Not much to say for this month,
but I did recently come across a liberal economic thought in one of Darwin’s
letters from 1845 (he would have been 36). It is so unusual for him that I
thought I would record it here.
Keep in mind that Darwin was
socially conservative in almost every way and much of it seeped into his
science. He preferred to view nature as a hierarchy of beings in competition rather
than as a holistic collection in which every organism has an important part to
play. He seemed to hate social and political expressions of equality. He did
not like labor unions and cooperatives because he believed they hurt the
competitive principle. In New Zealand, he did not like seeing slaves step out
of line and greet someone before their owners did. Tribes that practiced
equality were primitive and would not advance until they acquired strong
chiefs, he thought.
So I was quite surprised to read
these comments by Darwin in an 1845 letter, which concerns the taxes or duties that
someone had to pay when purchasing land in England:
“I believe few things would do this
Country more good in future ages than the destruction of primogeniture,—so as
to lessen the difference in land wealth & make more small freeholders.—How
atrociously unjust are the stamp laws which render it so expensive for the poor
man to buy his ¼ of an acre, it makes one’s blood burn with indignation.”
I suppose it makes some sense for
Darwin to have written this. It could be taken as consistent with his view that
competition should always be encouraged, but it is still rare to see him invoke
this principle in favor of the poor man. Justice in and of itself does not seem
to have been a principle with him; he was after all blind, for example, to the
justice that labor unions were seeking. He does not seem to have ever thought
that competition might itself be unjust on occasion. He more likely believed
that whenever the fittest survive (in accordance with what his conservative
class considered fitness), justice simply does not enter into it.
© 2019 Leon Zitzer
