Once More Unto the Breach

[cross-posted on Austro-Athenian Empire]



As my regular readers know (see the links to my previous discussions on this topic here), I've taken upon myself something like the role of one-man Herbert Spencer Anti-Defamation League. Today my concern is with a recent article by Eric Roark (no relation to Howard, I presume) titled Herbert Spencer's Evolutionary Individualism. Let me immediately stress that Roark’s article expresses a nuanced and valuable appreciation of Spencer, and is in no way comparable to some of the hatchet jobs I've dissected here before. Nevertheless, Roark does unwittingly recycle some of the same old myths about Spencer, and I am sworn to hunt those myths down and kill kill kill whenever they appear, so here goes.

Roark follows mainstream mythology in calling Spencer a" conservative," noting that he means the term in its modern rather than its classical sense. But I find it difficult to apply the term in any sense to a thinker who rejected private ownership of land; denounced state support for religion; condemned militarism and male supremacy as mutually reinforcing evils; regarded colonialism as a scheme to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor; and sought to replace the wage system with workers' cooperatives.

Roark also follows mainstream mythology in presenting Spencer as a defender of the wealthy. For example, Roark writes:

"Spencer did not dislike the poor per se, only the 'idle poor' who refused to work. (Spencer reserves comment on persons unable to work because of disability.) Interestingly, this condemnation did not extend to a critique of the 'idle rich,' a group that if they knew the meaning of industriousness had practiced such an art only once at birth."

There are two problems with this. First, Spencer certainly did not"reserve comment" on those unable to work; he wrote about them frequently, and advocated assisting them:

"Accidents will still supply victims on whom generosity may be legitimately expended. Men thrown upon their backs by unforeseen events, men who have failed for want of knowledge inaccessible to them, men ruined by the dishonesty of others, and men in whom hope long delayed has made the heart sick may, with advantage to all parties, be assisted."

Second, Spencer had plenty to say against the idle rich, as for example in the famous passage from Social Statics (and it's Statics, not Statistics!) where he writes:

"It is very easy for you, O respectable citizen, seated in your easy chair, with your feet on the fender, to hold forth on the misconduct of the people -- very easy for you to censure their extravagant and vicious habits .... It is no honor to you that you do not spend your savings in sensual gratification; you have pleasures enough without. But what would you do if placed in the position of the laborer? How would these virtues of yours stand the wear and tear of poverty? Where would your prudence and self-denial be if you were deprived of all the hopes that now stimulate you ...? Let us see you tied to an irksome employment from dawn till dusk; fed on meager food, and scarcely enough of that .... Suppose your savings had to be made, not, as now, out of surplus income, but out of wages already insufficient for necessaries; and then consider whether to be provident would be as easy as you at present find it. Conceive yourself one of a despised class contemptuously termed 'the great unwashed'; stigmatized as brutish, stolid, vicious ... and then say whether the desire to be respectable would be as practically operative on you as now. ... How offensive it is to hear some pert, self-approving personage, who thanks God that he is not as other men are, passing harsh sentence on his poor, hard-worked, heavily burdened fellow countrymen ...."

Roark also follows mainstream mythology in presenting Spencer as favouring competition over cooperation."Does social evolution occur because individuals cooperate with one another," Roark asks,"or because they compete against one another?" And he describes Spencer and Kropotkin as"polarized extremes" on this question. But it is a serious mistake to depict Spencer as occupying one extreme of the cooperation-competition pole; Spencer's view, on the contrary, was that as human beings grow more and more adapted to the social state, competition gives way more and more to cooperation.

Roark's suggestion that"survival of the fittest" tells in favour of competition and against cooperation neglects Spencer’s doctrine that cooperative modes of social interaction are precisely those that are fitter and so tend to displace competitive modes. In addition, Spencer was in favour of, not opposed to, present-day efforts to moderate the competitive aspects of society (so long as such efforts were voluntary);"the struggle for life," Spencer wrote,"needs to be qualified when the gregarious state is entered," so that"the weak shall be guarded against the strong." The popular notion, first concocted by Spencer's political enemies, that Spencer was opposed to"assisting the unfit" was one he insistently denied, over and over.

This brings us to the worst, and most often repeated, of the mainstream mythology's calumnies against Spencer: Roark quotes the passage that Spencer's critics always quote to show that Spencer favoured letting the poor die off:"If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die." And like those critics Roark disastrously neglects to include the first sentence of the immediately following paragraph:"Of course, in so far as the severity of this process is mitigated by the spontaneous sympathy of men for each other, it is proper that it should be mitigated." Spencer goes on to explain that although charity can have negative effects,"the drawbacks hence arising are nothing like commensurate with the benefits otherwise conferred." In other words, in context the quoted passage says precisely the opposite of what it is always interpreted to mean. Once the passage is read in context, Roark's inference that Spencer"leaves no acceptable social space for those who cannot sustain self-sufficiency" is simply indefensible -- and ignores the literally hundreds of pages Spencer wrote about the duties of charity and positive beneficence.

Roark recycles the usual charge that Spencer inconsistently attempts to combine social organicism with ethical individualism. Actually this combination was the standard approach among 19th-century libertarians, as among many more recent libertarian thinkers such as Hayek; the view that individuality is socially constituted is traditionally a libertarian idea. But Roark never says what is inconsistent about such a combination.

In any case he seems to have an odd view of what Spencerian individualism comes to, since he contrasts Marx's view that" cooperative and interdependent social relations [are] the apex of social evolutionism" with Spencer's supposed view of social evolution as"paving the way for the solitary, free, and independent individual." This is an odd thing to say of a thinker who hoped that the progress of social evolution would"so mold human nature" that in due course the"likeness between the feelings of the sympathizer and those of the sympathized with" would come"near to identity," so that"ministration to others' happiness will become a daily need" and"sympathetic pleasures will be spontaneously pursued to the fullest extent advantageous to each and all."

A few more minor points:

I must dissent from Roark’s suggestion that"Spencer's 'law of equal freedom' is almost identical in substance with John Stuart Mill's 'harm principle.'" There are many ways of harming a person (i.e., making the person worse off) that are not violations of the person's liberty, and so Mill's principle licenses far more in the way of state intervention that Spencer's does. (Roark also, strangely, seems to think that in Spencer's view only it is only governments, never individuals, that violate the law of equal freedom; but Spencer said nothing of the kind.)

Roark criticises Spencer as inconsistent for opposing governmental intervention when his own policies constitute"politically interfering in the decision of a community to construct a system of poverty welfare." But of course from Spencer's point of view the difference here is between initiatory and defensive uses of force; if A tries to whack B with an axe, and C intervenes to save B, both A and C are"interfering," but hardly in the same sense. (And moreover Spencer looked forward to the day when both forms of force would have withered away.)

Roark notes that Spencer's approach was"grounded in British empiricism rather than German idealism." But I think Spencer is better seen as trying to synthesise, or transcend the dichotomy between, British empiricism and German idealism, rather than picking a side. He explicitly said, after all, that his aim was to reconcile Locke and Kant. Spencer's doctrines of"transfigured realism" and"the unknowable" -- his proto-Hayekian notion that we can have knowledge of the patterns and relations among real things despite our ignorance of the inherent natures of those things themselves -- is meant to split the difference between empiricism and idealism metaphysically, while his theory that our innate ideas are the product of our ancestors' experiences is meant to split the difference epistemologically. (While Spencer did regard some of Kant's views as"rubbish," contrary to Roark's suggestion he certainly did not dismiss Kant as unworthy of serious consideration, but on the contrary wrestles with Kantian themes throughout his writings.)

Finally, Roark's article contains the following baffling remark:"Even the staunchest political libertarian accepts some very limited minimal state." In light of the enormous number of free-market libertarian anarchists I simply have no idea what to make of this statement.

Having said all that, let me reiterate my opening remark, which the reader is now very likely to have forgotten: these errors are not the centerpiece of Roark's article, and the article is not a typical piece of Spencer-bashing like some of the screeds I've inveighed against before. On the contrary, it is in many ways sympathetic toward Spencer, and critical of various aspects of the mainstream mythology about him. All the same, Roark's article lends more support to the standard defamatory line than it should, and so called forth my wakeful sword.