There are at least two critiques of Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism. On the one hand, there is a Darwinian critique itself. On the other, there is a Nietzschean critique.
Before going any further, I should point out that Spencer did not speak merely of “selection of the fittest”: he was a sociologist, and for him “fittest” nevertheless meant more “socially useful”.
It is also essential to recall that social Darwinism is a pseudoscience: it is a scientific theory that has achieved no experimental success.
But let us continue. The Darwinian critique is the one that interests me most at present, because I know the Nietzschean critique of utility all too well. It consists in saying that the aim of the noble man is not to be useful to the social body, but to feel his potency. As an absolutely unintended by-product of this, the noble man may admittedly take delight, even “rejoice”, enthralled by the way his ultimate expression of potency—a healthy product of the rise of the feeling of potency within him—carries others along with him. That said, I believe I have sufficiently demonstrated, throughout the few major writings in my philosophical corpus, that such delight and rejoicing are healthy only when they belong on the side of joy, or at most desire—that is, of production as opposed to consumption. One must therefore be cautious about this delight and rejoicing.
To be very precise, it is in paragraph 3 of the First Treatise of On the Genealogy of Morality that Nietzsche explicitly criticizes Spencer’s social Darwinism, according to which the fittest—in the sense of the most socially useful—survive, and this is the driving force of human progress in the broadest sense.
But let us now focus on the Darwinian critique. It seems to me to be essentially a Christian critique, and is therefore highly insufficient. In particular, I doubt that this critique is scientifically substantiated within the Darwinian corpus. I refer the reader, as well as myself, to the work of Patrick Tord on this subject, a French specialist in Darwin, and to a video by the psychiatrist and YouTuber PaDu, who rightly cites Tord. I have said that the Darwinian critique, if it is indeed essentially Christian, is highly insufficient, for the following reason: Nietzsche’s work has shown very clearly, in my view, that the political left, if it is to be noble—that is, good—cannot be founded upon Christianity. The only noble left that has ever existed was founded by Marx. Yet there may be an argument whose conclusion is that rebellion, and revolution all the more so, was more dangerous for Jews under Roman occupation than for workers in Marx’s day, such that the only left that could be founded in Judea was one founded upon pity. Marxist society, indeed, is a society that had already benefited from nearly two thousand years of the major Western balance between Yin and Yang, the balance that emerged from the dialectic between Rome and Judea and led to the Christianization of the Roman Empire in the third or fourth century AD.
In any event, what I am seeking is therefore a Marxist critique of social Darwinism. This is not only because of the nobility of Marxist values, but also—and in fact above all!—because Marx’s work was marked by a very substantial effort toward scientific rigor, unlike Nietzsche’s work! That said, Marx dealt with economics, whereas what interests me is an anthropological critique. I am seeking an anthropological critique of social Darwinism. I need to examine the work of Graeber and Godelier more closely. I also recall a lecture by Lévi-Strauss in which he says that the Cartesian existential ego was capable of grounding physics, but not biology.
Social Darwinism—and in any case this very expression was introduced in order to criticize Spencer’s work, in the popular sense of the word—leads to the typically right-wing idea that everything which does not move in the direction of what a sufficiently well-argued theory designates as good should be of no interest to us. This underestimates the productive capacity of human beings living under good emotional, social, and material conditions. Yet it is so easy to observe the extent to which human productive energies unfold when such conditions are present. I believe that the right, and capitalism all the more so, are simply dynamics that are essentially the product of the anxiety of death. Nothing good can be achieved within such anxiety: Heidegger’s work is obviously no exception. The anxiety of death is characteristic of a sick organism, of a consciousness that detaches itself from the vitality of being and works against it. The anxiety of death may serve as a spur to being, but it must be removed from consciousness in a highly radical manner; otherwise, the human being will live in a state of perpetual trauma of consciousness, and the great intelligence he once displayed—the awakening of consciousness—will have profoundly worked against him. Generalized desire for living beings must annihilate all anxiety of death.
That said, I am straying from science here. The question is, first, whether there are natural mechanisms of mutual aid—or, as I would prefer to put it, of generalized giving—produced by desire and leading to a virtuous circle of productivity, at work among social animals, that would challenge the excessively narrow scope assigned to natural selection, particularly its purely individual character, whereas human beings are social animals. Pablo Servigne has published a book that may prove interesting in this respect.
Even if this book were to provide no sufficiently conclusive evidence concerning humankind, evidence may perhaps exist once we leave the realm of nature and enter that of human culture. Culture, as opposed to humanity’s merely natural foundation, may develop mechanisms of survival, production, and creation that strictly exceed those of natural selection and make it fundamentally irrelevant to the study of human survival and growth.
Lastly, I would nevertheless like to return to Nietzsche here: the fact that humankind is a species whose individuals can become so much more conscious of what suits their lives—and what is ultimately at issue here is physiological and psychological consciousness, without even mentioning philosophy, because I wish to remain within the realm of science—may render the mechanism of natural selection insignificant on the human scale.