Orwell, Darwin, and a fool

Why George Orwell makes me feel less of a fool for questioning how Charles Darwin’s ideas twist our politics and economics, by Nat Dyer

Last week while reading a book that I’ve owned for almost twenty years, I had the skin-tingling feeling of worlds colliding and new pathways opening up.

George Orwell has fascinated me since the age of 11 when I first read Animal Farm as a simple story about pigs, horses and sheep. I bought his four-volume Collected Essays from a tardis-like, second-hand bookshop across the road from my student house at Birmingham University in the early 2000s.

I often read Orwell for the pictures he paints with words, his political insights and his moral clarity, but I had never seen anything he’d written about another of my interests: the story of evolution and what it means for politics and economics. Then, I came across Orwell writing that Mark Twain was “convinced…  of the unbearable cruelty of the universe” by Charles Darwin. Ouch. That sparked my interest, but it was just a line. Had Orwell written anything more about Darwin’s influence on society? I flicked to the index, amazed I’d not done it before, and found gold in a piece about another American literary giant.

“Darwinism was used as a justification for laissez-faire capitalism, for power politics and for the exploiting of subject peoples.”

George Orwell, 1945

My interest in what evolution means for society started just a couple of years after first reading Orwell when I was given Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker to read. It’s not a book I would advise giving to a 13-year-old, but I was captivated by it, and its message that evolution should revolutionise our understanding of all areas of our lives has sunk immoveable hooks in my worldview. In the last year or so, I’ve been reading deeper into the subject again fascinated anew by the possibility that Dawkins’ vision was entirely wrong and somehow marched in step with the more selfish, greed-is-good capitalism of the 1980s which today is seemingly both economically inevitable and politically toxic.

What did Orwell have to say about the relationship between biology and politics? The index guided me to a piece Orwell had written on Jack London, a one-time Alaskan gold miner and author of The Call of the Wild who died in 1916 at the age of 40. A major figure in his day in the United States and globally, his stories about tame dogs turning wild and vice-versa are evergreen. Last year Netflix released an adaptation of his novel White Fang, and next year The Call of the Wild will be released in Hollywood, CGI animated glory starring Harrison Ford.

Here’s Orwell writing in 1945 about the influence of one strain of Darwin’s thinking on Jack London. I’m reproducing the whole passage even though it’s long, so you can get the full flavour and enjoy his style.

“there is something in [Jack] London that takes a kind of pleasure in the whole cruel process. It is not so much an approval of the harshness of Nature, as a mystical belief that Nature is like that. Nature is ‘red in tooth and claw’. Perhaps fierceness is bad, but fierceness is the price of survival. The young slay the old, the strong slay the weak, by an inexorable law. Man fights against the elements or against his fellow man, and there is nothing except his own toughness to help him through. London would have said that he was merely describing life as it is actually lived, and in his best stories he does so: still, the constant recurrence of the same theme – struggle, toughness, survival – shows which way his inclinations pointed.”

“London had been deeply influenced by the theory of the Survival of the Fittest. His book, Before Adam – an inaccurate but very readable story of prehistory, in which ape-man and early and late Palaeolithic men are all shown as existing simultaneously – is an attempt to popularize Darwin. Although Darwin’s main thesis has not been shaken, there has been, during the past twenty or thirty years, a change in the interpretation put upon it by the average thinking man. In the late nineteenth-century Darwinism was used as a justification for laissez-faire capitalism, for power politics and for the exploiting of subject peoples. Life was a free-for-all in which the fact of survival was proof of fitness to survive: this was a comforting thought for successful businessmen, and it also led naturally, though not very logically, to the notion of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ races. In our day we are less willing to apply biology to politics, partly because we have watched the Nazis do just that thing with great thoroughness and with horrible results. But when London was writing, a crude version of Darwinism was widespread and must have been difficult to escape. He himself was even capable at times of succumbing to racial mysticism.”

Orwell here is saying a few things that are very important. First, the key battleground is over how Darwin is interpreted: the fact of evolution is beyond doubt. Tick. Second, one widespread interpretation is a “crude version of Darwinism” which has justified ruthless power struggles in business and politics, stark inequality, racism, imperial conquest and plunder, and fascism. Tick, tick, tick – and we could add subjugation of women to the list. Third, this crude version of Darwinism is a sort of “mystical belief” which Orwell had seen largely overturned in his own lifetime. Tick. So, this battle over what evolution means for us is not an abstract, intellectual tussle about an obscure corner of biology: evolutionary theory is a potent origin story and like food dye in a cake mixture can colour everything in society. It’s a battle about what the kind of economics we get and whether humans will preserve the ecosystem on which they depend.

“The battle over the meaning of evolution is not an abstract, intellectual tussle about an obscure corner of biology: evolutionary theory is a potent origin story and like food dye in a cake mixture can colour everything in society.’

Other sources back up Orwell’s thesis that this ‘mystical’ belief in the fierceness of nature – often known as ‘Social Darwinism’ – reigned supreme for decades after the 1860s before being overturned in the early twentieth century. A year before Orwell wrote the passage above, an American historian Richard Hofstadter published Social Darwinism in American Thought which perhaps surprisingly sold 200,000 copies. The book argued that a crude interpretation of Darwin helped support the gross inequality of American’s Gilded Age (a term popularised by Mark Twain) with its robber barons and monopolistic companies. The crude Darwinian story was then challenged by an interpretation which put up front the role of cooperation in nature and of the social environment in defining outcomes, which coincided with the Progressive Era. Critics have accused Hofstadter of over-exaggerating the influence of Darwinism on society, arguing that the core beliefs which justified ruthless competition and the acceptance of poverty amid plenty came from other sources: classical economics, and appeals to hard work and ‘wealth creation’. There is undoubtedly some truth in that, but ‘crude Darwinism’ is firmly in the mix, near the root, and nowadays often overlooked.

London was long dead when Orwell wrote this essay, but in his own words revealed his intellectual debt to Darwin: “I endeavoured to make my stories in line with the facts of evolution; I hewed them to the mark set by scientific research,” London wrote. So, the 1984 author wasn’t writing on air.

So that’s the history, but what does this mean now and what should we do about it?

The impact on evolutionary thinking on society is again today difficult to escape. The tide which Orwell saw ebbing away from a mystical, crude Darwinism in the middle of the twentieth century, turned sometime around the 1970s and roared back towards a more selfish, individualised and harsher interpretation of Darwin’s brilliant thesis, supported by new insights into genetics. We are living in that wave, which may be about to break. Richard Dawkins played a central role in this reversal with the publication of The Selfish Gene. It is no coincidence that in the archetypal speech of our neoliberal, casino capitalism era – Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” speech in the movie Wall Street – Gekko bolsters his economic argument by saying that greed is natural and “captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit”. It doesn’t take much to join the dots.

“The impact on evolutionary thinking on society is again today difficult to escape.”

Fortunately, the 21^st-century advocates of a ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ vision have also been challenged both inside and outside science. The story is too long to go into here – and I’m still piecing it together – but it brings together the discovery of symbiosis as a motor of evolution by American microbiologist Lynn Margulis (more here), the holistic philosophy of Mary Midgley, the Gaia theory (which I see as a metaphor rather than a truth) of the independent scientist James Lovelock, and the work of primatologist Franz de Waal who has shown that fairness has ancient, deeply rooted origins in mammals. It crosses the thorny and tangled terrain of the sociobiology debate, where rights and wrongs lie on both sides. This has nothing to do with creationism: Darwin’s theory is one of the most stunning advances in our understanding of our place in the universe. The challenge is to a partial, crude interpretation of Darwin which is blocking a new, scientifically sound vision for a better, more life-sustaining world. And prompts us all to consider how biology influences politics, and how society shapes – even in subtle ways – biology.

There is a danger in a non-scientist like me writing about evolution of appearing a fool. What if I get my mitochondria mixed up with my mycorrhiza? Is it not best to leave science and its interpretation to the scientists? I studied history and international politics, not biology, but I have seen first-hand the ruthless disregard for the natural world and the poor in my work. And I’ve traced back the ideas which sustain that destructive system to economics and a fundamental misrepresentation of nature. Those looking at the bigger picture and how it fits together have as much of a role as the specialists.

Science is often seen as the objective truth uniquely shielded from the influence of individual and societal biases and values. These biases cloud the vision of other disciplines, it is argued, which often fear to look directly at harsh truths. In part, that’s true. Some scientific knowledge, bits of physics, maybe like that. But scientists are still human and large parts of science have been, and is, strongly influenced by the society in which it is done. To close our eyes to that truth, just makes it more dangerous.

The criticism comes in that anyone who disagrees with today’s version of ‘crude Darwinism’ is too squeamish to see the bloody fight for survival in Nature in all its glory. Or that ‘survival of the fittest’ may be the rule in the wild but has no bearing whatsoever on human society. These are both old arguments for the status quo. It is a great boon, then, to discover this passage from Orwell critiquing the ‘crude Darwinism’ of his day and its impact on human society as he was a fighter, not a coward and famously put his own success down to his “power of facing unpleasant facts”. He makes me feel much less foolish, firms up my ideas and spurs me on. If I’m wrong, at least I’m in good company.

(For more of my writing on evolution and economics click here, here or here)