On Social Revolutions

HUM 2052: Civilization IISpring 2015Dr. Perdigao

March 16-18, 2015

That fish• Charles Darwin (1809-1892)

• Erasmus Darwin—grandfather—published Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life, and evidence that earth existed for millions of years before people, animal modifications (Perry 579)

• Naturalist, HMS Beagle (1831-36), surveyed South America and Pacific islands

• “Darwin did for biology what Newton had done for physics: he made it an objective science based on general principles” (Perry 578)

• “mutability of species,” “natural selection,” “survival of the fittest” (1370)

• “A natural selection acts by competition” (1372); “The natural system is a genealogical arrangement, in which we have to discover the lines of descent by the most permanent characters, however slight their vital importance may be” (1374).

Creationism vs. Evolutionary Theory• Completes “trend initiated by Galileo” and contributes to the “waning

of religious belief and to a growing secular attitude” (Perry 581)

• Rejection of literal interpretation of the Bible: “It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the ‘plan of creation,’ ‘unity of design,’ et cetera…” (1375)

• Backlash— “Genesis is a lie. . . The revelation of God to man, as we Christians know it, is a delusion and a snare” (qtd. in Perry 580); “practically destructive of the authority of divine revelation, and subversive of the foundation of religion and morality” (qtd. in Perry 581)

• “In the distant future I see open fields for far more important research. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history” (1375).

• Christianity more of an issue of faith than reason . . . “Copernicanism had deprived people of the comforting belief that the earth had been placed in the center of the universe just for them; Darwinism deprived them of the privilege of being God’s special creation” (Perry 580).

• http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/evolut.htm

Sigh

Social Sciences• The Descent of Man

• “man is descended from some less highly organized form” (1376); “We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World” (1377)

• “Social Darwinism” as work of social science, applying Darwin’s theories to social and economic issues: “struggle for existence” and “survival of the fittest”

• Loose application leads to problematic uses—language of imperialism, racism, nationalism, militarism, “doctrines that preached relentless conflict” (Perry 581)

• Darwinian biology to promote belief in Anglo-Saxon (British and American) and Teutonic (German) racial superiority (Perry 581)

• Growth of British Empire, expansion of United States to Pacific, and extension of German power seen by Social Darwinists as issues of racial superiority, domination of American Indians, Africans, Asians, Poles (Perry 581)

Social Sciences• “Whereas the philosophes emphasized human equality, Social

Darwinists divided humanity into racial superiors and inferiors” (Perry 582)

• Racial and national conflict as “biological necessity, law of history, and a means of progress” and “distorted the image of progress” (Perry 582)

Reconfiguring DarwinCreation Museum:http://www.creationmuseum.org/about

Unicorn Museum:http://www.unicornmuseum.org/

Inherit the Wind (1960):http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_DQUAuNUvw

Planet of the Apes (1968):http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjcpRHuPjOI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb4eZ7Z5yk8

Planet of the Apes (2001):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPgNrHqfTdY

Collectivists and Communists• After failed revolutions in 1848 in Germany, Austria, and Italy, led by

nationalists and liberals, Marxists and anarchists as “chief proponents of revolution” (Perry 584); both liberalism and Marxism shared principles derived from Enlightenment, social progress

• Differences as seizure of power by working class and destruction of capitalism, violence and struggle as “essence of history,” “instruments of progress” (Perry 584)

• “emphasizing their desire to replace private property by communal, collective ownership” (676)

• Marx (1818-1883) and Engels (1820-1895)

• Communist League, 1848 Communist Manifesto

• Little immediate impact on insurrections at time but it became a founding document, defining “historical change in a way that gave hope to future revolutionaries by making their victory seem inevitable” (1381)

Marx’s Science• Marx as “strict materialist” and “Young Hegelian,” belief that the

“Germany of their day” “had not attained a harmony between the individual and society; it as not rationally organized and did not foster freedom” (Perry 531); “dialectical conflict” between opposing forces, thesis (force) and antithesis (adversary), not abstract natural rights but “true freedom” attained “through the social group” (Perry 530), history as “not an assortment of unrelated and disconnected events, but a progressive development” (Perry 585)

• For Marx, clash of classes rather than opposing ideas—“dialectical materialism” which accounts for change and progress (Perry 585); saw Hegel as too metaphysical

Marxist Theory• Marx and Engels—turn to economic relationships that influence

society—social, political, intellectual, and cultural—and change throughout history with production change

• Revolutionizing instruments of production; great crises, according to Marx and Engels, in production and production forces

• “capitalist free enterprise system that had created the crystal palace was now on the verge of collapse and would soon be overturned by the very class of laborers it had created to meet industrial demands” (1369)

• Bourgeoisie vs. proletariat

• Bourgeoisie (capitalist)

• Proletariat (working class)

• Embrace industrialization to bring about proletarian revolution and “abolition of exploitation, private property, and class society” (676)

Rise of Marxism• Marx: political theorist and labor organizer

• Scientific theory (like Darwin?): mathematical calculations of production and profit

• Das Kapital

• Returns to John Locke (another influential text for Frankenstein) “that human existence was defined by the necessity to work to fulfill basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter” (MW: 713).

• Materialism as class relationships developed around the “mode of production”

• Feudalism (serf and medieval lord); slavery (slave and master); capitalism (worker [proletariat] and capitalist)

The Road to Revolution• Rather than emphasize individual rights, focus on unequal class

relations and discards the “romantic views of the Utopian socialists” to focus on struggle as means to bring change

• Marx “rejected the liberal Enlightenment view that society was basically harmonious, maintaining instead that social progress could occur only through conflict” (MW: 714)

• Anarchism as destruction of state power because “the existence of the state was the root of social injustice” (713)

• Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), wanted all oppressed people to revolt, secret societies rather than mass political parties, feared Marxists would become new masters and exploiters , instead should destroy the state (Perry 588-589)

Limits of Civilization• “the epidemic of over production” that leads society into

“momentary barbarism” (return to Montaigne?)

• “Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society . . .” (1386).