WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.419 Imagine, just for a moment, that you are the 00:00:03.419 --> 00:00:07.080 absolute giant of the intellectual world. I don't 00:00:07.080 --> 00:00:10.099 mean you have a bestseller or, you know, a popular 00:00:10.099 --> 00:00:13.619 TED Talk. I mean you are the colossus. Right. 00:00:13.699 --> 00:00:17.559 The guy. The guy. You are selling books by the 00:00:17.559 --> 00:00:20.100 millions, and I mean literally over a million 00:00:20.100 --> 00:00:22.239 copies during your lifetime. Which is a number 00:00:22.239 --> 00:00:24.660 that, for the 19th century, for a philosophical 00:00:24.660 --> 00:00:28.260 writer, it's just staggering. It doesn't compute. 00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:31.739 You're being toasted by the elite in London's 00:00:31.739 --> 00:00:34.619 private clubs. Your ideas are sparking actual 00:00:34.619 --> 00:00:37.340 political movements in places as far away as 00:00:37.340 --> 00:00:39.920 China, Japan. And the greatest writers of the 00:00:39.920 --> 00:00:43.039 age are using our ideas. Tolstoy, George Eliot. 00:00:43.770 --> 00:00:45.649 They're weaving your theories right into their 00:00:45.649 --> 00:00:47.729 characters. You are, for all intents and purposes, 00:00:47.929 --> 00:00:50.329 the Aristotle of the Victorian age. It's a level 00:00:50.329 --> 00:00:52.829 of fame that's really hard for us to grasp today. 00:00:53.090 --> 00:00:54.750 I mean, maybe the closest comparison would be 00:00:54.750 --> 00:00:56.630 if you took Einstein's scientific credibility 00:00:56.630 --> 00:00:59.350 and mixed it with the, I don't know, the pop 00:00:59.350 --> 00:01:02.549 culture reach of a Jordan Peterson or a Yuval 00:01:02.549 --> 00:01:04.689 Noah Harari. Yeah, but even that doesn't quite 00:01:04.689 --> 00:01:06.930 get there, does it? No, because it wasn't just 00:01:06.930 --> 00:01:10.269 a niche. He was the heir the Victorians breathed. 00:01:10.290 --> 00:01:14.019 His ideas were everywhere. Exactly. But then 00:01:14.019 --> 00:01:18.780 you fast forward a few decades, not even a century, 00:01:18.900 --> 00:01:22.180 and you've almost completely vanished. Oof, gone. 00:01:22.260 --> 00:01:24.159 You go from being the greatest philosopher of 00:01:24.159 --> 00:01:27.659 the age to, well, to a punchline. People stop 00:01:27.659 --> 00:01:30.390 reading you. Academics scoff at your work. And 00:01:30.390 --> 00:01:33.250 the one thing, the one single phrase that everyone 00:01:33.250 --> 00:01:36.170 still knows you for. The one sentence that defines 00:01:36.170 --> 00:01:39.310 your entire legacy. Is almost universally attributed 00:01:39.310 --> 00:01:41.829 to somebody else. It's a spectacular fall from 00:01:41.829 --> 00:01:44.590 grace. A complete collapse of reputation. And 00:01:44.590 --> 00:01:46.370 I'm guessing we're talking about the great Mandela 00:01:46.370 --> 00:01:48.290 effect of the history of science here. We are 00:01:48.290 --> 00:01:49.730 indeed. We're talking about the phrase survival 00:01:49.730 --> 00:01:52.450 of the fittest. Yeah, yes. If you walked out 00:01:52.450 --> 00:01:55.230 on the street right now and asked a hundred people 00:01:55.230 --> 00:01:57.480 who coined that phrase. what would they say? 00:01:57.700 --> 00:02:00.620 99, maybe 100 of them would say Charles Darwin. 00:02:00.760 --> 00:02:04.079 Of course. It's synonymous with Darwinism. But 00:02:04.079 --> 00:02:06.700 they'd all be wrong. Completely wrong. It wasn't 00:02:06.700 --> 00:02:08.979 Darwin at all. It was the man we are doing a 00:02:08.979 --> 00:02:12.479 deep dive on today, Herbert Spencer. That's the 00:02:12.479 --> 00:02:14.930 classic cocktail party fact, isn't it? The one 00:02:14.930 --> 00:02:16.789 that always gets a little bit of a surprised 00:02:16.789 --> 00:02:19.710 reaction. It really is. Darwin didn't use that 00:02:19.710 --> 00:02:22.889 phrase at all in the first edition of The Origin 00:02:22.889 --> 00:02:27.169 of Species. It was Spencer who read Darwin, sort 00:02:27.169 --> 00:02:29.189 of nodded along, and then said, you know, I have 00:02:29.189 --> 00:02:32.090 a catchier, more philosophical way to describe 00:02:32.090 --> 00:02:34.469 this whole natural selection thing. And Darwin 00:02:34.469 --> 00:02:37.389 actually liked it. He did. He ended up adopting 00:02:37.389 --> 00:02:40.409 Spencer's phrase in the later editions of Origin, 00:02:40.590 --> 00:02:43.379 specifically the fifth edition. He thought it 00:02:43.379 --> 00:02:45.520 captured the mechanism of natural selection really 00:02:45.520 --> 00:02:47.520 well, even though it opened the door to a lot 00:02:47.520 --> 00:02:50.319 of misinterpretation. But yeah, the words themselves, 00:02:50.479 --> 00:02:53.280 they belong to Spencer. So today, our mission 00:02:53.280 --> 00:02:56.439 is something of an archaeological dig. We're 00:02:56.439 --> 00:02:59.300 going to excavate Herbert Spencer from the dustbin 00:02:59.300 --> 00:03:01.699 of history. And I want to be really clear to 00:03:01.699 --> 00:03:04.280 you listening. We're not necessarily here to 00:03:04.280 --> 00:03:07.229 praise him. When we get into the weeds of his 00:03:07.229 --> 00:03:10.050 social theories, there is some genuinely dark, 00:03:10.110 --> 00:03:13.930 controversial stuff. Views on race, on poverty, 00:03:14.110 --> 00:03:16.870 on the elimination of the unfit. Stuff that can 00:03:16.870 --> 00:03:19.909 be quite shocking to modern ears. But we need 00:03:19.909 --> 00:03:22.729 to understand him. Because he's the missing link 00:03:22.729 --> 00:03:24.990 in understanding the 19th century. And not just 00:03:24.990 --> 00:03:27.270 the 19th century. To understand the political 00:03:27.270 --> 00:03:29.270 arguments we are having right now today about 00:03:29.270 --> 00:03:31.490 the size of government, about the welfare state, 00:03:31.710 --> 00:03:34.729 individual liberty. You have to grapple with 00:03:34.729 --> 00:03:36.930 Spencer. He's the ghost in the machine. He is. 00:03:36.990 --> 00:03:39.169 He's in many ways the intellectual grandfather 00:03:39.169 --> 00:03:42.129 of modern libertarianism. He was formulating 00:03:42.129 --> 00:03:45.270 arguments for the right to ignore the state long, 00:03:45.409 --> 00:03:47.569 long before the modern movement ever took shape. 00:03:47.789 --> 00:03:50.009 So we have a massive stack of source material 00:03:50.009 --> 00:03:52.629 to get through today. We're drawing from his 00:03:52.629 --> 00:03:56.330 biography his huge multi -volume system of synthetic 00:03:56.330 --> 00:03:59.090 philosophy. Which is a title in itself. It is. 00:03:59.150 --> 00:04:01.509 And we're looking at the critiques from his contemporaries 00:04:01.509 --> 00:04:05.000 and the historians who who later, well, dismantled 00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:07.000 his reputation. We're going to look at his theory 00:04:07.000 --> 00:04:09.960 of everything, his complicated feud -slash -friendship 00:04:09.960 --> 00:04:12.500 with Darwin, and the huge paradox of a man who 00:04:12.500 --> 00:04:15.419 championed survival of the fittest, but was personally 00:04:15.419 --> 00:04:18.899 a pacifist who absolutely hated war. It's a fascinating 00:04:18.899 --> 00:04:21.819 story. But let's start at the beginning. Who 00:04:21.819 --> 00:04:25.019 was this guy? Where does a mind like this even 00:04:25.019 --> 00:04:27.420 come from? Well, Herbert Spencer was born in 00:04:27.420 --> 00:04:30.939 Derby, England in 1820. And if you want to understand 00:04:30.939 --> 00:04:33.720 why he spent his whole life fighting against 00:04:33.720 --> 00:04:36.990 authority. You just have to look at his dad. 00:04:37.189 --> 00:04:39.910 Okay. He was the son of William George Spencer, 00:04:40.189 --> 00:04:43.209 who was known as a religious dissenter. I saw 00:04:43.209 --> 00:04:45.310 that term dissenter pop up a lot in the notes. 00:04:45.370 --> 00:04:48.389 For those of us who might not be up on our 19th 00:04:48.389 --> 00:04:50.629 century British religious history, that's not 00:04:50.629 --> 00:04:53.189 just a generic term for a rebel, right? It carries 00:04:53.189 --> 00:04:56.250 some specific weight. It does, yeah. In this 00:04:56.250 --> 00:04:58.670 context, dissenters were Protestants who separated 00:04:58.670 --> 00:05:01.089 from the Church of England. They were the nonconformists. 00:05:01.310 --> 00:05:03.370 So outside the establishment. Completely outside. 00:05:03.509 --> 00:05:05.269 They were often barred from certain... public 00:05:05.269 --> 00:05:07.949 offices or from attending universities like Oxford 00:05:07.949 --> 00:05:10.569 and Cambridge. So there was this built -in culture 00:05:10.569 --> 00:05:13.209 of being an outsider, of questioning the established 00:05:13.209 --> 00:05:16.250 order. And his dad was deep in that world. Very 00:05:16.250 --> 00:05:19.430 deep. He drifted from Methodism to Quakerism, 00:05:19.470 --> 00:05:22.149 but the core trait he seems to have passed down 00:05:22.149 --> 00:05:25.750 to Herbert was this staunch, almost pathological 00:05:25.750 --> 00:05:28.649 opposition to all forms of authority. He ran 00:05:28.649 --> 00:05:30.930 a school based on very progressive teaching methods. 00:05:31.149 --> 00:05:33.709 But interestingly, Herbert himself didn't really 00:05:33.709 --> 00:05:35.850 go to school in the traditional sense. He was 00:05:35.850 --> 00:05:38.370 the ultimate autodidact. That really stood out 00:05:38.370 --> 00:05:40.430 to me. Oh, completely. He didn't have a university 00:05:40.430 --> 00:05:43.129 degree. He didn't come up through the Eaton and 00:05:43.129 --> 00:05:45.329 Oxford pipeline like almost every other British 00:05:45.329 --> 00:05:47.790 intellectual of that era. No, he was totally 00:05:47.790 --> 00:05:50.209 outside that system. He was taught primarily 00:05:50.209 --> 00:05:52.529 by his father and his uncle, the Reverend Thomas 00:05:52.529 --> 00:05:55.939 Spencer. And his education was... Well, it was 00:05:55.939 --> 00:05:57.779 highly curated, let's say. What do you mean by 00:05:57.779 --> 00:06:00.100 that? He learned mathematics and physics because 00:06:00.100 --> 00:06:02.939 the subjects interested him. They fit his view 00:06:02.939 --> 00:06:05.699 of a mechanical universe. He learned enough Latin 00:06:05.699 --> 00:06:08.240 to translate some easy texts, but he famously 00:06:08.240 --> 00:06:10.959 refused to learn things that bored him. He just 00:06:10.959 --> 00:06:13.120 wouldn't do it. So he was kind of a picky eater, 00:06:13.300 --> 00:06:16.000 but for knowledge. That's a great way to put 00:06:16.000 --> 00:06:18.360 it. He acquired his knowledge through what the 00:06:18.360 --> 00:06:21.680 biography calls narrowly focused readings. Narrowly 00:06:21.680 --> 00:06:24.290 focused readings. That sounds like a very polite 00:06:24.290 --> 00:06:26.970 way of saying, I only read what confirms my existing 00:06:26.970 --> 00:06:29.410 biases. There is certainly an element of that. 00:06:29.529 --> 00:06:32.689 He was famous later in life for not reading books 00:06:32.689 --> 00:06:35.029 that disagreed with him. He'd read the first 00:06:35.029 --> 00:06:37.449 few pages, get annoyed, and throw the book across 00:06:37.449 --> 00:06:40.310 the room. Wow. But in his youth, he really was 00:06:40.310 --> 00:06:42.769 a sponge for information, just not through the 00:06:42.769 --> 00:06:44.370 lecture hall. He learned through conversation. 00:06:44.430 --> 00:06:47.170 He'd hang out with smart people, with scientists 00:06:47.170 --> 00:06:50.110 and radicals, and just absorb their ideas. It 00:06:50.110 --> 00:06:52.730 feels very modern, doesn't it? He was learning 00:06:52.730 --> 00:06:55.269 via the 19th century equivalent of podcasts and 00:06:55.269 --> 00:06:57.709 YouTube essays rather than sitting in a classroom. 00:06:57.870 --> 00:07:00.649 It does. But because he wasn't part of that academic 00:07:00.649 --> 00:07:03.589 machine, he had this really unique career path. 00:07:03.810 --> 00:07:05.990 He wasn't a professor. He couldn't be. He started 00:07:05.990 --> 00:07:08.149 out as a civil engineer. Right. During the railway 00:07:08.149 --> 00:07:11.170 boom, you have to picture the late 1830s in England. 00:07:11.269 --> 00:07:14.689 It was like the dot -com boom of the 1990s. Everyone 00:07:14.689 --> 00:07:17.110 was building railways. It was the future. And 00:07:17.110 --> 00:07:19.459 Spencer was right in the middle of it. He was. 00:07:19.600 --> 00:07:22.300 He worked as a civil engineer, drafting plans, 00:07:22.639 --> 00:07:24.740 looking at mechanics, dealing with bridges and 00:07:24.740 --> 00:07:27.220 gradients. And I think this is absolutely crucial 00:07:27.220 --> 00:07:30.439 to understanding him. How so? It gave him a mechanical 00:07:30.439 --> 00:07:33.360 view of the world. He saw the world as a system 00:07:33.360 --> 00:07:36.399 of forces, pressures, balances, and equilibriums. 00:07:36.699 --> 00:07:39.379 He didn't see society through the lens of poetry 00:07:39.379 --> 00:07:42.839 or ancient history. He saw it as an engine, something 00:07:42.839 --> 00:07:45.319 to be understood and optimized. And speaking 00:07:45.319 --> 00:07:48.129 of optimizing things. Yeah. We have to talk about 00:07:48.129 --> 00:07:50.490 the invention. This is my absolute favorite detail 00:07:50.490 --> 00:07:52.790 in the entire biography. I think I know where 00:07:52.790 --> 00:07:55.050 you're going with this. Somewhere between writing 00:07:55.050 --> 00:07:57.470 about the fundamental laws of the cosmos and 00:07:57.470 --> 00:08:00.800 inventing the field of sociology. Herbert Spencer 00:08:00.800 --> 00:08:03.420 invented a precursor to the paperclip. He did. 00:08:03.480 --> 00:08:05.800 He called it a binding pin. It was distributed 00:08:05.800 --> 00:08:08.620 by a company called Ackerman and Company. What 00:08:08.620 --> 00:08:10.180 did it look like? Was it like the paperclips 00:08:10.180 --> 00:08:12.839 we use today? Not quite. If you look at the diagrams, 00:08:13.019 --> 00:08:15.300 and he actually included drawings of it in his 00:08:15.300 --> 00:08:17.319 autobiography, which tells you something. He 00:08:17.319 --> 00:08:19.959 was proud of it. Very proud. It looks more like 00:08:19.959 --> 00:08:22.000 what we would call a cotter pin today. It was 00:08:22.000 --> 00:08:23.920 a piece of metal used to hold sheets of paper 00:08:23.920 --> 00:08:25.899 together. It just shows you how his mind worked 00:08:25.899 --> 00:08:28.860 on every level. He couldn't stand disorder. Loose 00:08:28.860 --> 00:08:32.100 papers were incoherent homogeneity, if you will. 00:08:32.220 --> 00:08:34.960 Uh -huh. Right. A chaotic blob of paper. And 00:08:34.960 --> 00:08:36.899 he needed to bind them into a system. He wanted 00:08:36.899 --> 00:08:38.799 to optimize everything from the universe down 00:08:38.799 --> 00:08:41.279 to his desktop. But, and here's the great irony. 00:08:41.759 --> 00:08:43.980 For a guy who was trying to optimize binding 00:08:43.980 --> 00:08:46.639 paper and optimize society, he seemed to have 00:08:46.639 --> 00:08:49.000 a really, really hard time optimizing his own 00:08:49.000 --> 00:08:51.399 life. Oh, that's putting it mildly. The sources 00:08:51.399 --> 00:08:54.240 describe him as a lifelong hypochondriac. The 00:08:54.240 --> 00:08:57.200 hypochondria is absolutely central to his character. 00:08:57.200 --> 00:09:00.740 After about 1855, he suffered from some kind 00:09:00.740 --> 00:09:03.860 of nervous breakdown that... By all accounts, 00:09:03.980 --> 00:09:06.460 he never really recovered from. What were the 00:09:06.460 --> 00:09:09.279 symptoms? He was constantly complaining of pains, 00:09:09.559 --> 00:09:12.440 of insomnia, of digestive issues, of all these 00:09:12.440 --> 00:09:14.480 maladies that no physician could ever actually 00:09:14.480 --> 00:09:17.100 diagnose. He essentially became an invalid for 00:09:17.100 --> 00:09:19.139 the last half of his life. The phrase nervous 00:09:19.139 --> 00:09:21.659 sensibility comes up a lot. It wasn't just that 00:09:21.659 --> 00:09:23.519 he was in physical pain. It was that he couldn't 00:09:23.519 --> 00:09:25.909 handle stimulation. Exactly. He couldn't handle 00:09:25.909 --> 00:09:27.429 excitement. He couldn't handle disagreement. 00:09:27.730 --> 00:09:30.330 He had to dictate his books because the physical 00:09:30.330 --> 00:09:32.950 act of writing taxed him too much. I read he 00:09:32.950 --> 00:09:35.110 would take a rowboat out into the middle of the 00:09:35.110 --> 00:09:37.970 Serpentine Lake in London just to get away from 00:09:37.970 --> 00:09:41.129 the noise. He did. He wore earmuffs. He was incredibly 00:09:41.129 --> 00:09:43.889 sensitive. And there's a famous story where he 00:09:43.889 --> 00:09:46.610 canceled a meeting with his friend T .H. Huxley, 00:09:46.809 --> 00:09:50.289 Darwin's bulldog, a very intense argumentative 00:09:50.289 --> 00:09:53.519 guy. Right. Spencer canceled because he feared 00:09:53.519 --> 00:09:55.919 that if they got into a scientific disagreement, 00:09:56.100 --> 00:09:58.399 the excitement would ruin his night's sleep. 00:09:58.539 --> 00:10:00.679 He literally couldn't handle a debate with a 00:10:00.679 --> 00:10:02.500 friend. I just have to pause on that for a second 00:10:02.500 --> 00:10:05.960 because it's so it's so relatable on one level, 00:10:06.000 --> 00:10:08.519 but it's also so deeply contradictory. How so? 00:10:08.720 --> 00:10:13.639 You have this man who is famous for a philosophy 00:10:13.639 --> 00:10:16.639 that is often described as ruthless. Survival 00:10:16.639 --> 00:10:19.879 of the fittest. Let the weak fail. A philosophy 00:10:19.879 --> 00:10:23.120 of iron and struggle. The epitome of a hard philosophy. 00:10:23.500 --> 00:10:27.120 And yet, a heated chat about biology sends him 00:10:27.120 --> 00:10:30.220 to bed with a migraine. He is this incredibly 00:10:30.220 --> 00:10:33.559 fragile vessel carrying a very, very hard philosophy. 00:10:33.899 --> 00:10:36.559 It's a striking contradiction, and some biographers 00:10:36.559 --> 00:10:38.379 have suggested that his philosophy was almost 00:10:38.379 --> 00:10:41.840 a way of managing his own internal chaos. A coping 00:10:41.840 --> 00:10:45.440 mechanism. In a way, yes. If he could prove that 00:10:45.440 --> 00:10:48.200 the universe was orderly, that there was a law 00:10:48.200 --> 00:10:50.360 for everything, that everything was progressing 00:10:50.360 --> 00:10:53.600 toward a perfect equilibrium, maybe the chaos 00:10:53.600 --> 00:10:56.279 of his own nervous system would feel less threatening. 00:10:56.440 --> 00:10:59.179 That makes a lot of sense. But despite the nerves, 00:10:59.360 --> 00:11:02.919 the ambition was just boundless. He didn't just 00:11:02.919 --> 00:11:05.259 want to write about biology or politics. He wanted 00:11:05.259 --> 00:11:08.279 to explain. Everything. Everything. And this 00:11:08.279 --> 00:11:09.860 is where we get to the synthetic philosophy. 00:11:10.059 --> 00:11:11.919 That word synthetic is important here. He doesn't 00:11:11.919 --> 00:11:14.379 mean fake, like synthetic fabric. No, not at 00:11:14.379 --> 00:11:16.720 all. He means synthesis, as in bringing it all 00:11:16.720 --> 00:11:19.320 together into one coherent system. He published 00:11:19.320 --> 00:11:21.860 a prospectus, basically a business plan for his 00:11:21.860 --> 00:11:23.669 life's work. What does it say? It essentially 00:11:23.669 --> 00:11:26.330 said, I am going to write a series of books, 00:11:26.490 --> 00:11:29.870 a dozen volumes, that will demonstrate a single 00:11:29.870 --> 00:11:32.590 universal law that applies to the formation of 00:11:32.590 --> 00:11:35.190 the stars, the cooling of the Earth, the evolution 00:11:35.190 --> 00:11:37.970 of biological life, the development of the human 00:11:37.970 --> 00:11:41.450 mind, and the structure of human societies. That 00:11:41.450 --> 00:11:43.490 is a staggering amount of confidence. I mean, 00:11:43.509 --> 00:11:45.470 most scientists spend their whole lives studying 00:11:45.470 --> 00:11:48.250 one species of beetle. And Spencer wanted to 00:11:48.250 --> 00:11:51.210 explain the entire cosmos, from the nebula to 00:11:51.210 --> 00:11:54.309 the nation state. So what was this law? What 00:11:54.309 --> 00:11:56.730 is the secret to the universe, according to Herbert 00:11:56.730 --> 00:11:59.299 Spencer? At its core, it's the law of evolution. 00:11:59.600 --> 00:12:02.139 But we have to be very, very careful here because 00:12:02.139 --> 00:12:04.700 he isn't using the word evolution in exactly 00:12:04.700 --> 00:12:07.159 the same way a modern biologist would. It's broader 00:12:07.159 --> 00:12:09.259 for him. Much broader. For Spencer, evolution 00:12:09.259 --> 00:12:12.720 was a cosmic process. He defined it as the universal 00:12:12.720 --> 00:12:16.059 movement from simple, undifferentiated homogeneity 00:12:16.059 --> 00:12:19.360 to complex, differentiated heterogeneity. Okay, 00:12:19.440 --> 00:12:21.559 that is a mouthful of Victorian academic speak. 00:12:21.820 --> 00:12:26.139 It is. Simple. undifferentiated homogeneity to 00:12:26.139 --> 00:12:29.919 complex differentiated heterogeneity. Let's break 00:12:29.919 --> 00:12:31.559 that down for the listener. What are we actually 00:12:31.559 --> 00:12:33.679 visualizing here? The easiest way to think of 00:12:33.679 --> 00:12:36.759 it is the movement from a blob to a machine or 00:12:36.759 --> 00:12:39.620 a blob to a body. Okay. A blob to a body. I like 00:12:39.620 --> 00:12:42.299 that. The universe, in his view, starts as a 00:12:42.299 --> 00:12:47.500 nebula, a giant diffuse cloud of gas. Every part 00:12:47.500 --> 00:12:49.519 of that cloud is basically the same as every 00:12:49.519 --> 00:12:51.940 other part. That is homogeneity. It's simple. 00:12:52.039 --> 00:12:54.639 It's a blob. It's a blob. But then gravity starts 00:12:54.639 --> 00:12:56.820 to act on it. It pulls it together. It starts 00:12:56.820 --> 00:12:59.440 to spin, clumps form, and eventually you get 00:12:59.440 --> 00:13:03.580 planets, a sun, moons. Now you have a solar system. 00:13:03.960 --> 00:13:06.159 You have distinct parts, a sun, an earth, a moon. 00:13:06.340 --> 00:13:08.059 They're all different. They're specialized. That 00:13:08.059 --> 00:13:11.320 is heterogeneity. And he believed this single 00:13:11.320 --> 00:13:13.899 process applied to absolutely everything. Everything. 00:13:13.940 --> 00:13:16.240 Take a biological embryo. It starts as a cluster 00:13:16.240 --> 00:13:18.440 of identical cells. That's homogeneity. A little 00:13:18.440 --> 00:13:21.279 blob of cells. Exactly. And it grows into a baby 00:13:21.279 --> 00:13:24.120 with a brain, a heart, a liver, and skin. All 00:13:24.120 --> 00:13:26.399 these specialized organs working together. That's 00:13:26.399 --> 00:13:28.990 heterogeneity. Okay, that makes sense. Or take 00:13:28.990 --> 00:13:31.169 a primitive tribe in Spencer's view. Everyone 00:13:31.169 --> 00:13:33.309 is doing more or less the same thing. Hunting. 00:13:33.730 --> 00:13:37.330 Gathering. Simple. Homogenous. But a modern industrial 00:13:37.330 --> 00:13:41.090 society has bankers, bakers, engineers, artists, 00:13:41.370 --> 00:13:43.830 podcasters. Right. Millions of specialized roles. 00:13:44.049 --> 00:13:47.740 Complex. Heterogeneous. That's it. For Spencer, 00:13:47.919 --> 00:13:50.539 that movement from simple same to complex different 00:13:50.539 --> 00:13:53.919 is the arrow of time. It's the fundamental law 00:13:53.919 --> 00:13:55.899 of all progress. So he thought this was a law 00:13:55.899 --> 00:13:58.799 of physics, basically, like gravity or thermodynamics. 00:13:58.799 --> 00:14:02.129 Yes. He saw it as a physical necessity. And this 00:14:02.129 --> 00:14:03.850 is where the comfort comes in for his Victorian 00:14:03.850 --> 00:14:06.470 audience. You have to remember, the mid -19th 00:14:06.470 --> 00:14:08.809 century was a time of massive anxiety. A crisis 00:14:08.809 --> 00:14:11.490 of faith. A huge one. Geology was showing the 00:14:11.490 --> 00:14:14.090 Earth was millions of years old, not 6 ,000. 00:14:14.529 --> 00:14:16.629 Darwin had just shown up and suggested we were 00:14:16.629 --> 00:14:19.570 related to apes. God was, for many educated people, 00:14:19.830 --> 00:14:21.769 retreating from the picture. And that leaves 00:14:21.769 --> 00:14:24.610 a void. A terrifying void. People were scared 00:14:24.610 --> 00:14:26.389 that life was just random, meaningless chaos. 00:14:27.240 --> 00:14:29.799 Precisely. And in walks Herbert Spencer with 00:14:29.799 --> 00:14:32.620 these massive, dense books. And he says, don't 00:14:32.620 --> 00:14:35.340 worry, there is a plan. It's not a divine plan 00:14:35.340 --> 00:14:37.940 in the old sense, but it is a natural plan. The 00:14:37.940 --> 00:14:40.799 universe is not chaotic. It is moving from chaos 00:14:40.799 --> 00:14:43.259 to order. We are evolving toward perfection. 00:14:43.659 --> 00:14:47.080 That word perfection is key. He really believed 00:14:47.080 --> 00:14:49.299 there was an endpoint, didn't he? Oh, absolutely. 00:14:50.000 --> 00:14:52.980 He was what philosophers call teleological, which 00:14:52.980 --> 00:14:55.460 means he believed processes have a goal or a 00:14:55.460 --> 00:14:58.000 purpose. He believed that evolution wasn't just 00:14:58.000 --> 00:15:00.620 random change. It was progress. It was directional. 00:15:00.759 --> 00:15:03.259 And where was it all heading? To a state of perfect 00:15:03.259 --> 00:15:06.179 equilibrium, the perfect man in the perfect society. 00:15:06.480 --> 00:15:08.919 And he combined the scientific sounding framework 00:15:08.919 --> 00:15:11.759 with a kind of residual religious feeling. He 00:15:11.759 --> 00:15:14.019 was an agnostic. In fact, he coined the term 00:15:14.019 --> 00:15:16.500 the unknowable to describe the ultimate reality 00:15:16.500 --> 00:15:19.059 or power behind the universe. The unknowable. 00:15:19.139 --> 00:15:21.480 Right. He argued that this was the one thing 00:15:21.480 --> 00:15:23.519 that both science and religion could agree on, 00:15:23.559 --> 00:15:26.600 that the ultimate cause is inscrutable. We can 00:15:26.600 --> 00:15:28.820 study phenomena, but we can never know the thing 00:15:28.820 --> 00:15:31.019 in itself. But he didn't treat this unknowable 00:15:31.019 --> 00:15:34.340 force as neutral or scary. No, not at all. He 00:15:34.340 --> 00:15:36.879 treated it as benevolent. He wrote that the laws 00:15:36.879 --> 00:15:40.080 of nature were the decrees of a being transcendentally 00:15:40.080 --> 00:15:43.889 kind. So he basically smuggled a deist god back 00:15:43.889 --> 00:15:46.429 in through the side door. So the message is, 00:15:46.509 --> 00:15:49.190 if you just get out of the way and let the laws 00:15:49.190 --> 00:15:51.590 of nature do their work, everything will eventually 00:15:51.590 --> 00:15:54.549 become perfect. Exactly. And that is why he sold 00:15:54.549 --> 00:15:57.450 a million books. He allowed Victorians to feel 00:15:57.450 --> 00:15:59.909 scientific without becoming nihilistic. He gave 00:15:59.909 --> 00:16:02.929 them a new faith, a secular religion of progress. 00:16:03.330 --> 00:16:05.710 But this faith in progress brings us to the most 00:16:05.710 --> 00:16:08.799 contentious part of his work. his biology, and 00:16:08.799 --> 00:16:11.000 his relationship with Darwin. The Great Showdown. 00:16:11.159 --> 00:16:13.120 We established that Spencer was writing about 00:16:13.120 --> 00:16:16.120 evolution before Darwin. He wrote an essay called 00:16:16.120 --> 00:16:19.379 The Philosophy of Style in 1852 and another one, 00:16:19.460 --> 00:16:23.269 Progress, Its Law and Cause, in 1857. Darwin 00:16:23.269 --> 00:16:25.070 doesn't publish the origins of species until 00:16:25.070 --> 00:16:28.590 1859. Right. So Spencer was already an evolutionist. 00:16:28.610 --> 00:16:30.710 He already believed species weren't fixed, that 00:16:30.710 --> 00:16:33.009 they changed over time. But he had a different 00:16:33.009 --> 00:16:35.389 mechanism in mind for how they changed. So when 00:16:35.389 --> 00:16:37.190 Darwin published, what was Spencer's reaction? 00:16:37.509 --> 00:16:40.129 He felt vindicated. He was like, see, I told 00:16:40.129 --> 00:16:42.570 you species change. This famous biologist just 00:16:42.570 --> 00:16:45.279 proved my point. But he never fully abandoned 00:16:45.279 --> 00:16:47.860 his original belief in Lamarckism. He just sort 00:16:47.860 --> 00:16:50.799 of bolted Darwin's idea onto his existing system. 00:16:51.100 --> 00:16:53.379 Lamarckism. We need to unpack this because it 00:16:53.379 --> 00:16:56.720 is the absolute linchpin of his entire political 00:16:56.720 --> 00:16:59.519 and social worldview. This is the idea of use 00:16:59.519 --> 00:17:01.960 inheritance, right? Yes. It's named after the 00:17:01.960 --> 00:17:04.599 French naturalist Jean -Baptiste Lamarck. The 00:17:04.599 --> 00:17:07.200 classic textbook example is the giraffe. Right, 00:17:07.279 --> 00:17:09.480 the giraffe stretching its neck. Lamarck argued 00:17:09.480 --> 00:17:11.960 that a giraffe stretches its neck to reach the 00:17:11.960 --> 00:17:14.880 high leaves on a tree. That effort over its lifetime 00:17:14.880 --> 00:17:17.700 stretches the neck just a tiny bit. Then the 00:17:17.700 --> 00:17:19.920 crucial part is that the giraffe passes that 00:17:19.920 --> 00:17:22.660 acquired longer neck down to its offspring. So 00:17:22.660 --> 00:17:24.460 the baby giraffe is born with a slightly longer 00:17:24.460 --> 00:17:26.720 neck because of its parents' efforts. Exactly. 00:17:26.819 --> 00:17:28.880 Generation after generation of stretching and 00:17:28.880 --> 00:17:30.480 passing it on and you get the modern giraffe. 00:17:30.740 --> 00:17:32.500 Spencer believed this applied to everything, 00:17:32.740 --> 00:17:35.519 especially human psychology and morality. So 00:17:35.519 --> 00:17:38.039 if I work really hard my whole life to become 00:17:38.039 --> 00:17:43.269 disciplined and punctual and moral. My children 00:17:43.269 --> 00:17:45.930 will be born with a biological predisposition 00:17:45.930 --> 00:17:49.589 to be disciplined, punctual and moral. That's 00:17:49.589 --> 00:17:51.529 exactly what he believed. And conversely, if 00:17:51.529 --> 00:17:54.650 you are lazy or criminal or aggressive, you pass 00:17:54.650 --> 00:17:57.089 those acquired character traits down to your 00:17:57.089 --> 00:17:59.289 children. Your choices get written into your 00:17:59.289 --> 00:18:01.490 biological hardware. And how is that different 00:18:01.490 --> 00:18:04.230 from Darwin's idea? Darwin's big idea was natural 00:18:04.230 --> 00:18:06.950 selection. For Darwin, it's about random variation. 00:18:07.470 --> 00:18:10.069 In any population of proto -giraffes, some are 00:18:10.069 --> 00:18:11.829 just randomly born with slightly longer necks 00:18:11.829 --> 00:18:13.650 than others. Just the luck of the draw. The luck 00:18:13.650 --> 00:18:15.670 of the draw. And in an environment where the 00:18:15.670 --> 00:18:17.690 lower leaves have all been eaten, the ones with 00:18:17.690 --> 00:18:20.250 the slightly longer necks can eat, survive, and 00:18:20.250 --> 00:18:22.769 have more babies. The short -necked ones starve 00:18:22.769 --> 00:18:25.170 and die out. The environment selects the winners. 00:18:25.410 --> 00:18:28.190 It's a filter, not a striving mechanism. So it's 00:18:28.190 --> 00:18:31.799 passive in a way. It is. Spencer accepted natural 00:18:31.799 --> 00:18:34.480 selection as part of the process. He's the one 00:18:34.480 --> 00:18:36.319 who called it survival of the fittest after all. 00:18:36.440 --> 00:18:38.920 But he always thought the main driver of human 00:18:38.920 --> 00:18:41.660 progress was this Lamarckian self -improvement 00:18:41.660 --> 00:18:44.579 being stamped into our genes. This distinction, 00:18:44.839 --> 00:18:48.170 Lamarck versus Darwin, it seems technical. But 00:18:48.170 --> 00:18:50.609 it actually explains his entire view of the poor 00:18:50.609 --> 00:18:53.190 and social policy, doesn't it? It explains everything. 00:18:53.470 --> 00:18:55.670 Absolutely everything. Because if Lamarck is 00:18:55.670 --> 00:18:58.049 true, then suffering has a purpose. It has a 00:18:58.049 --> 00:19:00.490 pedagogical purpose. It's a lesson. It's a lesson 00:19:00.490 --> 00:19:03.029 that gets passed on. The struggle to survive 00:19:03.029 --> 00:19:06.569 forces you to adapt, to become smarter, stronger, 00:19:06.750 --> 00:19:09.109 more disciplined. And those improvements then 00:19:09.109 --> 00:19:11.829 get hardwired into the human race. So if you 00:19:11.829 --> 00:19:13.579 take away the struggle. If you take away the 00:19:13.579 --> 00:19:16.279 struggle, if you give people free food or free 00:19:16.279 --> 00:19:19.259 housing or a safety net, you aren't just making 00:19:19.259 --> 00:19:21.680 them lazy in the short term. In Spencer's view, 00:19:21.799 --> 00:19:23.539 you are committing a crime against the future. 00:19:23.720 --> 00:19:26.599 You are stopping the biological evolution of 00:19:26.599 --> 00:19:29.420 the entire species. You're preventing the adaptation 00:19:29.420 --> 00:19:31.839 that leads to the perfect man. You're halting 00:19:31.839 --> 00:19:35.109 progress itself. Wow. That is a heavy concept. 00:19:35.230 --> 00:19:38.869 It turns welfare from a kindness into a sin against 00:19:38.869 --> 00:19:41.609 cosmic law. That is exactly how he saw it. And 00:19:41.609 --> 00:19:44.410 it's the bridge from his biology to his sociology. 00:19:44.849 --> 00:19:47.250 Right. So let's talk about the sociology. He 00:19:47.250 --> 00:19:50.630 viewed society as a social organism. And from 00:19:50.630 --> 00:19:53.089 the sounds of it, he took this metaphor very, 00:19:53.150 --> 00:19:55.549 very literally. Incredibly literally. He wasn't 00:19:55.549 --> 00:19:58.109 just saying society is like an organism. He was 00:19:58.109 --> 00:20:00.049 saying it is an organism, just on a different 00:20:00.049 --> 00:20:03.569 scale. He spent pages and pages in his books 00:20:03.569 --> 00:20:05.970 mapping out the analogies. Give me some examples. 00:20:06.210 --> 00:20:08.710 Okay. So he said the government is the cerebrum, 00:20:08.710 --> 00:20:11.309 the brain's nervous system, because it regulates 00:20:11.309 --> 00:20:13.450 action across the whole body. Makes sense. The 00:20:13.450 --> 00:20:16.150 roads, railways, and telegraphs are the vascular 00:20:16.150 --> 00:20:18.990 system, the veins and arteries because they distribute 00:20:18.990 --> 00:20:21.390 nutrition and information. Okay. And the working 00:20:21.390 --> 00:20:24.109 class, the producers, they are the alimentary 00:20:24.109 --> 00:20:27.210 system, the digestive tract, because they process 00:20:27.210 --> 00:20:29.750 the raw resources for the benefit of the whole 00:20:29.750 --> 00:20:32.269 organism. It sounds a bit like a freshman biology 00:20:32.269 --> 00:20:34.849 student trying to force a metaphor, but he built 00:20:34.849 --> 00:20:37.930 his entire worldview on it. He did. And within 00:20:37.930 --> 00:20:40.490 this organic view of history, he saw two main 00:20:40.490 --> 00:20:43.829 types of society competing with each other. This 00:20:43.829 --> 00:20:46.089 is probably his most enduring contribution to 00:20:46.089 --> 00:20:50.089 sociology. The militant versus industrial distinction. 00:20:50.930 --> 00:20:52.930 Militant versus industrial. Let's break those 00:20:52.930 --> 00:20:55.859 down. What is a militant society? A militant 00:20:55.859 --> 00:20:58.740 society is the primitive form. Think of Sparta 00:20:58.740 --> 00:21:02.220 or the Roman Empire or feudal Europe. The primary 00:21:02.220 --> 00:21:04.779 goal of the whole society is preservation against 00:21:04.779 --> 00:21:07.880 external enemies. It's organized for warfare. 00:21:08.119 --> 00:21:10.700 So it's structured like an army. Exactly. It's 00:21:10.700 --> 00:21:13.019 hierarchical. Your status is everything. You 00:21:13.019 --> 00:21:15.099 do what you were told. The individual exists 00:21:15.099 --> 00:21:17.380 to serve the state, not the other way around. 00:21:17.559 --> 00:21:20.079 And cooperation is compulsory. You work because 00:21:20.079 --> 00:21:22.299 if you don't, you get whipped or imprisoned or 00:21:22.299 --> 00:21:24.579 killed. And the industrial society, that's the 00:21:24.579 --> 00:21:26.720 evolved form. That's the evolved form. And he 00:21:26.720 --> 00:21:29.140 doesn't just mean a society with factories and 00:21:29.140 --> 00:21:32.019 smokestacks. He means a society based on production 00:21:32.019 --> 00:21:34.960 rather than destruction. In an industrial society, 00:21:35.220 --> 00:21:38.079 the primary social bond isn't status, it's contract. 00:21:38.339 --> 00:21:40.710 A voluntary. agreement. A voluntary agreement. 00:21:41.009 --> 00:21:42.789 I will do this for you if you do this for me. 00:21:42.990 --> 00:21:45.049 People cooperate because it's in their mutual 00:21:45.049 --> 00:21:47.349 self -interest. In this type of society, the 00:21:47.349 --> 00:21:49.789 state's power shrinks and the individual's freedom 00:21:49.789 --> 00:21:52.990 grows. And he saw this as the inevitable future. 00:21:53.210 --> 00:21:55.690 We were all moving from the militant past to 00:21:55.690 --> 00:21:58.000 the industrial future. Yes. That was the direction 00:21:58.000 --> 00:22:00.920 of progress. But he got very worried toward the 00:22:00.920 --> 00:22:02.799 end of his life. He saw Britain sliding backwards. 00:22:03.000 --> 00:22:06.200 He called it rebarbarization. What was causing 00:22:06.200 --> 00:22:09.980 this rebarbarization? Imperialism. The massive 00:22:09.980 --> 00:22:12.720 expansion of the British Empire, the growth of 00:22:12.720 --> 00:22:15.019 the military, the rise of the bureaucracy needed 00:22:15.019 --> 00:22:17.740 to manage it all. He saw this as a sign that 00:22:17.740 --> 00:22:20.339 the militant type of society was making a terrifying 00:22:20.339 --> 00:22:23.039 comeback. This leads us directly to his politics 00:22:23.039 --> 00:22:25.440 and the book that I think every libertarian has 00:22:25.440 --> 00:22:28.039 on their shelf, The Man Versus the State, which 00:22:28.039 --> 00:22:30.740 he published in 1884. This is his great political 00:22:30.740 --> 00:22:33.559 manifesto. By the 1880s, the Liberal Party in 00:22:33.559 --> 00:22:35.380 Britain, which Spencer used to identify with, 00:22:35.500 --> 00:22:38.099 started shifting. They began passing laws to 00:22:38.099 --> 00:22:40.200 help the poor, improve working conditions, fund 00:22:40.200 --> 00:22:42.119 public libraries, create safety regulations. 00:22:42.779 --> 00:22:45.380 This was the birth of modern social liberalism. 00:22:45.460 --> 00:22:48.779 It was. And Spencer was absolutely horrified. 00:22:49.440 --> 00:22:52.220 He saw it as a betrayal of what liberalism was 00:22:52.220 --> 00:22:54.920 supposed to mean which to him was individual 00:22:54.920 --> 00:22:57.980 liberty. He argued for what he called the right 00:22:57.980 --> 00:23:00.819 to ignore the state. That is a pretty radical 00:23:00.819 --> 00:23:03.400 concept even today. It is essentially anarcho 00:23:03.400 --> 00:23:06.349 -capitalism before the term existed. He believed 00:23:06.349 --> 00:23:08.849 that if the state provides anything beyond the 00:23:08.849 --> 00:23:11.490 most basic protection of life and contract enforcement, 00:23:11.849 --> 00:23:14.450 it is violating your fundamental rights. The 00:23:14.450 --> 00:23:16.549 night watchman state. The absolute bare minimum. 00:23:16.690 --> 00:23:19.589 He believed that as society continued to evolve 00:23:19.589 --> 00:23:22.529 into the peaceful industrial form, the state 00:23:22.529 --> 00:23:24.549 would eventually wither away and die completely. 00:23:25.390 --> 00:23:27.650 We wouldn't need police or courts because we 00:23:27.650 --> 00:23:29.789 would all be so perfectly adapted and moral that 00:23:29.789 --> 00:23:31.609 we wouldn't hurt each other. A kind of biological 00:23:31.609 --> 00:23:35.009 utopia. Exactly. But until that utopia arrives, 00:23:35.309 --> 00:23:38.250 he had some very, very harsh words for the government's 00:23:38.250 --> 00:23:40.269 attempts to help people along the way. Which 00:23:40.269 --> 00:23:45.170 brings us to the famous quote, And he meant that 00:23:45.170 --> 00:23:48.289 literally, definitionally. He laid out his logic 00:23:48.289 --> 00:23:52.359 like this. What is a slave? A slave is someone 00:23:52.359 --> 00:23:55.119 who labors under coercion to satisfy another 00:23:55.119 --> 00:23:58.619 person's desires. OK. He then says if the government 00:23:58.619 --> 00:24:01.359 taxes 10 percent of your income to build a public 00:24:01.359 --> 00:24:04.059 library that you don't want or use, then for 00:24:04.059 --> 00:24:06.779 10 percent of your working hours, you are laboring 00:24:06.779 --> 00:24:09.720 under coercion for someone else's benefit. Therefore, 00:24:10.059 --> 00:24:13.240 you are 10 percent slave. That's a powerful rhetorical 00:24:13.240 --> 00:24:15.420 argument. It is. And he said it doesn't matter 00:24:15.420 --> 00:24:18.140 if the master is a single plantation owner or 00:24:18.140 --> 00:24:20.029 a Democratic. committee voting to spend your 00:24:20.029 --> 00:24:22.589 money. The relationship of coercion is the same. 00:24:22.730 --> 00:24:24.789 You can see why that resonates with people who 00:24:24.789 --> 00:24:27.450 value individual liberty above all else. But 00:24:27.450 --> 00:24:29.450 we have to look at the flip side of this. When 00:24:29.450 --> 00:24:31.769 you strip away the state's protection, what happens 00:24:31.769 --> 00:24:34.630 to the vulnerable? This brings us to what we 00:24:34.630 --> 00:24:37.390 call the dark side of Spencer, the social Darwinism. 00:24:37.470 --> 00:24:39.750 Right. We have to address the extermination quotes. 00:24:40.089 --> 00:24:42.369 They are undeniably there in the text, especially 00:24:42.369 --> 00:24:44.970 in his earlier, more radical book, Social Statics. 00:24:45.069 --> 00:24:47.369 He talks about the purifying process of nature. 00:24:47.819 --> 00:24:50.700 He does. He says that the forces working toward 00:24:50.700 --> 00:24:53.420 ultimate happiness exterminate such sections 00:24:53.420 --> 00:24:56.880 of mankind as stand in their way. Exterminate. 00:24:56.920 --> 00:24:59.740 That is a chilling, chilling word to use for 00:24:59.740 --> 00:25:02.480 human beings. It is. He writes, be he human or 00:25:02.480 --> 00:25:04.759 be he brute, the hindrance must be got rid of. 00:25:05.339 --> 00:25:08.299 Now, Spencer's defenders, and he did have them, 00:25:08.460 --> 00:25:11.160 would argue that he is simply describing a law 00:25:11.160 --> 00:25:13.740 of nature, like describing how gravity works. 00:25:14.099 --> 00:25:16.519 So he's not saying we should go out and exterminate 00:25:16.519 --> 00:25:19.579 them. He's saying. Nature will exterminate them 00:25:19.579 --> 00:25:21.940 if they can't adapt. That's the argument. He's 00:25:21.940 --> 00:25:24.099 saying if you are not smart enough or strong 00:25:24.099 --> 00:25:26.299 enough or disciplined enough to survive in your 00:25:26.299 --> 00:25:29.660 environment, nature will kill you. And he believed 00:25:29.660 --> 00:25:32.299 that this death was, in a grand cosmic sense, 00:25:32.460 --> 00:25:34.880 benevolent because it weeded out the unfit and 00:25:34.880 --> 00:25:37.180 ensured the overall health of the species. It's 00:25:37.180 --> 00:25:39.539 the cold logic of the herd. You let the slow 00:25:39.539 --> 00:25:41.759 gazelle get eaten by the lion so the herd as 00:25:41.759 --> 00:25:44.400 a whole stays fast. Yes. But applied to human 00:25:44.400 --> 00:25:46.920 beings, it means letting the widow and the orphan 00:25:46.920 --> 00:25:49.730 and the disabled person starve. Well, this is 00:25:49.730 --> 00:25:51.630 where a really important nuance comes in and 00:25:51.630 --> 00:25:53.470 one that often gets lost in the conversation 00:25:53.470 --> 00:25:57.509 about him. Spencer was not against charity. Oh, 00:25:57.690 --> 00:25:59.670 so what was he against? He was against state 00:25:59.670 --> 00:26:02.230 charity, compulsory charity. What's the difference 00:26:02.230 --> 00:26:04.569 to him? From the perspective of the starving 00:26:04.569 --> 00:26:07.549 person, they get fed either way. To Spencer, 00:26:07.690 --> 00:26:10.289 the mechanism mattered more than anything. If 00:26:10.289 --> 00:26:12.569 the state takes your money by force and gives 00:26:12.569 --> 00:26:14.849 it to the poor, there is no virtue in it for 00:26:14.849 --> 00:26:17.630 you. You were coerced. But if you choose to help 00:26:17.630 --> 00:26:20.109 a poor person out of your own compassion, that 00:26:20.109 --> 00:26:22.809 is an exercise in altruism. It improves your 00:26:22.809 --> 00:26:25.130 character. So he's thinking about the soul of 00:26:25.130 --> 00:26:26.950 the giver, not just the stomach of the receiver. 00:26:27.250 --> 00:26:30.089 Precisely. He actually encouraged private philanthropy. 00:26:31.420 --> 00:26:33.579 And it's a very big, but he warned that even 00:26:33.579 --> 00:26:35.819 private charity had to be administered carefully. 00:26:36.039 --> 00:26:38.500 How so? He said you shouldn't help the undeserving 00:26:38.500 --> 00:26:41.119 poor. The undeserving poor. Who gets to decide 00:26:41.119 --> 00:26:43.559 who is deserving? Well, in his view, the undeserving 00:26:43.559 --> 00:26:46.519 were the drunks, the lazy, the immoral. You should 00:26:46.519 --> 00:26:48.220 only give charity to those who are struggling 00:26:48.220 --> 00:26:50.559 due to bad luck, an accident, a sudden illness, 00:26:50.740 --> 00:26:54.700 not due to bad character. Why? Because if you 00:26:54.700 --> 00:26:58.170 help the lazy survive and reproduce. They will 00:26:58.170 --> 00:27:00.890 have lazy children and you will be actively filling 00:27:00.890 --> 00:27:03.190 the world with lazy people. You'd be rewarding 00:27:03.190 --> 00:27:07.150 unfitness. Again, it all comes back to that Lamarckian 00:27:07.150 --> 00:27:10.470 fear of breeding bad traits into the population. 00:27:10.849 --> 00:27:13.690 Every single time. And this obsession with good 00:27:13.690 --> 00:27:17.990 and bad traits extended to race as well. We have 00:27:17.990 --> 00:27:20.450 to talk about his advice to the government of 00:27:20.450 --> 00:27:23.539 Japan. This is a fascinating and pretty disturbing 00:27:23.539 --> 00:27:26.160 historical footnote. In the late 19th century, 00:27:26.240 --> 00:27:28.440 Japan was rapidly modernizing and opening up 00:27:28.440 --> 00:27:30.960 to the West. And they respected Spencer immensely. 00:27:31.180 --> 00:27:33.839 They saw him as a prophet of the industrial society 00:27:33.839 --> 00:27:35.819 they wanted to become. So they asked for his 00:27:35.819 --> 00:27:37.960 advice. They did. They wrote to him and asked 00:27:37.960 --> 00:27:40.259 for his guidance on modernization. And he wrote 00:27:40.259 --> 00:27:42.200 a letter back, advising them in the strongest 00:27:42.200 --> 00:27:44.440 possible terms against allowing intermarriage 00:27:44.440 --> 00:27:46.579 between Japanese people and Westerners. Why? 00:27:46.839 --> 00:27:49.059 What was his reasoning? He called it creating 00:27:49.059 --> 00:27:53.299 a bad hybrid. A bad hybrid. Yes. He used biological 00:27:53.299 --> 00:27:55.880 analogies. He said if you mix two different species 00:27:55.880 --> 00:27:58.000 of animal that are perfectly adapted to their 00:27:58.000 --> 00:28:00.920 different environments, you get a hybrid that 00:28:00.920 --> 00:28:03.680 is adapted to neither. It's an inferior product. 00:28:04.039 --> 00:28:06.599 He applied this directly to human races. So he 00:28:06.599 --> 00:28:09.400 thought that a child of a European and an Asian 00:28:09.400 --> 00:28:12.940 parent would have a chaotic constitution. That's 00:28:12.940 --> 00:28:15.339 the phrase he used. It was a pseudoscientific 00:28:15.339 --> 00:28:18.680 racism. It wasn't necessarily based on hate. 00:28:19.339 --> 00:28:21.460 in the emotional sense we think of today. He 00:28:21.460 --> 00:28:23.380 didn't seem to hate Japanese people. He respected 00:28:23.380 --> 00:28:25.900 them enough to advise them. Right. But it was 00:28:25.900 --> 00:28:28.599 based on this rigid and completely incorrect 00:28:28.599 --> 00:28:32.200 biological theory that races were like distinct 00:28:32.200 --> 00:28:34.759 species that shouldn't be mixed. And he used 00:28:34.759 --> 00:28:36.740 the same logic to oppose Chinese immigration 00:28:36.740 --> 00:28:39.279 to America. Correct. He visited America and was 00:28:39.279 --> 00:28:41.259 horrified by the idea. He thought it would cause 00:28:41.259 --> 00:28:43.279 social disorganization because you were mixing 00:28:43.279 --> 00:28:46.140 two profoundly different social types. He saw 00:28:46.140 --> 00:28:48.829 societies as these delicate organisms with their 00:28:48.829 --> 00:28:51.170 own specific internal balance. You can't just 00:28:51.170 --> 00:28:53.470 transplant tissue from one to another without 00:28:53.470 --> 00:28:56.210 rejection. So if we stop the story right here, 00:28:56.349 --> 00:28:58.869 Spencer sounds like the ultimate villain for 00:28:58.869 --> 00:29:01.049 the modern progressive. He's against welfare. 00:29:01.250 --> 00:29:03.029 He's against immigration. He's talking about 00:29:03.029 --> 00:29:05.309 exterminating the weak. It sounds like a proto 00:29:05.309 --> 00:29:07.490 -fascist ideology. That's certainly how he's 00:29:07.490 --> 00:29:10.390 often painted. But, and this is the twist that 00:29:10.390 --> 00:29:12.990 makes him so complex and so fascinating, he was 00:29:12.990 --> 00:29:16.890 also a radical anti -imperialist who hated war. 00:29:17.579 --> 00:29:20.039 This is the paradox that confuses everyone. It 00:29:20.039 --> 00:29:22.920 completely breaks the stereotype. Right. If you 00:29:22.920 --> 00:29:25.660 believe in survival of the fittest, shouldn't 00:29:25.660 --> 00:29:27.900 you be cheering for the British Empire as it 00:29:27.900 --> 00:29:30.059 conquers the globe? Shouldn't you think we are 00:29:30.059 --> 00:29:33.019 the strong, they are the weak, we win, this is 00:29:33.019 --> 00:29:35.259 progress? That would be the logical conclusion. 00:29:35.500 --> 00:29:38.720 But Spencer hated it. He was arguably the most 00:29:38.720 --> 00:29:41.420 prominent and vocal anti -imperialist in Britain 00:29:41.420 --> 00:29:45.700 at the time. He detested the wars, the conquests, 00:29:45.700 --> 00:29:48.890 all of it. Why? How does he possibly square that 00:29:48.890 --> 00:29:50.869 circle? It goes right back to the militant versus 00:29:50.869 --> 00:29:53.950 industrial distinction. He believed that by conquering 00:29:53.950 --> 00:29:56.170 other nations, Britain was becoming a militant 00:29:56.170 --> 00:29:59.440 society again. To run an empire, what do you 00:29:59.440 --> 00:30:01.819 need? You need a big army. You need high taxes 00:30:01.819 --> 00:30:04.920 to pay for it. You need a powerful, centralized 00:30:04.920 --> 00:30:08.240 bureaucracy. You need a culture of obedience 00:30:08.240 --> 00:30:11.200 and deference to authority. All the hallmarks 00:30:11.200 --> 00:30:13.720 of the militancy. All the hallmarks. And all 00:30:13.720 --> 00:30:16.740 those things destroy individual liberty at home. 00:30:17.000 --> 00:30:20.500 They crush the voluntary, contractual society 00:30:20.500 --> 00:30:23.880 he valued. So he didn't oppose empire because 00:30:23.880 --> 00:30:26.259 he felt bad for the people being conquered. Though 00:30:26.259 --> 00:30:28.700 maybe he did on some level. He opposed it because 00:30:28.700 --> 00:30:30.380 he thought it was corrupting the British soul. 00:30:30.799 --> 00:30:32.799 Precisely. He thought it was re -barbarizing 00:30:32.799 --> 00:30:35.059 Britain and dragging it back down the evolutionary 00:30:35.059 --> 00:30:37.720 ladder. There's a really skating quote I saw 00:30:37.720 --> 00:30:40.400 regarding the Second Afghan War. When he was 00:30:40.400 --> 00:30:42.599 told that British troops were in danger, he said 00:30:42.599 --> 00:30:44.579 something just shocking. Oh, I know the one. 00:30:44.720 --> 00:30:46.619 He basically said, I don't care if they are shot. 00:30:46.799 --> 00:30:49.059 Which is, wow. Yeah. Support the troops was not 00:30:49.059 --> 00:30:52.019 his motto. Not even a little bit. And his logic 00:30:52.019 --> 00:30:55.279 was cold. But consistent, he said. When men hire 00:30:55.279 --> 00:30:57.559 themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking 00:30:57.559 --> 00:31:00.240 nothing about the justice of their cause, they 00:31:00.240 --> 00:31:02.890 are forfeiting their right to sympathy. he viewed 00:31:02.890 --> 00:31:05.970 soldiers not as heroes but as tools of a coercive 00:31:05.970 --> 00:31:09.009 state exactly just another arm of the government 00:31:09.009 --> 00:31:11.789 he hated he thought patriotism was just a fancy 00:31:11.789 --> 00:31:14.069 word for primitive tribalism and that it was 00:31:14.069 --> 00:31:16.990 holding back human progress that is a level of 00:31:16.990 --> 00:31:19.309 ideological consistency that you almost have 00:31:19.309 --> 00:31:22.170 to admire even if it's incredibly harsh he hated 00:31:22.170 --> 00:31:24.049 the state so much that he wouldn't even support 00:31:24.049 --> 00:31:26.910 its wars when his own soldiers were dying this 00:31:26.910 --> 00:31:29.490 position really isolated him didn't it completely 00:31:29.490 --> 00:31:32.789 by the end of his life he was a man with And 00:31:32.789 --> 00:31:46.049 that brings us to the great decline. We started 00:31:46.049 --> 00:31:48.410 by saying he was the Aristotle of the 19th century. 00:31:48.589 --> 00:31:52.430 But by 1937, the great American sociologist Talcott 00:31:52.430 --> 00:31:55.690 Parsons opens a foundational book with the now 00:31:55.690 --> 00:31:59.450 famous question, who now reads Spencer? And the 00:31:59.450 --> 00:32:02.819 answer was nobody. Pretty much nobody. It was 00:32:02.819 --> 00:32:06.400 a brutal and stunningly fast crash. And it happened 00:32:06.400 --> 00:32:09.099 for two main reasons. Okay. What were they? First, 00:32:09.180 --> 00:32:11.440 the science he built his entire system on fell 00:32:11.440 --> 00:32:15.140 apart. Lamarckism. Lamarckism. Oh. Around the 00:32:15.140 --> 00:32:17.019 turn of the century, the work of August Wiseman 00:32:17.019 --> 00:32:19.259 and others on genetics established what's called 00:32:19.259 --> 00:32:22.480 the Wiseman barrier. This proved that the reproductive 00:32:22.480 --> 00:32:25.480 cells, the sperm and eggs, are separate and insulated 00:32:25.480 --> 00:32:27.240 from the body cells. So no matter how much you 00:32:27.240 --> 00:32:29.259 stretch your neck or go to the gym, your sperm 00:32:29.259 --> 00:32:32.400 or eggs don't change. Exactly. Acquired characteristics 00:32:32.400 --> 00:32:35.480 are not inherited. And with that discovery, Spencer's 00:32:35.480 --> 00:32:38.359 entire promise of inevitable perfection just 00:32:38.359 --> 00:32:41.619 died. If we don't inherit acquired moral traits, 00:32:41.819 --> 00:32:44.460 then there is no guarantee that humanity is getting 00:32:44.460 --> 00:32:46.779 better and better with each generation. Right. 00:32:46.940 --> 00:32:49.559 We might just be stuck with the same flawed human 00:32:49.559 --> 00:32:52.299 nature forever. The whole teleological engine 00:32:52.299 --> 00:32:55.059 of his system ran out of fuel. Okay, so that's 00:32:55.059 --> 00:32:57.519 the scientific reason. What was the second reason 00:32:57.519 --> 00:33:00.519 for his decline? The world changed in ways he 00:33:00.519 --> 00:33:03.740 never predicted. Spencer's philosophy predicted 00:33:03.740 --> 00:33:06.839 a future of increasing peace, shrinking governments, 00:33:07.099 --> 00:33:10.680 and voluntary cooperation. Instead, the 20th 00:33:10.680 --> 00:33:12.859 century gave us World War I, the Great Depression, 00:33:13.180 --> 00:33:16.539 the rise of fascism, Nazism, and communism. The 00:33:16.539 --> 00:33:18.539 exact opposite of what he predicted. The polar 00:33:18.539 --> 00:33:21.059 opposite. The militant societies didn't vanish. 00:33:21.220 --> 00:33:23.799 They came back with a vengeance and on an industrial 00:33:23.799 --> 00:33:26.819 scale. It became impossible to read Spencer's 00:33:26.819 --> 00:33:29.200 optimistic law of evolution with a straight face 00:33:29.200 --> 00:33:31.259 while looking at the trenches of the Somme or 00:33:31.259 --> 00:33:33.279 the gas chambers of Auschwitz. He just looked 00:33:33.279 --> 00:33:35.619 hopelessly naive. Hopelessly naive. And at the 00:33:35.619 --> 00:33:38.079 same time, the field he helped create, sociology, 00:33:38.359 --> 00:33:41.359 moved on. Sociologists like Emil Durkheim and 00:33:41.359 --> 00:33:43.779 Max Weber came along and said, look, society 00:33:43.779 --> 00:33:46.700 isn't a simple biological organism. It's a complex 00:33:46.700 --> 00:33:49.279 structure of culture, meaning, values, and symbols. 00:33:49.480 --> 00:33:51.759 They professionalized the field. And Spencer 00:33:51.759 --> 00:33:54.450 was left looking like a gifted amateur. He was. 00:33:54.869 --> 00:33:57.670 The historian Richard Hofstadter delivered the 00:33:57.670 --> 00:34:00.569 final, brutal blow when he called Spencer the 00:34:00.569 --> 00:34:03.589 metaphysician of the homemade intellectual. Metaphysician 00:34:03.589 --> 00:34:07.109 of the homemade intellectual. Ouch. That is a 00:34:07.109 --> 00:34:10.090 devastating critique. It's just brutal. It basically 00:34:10.090 --> 00:34:12.449 says, this is philosophy for guys who like to 00:34:12.449 --> 00:34:14.889 tinker in their garages, not for serious thinkers. 00:34:15.170 --> 00:34:17.690 It's an elitist dismissal, for sure, coming from 00:34:17.690 --> 00:34:20.780 a university academic. But it stuck. Spencer 00:34:20.780 --> 00:34:23.260 was cast out of the canon. But he hasn't disappeared 00:34:23.260 --> 00:34:25.699 completely. We mentioned at the start that he 00:34:25.699 --> 00:34:28.320 is the ghost in the machine of modern libertarianism. 00:34:28.320 --> 00:34:31.880 He is. His ideas had a long afterlife. The philosopher 00:34:31.880 --> 00:34:34.380 Robert Nozick in his hugely influential book, 00:34:34.539 --> 00:34:37.159 Anarchy, State and Utopia, took Spencer's right 00:34:37.159 --> 00:34:39.760 to ignore the state very, very seriously. And 00:34:39.760 --> 00:34:42.099 what about his influence more broadly in politics? 00:34:42.420 --> 00:34:44.360 Think about the Margaret Thatcher era in the 00:34:44.360 --> 00:34:47.659 UK or the Reagan era in the US. That famous slogan 00:34:47.659 --> 00:34:51.679 Thatcher used, there is no alternative or Tina. 00:34:51.940 --> 00:34:54.340 Right. No alternative to the free market. That 00:34:54.340 --> 00:34:57.969 idea. That the market is not just one possible 00:34:57.969 --> 00:35:00.730 system, but the only natural way to organize 00:35:00.730 --> 00:35:03.409 society and that any attempt to interfere with 00:35:03.409 --> 00:35:06.730 it will only make things worse. That is pure, 00:35:06.929 --> 00:35:09.909 distilled Herbert Spencer. Every time you hear 00:35:09.909 --> 00:35:12.449 someone argue that taxation is theft or that 00:35:12.449 --> 00:35:14.550 government regulation is always counterproductive, 00:35:14.690 --> 00:35:17.769 you are hearing an echo of Herbert Spencer. It 00:35:17.769 --> 00:35:20.349 is truly amazing how he can be the source of 00:35:20.349 --> 00:35:23.289 the paperclip and the source of modern anti -state 00:35:23.289 --> 00:35:26.210 rhetoric. He was a system builder, a flawed one, 00:35:26.329 --> 00:35:28.650 a misguided one in many ways, but a powerful 00:35:28.650 --> 00:35:31.210 one. And parts of his system are still very much 00:35:31.210 --> 00:35:33.090 with us, even if people don't know his name. 00:35:33.269 --> 00:35:35.909 So we've unpackaged the man, the myth, the paperclip, 00:35:35.969 --> 00:35:38.570 and the philosophy. We have looked at the synthetic 00:35:38.570 --> 00:35:41.110 philosophy that tried to explain the stars and 00:35:41.110 --> 00:35:44.070 the slums with the very same law. We've seen 00:35:44.070 --> 00:35:46.130 the paradox of the pacifist who sounded like 00:35:46.130 --> 00:35:48.269 a brute and the hypochondriac who preached a 00:35:48.269 --> 00:35:51.030 gospel of strength. And we've seen how fame is 00:35:51.030 --> 00:35:53.650 fleeting. Being the biggest intellectual of your 00:35:53.650 --> 00:35:55.750 century guarantees you absolutely nothing in 00:35:55.750 --> 00:35:57.989 the next. A cautionary tale for all of us. As 00:35:57.989 --> 00:35:59.989 we wrap up this deep dive, I want to leave you, 00:36:00.050 --> 00:36:02.309 our listener, with a final thought to chew on. 00:36:02.800 --> 00:36:05.639 We often think of survival of the fittest as 00:36:05.639 --> 00:36:09.019 a call for ruthless dominance, the strong crushing 00:36:09.019 --> 00:36:12.219 the weak. That's the social Darwinist nightmare 00:36:12.219 --> 00:36:15.380 that we rightly associate with the worst ideologies 00:36:15.380 --> 00:36:17.920 of the 20th century. Right. That's the common 00:36:17.920 --> 00:36:20.260 interpretation. But remember Spencer's goal, 00:36:20.440 --> 00:36:23.920 his teleology. He believed evolution was moving 00:36:23.920 --> 00:36:27.619 us toward a state of perfect altruism. He genuinely 00:36:27.619 --> 00:36:30.119 believed that eventually human nature would change 00:36:30.119 --> 00:36:33.000 so much that the very idea of causing another 00:36:33.000 --> 00:36:35.780 person pain would be physically impossible for 00:36:35.780 --> 00:36:37.780 us. He thought we would become so empathetic 00:36:37.780 --> 00:36:39.739 that we would literally feel each other's feelings, 00:36:39.940 --> 00:36:42.480 making violence unthinkable. It's the ultimate 00:36:42.480 --> 00:36:45.019 irony, isn't it? He advocated for what sounds 00:36:45.019 --> 00:36:47.619 like ruthless competition in the present in order 00:36:47.619 --> 00:36:49.980 to create a utopia of perfect saints in the future. 00:36:50.119 --> 00:36:52.599 The ends justify the means on a cosmic scale. 00:36:52.760 --> 00:36:56.579 So it raises a provocative question. Is it possible 00:36:56.579 --> 00:36:59.559 that we have completely misunderstood the goal 00:36:59.559 --> 00:37:03.039 of his philosophy? Was this brutal, competitive 00:37:03.039 --> 00:37:05.400 process supposed to be the fire that burned away 00:37:05.400 --> 00:37:07.800 all our aggression, leaving behind a species 00:37:07.800 --> 00:37:11.119 that was purely kind? It's a strange, almost 00:37:11.119 --> 00:37:13.840 utopian thought from such a cold -seeming man. 00:37:15.769 --> 00:37:18.150 wouldn't mean the strongest or the most brutal. 00:37:18.309 --> 00:37:21.489 The fittest would eventually mean the most empathetic. 00:37:21.530 --> 00:37:23.929 The kindest. The kindest. And that is a definition 00:37:23.929 --> 00:37:25.469 of fitness, I think. We could all get behind, 00:37:25.650 --> 00:37:28.110 even if we completely reject the brutal biology 00:37:28.110 --> 00:37:30.750 he used to get there. Absolutely. Thank you for 00:37:30.750 --> 00:37:32.630 listening to this deep dive into the rise and 00:37:32.630 --> 00:37:34.929 very steep fall of Herbert Spencer. We'll catch 00:37:34.929 --> 00:37:35.510 you on the next one.