Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer is considered (in some ways unfairly) the classic proponent of social Darwinism, which justifies cruelty and oppression on grounds that suffering is evolution’s path of “progress.”

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Dinesh ^club

. . . . One school, later called social Darwinism, dwelt on natural selection’s pitiless but ultimately creative disposal of the unfit. The moral of the story seemed to be that suffering is the handmaiden of progress, in human as in envolutionary history. The ‘Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations’ version of social Darwinism comes from Herbert Spencer, generally regarded as its father: “The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many ‘in shallows and in miseries’ are the decrees of a large, farseeing benevolence.” ~ Page 329

2 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.

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Herbert Spencer

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