The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (18 page)

The truth, however, is that American prosperity during this admittedly rough-and-tumble period lifted millions of poor people out of poverty. What Reich describes as a period of runaway income inequality was in fact the single greatest explosion in economic growth in American history. Per capita GDP soared during the so-called Gilded Age. Milton Friedman concluded that the 1880s were the single most prosperous decade in American history. And from 1890 to 1910, U.S. GNP grew at 6 percent a year.
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According to historian Burton Folsom, in 1870 America was creating 23 percent of the world’s industrial goods, while Britain and Germany produced 30 percent and 13 percent, respectively. By 1900, America was in first place with 30 percent; Britain had fallen to 20 percent; and Germany had risen to 20 percent. In 1870, Britain was the world’s chief steel producer; by 1900, Andrew Carnegie alone made more steel than all of Great Britain.
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Henry Hazlitt describes it as “a period of unprecedented expansion, of rising wages and falling prices, of increased longevity and startling increase
of population, of rising living standards and the beginnings of production for, and consumption by, the masses.… But the historians were so preoccupied by the growing pains,” notes Hazlitt, “that they overlooked the growth.” Hazlitt points out that the famous progressive historians Mary and Charles Beard delivered

a relentless bitter indictment of American business enterprise after the Civil War. But then, in a brief afterthought, they mentioned a few statistics which revealed the astounding national growth and material wellbeing of the period. Between 1860 and 1900 our population grew from 31 million to 76 million, a growth “unprecedented in Western history.” Our national wealth, said the Beards, was only one third that of Great Britain in the year of Daniel Webster’s death. Half a century later our wealth was one and a quarter times that of Great Britain. In half a century it had grown fivefold.
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One need not defend every so-called robber baron to defend the “age of robber barons” as a boon to mankind. Indeed, I will gladly concede that some robber barons cut too many corners if the Left will concede that many a robber baron was not so committed to capitalism as the standard myths suggest. Many robber barons went on bended knee to Washington asking for protection from the ravaging tides of capitalism. In 1909, Andrew Carnegie himself was asking for “government control” of the steel industry.
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So what does this have to do with Social Darwinism? Well, pretty much nothing, just like the robber barons themselves. Hofstadter, the historian who essentially invented the idea that American capitalism in the nineteenth century was inspired by Charles Darwin, never offered much by way of actual proof that his idea was accurate. A truly brilliant writer, he was like a chef who can make a few ingredients go a long way. He stretched out the broth in
Social Darwinism in America
by citing a handful of anecdotes and then making sweeping generalizations about them.

Thanks to a legendary effort in historical fact-checking, led by scholars Irwin Wyllie and Robert C. Bannister, Hofstadter’s entire project has been dismantled.
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Quite
simply, the “robber barons” were not inspired by Charles Darwin or Darwinism. They did not see in Darwin a rationalization for their economic philosophies or business practices. Not only was there no self-declared school of Social Darwinists among academics and intellectuals, the alleged beneficiaries of their teachings had little to no interest in the subject whatsoever.

Now when you dismantle something you do not destroy it in every particular. A dismantled engine will still leave you with a carburetor, a drive shaft, etc. Similarly, Hofstadter & Co. can and do still cling to a few random quotes from second-order figures who were parroting the vernacular at the time. (Darwinian metaphors were all the rage in the late nineteenth century, in every field.) And they can certainly cite Andrew Carnegie, who was, legitimately, a true disciple of Herbert Spencer and a devotee of Darwinian thought.

The fact that Carnegie was an exception to the rule is of little regard to Hofstadter and others determined to attach Social Darwinism and the robber barons at the hip. So certain it couldn’t be otherwise, both Hofstadter and Reich eagerly identify John D. Rockefeller as a Social Darwinist by referring to a speech where Rockefeller attributed his fortune to “merely a survival of the fittest,… the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.” The only problem, of course, is that the line is actually from a 1902 speech by John D. Rockefeller
Junior
, son of the pious Christian entrepreneur who, for the record, had no use for Darwinism.
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To be fair, Reich simply repeated Hofstadter’s mistake. And Hoftsadter made many. Quotes about “natural law” are repeated without noting that they are references to the laws of physics or God, not Darwinian evolution. Other references to evolution, say, in Thomas Mellon’s memoirs, are taken as endorsements of Social Darwinism, when in fact they are only relevant to religion.

When you think about it, the idea that businessmen were inspired by a then novel biological theory should not have even passed the smell test. “Gilded Age businessmen were not sufficiently bookish, or sufficiently well educated, to keep up with the changing world of ideas,” writes Wyllie. “As late as 1900, 84 percent of the businessmen listed in
Who’s Who in America
had not been educated beyond high school.”
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Overwhelmingly, businessmen of the period were influenced by Christianity first and foremost, classical
economics second, some self-help inspirational nostrums a distant third, and egghead notions about biology almost not at all. Cornelius Vanderbilt read one book in his entire life. It was
Pilgrim’s Progress
. And he didn’t get to it until he was past the age of seventy. “If I had learned education,” Vanderbilt famously quipped, “I would not have had time to learn anything else.”
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The response from informed liberals is often, well, yes, Social Darwinism is a misleading term if you mean that it was a school of thought—but it does accurately describe the behavior of the robber barons. Except that’s not true either. To be sure, these were tough businessmen, but they were also some of the greatest philanthropists in world history; they created libraries, hospitals, conservation trusts, foundations, universities, and general purpose charities. Now why would they do that if they saw the world through the zero-sum prism of survival of the fittest? Because these men took their Christianity very, very seriously. As Wyllie notes, Christian ethics suffused the business world because even the well educated were taught in an explicitly religious context. Robert Harris, the president of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad, might be a good candidate to be a Social Darwinist if not for his expressed view: “As a general proposition, it seems to me that the strong should help the weak, now by one course and now by another; and in exercising authority to do it as we would wish it done to ourselves.”
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Even the avowed Spencerist Andrew Carnegie was one of the most spectacularly generous philanthropists the world has ever seen. At the age of thirty-three he wrote a letter to himself, which read in part: “[T]he amassing of wealth is one of the worst species of idolatry—no idol more debasing than the worship of money.”
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He committed to retiring at the age of thirty-five so he could dedicate himself to philanthropy. He believed that the man who “dies rich dies disgraced.” He missed his deadline but nonetheless became one of the most generous benefactors in the world and a committed pacifist.

Hofstadter claimed that Social Darwinism provided “one of the great informing insights in… the history of the conservative mind in America.”
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But as Robert Bannister painstakingly demonstrates, the truth is something close to the exact opposite. Liberals, progressives, and other champions of “reform Darwinism” were obsessed with Darwin and his theory’s
implications for society. It suffused their thinking in every respect (not least because it seemed so complementary with Hegelianism). And as a result, they
projected their categories of thought
onto their ideological opponents. Their obsessions with eugenics, with “fixing” society, with reform in all of its myriad particulars were driven by the great informing insight of Darwinism. And in their consummate arrogance and cocksure belief that they were the heroes of the tale, they simply concocted motivations for their opponents that did not exist. It’s a familiar tale.

9

SLIPPERY SLOPE

O
ne wonders if someone had told whoever it was in the early nineteenth century who first made reference to the “slippery slope” something along the lines of: “You know, once you start talking about ‘slippery slopes,’ pretty soon we’ll be on a slippery slope. There will be no turning back.” Alas, no one offered such a warning, and the camel’s nose got under the tent, the ship sailed, the horse got out of the barn and drove the wedge that toppled the first domino, which opened the floodgates, and now all we have left is boiled frog.

There is nary a statesman, scholar, or bricklayer who has not used, or opined on, the phrase “the slippery slope.” There’s a vast body of literature on the problem presented with SSAs (slippery slope arguments) and similar forms of inductive fallacies and arguments from analogy.
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I will not rehearse it all here, because once you start, you just don’t know where that sort of thing will end.

It should be conceded up front that there’s nothing inherently liberal or progressive about slippery slope arguments. If anything, it is a small-c conservative form of argumentation used by people across the ideological spectrum. The basic SSA goes like this: If we permit A, we’ll have to allow B, and pretty soon Xs, Ys, and even Zs will be getting married and having sex on Saturday morning TV or rounding up dissidents and honest citizens. (First, they came for the A, but I was not an A. Then they came for the Bs…) So that’s why we can’t give any of these damn As an inch, because we know the rest of the alphabetical integers will take a mile.

At some level, slippery slope arguments surely appeal to our caveman brains. The Neanderthal who never asked, “What could go wrong?” probably had a hard time passing on his genes successfully. Humans evolved in harsh environments, where anticipating how big problems stem from little ones was no doubt the key to making it through many a bad winter. Social organization itself is an evolutionary adaptation, and societies that stumble on successful cultures no doubt bequeathed to their progeny an innate instinct to protect them from reckless experimentation.

And in this sense slippery slope arguments make an important and valuable contribution to human progress. Only fools and revolutionaries fail to ask, “What could go wrong?” Hence the slippery slope argument is a
fundamentally conservative mechanism in the sense that it promotes risk avoidance. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t used just as relentlessly by people on the left end of the ideological spectrum. Every Communist functionary who has been told to allow a little liberalization or a few market-based reforms has responded with a slippery slope argument that ended with a headlong rush to immoral capitalism. Every left-wing dictator who ponders giving his subjects an inch of freedom is quickly advised by his apparatchiks that the greedy people will demand a mile.

Likewise every lover of liberty frets that a small expansion of government into the realm of freedom will, like a metastasizing cancer cell, spread ever further. This offers one of the great insights into the wonder and glory of America and the greatness of her people. In much of the world, Europe included, the slippery slope argument in favor of restraining government’s grip on our liberties has little to no purchase. Even in Great Britain, the wellspring of our own conception of liberty, it is widely accepted that the state can intrude wherever it is deemed prudent or progressive without much fear things will turn oppressive. For instance, every nook and cranny of the country is covered in surveillance cameras, and in some communities the government agents monitoring them can even use public address systems to chastise you for littering or to tell you to stop jaywalking.

Thanks to an earlier English fondness for intrusiveness, the colonies in North America became a haven for ornery types seeking to be left alone. The proto-Americans had a tendency to take what might be called preemptive offense at threats to their liberties. “In other countries [than the American colonies], the people… judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance,” Edmund Burke observed in 1775, but in America, “they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.”