Today we briefly touched on the issue of "survival of the fittest" and Social Darwinism. Herbert Spencer formulated the idea of Social Darwinism to justify racism. He perverted Darwin's ideas of natural selection and applied them to economics, saying that white western Europeans, and especially the English, were better than all other "races" because they were industrialized and had supposedly created the highest forms of art and made greater scientific discoveries. People used these ideas to justify imperialism and racism up into the twentieth century.
It is interesting that Spencer applied Darwin's scientific ideas to other disciplines, but he did so in a harmful way. As we move into studying the Victorian Age I think it will be interesting to see how tying together disciplines can sometimes be a negative thing. We must keep in mind what consequences scientific and technological progress in Europe had for the rest of the world. I brought this idea up because of this article (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/us/politics/obama-attacks-house-gop-budget.html?_r=1&hp) that was on the front page of the NY Times today, showing that the ideas we are learning about are still very controversial today.
It is interesting that Spencer applied Darwin's scientific ideas to other disciplines, but he did so in a harmful way. As we move into studying the Victorian Age I think it will be interesting to see how tying together disciplines can sometimes be a negative thing. We must keep in mind what consequences scientific and technological progress in Europe had for the rest of the world. I brought this idea up because of this article (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/us/politics/obama-attacks-house-gop-budget.html?_r=1&hp) that was on the front page of the NY Times today, showing that the ideas we are learning about are still very controversial today.
In our class, we have mostly discussed the tying together of disciplines in positive terms. While I believe that the separation of disciplines is the result of a somewhat arbitrary, and often harmful, construct, I also agree that there can be a downside to the bringing together of disciplines, particularly when information from one is applied incorrectly to another. Whether it's Spencer's writings in the Victorian Age, or the "Welfare State" vs. the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps/survival of the fittest" debate that makes up the core of today's political discourse, Darwin's ideas have been applied in many ways I don't believe he would have agreed with.
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