I read a review/essay in The New Yorker last night on Herbert Spencer, the 19th century (mostly: he died in 1903)  thinker/philosopher famous for the idea of "social Darwinism."   Many thoughts came to mind, mostly of a Taoist nature.

    Spencer first crossed my intellectual path back in graduate school.  He would pop up every so often in one or another exegesis of Marx or Smith or some other 18th or 19th century social theorist.  I did not like what I read of him.  The idea of the "naturalness" of human competition and "survival of the fittest" was so obviously ensconced in the historical context of imperialism and colonialism to make it a mere rationalization for domination and power.  Or that is what I thought at the time.

     The essay, by Steven Shapin, does little to dispel my early aversion.  We learn that he was, at base, a libertarian, emphasizing the necessity of human freedom, which I did not take the time to notice in the past.  That’s nice; Chuang Tzu would agree.  And he pushes against government intervention into society and economy, in a Tao-esque sort of way (remember the Tao Te Ching, passage 80: let nations be small and people few…"), although he pushes this to cold-hearted lengths – don’t help the poor because it will only encourage their sloth – that might twinge the conscience of Taoists more critical of the wealth and luxury enjoyed by the high and mighty.

     There are two points, however, that mark a clear distinction between Taoist sensibilities and Spencerian (or neo-Spencerian in the case of contemporary conservatives) thinking.

     First, the notion that competition and the hierarchy of "survival of the fittest" is somehow "natural" pushes against the connotations of Way.  Taoists would certainly recognize that humans do, under certain circumstances and at certain times, compete with one another.  But the "naturalness" of such competition is problematic.  On the one hand, the "way of humankind" includes selfishness and rivalry.  But there is also a sense that the willful pursuit of these human qualities can push against the natural unfolding of Way.  I keep hearing the last line of passage 53 of the Tao Te Ching ringing in my ears: It’s vainglorious thievery – not the Way, not the Way at all.  The human condition is simultaneously situated within Way (there can be nothing outside of Way) and capable of acting against Way.  And I suspect most of what Spencer celebrates as the achievements of competition would be rejected by Taoists as unnecessary extravagances or worse.

    Second, Spencer’s 19th century positivism is wildly un-Taoist.  Shapin writes, and quotes Spencer:

For Spencer, the importance of being earnest could not be
underestimated; the truth was all that mattered. Science, and a
scientific approach to all the problems of social life, was another
mode of sincerity, and the more science there was, the more moral
people would be:
 
["]What
knowledge is of most worth?—the uniform reply is—Science. This is the
verdict on all the counts. . . . Alike for the most perfect production
and highest enjoyment of art in all its forms, the needful preparation
is still—Science. And for purposes of discipline—intellectual, moral,
religious—the most efficient study is, once more—Science.["]

Science could not only
allow one to understand, predict, and control; it was all one needed to
do the right thing, to be a good person.

 Perhaps Taoism is not unscientific.  But its deep epistemological skepticism and its openness to "knowledge" other than systematized and verified (or falsified) "justified true belief" makes it an uneasy partner of science.  Indeed, it is precisely the marriage of scientific reasoning and human competition that would appall Taoists most.  How far is it from that combination to the violent imposition of the "truths" so discovered?

     I still find Spencer’s to be an abominable ideology.  Thank goodness for G.E. Moore, whose identification of the "naturalistic fallacy" fundamentally undermined the vainglorious rationalizations of Spencerian "social Darwinism:"

In 1903, the year of Spencer’s death, the moral philosopher G. E. Moore
identified what he called “the naturalistic fallacy”—the logical
impossibility of inferring that something is good from a proposition
about its natural properties. Spencer had spent most of his career
doing precisely this, and Moore wrote, “There can be no doubt that Mr.
Spencer has committed the naturalistic fallacy.” Spencer might have
argued that since the moral domain was itself a natural phenomenon
there was no fallacy at all. Still, Moore had identified a crucial
difference between the concept of evolution propounded by Spencer and
that proposed by Darwin. For Darwin, evolution was directionless and
morally neutral, but for Spencer evolution was going somewhere;
natural change was progressive, and it was good. Progress, Spencer
wrote (eight years before Darwin published “On the Origin of Species”),
was “not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilization being
artificial, it is a part of nature; all of a piece with the development
of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower.” Darwin’s evolutionary
writings had immense scientific authority, and they sought to be
morally and politically neutral. By contrast, Spencer delivered the
moral and political goods to people who believed, or wanted to believe,
that they were nature’s fittest and would be the survivors—not through
the exercise of naked power but through the inevitable workings of
natural law.

 "Directionless and morally neutral" – that sounds more like Way to me….