Status Anxiety

by Alain de Botton

The Social Darwinists furthermore insisted that the sufferings and untimely deaths of the poor benefitted society as a whole and should therefore under no circumstances be prevented by government interference. The weak were nature’s mistakes and must be allowed to perish before they could reproduce and thereby contaminate the rest of the population. Just as the animal kingdom spawned its share of malformed creatures, so, too, did mankind. The most humane thing was to let the feeble die without misguided mercy. In his Social Statics (1851), the English Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer asserted that biology itself was opposed to charity: “It seems hard that widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life or death. Nevertheless, when regarded not separately, but in connection with the interests of universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to be full of beneficence—the same beneficence which brings to early graves the children of diseased parents… . Under the natural order of things society is constantly excreting its unhealthy, imbecile, slow, vacillating, faithless members. 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 they should die.”