Imagine, just for a moment, that you are the
absolute giant of the intellectual world. I don't
mean you have a bestseller or, you know, a popular
TED Talk. I mean you are the colossus. Right.
The guy. The guy. You are selling books by the
millions, and I mean literally over a million
copies during your lifetime. Which is a number
that, for the 19th century, for a philosophical
writer, it's just staggering. It doesn't compute.
You're being toasted by the elite in London's
private clubs. Your ideas are sparking actual
political movements in places as far away as
China, Japan. And the greatest writers of the
age are using our ideas. Tolstoy, George Eliot.
They're weaving your theories right into their
characters. You are, for all intents and purposes,
the Aristotle of the Victorian age. It's a level
of fame that's really hard for us to grasp today.
I mean, maybe the closest comparison would be
if you took Einstein's scientific credibility
and mixed it with the, I don't know, the pop
culture reach of a Jordan Peterson or a Yuval
Noah Harari. Yeah, but even that doesn't quite
get there, does it? No, because it wasn't just
a niche. He was the heir the Victorians breathed.
His ideas were everywhere. Exactly. But then
you fast forward a few decades, not even a century,
and you've almost completely vanished. Oof, gone.
You go from being the greatest philosopher of
the age to, well, to a punchline. People stop
reading you. Academics scoff at your work. And
the one thing, the one single phrase that everyone
still knows you for. The one sentence that defines
your entire legacy. Is almost universally attributed
to somebody else. It's a spectacular fall from
grace. A complete collapse of reputation. And
I'm guessing we're talking about the great Mandela
effect of the history of science here. We are
indeed. We're talking about the phrase survival
of the fittest. Yeah, yes. If you walked out
on the street right now and asked a hundred people
who coined that phrase. what would they say?
99, maybe 100 of them would say Charles Darwin.
Of course. It's synonymous with Darwinism. But
they'd all be wrong. Completely wrong. It wasn't
Darwin at all. It was the man we are doing a
deep dive on today, Herbert Spencer. That's the
classic cocktail party fact, isn't it? The one
that always gets a little bit of a surprised
reaction. It really is. Darwin didn't use that
phrase at all in the first edition of The Origin
of Species. It was Spencer who read Darwin, sort
of nodded along, and then said, you know, I have
a catchier, more philosophical way to describe
this whole natural selection thing. And Darwin
actually liked it. He did. He ended up adopting
Spencer's phrase in the later editions of Origin,
specifically the fifth edition. He thought it
captured the mechanism of natural selection really
well, even though it opened the door to a lot
of misinterpretation. But yeah, the words themselves,
they belong to Spencer. So today, our mission
is something of an archaeological dig. We're
going to excavate Herbert Spencer from the dustbin
of history. And I want to be really clear to
you listening. We're not necessarily here to
praise him. When we get into the weeds of his
social theories, there is some genuinely dark,
controversial stuff. Views on race, on poverty,
on the elimination of the unfit. Stuff that can
be quite shocking to modern ears. But we need
to understand him. Because he's the missing link
in understanding the 19th century. And not just
the 19th century. To understand the political
arguments we are having right now today about
the size of government, about the welfare state,
individual liberty. You have to grapple with
Spencer. He's the ghost in the machine. He is.
He's in many ways the intellectual grandfather
of modern libertarianism. He was formulating
arguments for the right to ignore the state long,
long before the modern movement ever took shape.
So we have a massive stack of source material
to get through today. We're drawing from his
biography his huge multi -volume system of synthetic
philosophy. Which is a title in itself. It is.
And we're looking at the critiques from his contemporaries
and the historians who who later, well, dismantled
his reputation. We're going to look at his theory
of everything, his complicated feud -slash -friendship
with Darwin, and the huge paradox of a man who
championed survival of the fittest, but was personally
a pacifist who absolutely hated war. It's a fascinating
story. But let's start at the beginning. Who
was this guy? Where does a mind like this even
come from? Well, Herbert Spencer was born in
Derby, England in 1820. And if you want to understand
why he spent his whole life fighting against
authority. You just have to look at his dad.
Okay. He was the son of William George Spencer,
who was known as a religious dissenter. I saw
that term dissenter pop up a lot in the notes.
For those of us who might not be up on our 19th
century British religious history, that's not
just a generic term for a rebel, right? It carries
some specific weight. It does, yeah. In this
context, dissenters were Protestants who separated
from the Church of England. They were the nonconformists.
So outside the establishment. Completely outside.
They were often barred from certain... public
offices or from attending universities like Oxford
and Cambridge. So there was this built -in culture
of being an outsider, of questioning the established
order. And his dad was deep in that world. Very
deep. He drifted from Methodism to Quakerism,
but the core trait he seems to have passed down
to Herbert was this staunch, almost pathological
opposition to all forms of authority. He ran
a school based on very progressive teaching methods.
But interestingly, Herbert himself didn't really
go to school in the traditional sense. He was
the ultimate autodidact. That really stood out
to me. Oh, completely. He didn't have a university
degree. He didn't come up through the Eaton and
Oxford pipeline like almost every other British
intellectual of that era. No, he was totally
outside that system. He was taught primarily
by his father and his uncle, the Reverend Thomas
Spencer. And his education was... Well, it was
highly curated, let's say. What do you mean by
that? He learned mathematics and physics because
the subjects interested him. They fit his view
of a mechanical universe. He learned enough Latin
to translate some easy texts, but he famously
refused to learn things that bored him. He just
wouldn't do it. So he was kind of a picky eater,
but for knowledge. That's a great way to put
it. He acquired his knowledge through what the
biography calls narrowly focused readings. Narrowly
focused readings. That sounds like a very polite
way of saying, I only read what confirms my existing
biases. There is certainly an element of that.
He was famous later in life for not reading books
that disagreed with him. He'd read the first
few pages, get annoyed, and throw the book across
the room. Wow. But in his youth, he really was
a sponge for information, just not through the
lecture hall. He learned through conversation.
He'd hang out with smart people, with scientists
and radicals, and just absorb their ideas. It
feels very modern, doesn't it? He was learning
via the 19th century equivalent of podcasts and
YouTube essays rather than sitting in a classroom.
It does. But because he wasn't part of that academic
machine, he had this really unique career path.
He wasn't a professor. He couldn't be. He started
out as a civil engineer. Right. During the railway
boom, you have to picture the late 1830s in England.
It was like the dot -com boom of the 1990s. Everyone
was building railways. It was the future. And
Spencer was right in the middle of it. He was.
He worked as a civil engineer, drafting plans,
looking at mechanics, dealing with bridges and
gradients. And I think this is absolutely crucial
to understanding him. How so? It gave him a mechanical
view of the world. He saw the world as a system
of forces, pressures, balances, and equilibriums.
He didn't see society through the lens of poetry
or ancient history. He saw it as an engine, something
to be understood and optimized. And speaking
of optimizing things. Yeah. We have to talk about
the invention. This is my absolute favorite detail
in the entire biography. I think I know where
you're going with this. Somewhere between writing
about the fundamental laws of the cosmos and
inventing the field of sociology. Herbert Spencer
invented a precursor to the paperclip. He did.
He called it a binding pin. It was distributed
by a company called Ackerman and Company. What
did it look like? Was it like the paperclips
we use today? Not quite. If you look at the diagrams,
and he actually included drawings of it in his
autobiography, which tells you something. He
was proud of it. Very proud. It looks more like
what we would call a cotter pin today. It was
a piece of metal used to hold sheets of paper
together. It just shows you how his mind worked
on every level. He couldn't stand disorder. Loose
papers were incoherent homogeneity, if you will.
Uh -huh. Right. A chaotic blob of paper. And
he needed to bind them into a system. He wanted
to optimize everything from the universe down
to his desktop. But, and here's the great irony.
For a guy who was trying to optimize binding
paper and optimize society, he seemed to have
a really, really hard time optimizing his own
life. Oh, that's putting it mildly. The sources
describe him as a lifelong hypochondriac. The
hypochondria is absolutely central to his character.
After about 1855, he suffered from some kind
of nervous breakdown that... By all accounts,
he never really recovered from. What were the
symptoms? He was constantly complaining of pains,
of insomnia, of digestive issues, of all these
maladies that no physician could ever actually
diagnose. He essentially became an invalid for
the last half of his life. The phrase nervous
sensibility comes up a lot. It wasn't just that
he was in physical pain. It was that he couldn't
handle stimulation. Exactly. He couldn't handle
excitement. He couldn't handle disagreement.
He had to dictate his books because the physical
act of writing taxed him too much. I read he
would take a rowboat out into the middle of the
Serpentine Lake in London just to get away from
the noise. He did. He wore earmuffs. He was incredibly
sensitive. And there's a famous story where he
canceled a meeting with his friend T .H. Huxley,
Darwin's bulldog, a very intense argumentative
guy. Right. Spencer canceled because he feared
that if they got into a scientific disagreement,
the excitement would ruin his night's sleep.
He literally couldn't handle a debate with a
friend. I just have to pause on that for a second
because it's so it's so relatable on one level,
but it's also so deeply contradictory. How so?
You have this man who is famous for a philosophy
that is often described as ruthless. Survival
of the fittest. Let the weak fail. A philosophy
of iron and struggle. The epitome of a hard philosophy.
And yet, a heated chat about biology sends him
to bed with a migraine. He is this incredibly
fragile vessel carrying a very, very hard philosophy.
It's a striking contradiction, and some biographers
have suggested that his philosophy was almost
a way of managing his own internal chaos. A coping
mechanism. In a way, yes. If he could prove that
the universe was orderly, that there was a law
for everything, that everything was progressing
toward a perfect equilibrium, maybe the chaos
of his own nervous system would feel less threatening.
That makes a lot of sense. But despite the nerves,
the ambition was just boundless. He didn't just
want to write about biology or politics. He wanted
to explain. Everything. Everything. And this
is where we get to the synthetic philosophy.
That word synthetic is important here. He doesn't
mean fake, like synthetic fabric. No, not at
all. He means synthesis, as in bringing it all
together into one coherent system. He published
a prospectus, basically a business plan for his
life's work. What does it say? It essentially
said, I am going to write a series of books,
a dozen volumes, that will demonstrate a single
universal law that applies to the formation of
the stars, the cooling of the Earth, the evolution
of biological life, the development of the human
mind, and the structure of human societies. That
is a staggering amount of confidence. I mean,
most scientists spend their whole lives studying
one species of beetle. And Spencer wanted to
explain the entire cosmos, from the nebula to
the nation state. So what was this law? What
is the secret to the universe, according to Herbert
Spencer? At its core, it's the law of evolution.
But we have to be very, very careful here because
he isn't using the word evolution in exactly
the same way a modern biologist would. It's broader
for him. Much broader. For Spencer, evolution
was a cosmic process. He defined it as the universal
movement from simple, undifferentiated homogeneity
to complex, differentiated heterogeneity. Okay,
that is a mouthful of Victorian academic speak.
It is. Simple. undifferentiated homogeneity to
complex differentiated heterogeneity. Let's break
that down for the listener. What are we actually
visualizing here? The easiest way to think of
it is the movement from a blob to a machine or
a blob to a body. Okay. A blob to a body. I like
that. The universe, in his view, starts as a
nebula, a giant diffuse cloud of gas. Every part
of that cloud is basically the same as every
other part. That is homogeneity. It's simple.
It's a blob. It's a blob. But then gravity starts
to act on it. It pulls it together. It starts
to spin, clumps form, and eventually you get
planets, a sun, moons. Now you have a solar system.
You have distinct parts, a sun, an earth, a moon.
They're all different. They're specialized. That
is heterogeneity. And he believed this single
process applied to absolutely everything. Everything.
Take a biological embryo. It starts as a cluster
of identical cells. That's homogeneity. A little
blob of cells. Exactly. And it grows into a baby
with a brain, a heart, a liver, and skin. All
these specialized organs working together. That's
heterogeneity. Okay, that makes sense. Or take
a primitive tribe in Spencer's view. Everyone
is doing more or less the same thing. Hunting.
Gathering. Simple. Homogenous. But a modern industrial
society has bankers, bakers, engineers, artists,
podcasters. Right. Millions of specialized roles.
Complex. Heterogeneous. That's it. For Spencer,
that movement from simple same to complex different
is the arrow of time. It's the fundamental law
of all progress. So he thought this was a law
of physics, basically, like gravity or thermodynamics.
Yes. He saw it as a physical necessity. And this
is where the comfort comes in for his Victorian
audience. You have to remember, the mid -19th
century was a time of massive anxiety. A crisis
of faith. A huge one. Geology was showing the
Earth was millions of years old, not 6 ,000.
Darwin had just shown up and suggested we were
related to apes. God was, for many educated people,
retreating from the picture. And that leaves
a void. A terrifying void. People were scared
that life was just random, meaningless chaos.
Precisely. And in walks Herbert Spencer with
these massive, dense books. And he says, don't
worry, there is a plan. It's not a divine plan
in the old sense, but it is a natural plan. The
universe is not chaotic. It is moving from chaos
to order. We are evolving toward perfection.
That word perfection is key. He really believed
there was an endpoint, didn't he? Oh, absolutely.
He was what philosophers call teleological, which
means he believed processes have a goal or a
purpose. He believed that evolution wasn't just
random change. It was progress. It was directional.
And where was it all heading? To a state of perfect
equilibrium, the perfect man in the perfect society.
And he combined the scientific sounding framework
with a kind of residual religious feeling. He
was an agnostic. In fact, he coined the term
the unknowable to describe the ultimate reality
or power behind the universe. The unknowable.
Right. He argued that this was the one thing
that both science and religion could agree on,
that the ultimate cause is inscrutable. We can
study phenomena, but we can never know the thing
in itself. But he didn't treat this unknowable
force as neutral or scary. No, not at all. He
treated it as benevolent. He wrote that the laws
of nature were the decrees of a being transcendentally
kind. So he basically smuggled a deist god back
in through the side door. So the message is,
if you just get out of the way and let the laws
of nature do their work, everything will eventually
become perfect. Exactly. And that is why he sold
a million books. He allowed Victorians to feel
scientific without becoming nihilistic. He gave
them a new faith, a secular religion of progress.
But this faith in progress brings us to the most
contentious part of his work. his biology, and
his relationship with Darwin. The Great Showdown.
We established that Spencer was writing about
evolution before Darwin. He wrote an essay called
The Philosophy of Style in 1852 and another one,
Progress, Its Law and Cause, in 1857. Darwin
doesn't publish the origins of species until
1859. Right. So Spencer was already an evolutionist.
He already believed species weren't fixed, that
they changed over time. But he had a different
mechanism in mind for how they changed. So when
Darwin published, what was Spencer's reaction?
He felt vindicated. He was like, see, I told
you species change. This famous biologist just
proved my point. But he never fully abandoned
his original belief in Lamarckism. He just sort
of bolted Darwin's idea onto his existing system.
Lamarckism. We need to unpack this because it
is the absolute linchpin of his entire political
and social worldview. This is the idea of use
inheritance, right? Yes. It's named after the
French naturalist Jean -Baptiste Lamarck. The
classic textbook example is the giraffe. Right,
the giraffe stretching its neck. Lamarck argued
that a giraffe stretches its neck to reach the
high leaves on a tree. That effort over its lifetime
stretches the neck just a tiny bit. Then the
crucial part is that the giraffe passes that
acquired longer neck down to its offspring. So
the baby giraffe is born with a slightly longer
neck because of its parents' efforts. Exactly.
Generation after generation of stretching and
passing it on and you get the modern giraffe.
Spencer believed this applied to everything,
especially human psychology and morality. So
if I work really hard my whole life to become
disciplined and punctual and moral. My children
will be born with a biological predisposition
to be disciplined, punctual and moral. That's
exactly what he believed. And conversely, if
you are lazy or criminal or aggressive, you pass
those acquired character traits down to your
children. Your choices get written into your
biological hardware. And how is that different
from Darwin's idea? Darwin's big idea was natural
selection. For Darwin, it's about random variation.
In any population of proto -giraffes, some are
just randomly born with slightly longer necks
than others. Just the luck of the draw. The luck
of the draw. And in an environment where the
lower leaves have all been eaten, the ones with
the slightly longer necks can eat, survive, and
have more babies. The short -necked ones starve
and die out. The environment selects the winners.
It's a filter, not a striving mechanism. So it's
passive in a way. It is. Spencer accepted natural
selection as part of the process. He's the one
who called it survival of the fittest after all.
But he always thought the main driver of human
progress was this Lamarckian self -improvement
being stamped into our genes. This distinction,
Lamarck versus Darwin, it seems technical. But
it actually explains his entire view of the poor
and social policy, doesn't it? It explains everything.
Absolutely everything. Because if Lamarck is
true, then suffering has a purpose. It has a
pedagogical purpose. It's a lesson. It's a lesson
that gets passed on. The struggle to survive
forces you to adapt, to become smarter, stronger,
more disciplined. And those improvements then
get hardwired into the human race. So if you
take away the struggle. If you take away the
struggle, if you give people free food or free
housing or a safety net, you aren't just making
them lazy in the short term. In Spencer's view,
you are committing a crime against the future.
You are stopping the biological evolution of
the entire species. You're preventing the adaptation
that leads to the perfect man. You're halting
progress itself. Wow. That is a heavy concept.
It turns welfare from a kindness into a sin against
cosmic law. That is exactly how he saw it. And
it's the bridge from his biology to his sociology.
Right. So let's talk about the sociology. He
viewed society as a social organism. And from
the sounds of it, he took this metaphor very,
very literally. Incredibly literally. He wasn't
just saying society is like an organism. He was
saying it is an organism, just on a different
scale. He spent pages and pages in his books
mapping out the analogies. Give me some examples.
Okay. So he said the government is the cerebrum,
the brain's nervous system, because it regulates
action across the whole body. Makes sense. The
roads, railways, and telegraphs are the vascular
system, the veins and arteries because they distribute
nutrition and information. Okay. And the working
class, the producers, they are the alimentary
system, the digestive tract, because they process
the raw resources for the benefit of the whole
organism. It sounds a bit like a freshman biology
student trying to force a metaphor, but he built
his entire worldview on it. He did. And within
this organic view of history, he saw two main
types of society competing with each other. This
is probably his most enduring contribution to
sociology. The militant versus industrial distinction.
Militant versus industrial. Let's break those
down. What is a militant society? A militant
society is the primitive form. Think of Sparta
or the Roman Empire or feudal Europe. The primary
goal of the whole society is preservation against
external enemies. It's organized for warfare.
So it's structured like an army. Exactly. It's
hierarchical. Your status is everything. You
do what you were told. The individual exists
to serve the state, not the other way around.
And cooperation is compulsory. You work because
if you don't, you get whipped or imprisoned or
killed. And the industrial society, that's the
evolved form. That's the evolved form. And he
doesn't just mean a society with factories and
smokestacks. He means a society based on production
rather than destruction. In an industrial society,
the primary social bond isn't status, it's contract.
A voluntary. agreement. A voluntary agreement.
I will do this for you if you do this for me.
People cooperate because it's in their mutual
self -interest. In this type of society, the
state's power shrinks and the individual's freedom
grows. And he saw this as the inevitable future.
We were all moving from the militant past to
the industrial future. Yes. That was the direction
of progress. But he got very worried toward the
end of his life. He saw Britain sliding backwards.
He called it rebarbarization. What was causing
this rebarbarization? Imperialism. The massive
expansion of the British Empire, the growth of
the military, the rise of the bureaucracy needed
to manage it all. He saw this as a sign that
the militant type of society was making a terrifying
comeback. This leads us directly to his politics
and the book that I think every libertarian has
on their shelf, The Man Versus the State, which
he published in 1884. This is his great political
manifesto. By the 1880s, the Liberal Party in
Britain, which Spencer used to identify with,
started shifting. They began passing laws to
help the poor, improve working conditions, fund
public libraries, create safety regulations.
This was the birth of modern social liberalism.
It was. And Spencer was absolutely horrified.
He saw it as a betrayal of what liberalism was
supposed to mean which to him was individual
liberty. He argued for what he called the right
to ignore the state. That is a pretty radical
concept even today. It is essentially anarcho
-capitalism before the term existed. He believed
that if the state provides anything beyond the
most basic protection of life and contract enforcement,
it is violating your fundamental rights. The
night watchman state. The absolute bare minimum.
He believed that as society continued to evolve
into the peaceful industrial form, the state
would eventually wither away and die completely.
We wouldn't need police or courts because we
would all be so perfectly adapted and moral that
we wouldn't hurt each other. A kind of biological
utopia. Exactly. But until that utopia arrives,
he had some very, very harsh words for the government's
attempts to help people along the way. Which
brings us to the famous quote, And he meant that
literally, definitionally. He laid out his logic
like this. What is a slave? A slave is someone
who labors under coercion to satisfy another
person's desires. OK. He then says if the government
taxes 10 percent of your income to build a public
library that you don't want or use, then for
10 percent of your working hours, you are laboring
under coercion for someone else's benefit. Therefore,
you are 10 percent slave. That's a powerful rhetorical
argument. It is. And he said it doesn't matter
if the master is a single plantation owner or
a Democratic. committee voting to spend your
money. The relationship of coercion is the same.
You can see why that resonates with people who
value individual liberty above all else. But
we have to look at the flip side of this. When
you strip away the state's protection, what happens
to the vulnerable? This brings us to what we
call the dark side of Spencer, the social Darwinism.
Right. We have to address the extermination quotes.
They are undeniably there in the text, especially
in his earlier, more radical book, Social Statics.
He talks about the purifying process of nature.
He does. He says that the forces working toward
ultimate happiness exterminate such sections
of mankind as stand in their way. Exterminate.
That is a chilling, chilling word to use for
human beings. It is. He writes, be he human or
be he brute, the hindrance must be got rid of.
Now, Spencer's defenders, and he did have them,
would argue that he is simply describing a law
of nature, like describing how gravity works.
So he's not saying we should go out and exterminate
them. He's saying. Nature will exterminate them
if they can't adapt. That's the argument. He's
saying if you are not smart enough or strong
enough or disciplined enough to survive in your
environment, nature will kill you. And he believed
that this death was, in a grand cosmic sense,
benevolent because it weeded out the unfit and
ensured the overall health of the species. It's
the cold logic of the herd. You let the slow
gazelle get eaten by the lion so the herd as
a whole stays fast. Yes. But applied to human
beings, it means letting the widow and the orphan
and the disabled person starve. Well, this is
where a really important nuance comes in and
one that often gets lost in the conversation
about him. Spencer was not against charity. Oh,
so what was he against? He was against state
charity, compulsory charity. What's the difference
to him? From the perspective of the starving
person, they get fed either way. To Spencer,
the mechanism mattered more than anything. If
the state takes your money by force and gives
it to the poor, there is no virtue in it for
you. You were coerced. But if you choose to help
a poor person out of your own compassion, that
is an exercise in altruism. It improves your
character. So he's thinking about the soul of
the giver, not just the stomach of the receiver.
Precisely. He actually encouraged private philanthropy.
And it's a very big, but he warned that even
private charity had to be administered carefully.
How so? He said you shouldn't help the undeserving
poor. The undeserving poor. Who gets to decide
who is deserving? Well, in his view, the undeserving
were the drunks, the lazy, the immoral. You should
only give charity to those who are struggling
due to bad luck, an accident, a sudden illness,
not due to bad character. Why? Because if you
help the lazy survive and reproduce. They will
have lazy children and you will be actively filling
the world with lazy people. You'd be rewarding
unfitness. Again, it all comes back to that Lamarckian
fear of breeding bad traits into the population.
Every single time. And this obsession with good
and bad traits extended to race as well. We have
to talk about his advice to the government of
Japan. This is a fascinating and pretty disturbing
historical footnote. In the late 19th century,
Japan was rapidly modernizing and opening up
to the West. And they respected Spencer immensely.
They saw him as a prophet of the industrial society
they wanted to become. So they asked for his
advice. They did. They wrote to him and asked
for his guidance on modernization. And he wrote
a letter back, advising them in the strongest
possible terms against allowing intermarriage
between Japanese people and Westerners. Why?
What was his reasoning? He called it creating
a bad hybrid. A bad hybrid. Yes. He used biological
analogies. He said if you mix two different species
of animal that are perfectly adapted to their
different environments, you get a hybrid that
is adapted to neither. It's an inferior product.
He applied this directly to human races. So he
thought that a child of a European and an Asian
parent would have a chaotic constitution. That's
the phrase he used. It was a pseudoscientific
racism. It wasn't necessarily based on hate.
in the emotional sense we think of today. He
didn't seem to hate Japanese people. He respected
them enough to advise them. Right. But it was
based on this rigid and completely incorrect
biological theory that races were like distinct
species that shouldn't be mixed. And he used
the same logic to oppose Chinese immigration
to America. Correct. He visited America and was
horrified by the idea. He thought it would cause
social disorganization because you were mixing
two profoundly different social types. He saw
societies as these delicate organisms with their
own specific internal balance. You can't just
transplant tissue from one to another without
rejection. So if we stop the story right here,
Spencer sounds like the ultimate villain for
the modern progressive. He's against welfare.
He's against immigration. He's talking about
exterminating the weak. It sounds like a proto
-fascist ideology. That's certainly how he's
often painted. But, and this is the twist that
makes him so complex and so fascinating, he was
also a radical anti -imperialist who hated war.
This is the paradox that confuses everyone. It
completely breaks the stereotype. Right. If you
believe in survival of the fittest, shouldn't
you be cheering for the British Empire as it
conquers the globe? Shouldn't you think we are
the strong, they are the weak, we win, this is
progress? That would be the logical conclusion.
But Spencer hated it. He was arguably the most
prominent and vocal anti -imperialist in Britain
at the time. He detested the wars, the conquests,
all of it. Why? How does he possibly square that
circle? It goes right back to the militant versus
industrial distinction. He believed that by conquering
other nations, Britain was becoming a militant
society again. To run an empire, what do you
need? You need a big army. You need high taxes
to pay for it. You need a powerful, centralized
bureaucracy. You need a culture of obedience
and deference to authority. All the hallmarks
of the militancy. All the hallmarks. And all
those things destroy individual liberty at home.
They crush the voluntary, contractual society
he valued. So he didn't oppose empire because
he felt bad for the people being conquered. Though
maybe he did on some level. He opposed it because
he thought it was corrupting the British soul.
Precisely. He thought it was re -barbarizing
Britain and dragging it back down the evolutionary
ladder. There's a really skating quote I saw
regarding the Second Afghan War. When he was
told that British troops were in danger, he said
something just shocking. Oh, I know the one.
He basically said, I don't care if they are shot.
Which is, wow. Yeah. Support the troops was not
his motto. Not even a little bit. And his logic
was cold. But consistent, he said. When men hire
themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking
nothing about the justice of their cause, they
are forfeiting their right to sympathy. he viewed
soldiers not as heroes but as tools of a coercive
state exactly just another arm of the government
he hated he thought patriotism was just a fancy
word for primitive tribalism and that it was
holding back human progress that is a level of
ideological consistency that you almost have
to admire even if it's incredibly harsh he hated
the state so much that he wouldn't even support
its wars when his own soldiers were dying this
position really isolated him didn't it completely
by the end of his life he was a man with And
that brings us to the great decline. We started
by saying he was the Aristotle of the 19th century.
But by 1937, the great American sociologist Talcott
Parsons opens a foundational book with the now
famous question, who now reads Spencer? And the
answer was nobody. Pretty much nobody. It was
a brutal and stunningly fast crash. And it happened
for two main reasons. Okay. What were they? First,
the science he built his entire system on fell
apart. Lamarckism. Lamarckism. Oh. Around the
turn of the century, the work of August Wiseman
and others on genetics established what's called
the Wiseman barrier. This proved that the reproductive
cells, the sperm and eggs, are separate and insulated
from the body cells. So no matter how much you
stretch your neck or go to the gym, your sperm
or eggs don't change. Exactly. Acquired characteristics
are not inherited. And with that discovery, Spencer's
entire promise of inevitable perfection just
died. If we don't inherit acquired moral traits,
then there is no guarantee that humanity is getting
better and better with each generation. Right.
We might just be stuck with the same flawed human
nature forever. The whole teleological engine
of his system ran out of fuel. Okay, so that's
the scientific reason. What was the second reason
for his decline? The world changed in ways he
never predicted. Spencer's philosophy predicted
a future of increasing peace, shrinking governments,
and voluntary cooperation. Instead, the 20th
century gave us World War I, the Great Depression,
the rise of fascism, Nazism, and communism. The
exact opposite of what he predicted. The polar
opposite. The militant societies didn't vanish.
They came back with a vengeance and on an industrial
scale. It became impossible to read Spencer's
optimistic law of evolution with a straight face
while looking at the trenches of the Somme or
the gas chambers of Auschwitz. He just looked
hopelessly naive. Hopelessly naive. And at the
same time, the field he helped create, sociology,
moved on. Sociologists like Emil Durkheim and
Max Weber came along and said, look, society
isn't a simple biological organism. It's a complex
structure of culture, meaning, values, and symbols.
They professionalized the field. And Spencer
was left looking like a gifted amateur. He was.
The historian Richard Hofstadter delivered the
final, brutal blow when he called Spencer the
metaphysician of the homemade intellectual. Metaphysician
of the homemade intellectual. Ouch. That is a
devastating critique. It's just brutal. It basically
says, this is philosophy for guys who like to
tinker in their garages, not for serious thinkers.
It's an elitist dismissal, for sure, coming from
a university academic. But it stuck. Spencer
was cast out of the canon. But he hasn't disappeared
completely. We mentioned at the start that he
is the ghost in the machine of modern libertarianism.
He is. His ideas had a long afterlife. The philosopher
Robert Nozick in his hugely influential book,
Anarchy, State and Utopia, took Spencer's right
to ignore the state very, very seriously. And
what about his influence more broadly in politics?
Think about the Margaret Thatcher era in the
UK or the Reagan era in the US. That famous slogan
Thatcher used, there is no alternative or Tina.
Right. No alternative to the free market. That
idea. That the market is not just one possible
system, but the only natural way to organize
society and that any attempt to interfere with
it will only make things worse. That is pure,
distilled Herbert Spencer. Every time you hear
someone argue that taxation is theft or that
government regulation is always counterproductive,
you are hearing an echo of Herbert Spencer. It
is truly amazing how he can be the source of
the paperclip and the source of modern anti -state
rhetoric. He was a system builder, a flawed one,
a misguided one in many ways, but a powerful
one. And parts of his system are still very much
with us, even if people don't know his name.
So we've unpackaged the man, the myth, the paperclip,
and the philosophy. We have looked at the synthetic
philosophy that tried to explain the stars and
the slums with the very same law. We've seen
the paradox of the pacifist who sounded like
a brute and the hypochondriac who preached a
gospel of strength. And we've seen how fame is
fleeting. Being the biggest intellectual of your
century guarantees you absolutely nothing in
the next. A cautionary tale for all of us. As
we wrap up this deep dive, I want to leave you,
our listener, with a final thought to chew on.
We often think of survival of the fittest as
a call for ruthless dominance, the strong crushing
the weak. That's the social Darwinist nightmare
that we rightly associate with the worst ideologies
of the 20th century. Right. That's the common
interpretation. But remember Spencer's goal,
his teleology. He believed evolution was moving
us toward a state of perfect altruism. He genuinely
believed that eventually human nature would change
so much that the very idea of causing another
person pain would be physically impossible for
us. He thought we would become so empathetic
that we would literally feel each other's feelings,
making violence unthinkable. It's the ultimate
irony, isn't it? He advocated for what sounds
like ruthless competition in the present in order
to create a utopia of perfect saints in the future.
The ends justify the means on a cosmic scale.
So it raises a provocative question. Is it possible
that we have completely misunderstood the goal
of his philosophy? Was this brutal, competitive
process supposed to be the fire that burned away
all our aggression, leaving behind a species
that was purely kind? It's a strange, almost
utopian thought from such a cold -seeming man.
wouldn't mean the strongest or the most brutal.
The fittest would eventually mean the most empathetic.
The kindest. The kindest. And that is a definition
of fitness, I think. We could all get behind,
even if we completely reject the brutal biology
he used to get there. Absolutely. Thank you for
listening to this deep dive into the rise and
very steep fall of Herbert Spencer. We'll catch
you on the next one.