Ingersoll & Jacoby (the biographer) on secularism, contrasted to Social Darwinism:
A secularist society would mean
“… living for ourselves and each other; for the present instead of the past, for this world rather than another … It is striving to do away with violence and vice, with ignorance, poverty and disease … It does not believe in praying and receiving, but in earning and deserving.”
A man who professed this humanistic secular creed could have hardly agreed with [Herbert] Spencer, who frequently said of the poor …
“If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well that they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best that they should die.”
In a short biography such as The Great Agnostic (effectively 190 pages, plus an Afterword, which I read, and Appendices, which I skipped) there’s scarcely room to properly treat all of the opinions of the man, and so there’s a lack of logical progression concerning the definition (or results) of a secular society that I would have preferred to have seen; if one plans to rip away the comforting religion to which humanity clings, at least something which can be logically studied should be presented1. So what we have here is a conclusion, not a closely argued discussion: this is how he sees a secular future. Naturally, given that he was a creature of the 19th century, he did not see what are arguably the secular disasters of the 20th century: communism and its Gulag Archipelago. It might also be argued, however, that these were the natural and logical conclusions of a society previously arbitrarily ruled by the Russian supreme rulers, and since such societies typically have some large facet of force to hold them together, in the face of its disappearance, the traditional social norms outside of force are weak and ineffectual. A peaceful society has not had a chance to evolve, and with the exponential development of technology, a combination of immense military power and unrestrained ambition and paranoia came into being, with predictable consequences.
Herbert Spencer was a British philosopher of the day, a friend to Ingersoll, and
During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in English-speaking academia. “The only other English philosopher to have achieved anything like such widespread popularity was Bertrand Russell, and that was in the 20th century.” Spencer was “the single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century”[3][4] but his influence declined sharply after 1900: “Who now reads Spencer?” asked Talcott Parsons in 1937.
Spencer is best known for the expression “survival of the fittest”, which he coined in Principles of Biology (1864), after reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. This term strongly suggests natural selection …
The quote of Spencer regarding the poor clearly ignores context: would the Royal Family of Britain be subject to such conditions? Of course not. I read it as merely giving cover to the discouraging observation that, with the limitations of the era, the poor could not easily be resolved.
He also seems to have suffered from the intellectual blind spot that anything natural is good, tangible or not. As we all know, arsenic is merely one product of nature inimical to ourselves; it’s worthwhile to ask about any other assumption, and I believe we may come to the conclusion that Social Darwinism does not pass muster, simply based on the obvious fact that it is contradictory to the basic impulse motivating society: we take care of each other. We provide for the common defense, the sick, the elderly, all those who have, or can, contribute to society. We understand that we’re greater together than apart. To use an unfortunate phrase, this is the social contract implicit in society.
This is important because if that contract is broken – if we euthanize the elderly, we walk away from the sick, we fail to care for the unfortunate – then those who have a choice, and something valuable to contribute, may walk away, endangering society by weakening it. A society which has a weak social contract may not attract those who can most contribute to it, and this is a world of competitive societies.
