regulation of housing conditions, and even public construction of sanitary systems Spencer castigated such efforts as born of good intentions but doomed to dire consequences by enhancing the survival of social dregs who should be allowed to perish for the good of all. (Spencer insisted, however, that he did not oppose private charity, although largely for the good effect of such giving upon the moral development of donors. Does any of this remind you of arguments now advanced as reformatory and spankingnew by our "modern" ultraconservatives? Shall we not profit by Santayana's famous dictum that those ignorant of history must be condemned to repeat it?) In his chapter on poor laws (which he, of course, opposed) in the Social Statics, Spencer wrote: We must call those spurious philanthropists who, to prevent present misery, would entail greater misery on future generations. That rigorous necessity which, when allowed to operate, becomes so sharp a spur to the lazy and so strong a bridle to the random, these paupers' friends would repeal, because of the wailings it here and
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there produces. Blind to the fact that under the natural order of things society is constantly excreting its unhealthy, imbecile, slow, vacillating, faithless members, these unthinking, though wellmeaning, men advocate an interference which not only stops the purifying process, but even increases the vitiation absolutely encouraging the multiplication of the reckless and incompetent by offering them an unfailing provision . . . . Thus, ill their eagerness to prevent the salutary sufferings that surround us, these sighwise and groanfoolish people bequeath to posterity a continually i creasing curse. 2. The stable body and the stable society. In the universal "evolution" of an systems to progress, organization becomes ever more complex by division of labor among the increasing number of differentiating parts. All parts must "know their place" and play their appointed role lest the entire system collapse. A primitive hydra can regrow any lost part, but nature gives a man only one head and one chance. Spencer recognized the basic inconsistency in validating social stability by analogy to the integrated needs of a single organic body, for he recognized the contrary rationales of the two systems: the parts of a body serve the totality, but the social totality (the state) supposedly exists only to serve the parts (individual people). But Spencer could never be fazed by logical or empirical difficulties when pursuing such a lovely generality. (Huxley was speaking of Spencer's penchant for building grandiose systems when he made his famous remark that Spencer's idea of tragedy was "a beautiful theory, killed by a nasty, ugly little fact.") So Spencer pushed right through the numerous absurdities of such a comparison and even professed that he could find a virtue in the differences. In his famous 1860 article The Social Organism, Spencer described the comparison between a human body and a human society: "Such, then, are the points of analogy and the points of difference. May we not say that the points of difference serve but to bring into clearer light the points of analogy." 13
Spencer's article then lists the supposed points of valid comparison, including such farfetched analogies as the historical origin of a middle class to the development in complex animals of the mesoderm, or third body layer, between the original ectoderm and endoderm; the likening of the ectoderm itself to the upper classes, for sensory organs that direct an animal arise in the ectoderm, while organs of production for such activities as digesting food emerge from the endoderm, or lower layer; the comparison of blood and money; the parallel courses of nerve and blood vessels in higher animals with the sidebyside construction of railways and telegraph wires; and, finally, in a comparison that even Spencer regarded as forced, the likening of a primitive, allpowerful monarchy with a simple brain, and an advanced parliamentary system with a complex brain composed of several lobes. Spencer wrote: "Strange as this assertion will be thought, our Houses of Parliament discharge in the social economy, functions that are in sundry respects comparable to those discharged by the cerebral masses in a vertebrate animal." The analogies were surely forced, but the social intent could not have been clearer: a stable society requires that an roles be filled and well executed and government must not interfere with a natural process of sorting out and allocation of appropriate rewards. A humble worker must toil and may remain forever poor, but the industrious poor, as an organ of the social body, must always be with us: Let the factory hands be put on short time, and immediately the colonial produce markets of London and Liverpool are depressed. The shopkeeper is busy or otherwise, according to the amount of the wheat crop. And a potatoblight may ruin dealers consols. ... This union of many men into one community this increasing mutual dependence of units which were originally independent this gradual segregation of citizens into separate bodies with reciprocallysubservient functions this formation of a whole consisting of unlike
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parts this growth of an organism, of which one portion cannot be injured without the rest feeling it may all be generalized under the law of individuation. Social Darwinism grew into a major movement, with political, academic, and journalistic advocates for a wide array of particular causes. But as historian Richard Hofstadter stated in the most famous book ever written on this subject social Danwinism in America Thought, first published in 1944, in press ever since, and still full of insight despite some inevitable archaicisms the primary impact of this doctrine lay in its buttressing of conservative political philosophies, particularly through the central, and highly effective, argument against state support of social services and governmental regulation of industry and housing: One might, like William Graham Sumner, take a pessimistic view of the import of Darwinism, and conclude that Darwinism could serve only to cause men to face up to the inherent hardship of the battle of life; or one might, like Herbert Spencer, promise that, whatever the immediate hardships for a large portion of mankind, evolution meant progress and thus assured that the whole process of life was tending toward some very remote but altogether glorious consummation. But in either case the conclusions to which Dawinism was at first put were conservative conclusions. They suggested that all attempts to reform social processes were efforts to remedy the irremediable, that they interfered with the wisdom of nature, that they could lead only to degeneration. The industrial magnates of America's Gilded Age ("robber barons" in a terminology favored by many people) loved the argument against regulation, 15
evidently for selfserving reasons, however much they mixed their lines about nature's cruel inevitability with expressions of standard Christian piety. John D. Rockefeller stated in a Sunday school address: The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest . ... The American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the workingout of a law of nature and a law of God. And Andrew Carnegie, who had been sorely distressed by the apparent failure of Christian values, found his solution in Herbert Spencer, then sought out the English philosopher for friendship and substantial favors. Carnegie wrote about his discovery of Spencer's work: "I remember that light came as in a flood and all was clear. Not only had I got rid of theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution. `All is well since all grows better' became my motto, and true source of comfort." Carnegie's philanthropy, primarily to libraries and universities, ranks as one of the great charitable acts of American history, but we should not forget his ruthlessness and resistance to reforms for his own workers (particularly his violent breakup of the Homestead strike of 1892) in building his empire of steel a harshness that he defended with the usual Spencerian line that any state regulation would derail an inexorable natural process eventually leading to progress for all. In his most famous essay (entitled "Wealth," published in the North American Review, of 1889), Carnegie stated: While the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great
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inequality of environment, tile concentration of wealth, business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race. I don't want to advocate a foolishly grandiose view about the social and political influence of academic arguments and I also wish to avoid the common fallacy of inferring a causal connection from a correlation. Of course I do not believe that the claims of social Darwinism directly caused the ills of unrestrained industrial capitalism and suppression of workers' rights. I know that most of these Spencerian lines acted as mere window dressing for social forces well in place and largely unmovable by any merely academic argument. On the other hand, academic arguments are not entirely impotent either for why else would those in charge invoke such claims so forcefully? The general thrust of social change unfolded in its own complex manner without much impact from purely intellectual rationales, but many particular issues especially the actual rates and styles for changes that would have eventually occurred in any case could be substantially affected by academic discourse. It really did matter to millions of people when a given reform suffered years o...