Posted on 01/31/2009 5:54:21 AM PST by Ethan Clive Osgoode
A compilation of interesting paragraphs from Enrico Ferri's Socialism and Positive Science, London Independent Labour Party, 5th edition 1909, translated from the french edition of 1896. Ferri, a professor of penal law at the university of Rome, was a student of the (crackpot) criminologist Cesare Lombroso and an influential communist. Lombroso was a monist and an honorary associate of Rationalist Press, along with Leonard Huxley and Ernst Haeckel.
Enrico Ferri
1.
I have proposed to indicate, and nearly always by means of rapid and summary observations, the general relations between contemporary socialism and the trend of modern scientific thought.
A CONVINCED follower of Darwin and Spencer, I purpose demonstrating that Marxian socialism the only kind that has a positive method and scientific worth, and that has power henceforward to inspire and group the social democrats of the whole civilised world is only the practical and fruitful complement in social life of that modern scientific revolution, which, inaugurated several centuries back by the revival of the experimental method in all the branches of human knowledge, has triumphed in our days, thanks to the labours of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer.
It is true that Darwin, and especially Spencer, stopped short half-way from the final conclusions of religious, political and social order, which necessarily follow from their indisputable premises. But that is only an individual episode which cannot stop the inevitable march of science or delay the fulfilment of its practical consequences which accord admirably with the saddest necessities of contemporary life. This is but one more obligation to us to render justice to the scientific and political life of Karl Marx, who completes the renovation of modern scientific thought.
We are now able to conclude that there is no contradiction between socialism and Darwinism on the subject of equality among all men. Socialism has never affirmed it, and it aims, in agreement with Darwinism, to promote a better life for individuals and for society.
Socialism, understood in the scientific sense, does not deny and cannot deny that there are always among men some "losers" in the struggle for existence.
In conclusion, we will say that even in the social regime although in infinitely less proportions there will always be some vanquished in the struggle for existence, there will be the victims of feebleness, of disease, of insanity, of nervous disorder, of suicide. We can then assert that socialism does not deny the Darwinian law of the struggle for existence. It will, however, have this unquestionable advantage that the epidemic and endemic forms of human degeneracy will be completely suppressed by the elimination of their principal cause, the physical and, consequently, the moral misery of the greatest number.
Such will be the triumph of socialism, and such is, once more, the most complete and fruitful interpretation that socialism gives of the inexorable natural laws discovered by Darwinism.
2.
Darwinism... has excluded all finality from modern scientific thought and from the interpretation of natural phenomena; evolution consists both of involution and dissolution.
It is not, therefore, correct to claim that natural selection determined by the struggle for existence secures the survival of the best; really it secures the survival of the best adapted.
The struggle for existence necessarily determines the survival of the individuals best adapted to the society and the time in which they live.
The problem is one in "social selections." It is in starting from this idea wrongly interpreted that certain writers, socialists and non-socialists, arrive at refusing to Darwinian theories an applicability to human society.
One knows in fact that in the contemporary, civilised world natural selection is vitiated by military selection, by matrimonial selection, and principally by economic selection.*
The temporary celibacy imposed on soldiers exercises a certainly deplorable influence on the human race; it is the young men with the least good constitutions, who, relieved of military service, marry the earliest, whilst the most healthy individuals are constrained to temporary sterility, and in the large towns run the chances of syphilis, the effects of which are unfortunately permanent.
Marriage itself, corrupted as it is in our present civilisation by economic interests, exercises usually a sexual selection in the wrong way. Women degenerate in health but, possessing a large fortune, find a husband more easily than the more robust women of the people or the middle class without a marriage portion, and these are condemned to remain sterile in an enforced celibacy, or to give themselves up to a prostitution more or less gilded.
It is incontestable that economic conditions have an influence on all social relations. The monopoly of wealth assures to its possessors victory in the struggle for existence; rich persons, even when they are less robust, have a longer life than those who are ill fed; the labour by day and by night under cruel conditions imposed on adult men, and the still more disastrous work imposed on women and children by modern capitalism, make the biological conditions of the proletarian class daily worse.
To that we must add that moral selection in the wrong way which causes capitalism today in the struggle waged with the proletariat to favour the survival of men of servile character, whilst it persecutes and tries to keep in the shade men of strong character and all those who do not seem disposed to bear the yoke of the present economic order.
I have maintained, and I maintain... that these social selections of backward tendency are not in contradiction to the Darwinian law, and more, that they serve as material for an argument in favour of socialism. Socialism in fact will alone be able to bring about a more beneficent working of this inexorable law of natural selection.
In fact the Darwinian law does not determine the survival of the best, but only of the best adapted.
It is evident that the degeneracy produced by social conditions, and notably by the present economic organisation, will still only contribute, and always increasingly, to the survival of those best adapted to this economic organisation itself.
If the conquerors in the struggle for existence are the worst and the most feeble, that does not mean that the Darwinian law does not apply; it simply means that the society is vitiated and that those who survive are precisely those who are best adapted for this vitiated society.
If the conquerors in the struggle for existence are the worst and the most feeble, that does not mean that the Darwinian law does not apply; it simply means that the society is vitiated and that those who survive are precisely those who are best adapted for this vitiated society.
The Darwinian law of natural selection works then even in human society. The error of those who deny this proposition arises because they confuse the present society and time... with the whole history of humanity; and in consequence they db not see that the disastrous effects of retrogressive modern social selection are only a confirmation of the survival of the best adapted.
In freeing society of all the corruptions with which an unbridled economic individualism pollutes it, socialism will necessarily correct the effects of natural and social selection. In a society physically and morally healthy the best adapted, those who will consequently survive, will be healthy.
In the struggle for existence, victory will then belong to him who possesses the greatest and most fruitful physical and moral energies. The collectivist economic organisation, in assuring to each the conditions of existence, must necessarily ameliorate the human race physically and morally... socialism will assure to all individuals and not only to some privileged ones or to some heroes, as now the freedom to assert and to develop their own personality. Then indeed the effect of the struggle for existence will be the survival of the best, and that precisely because in a normal society it is to normal individuals that victory belongs. Social Darwinism, therefore, in continuing natural Darwinism will bring about a selection towards the best.
To the Darwinian law of natural inequalities must be joined another law which is insepar- able from it and which Jacoby following the works of Morel, Lucas, Galton, De Candole, Ribot, Spencer, Mme. Royer, Lombroso, etc., has brought into full daylight.
"Out of the immensity of humanity individuals, families, and races spring up which tend to raise themselves above the common level. Painfully they climb abrupt heights, reach the summit of power, of wealth, of intelligence, of talent, and, once having attained, are precipitated below and disappear in the abysses of madness and degeneracy." (Jacoby, Etudes sur la selection dans ses rapports avec l'heredite chez l'homme, 1881)
The cretin, the man of genius, the pauper and the millionaire, the dwarf and the giant, are so many natural and social monstrosities, and nature strikes them inexorably with degeneracy or sterility, whether they be the product of organic life or the effect of the social organisation.
It is also an inevitable destiny for all families that possess any sort of monopoly monopoly of power, wealth, or talent to see their last offspring become mad or sterile or commit suicide, and finally be extinguished. Noble houses, dynasties of sovereigns, families of artists or learned men, descendants of millionaires, all follow the common law which, once again, confirms the inductions, in this sense levelling, of science and socialism.
3.
I add that not only is Darwinism not contrary to socialism, but that it forms one of its fundamental scientific premises.
Darwin's theory, whether one likes it or not, in showing that man descends from animals, has struck a great blow at the belief in God as the creator of the universe and of man by a special fiat. It is for that reason, moreover, that the most implacable opposition, and the only one which subsists against his scientific induction was, and is, maintained in the name of religion.
God, as Laplace has said, is an hypothesis of which positive science has no need. He is, according to Herzen, at the most an X which contains in itself not the unknowable as Spencer and Dubois Reymond claim but all that humanity does not yet know. Also it is a variable X which decreases in proportion as the discoveries of science advance.
It is for this reason that science and religion are in inverse ratio one to the other; the one diminishes and becomes feeble in the same measure as the other increases and is strengthened in its struggle with the unknown.
And if this is a consequence of Darwinism, its influence on the development of socialism is perfectly evident.
The disappearance of the faith in something beyond when the poor will become the elect of the Lord, and when the miseries of this "valley of tears" will find an eternal compensation in Paradise, gives more vigour to the desire of a little "terrestrial Paradise" down here for the unhappy and the less fortunate who are the most numerous... On this side again, socialism is joined to religious evolution and tends to substitute itself for religion because it desires precisely that humanity should have in itself its own "terrestrial paradise" without having to wait for it in a "something beyond," which, to say the least, is very problematical.
It is because socialism knows and foresees that religious beliefs, whether we consider them with M. Sergi as pathological phenomena of human psychology or as useless phenomena of moral incrustation, must waste away before the extension of even elementary scientific culture; it is for that reason that socialism does not feel the necessity of fighting specially these same religious beliefs which are destined to disappear. It has taken this attitude even though it knows that the absence, or lessening, of the belief in God is one of the most powerful factors in its extension, because the priests of all religions have been, in all phases of history, the most powerful allies of the governing classes in keeping the masses bent under the yoke, thanks to religious fascination, as the tamer keeps wild beasts under his whip.
I have thus shown the direct influence of modern positive science, which has substituted the conception of natural causality for the conception of miracle and divinity, on the very rapid development and on the experimental foundation of contemporary socialism.
4.
We can again show that scientific socialism proceeds directly from Darwinism by examining the different modes of conceiving the individual in relation to the species.
Everything living forms an association, a collective whole. The moneron itself, the living cell, the irreducible expression of the biological individuality, is also an aggregate of different parts (nucleus, nucleolus, protoplasm), and each of these in its turn is an aggregate of molecules, which are aggregates of atoms.
The organism of a mammal is only a federation of tissues, organs, structure; the organism of a society can only consist of a federation of townships, provinces, regions: the organism of humanity can only consist of a federation of nations... we can consider as proved, that at the end of the 19th century the individual, as a being in himself is dethroned in biology as in sociology. The individual exists but only in so far as he makes part of the social aggregate.
The species that is to say the social aggregate is the great, the living and eternal reality of life, as Darwinism has shown, and as all the positive sciences from astronomy to sociology have shown.
We have shown that the socialism which characterises the end of the 19th, and which illumines the dawn of this century, is in perfect harmony with the whole current of modern thought.
5.
Darwinism has proved that all the mechan- ism of animal evolution is reduced to the struggle for existence between individuals of one species, on the one hand, and between different species in the whole world of living beings, on the other.
In the same way all the mechanism of social evolution has been reduced by Marxian socialism to the law of the struggle of the classes. This theory does not give us only the secret motive power and the sole positive explanation of the history of humanity, it give us also the ideal and rigid norm which disciplines political socialism, and which saves it from the elastic, vaporous, inconclusive uncertainties of sentimental socialism.
The history of animal life has only found its positive explanation in the great Darwinian law of the struggle for existence; it alone permits us to determine the natural causes of birth, of evolution and of the disappearance of vegetable and animal species from paleontological times to our days. In the same manner the history of human life only finds its explanation in the great Marxian law of the struggle of the classes.
I shall have an opportunity when studying the relations of sociology and socialism of speaking more at length of this great conception which is the imperishable glory of Marx and which secures for him in sociology the place that Darwin occupies in biology and Spencer in natural philosophy.
Struggle of the classes that is to say, that human society like all other living organisms is not a homogeneous whole, the sum of a number, more or less great, of individuals; it is, on the contrary, a living organism which is the resultant of different parts and always more or less differentiated according as the degree of social evolution is raised.
On this side again socialism is, in fact, in complete accord with positive science, which denies the free will of man and sees in human activity, individual and collective, a necessary effect, determined at the same time by conditions of race and environment.
Crime, suicide, madness, misery, are not the fruit of free will, of the individual fault, as metaphysical spiritualism believes; and it is no more a result of free will, a fault of the individual capitalist, if the workman is badly paid, if he is without work, if he is miserable.
This grand scientific conception of "the unity of physical forces " according to the expression of P. Secchi, or of universal solidarity, throws far from it the childish conception which makes free will and the individual the cause of human phenomena.
But at the bottom the problem remains in its entirety, and there is always a man who lives in comfort without working, because ten others live miserably whilst working.
The class struggle is, therefore, a struggle of class against class, and a struggle, of course, by the methods of which I shall shortly speak when dealing with the four modes of social transformation : evolution -- revolution -- revolt -- personal violence. But it is a struggle of class in the Darwinian sense which renews in the history of man the grand drama of the struggle for life among the species instead of debasing ourselves to the savage and insignificant fight of one individual with another.
"The same year when Darwin's book appeared (1859), and setting out from quite a different direction, an identical impulse was given to a very important development of social science by a work which passed unperceived for a long time, and which bore for title: Criticism on Political Economy, by Karl Marx -- it was the precursor of Capital. What Darwin's book on the Origin of Species is for the genesis and evolution of unconscious nature up to man, the work of Marx is for the genesis and evolution of the community of human beings, of States, and of the social forms of humanity." (L. Jacoby)
And that is why Germany, which has been the most fruitful field for the development of Darwinian theories, has been the same for the conscious, disciplined propaganda of socialist ideas. And that is precisely why at Berlin in the libraries of socialist propaganda the works of Charles Darwin occupy the place of honour beside those of Karl Marx.
Darwin-Marx Ping.
Good Lord.....
And Fermi was not a biologist.....
Science is infected with this kind of thinking.
Crime, suicide, madness, misery, are not the fruit of free will, of the individual fault, as metaphysical spiritualism believes; and it is no more a result of free will, a fault of the individual capitalist, if the workman is badly paid, if he is without work, if he is miserable.
Anti-Christian thinking at its finest.
If it is a civilized world that would kill it's own people and put their own people in gulags, then stop the planet and let me off.
Thanks for the ping!
Thanks for the ping.
However convincing and factual, some can only
embrace ideology that validates their world view.
As I see it, the world has embraced the darkness
willingly. And so we perish.
Praise God, that Jesus will soon rule and reign
in righteousness!
Thanks for the ping. We must continue to expose evolution and its Marxist proponents for as you say, the soul destroyers that they are. Once they gain power, first they”mercy kill “ the unborn, then the weak and sick, then the frail and aged, and next, the “troublesome”. Watch the MSM and its useful idiots who write opinion pieces — Christians have already been labeled “troublesome”, unable to get along in “society”.
I don’t see anything there that you can’t find examples of in societies that existed well before Darwin.
read later
One of my best Christian friends is a neuro-endocrinologist. Another was a chemist and yet another was a professor of anatomy. You alone and Christ knows whether or not you are a Christian.
There it is in black & white
As always, thank you for the ping and keep up the good work!
“...then stop the planet and let me off.”
That’s a great line. In fact, if you become a child of God you become an alien to this world.
“Praise God, that Jesus will soon rule and reign
in righteousness!”
A lot of people are going to feel really stupid when that happens.
Although, I am not even worthy enough to wash the feet of our Lord, I can still say Amen to that.
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