Civilization and Barbarism: The Struggle for Survival or Supremacy

By Frederick Feied

PARADOX AND CONTRADICTION "WAR IS THE HEALTH OF THE STATE" RANDOLPH BOURNE WAR AND THE THREAT OF WAR HAVE CARRIED US TO UNDREAMED OF HEIGHTS OF ACHIEVEMENT IN SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE. THEY HAVE ALSO LED TO THE WORST EXCESSES OF DEPRAVITY. THE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY IS LITTERED WITH THE RUINS OF ONCE GREAT CIVILIZATIONS CONSIGNED TO THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY, EIR MONUMENTS TRAMPLED UNDERFOOT, THEIR SUBJECTS ENSLAVED, DISPERSED OR PUT TO THE SWORD. ONE CAN HARDLY THRUST A SHOVEL INTO THE EARTH WITHOUT STRIKING THE REMAINS OF SOME HAPLESS VICTIM OF WAR THIS PARADOX AND THIS CONTRADICTION LIE AT THE HEART OF THE HUMAN CONDITION. CAN WE AVOID THE FATE OF COUNTLESS CIVILIZATIONS BEFORE US OR ARE WE DOOMED TO REPEAT THE PAST? CAN WE BREAK THE HOLD OF JUNGLE LAW? CAN WE SOLVE THE RIDDLE OF POPULATION AND ECONOMICS? CAN WE MANAGE OUR DEVELOPMENT WITHOUT RECOURSE TO WAR? ARE PERIODIC OUTS O BLOODLETTING AND GENOCIDE PART OF A LARGER ECO EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS? CIVILIZATION AND BARBARISM explores questions in several disciplines in a number of chapters with provocative titles such as: Rube Goldberg, Barney Google and Charles Darwin; Malthus The Undead; Darwin's Mice And Steinbeck's Men; Positive Science And "Irrational" Man; Homo Sapiens Rex: Sexual Evolution And The Maturational Threshold; Biological Boom And Bust – When Credit Falls Like Rain On Credit Default Swaps; The First Commandment Is: "Thou Shalt Kill!" and Opiate Or Placebo. Dr. Feied earned his doctorate at Columbia University. He and has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Michigan State University and California State University at San Jose as well as other colleges and universities. He currently resides in Berkeley where he divides his time between writing and racing his thirty–eight foot sloop on San Francisco Bay.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781642980394

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Darwin and Marx Revisited: Classless Society or a Darwinian Battleground

Wanted: A New Law of Development by Jack London

In the opening sentence of The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels declared, The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle. In their view, this conflict between the classes was the engine that drove social evolution and powered the social change that would eventually result in the classless society of communism. It is this notion of the classless society, free of the anathema of class conflict, which prompted Jack London to ask in Wanted: A New Law of Development what would drive or power progress in future societies once the class struggle had been relegated to the dustbin of history?

Without attempting to answer this question, I would like to suggest that the class struggle forms only a part of the process of social evolution and that if our intention is to discover the effective engine and motive force of social change, we may have to broaden the area of investigation.

In discussing the ideas of great minds, one must accord all due respect to their originators and allow for the possibility that one has either misread their real intent, or failed to keep all their pertinent ideas in the forefront of one’s consciousness during one’s critique. Like the circus performer who keeps three, then four, then five, then six or more objects constantly in the air without dropping any of them, the critic must endeavor to keep a score or a hundred ideas constantly in his consciousness without losing sight of or dropping any of them.

With this caveat in mind, I suggest that if our aim is to consider the motive force of social evolution, we ought to amend or extend the statement cited above to include the following:

The history of all hitherto existing societies is also the history of struggle between competing societies. This struggle, sometimes open and sometimes hidden, may take the form of peaceful competition or of open conflict, but it is constant and unremitting. The motive force and engine of historical evolution has been the unremitting and unrelenting conflict between states and nations, powered in some fundamental way by that same engine of biological competition that has made man what he is—the supreme survivor.

Marx and Engels thought highly of Darwin—though not of Malthus, the source of his inspiration. Since they regarded Darwin’s work as a vindication of their own findings, it may be useful to restate briefly Darwin’s view of biological evolution for the light it may shed on the parallel and interrelated process of social evolution. I say interrelated because it is now generally accepted that the social organization of certain animals as well as of primitive man played an important part in their struggle for survival. Moreover, because of their evolving social and technological skills, the descendants of primitive man must have enjoyed ever-improving odds in the struggle for survival with competing groups, whether of the same or different species.

Darwin saw evolution as a process of natural selection in which certain groups or species were passed over or eliminated in the struggle to survive while others possessing superior qualities or characteristics lived to pass these qualities on to their offspring. His success in explaining the mechanism of evolution led many to believe that the theory of natural selection could also be used to explain and justify the survival of supposedly superior individuals or classes at the expense of the weaker or lower orders.

This argument or variants of it were used in various ways to justify the existence and behavior of the rugged individualists and robber barons of nineteenth-century capitalism. Rockefeller’s famous parable of the American Beauty rose, which required the ruthless pruning of weaker offshoots to produce the final prize-winning product, is only one example of this.

All this has had a decidedly negative effect on serious efforts to discuss the social implications of Darwinism. Any attempt to discover what, if any, application Darwin’s work may have for social policy runs the risk of being dismissed in a kind of pejorative shorthand implied in the term social Darwinism.

To repeat, Darwin’s discoveries in the realm of biological evolution led many to look for parallels in the realm of social evolution, often uncritically employing some of the same tools and concepts. To take a single instance: an improved variety of bird can split off from its near relations if it finds a source of food which it can eat and they cannot and thus perhaps help initiate or consolidate a new variety or species. However, the fact that an individual has amassed some wealth through currency manipulation does not mean that he has undergone a mutation which can be transmitted to his offspring, or that he is the forerunner of a new variety or species of human beings.

The case of the robber barons, often cited in a kind of Calvinistic perversion of Darwinism (i.e., their success proved they were superior beings or beloved of god) illustrates the vital difference between the mere aggregation of wealth and the introduction of a useful mutation. The phenomenon of the robber baron is better accounted for by Marx’s analysis of capital accumulation than Darwin’s theory of biological evolution. The robber barons could enjoy the fruits of their economic success during their lifetimes and even pass their wealth on to the next generation, but their genes they took to the grave unchanged. On the other hand, a new variety of finch possessing a thickened beak capable of cracking the tougher shell of the nuts produced in periods of drought not only enjoyed a significant advantage over the thin-beaked variety during its lifetime, but also could pass on the gene for a thicker or heavier beak to its offspring, thus separating its fate from theirs forever.

Social Darwinism provided the wealthy classes with a formidable, if flawed, argument against the labor movement in general and the socialist movement in particular. But social Darwinism as it has passed into the general consciousness has little or nothing to do with what might be construed as the social implications of Darwinism. Darwin’s theory holds that biological competition results in the natural selection or emergence of superior individuals or species with superior attributes. The social equivalent of such a theory would necessarily or logically hold that sociological competition results in the social selection or emergence of superior social groupings or societies.

If there is a valid application of Darwinism to social evolution, it should be looked for in the proposition that what makes a society more fit to survive is the evolution of superior social as well as technological arrangements, making a society more cohesive, more productive, and better adapted or more fit to survive the competition with its neighbors. It is the central thesis of this work that social evolution is the result of a parallel process of what might be called social selection, guaranteeing the survival of the fittest social