AIDS in Africa

In a post below about Bush and AIDS in Africa, Max commented:

"Most of these deaths are political."

I replied:

"Yep, lack of political will. Victims can't free themselves until they know they are slaves. Yes, it's nice to be compassionate but I fear that we are creating another huge chunk of dependent humans who will not contribute to the long term interests of human freedom. Africans have been taught how to fish for centuries but why bother to fish when guilty white liberals will do it for you? PEPFAR is at best a bandage on a bleeding wound. Like Mexicans, Africans need to get their shit together."

I know how cold and cruel that sounds but I agree with Herbert Spencer:

If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die. Of course, in so far as the severity of this process is mitigated by the spontaneous sympathy of men for each other, it is proper that it should be mitigated.

Precisely! But we should not kid ourselves that it is anymore than mere mitigation and that good intentions often have evil unforeseen consequences.

Out of compassion, the USA has acted as a safety valve for Mexico for a long time. It didn't help. Mexico is still a basket case. And we are now faced with the end of the American Revolution because we are being over-run by people who are ignorant of the enlightenment and the classical liberalism which is the basis of our republic. As Hosea wrote:

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up.

PS I don't take the bible literally but I'm convinced that, if you haven't read it, you're ignorant of half of the history of the human race.

Herbert Spencer: The Man versus the State

Herbert Spencer first used the phrase "survival of the fittest" after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. In his Principles of Biology published in 1864, in which he drew parallels between his own economic theories and Darwin's biological ones, he wrote:

“This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called 'natural selection', or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life."

Darwin had used the phrase "natural selection" in the first four editions of On the Origin of Species. He then used Spencer's new phrase "survival of the fittest" as a synonym for "natural selection" in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species, published in 1869:

"I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection. But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient."

Spencer's idea of the "survival of the fittest" has come to be termed "social Darwinism" a phrase which was first used as a term of abuse by the Leftist historian Richard Hofstadter in his book Social Darwinism in American Thought published in 1944.

Spencer has always been loathed by the Left but sadly, while he is admired by classical liberals and libertarians, he is not much respected by modern conservatives probably because of his agnosticism and Darwinism. He was by no means perfect and infallible (like another favorite, Eric Hoffer, Spencer was also an autodidact) but I count him among my favorite philosophers - and not only because he sacrificed his fame and reputation when he denounced the slaughter of my Boer ancestors by the British army and the destruction of the Boer republics which had been inspired by the American Revolution.

Spencer was born in England on April 27th 1820 and died in 1903:

Spencer’s father was a religious dissenter who drifted from Methodism to Quakerism, and who seems to have transmitted to his son an opposition to all forms of authority. Spencer was educated in empirical science by his father, while the members of the Derby Philosophical Society introduced him to pre-Darwinian concepts of biological evolution, particularly those of Erasmus Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

His uncle, the Reverend Thomas Spencer, vicar of Hinton Charterhouse near Bath, completed Spencer’s limited formal education by teaching him some mathematics and physics, and enough Latin to enable him to translate some easy texts. Thomas Spencer also imprinted on his nephew his own firmly free-trade and anti-statist political views. Otherwise, Spencer was an autodidact who acquired most of his knowledge from narrowly focused readings and conversations with his friends and acquaintances.
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He worked as a civil engineer during the railway boom of the late 1830s, while also devoting much of his time to writing for provincial journals that were nonconformist in their religion and radical in their politics. From 1848 to 1853 he served as sub-editor on the free-trade journal The Economist, during which time he published his first book, Social Statics (1851), which predicted that humanity would eventually become completely adapted to the requirements of living in society with the consequential withering away of the state.
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By the 1880s he had become an opponent of female suffrage and made common cause with the landowners of the Liberty and Property Defence League against what they saw as the drift towards 'socialism' of elements (such as Sir William Harcourt) within the administration of William Ewart Gladstone - largely against the opinions of Gladstone himself. Spencer's political views from this period were expressed in what has become his most famous work, The Man versus the State.

The exception to Spencer's growing conservativism was that he remained throughout his life an ardent opponent of imperialism and militarism. His critique of the Boer War was especially scathing, and it contributed to his declining popularity in Britain.
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Spencer's philosophical vision was formed by a combination of deism and positivism. On the one hand, he had imbibed something of eighteenth century deism from his father and other members of the Derby Philosophical Society and from books like George Combe's immensely popular The Constitution of Man (1828). This treated the world as a cosmos of benevolent design, and the laws of nature as the decrees of a 'Being transcendentally kind.' Natural laws were thus the statutes of a well governed universe that had been decreed by the Creator with the intention of promoting human happiness. Although Spencer lost his Christian faith as a teenager and later rejected any 'anthropomorphic' conception of the Deity, he nonetheless held fast to this conception at an almost sub-conscious level.
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He has been claimed as a precursor by libertarians and philosophical anarchists. Spencer argued that the state was not an "essential" institution and that it would "decay" as voluntary market organization would replace the coercive aspects of the state. He also argued that the individual had a "right to ignore the state."
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Politics in late Victorian Britain moved in directions that Spencer disliked, and his arguments provided so much ammunition for conservatives and individualists in Europe and America that they still are in use in the 21st century. The expression ‘There Is No Alternative’ (TINA), made famous by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, may be traced to its emphatic use by Spencer.
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Spencer denounced Irish land reform, compulsory education, laws to regulate safety at work, prohibition and temperance laws, tax funded libraries, and welfare reforms. His main objections were threefold: the use of the coercive powers of the government, the discouragement given to voluntary self-improvement, and the disregard of the "laws of life." The reforms, he said, were tantamount to "socialism", which he said was about the same as "slavery" in terms of limiting human freedom.
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Spencer anticipated many of the analytical standpoints of later libertarian theorists such as Friedrich Hayek, especially in his "law of equal liberty", his insistence on the limits to predictive knowledge, his model of a spontaneous social order, and his warnings about the "unintended consequences" of collectivist social reforms.
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Spencer also had an influence on literature, as many novelists and short story authors came to address his ideas in their work. George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, Bolesław Prus, Abraham Cahan, D. H. Lawrence and Jorge Luis Borges all referenced Spencer. Arnold Bennett greatly praised First Principles, and the influence it had on Bennett may be seen in his many novels. Jack London went so far as to create a character, Martin Eden, a staunch Spencerian. It has also been suggested that the character of "Vershinin" in Anton Chekhov's play The Three Sisters is a dedicated Spencerian. H.G. Wells used Spencer's ideas as a theme in his novella, The Time Machine, employing them to explain the evolution of man into two species.
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The last decades of Spencer's life were characterized by growing disillusionment and loneliness. He never married, and after 1855 was a perpetual hypochondriac who complained endlessly of pains and maladies that no physician could diagnose.

In 1902, shortly before his death, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Andrew Carnegie and Herbert Spencer:

Andrew Carnegie, already a titan of the business world, was sitting with friends on the moors of Scotland when the group took up the question of which author they would take with them if stranded on a deserted island. One said Shakespeare, another chose Dante. Carnegie didn't hesitate. "Herbert Spencer," he said.

Of all the writers that Carnegie read and studied throughout his life, he said that the English philosopher Herbert Spencer was the one who influenced him most. Spencer's writings provided the philosophical justification for Carnegie's unabashed pursuit of personal riches in the world of business, freeing him from the moral reservations about financial acquisition that he had inherited from his egalitarian Scottish relatives.

In his "Autobiography," Carnegie wrote about the dramatic effect of reading both the naturalist Charles Darwin and Spencer.

"I remember that light came as in a flood and all was clear," Carnegie wrote. "Not only had I got rid of theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution. 'All is well since all grows better' became my motto, my true source of comfort."
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"The concentration of capital is a necessity for meeting the demands of our day, and as such should not be looked at askance, but be encouraged," Carnegie wrote, paraphrasing Spencer. "There is nothing detrimental to human society in it, but much that is, or is bound soon to become, beneficial."

Yet Carnegie did not follow all of Spencer's teachings, especially Spencer's call for unfettered laissez faire capitalism. Carnegie argued, for example, that if workers were to have an eight-hour day, the state would have to regulate it -- something that Spencer never would have approved. Carnegie also ignored Spencer's complete opposition to philanthropy, as the American business tycoon was one of the great philanthropists of his day. Spencer held that the poor were the unfit who would not survive; Carnegie, however, believed that the poor (such as himself) were often the ones who grew up to become "the epoch-makers."

Carnegie not only admired Spencer; he also sought out his friendship. Carnegie was in England at the time he learned of Spencer's scheduled tour of America, where the Englishman's popularity was greatest. The steel magnate made hurried plans to return to the States on the same ship as Spencer and even managed to win a place at the same dining table with Spencer.

For nine days Carnegie used his ample charms to win over the difficult philosopher. Both Carnegie and Spencer recalled in their autobiographies an incident that revealed Carnegie's fearlessness and social confidence. The two men were sitting at a table of diners who were discussing whether great men lived up to their reputations when met in person. Carnegie argued that reality never lived up to expectations. In his autobiography, the steel tycoon described what happened next:

Oh!' said Mr. Spencer, "in my case, for instance was this so?"

"Yes," I replied, "You more than any. I had imagined my teacher, the great calm philosopher brooding Buddha-like, over all things, unmoved; never did I dream of seeing him excited over the question of cheshire or Cheddar cheese." The day before he [Spencer] had peevishly pushed away the former when presented by the steward exclaiming "Cheddar, Cheddar, not Cheshire; I said Cheddar." There was a roar in which none joined more heartily than the sage.

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Carnegie was also hurt by Spencer's attraction to Andrew's younger brother Tom. Tom's natural shyness seemed to appeal to Spencer more than Andrew's desire to please and impress. Tom had also read Spencer's works, and his questions impressed the philosopher so much that Spencer invited Tom to accompany him to Washington and New York, although Andrew's younger brother declined.

At the end of the American tour, Carnegie picked up Spencer on the day he was honored at a farewell dinner at Delmonico's in New York City. Carnegie saw that the great man was worried about the evening. Wrote Carnegie: "He could think of nothing but the address he was to deliver. I believe he had rarely before spoken in public." Some of the most important businessmen of the day made toasts to the philosopher. Interestingly enough, when it was Spencer's turn to speak, he did not encourage the gathered to continue to wage the competitive battle. Instead, Spencer, exhausted by his visit (Spencer was a fragile man and a hypochondriac), suggested that Americans learn how to find time to enjoy their leisure.

Many who had contact with Spencer judged his trip a failure, since Spencer spent much of his time complaining about hosts and avoiding the press. Yet the visit was salvaged in Carnegie's mind while the men were on deck of the ship that would take Spencer back across the Atlantic. Spencer, in a gesture uncommon to him, held the hands of Carnegie and editor Edward Youmans and said, "Here are my two best American friends." It was a gesture that Carnegie would recall often and obviously cherish.

On April 27th Damon W. Root wrote a birthday tribute to Spencer for Reason Magazine:

Yet for all his many accomplishments, Spencer is remembered today mostly as a villain, as a heartless and evil “social Darwinist” who believed the rich should feast on the poor. This false portrait is due largely to the slanderous work of Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter and his first book, Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944). In Hofstadter’s account, Spencer was the driving intellectual force behind the pseudo-scientific use of evolution to justify the harshest forms of racial, social, and economic inequality. And according to Hofstadter, the eugenics movement, which advocated forced sterilization and other violent and coercive measures, "has proved to be the most enduring aspect" of Spencer's "tooth and claw natural selection."

But the truth about Spencer is almost the exact opposite of Hofstadter’s vile caricature. As I wrote in “The Unfortunate Case of Herbert Spencer”:

At the heart of Hofstadter's case is the following passage from Spencer's famous first book, Social Statics (1851): "If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die."

That certainly sounds rough, but as it turns out, Hofstadter failed to mention the first sentence of Spencer's next paragraph, which reads, "Of course, in so far as the severity of this process is mitigated by the spontaneous sympathy of men for each other, it is proper that it should be mitigated." As philosophy professor Roderick Long has remarked, "The upshot of the entire section, then, is that while the operation of natural selection is beneficial, its mitigation by human benevolence is even more beneficial." This is a far cry from Hofstadter's summary of the text, which has Spencer advocating that the "unfit...should be eliminated."

Similarly, Hofstadter repeatedly points to Spencer's famous phrase, "survival of the fittest," a line that Charles Darwin added to the fifth edition of Origin of Species. But by fit, Spencer meant something very different from brute force. In his view, human society had evolved from a "militant" state, which was characterized by violence and force, to an "industrial" one, characterized by trade and voluntary cooperation. Thus Spencer the "extreme conservative" supported labor unions (so long as they were voluntary) as a way to mitigate and reform the "harsh and cruel conduct" of employers.

Spencer's style of writing is not given to short quotes but here are a few:

All socialism involves slavery.

An argument fatal to the communist theory, is suggested by the fact, that a desire for property is one of the elements of our nature.

Government is essentially immoral.

Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.

The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have been wrong must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.

The Republican form of government is the highest form of government: but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature, a type nowhere at present existing.

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.

We do not commonly see in a tax a diminution of freedom, and yet it clearly is one.

When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.

Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all. Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief, they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief, but assume that their own needs none.

Man needed one moral constitution to fit him for his original state; he needs another to fit him for his present state; and he has been, is, and will long continue to be, in process of adaptation. And the belief in human perfectibility merely amounts to the belief that, in virtue of this process, man will eventually become completely suited to his mode of life. Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is part of nature; all of a piece with the development of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower. The modifications mankind have undergone, and are still undergoing, result from a law underlying the whole organic creation; and provided the human race continues, and the constitution of things remains the same, those modifications must end in completeness.

Education has for its object the formation of character. To curb restive propensities, to awaken dormant sentiments, to strengthen the perceptions, and cultivate the tastes, to encourage this feeling and repress that, so as finally to develop the child into a man of well proportioned and harmonious nature — this is alike the aim of parent and teacher.

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, far-seeing benevolence.

Each new ontological theory, propounded in lieu of previous ones shown to be untenable, has been followed by a new criticism leading to a new scepticism. All possible conceptions have been one by one tried and found wanting; and so the entire field of speculation has been gradually exhausted without positive result: the only result reached being the negative one above stated, that the reality existing behind all appearances is, and must ever be, unknown.

If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.

It cannot but happen that those individuals whose functions are most out of equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces, will be those to die; and that those will survive whose functions happen to be most nearly in equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces. But this survival of the fittest, implies multiplication of the fittest. Out of the fittest thus multiplied, there will, as before, be an overthrowing of the moving equilibrium wherever it presents the least opposing force to the new incident force.

We have unmistakable proof that throughout all past time, there has been a ceaseless devouring of the weak by the strong.

Unlike private enterprise which quickly modifies its actions to meet emergencies — unlike the shopkeeper who promptly finds the wherewith to satisfy a sudden demand — unlike the railway company which doubles its trains to carry a special influx of passengers; the law-made instrumentality lumbers on under all varieties of circumstances at its habitual rate. By its very nature it is fitted only for average requirements, and inevitably fails under unusual requirements.

Strong as it looks at the outset, State-agency perpetually disappoints every one. Puny as are its first stages, private efforts daily achieve results that astound the world.

As there must be moderation in other things, so there must be moderation in self-criticism. Perpetual contemplation of our own actions produces a morbid consciousness, quite unlike that normal consciousness accompanying right actions spontaneously done; and from a state of unstable equilibrium long maintained by effort, there is apt to be a fall towards stable equilibrium, in which the primitive nature reasserts itself. Retrogression rather than progression may hence result.

Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.