Discussion Thread

No u

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good morning dt 👉👈

I offhandedly told my friend that I’m a p-zombie and he was like “wtf is that” so I just ran with it and now he thinks I’m a p-zombie while not entirely understanding what that means despite my best efforts to honestly explain it to him

I recently read Thomas Leonard’s paper “[Origins of the myth of social Darwinism: The ambiguous legacy of Richard Hofstadter’s *Social Darwinism in American Thought*](https://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/myth.pdf)” and it’s interesting and I wanna hear some thoughts on it from here now after hearing a couple thoughts on it from badhistory.

Basically, it lays-out a case that Richard Hofstadter’s influential book that popularized the term “social Darwinism” is fraught to the point of cognitive dissonance such that paper coins the two modes of thought as, “Hofstadter1” and “Hofstadter2”. Hofstadter defines it around two figures, Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. This gets a bit fraught in a number of ways. For one, neither seemed to have been much influenced by Darwin. William Graham Sumner only made occasional references to Darwinian evolution among a broad range of justifications for his beliefs (which, I will note for later, included an opposition to plutocracy which had motivated him to become a mugwump and anti-imperialism which lead him to oppose the annexation of the Philippines), With Herbert Spencer, meanwhile, you run into the problem that he was anti-Darwinian as a Lamarckian evolutionary theorist (interestingly, he’s one the one who coined the term, “survival of the fittest” which Darwin later adopted at Alfred Russel Wallace’s insistence). For a book that popularized the term, Hofstadter uses the term loosely, first being “the adaptation of Darwinism and related biological concepts to social ideologies,” then later, “biologically derived social speculation” and at other times seeming to just define it as, “survival of the fittest.”

The tension comes from having to reconcile this with the fact a lot of the Progressive Era reformist heroes he lionized in the book at times better fit those definitions than the two central characters of Sumner and Spencer. It was such that he had to coin, “Darwinist collectivism” to describe this particular tendency of Progressive Era reformers who fit those definitions in how they thought and argued for the policies that he heralded them for and for the policies he didn’t such as support for imperialism, racism, and eugenics. The best example of this cognitive dissonance is with how it treats Edward A. Ross, with “Hofstadter1” characterizing him with the statement, “men like Cooley and Ross refused to look upon the poor as unfit or to worship at the shrine of the fittest”, before four pages later “Hofstadter2” kicks-in and acknowledges the man was a eugenicist (which is a bit of an understatement; Edward A. Ross’s beliefs were centered around an idea that the industrial age was overcoming natural selection with an artificial selection for those he deemed inferior, “Latins, Slavs, Asiatics, and Hebrews,” which would lead to them overwhelming the “Anglo-Saxons” in a process for which he coined the term “racial suicide”, so he’s the asshole to blame for that term). In subsequent editions, he got rid of this term, “Darwinist collectivism,” entirely.

So why go through this? “Social Darwinism” existed before Hofstadter as what seems to have been an extremely rare term of exclusively pejorative use and it is likely that Hofstadter’s use of the phrase came entirely of his own thoughts as a retronym. The paper justifies why Hofstadter went through this whole rigamarole thusly in SDAT:

>Hofstadter’s (1944) New Deal left-liberal sensibility thus contained two intellectual posits: first, that state-planned reform was socially, economically and ethically better than free markets, and second, that biological, especially Darwinian explanations of human society were illegitimate and dangerous.6 But this reform-good-biology-bad trope, while characteristic of Hofstadter’s mid-20th century American liberalism, does not map upon the Gilded Age and Progressive Era analyzed in SDAT.7 In particular, it ill-suited the progressive scholars who were the real focus of SDAT and who were happy to harness biological (including Darwinian) arguments for their various reform ends. In fact, the Progressive Era progressives Hofstadter most admired (men like Lester F. Ward, Edward A. Ross, Thorstein Veblen, Charles Horton Cooley, and John R. Commons) were enthusiastic biologizers.
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>These two aspects of the more mature Hofstadter’s thought, contempt for free-market economics but skepticism regarding the biological explanations of progressives who would substitute expert planning for free markets, are both present in SDAT. However, Hofstadter1’s contempt for free markets was far more developed than Hofstadter2’s still incipient skepticism regarding progressivism, an asymmetry that had consequences for the subsequent fate of “social Darwinism” in social sciences.

>American students in ‘learning recession’ as math and reading scores decline

If you do a google news search for “recession” or “us recession” (not something I recommend btw) you end up seeing this article pop up dozens of times. By the 3rd page every result is this same piece published by different local news channels. Its gotta be a Sinclair thing.

I can’t quite get people who hate Fetterman and like Platner. I don’t really like either but Planter is both more crazy coming it (consider how Fetterman got after being in the senate) and he is in a state that is both bluer so you should compromise less and has one of the best R senators.

Feels like someone stuck in a rut after slowing putting the gas got the wheels to turn decided that to slam the gas and see if they can break the engine before someone drags them out.