The Man Who Believed in Nothing- Part I

Herbert Spencer and the Nihilism of the Right

For some time now I’ve been insisting loudly to everyone I can that the Victorian anarcho-capitalist Herbert Spencer is a central influence on right-wing ideas today, and that understanding him can help us understand the present. This is my attempt to explain why. The following short essay is the first in a several part series explaining the life and work of Spencer and its influence today. What you’re reading here is based on (though not an excerpt from) research for my upcoming book Control Science: From Bentham to Bezos.

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Herbert Spencer was born in 1820 to an emotionally abusive father, George, and a traumatized mother, Harriet. George tormented his wife- he insulted her daily, and he could be no less cruel with silence than words. If Harriet asked him a question he felt was poorly worded, he would simply ignore her, out of a supposedly belief in verbal clarity. She gave birth to at least seven children. All but Herbert died at an early age. Before her marriage, her most defining characteristic was reportedly her “sweetness.” By the end of her life, it appears to have been exhaustion. 

Harriet Spencer was a model Christian by 19th-century British standards, in Spencer’s account. She worked with her church to clothe the local poor, and she tirelessly gathered petitions for the abolition of slavery. Her son blamed her religion, in part, for her abusive marriage: because she believed in an eternal reward, she bore her suffering with restraint, which he found anything but enviable. She deserved better, and it was Herbert’s “unceasing regret,” he wrote decades later, that he failed to help her get it. Young Herbert had responded to the bitter sniping and authoritarian parenting of his father by retreating into himself. He came to fear conflict, emotion, and even love, well after childhood. When he fell in love with novelist George Eliot in 1852, she found him cold, emotionless, weighed down by the “tremendous glacier” inside him. She offered him love anyway, and he rejected it in agony, finding himself unable to accept affection.

Cold rationality defined his philosophy. In his 1851 book Social Statics, Spencer attempted to work out the “law of the perfect man.” This “system of pure ethics cannot recognize evil,” he coolly announced, and must ignore “wrong, injustice, or crime.”  His “purely synthetic morality” would be more reliable precisely because it consulted only his abstract reason, which told him this: individuals have capabilities (“faculties”), and using these makes them happy. Individuals’ failure to exercise their faculties, often because of a mismatch between them and an organism’s environment, produces unhappiness– “all evil results from the non-adaptation of constitution to conditions.” 

Thus, Spencer proposed an evolutionary morality and political philosophy based on adaptation. Society should maximize each person’s individual “sphere” of action so that all could use their capabilities and become as happy as possible. This led him to positions we would now identify as libertarian: laissez-faire economics, strong protections for private property, hostility to public health measures. Spencer’s individual sphere was a prison as much as a home: he insisted individuals had to reap the benefits and suffer the consequences of their actions in order to ensure they adapted properly– evil, after all, was non-adaptation. The state should not intervene to help the poor or the sick. The strong should not risk tiring themselves too much to aid the weak.

“It seems hard,” he conceded, “that widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life or death.” But he believed it a universal kindness that “brings to early graves the children of diseased parents,” and selects the vulnerable to die of epidemics. Spencer’s non-Darwinian idea of evolution conflated biological heredity, cultural transmission, and individual behavior– all could be inherited, he believed. This made competition’s winnowing all the more important. Competition rewarded properly adaptive decisions–whether that meant sleeping properly and taking care of one’s health, or making wise business decisions– and punished the opposite. As evolution cut down the weak and the unworthy, over time, humanity would end up healthier, happier, and better.

Spencer scorned any other criteria for “better”– was survival not a condition for all else? That which survived deserved to. Existence was self-justifying. So was death. Any other conception of good was ultimately incoherent and doomed. Many Victorian liberals supported limited welfare and regulation of working conditions in the factory under what Spencer called the “expediency-philosophy”-- the idea that we could ascertain and act on, approximately if not perfectly, the greater public good. More broadly, this could mean anything from a Catholic conception of the common good to Jeremy Bentham’s liberal utilitarianism to socialism, all ideas Spencer was hostile to. He believed the expediency philosophy relied on some kind of “umpire” deciding what was good for all– which he found ludicrous. No one could know what was good for the good of all. Not the democratic public, not wise philosophers, perhaps not even God. 

Herbert Spencer was thus skeptical we could orchestrate or organize any collective good at all. Attempts to do so were futile, even perverse. Abolitionists, for example, had called for the Royal Navy to enforce a ban on the slave trade, and had supposedly only succeeded in creating a more brutal illegal trade. This inaccurate fable was meant to demonstrate the futility of moral intervention above the level of the individual. Spencer wasn’t merely, or even primarily, a defender of the status quo. He was an enemy of compassion. The problem with abolitionists wasn’t that they acted against the status quo, but that they collectively acted based on a conception of the common good at all. Good, for Spencer, was a matter of evolution, not intention. 

Spencerism conflated would, could, and should. Evil was a result of maladaptation. Good was competitive success. Might was right. It’s not difficult to see how this attitude followed from his own life experiences. He had found time and again that should got him nowhere. He should have loved George Eliot. His father should have loved his mother. He should feel joy. Shoulds hurt– they let you believe something better was possible. This was foolish. Spencer argued it was painful for individuals to try to subordinate their desires to their will, it was tyranny for government to do so, and at either scale, such efforts meant inevitable failure. What can be would always be impossibly burdened by what has been.

Earlier in his career, he was arguably more optimistic. The early Spencer believed that a bright paradise was coming– one in which the state would be rendered unnecessary by mankind’s evolution into goodness. Cooperation and altruism were increasing, he claimed, as society adapted further to its industrial and civilized state. Young Spencer had actually claimed land should not be able to be owned as private property, and argued for the emancipation of women. Throughout his career, he was also a critic of war. Defenders of Spencer– like his most thorough biographer, Mark Francis– accordingly claim he was not a vicious social Darwinist. 

But this mistakes outcome with process. His belief in competitive evolution was prior and paramount, whereas his hope for cooperation was merely a conclusion drawn from it: he felt changing social conditions were now making it the winning competitive strategy. History was still a process of brutal winnowing by evolution. This made it easy to justify the worst crimes in history as a necessary part of progress. Spencer’s anti-militarism is a case in point: he believed that colonial expansion and warfare were a bad thing in the present, because industrial society made them unnecessary, but wholeheartedly supported them in the past. Slavery, he argued, was wrong now because Europeans knew it was– reimposing it would mean regressing socially– but he claimed it had worked evolutionary benefit in the past. Britain fighting to wrest control of South Africa from Dutch settlers was wrong, but settlers’ violent colonialism itself was simply a necessary step in social progress. 

This attitude could delay the resolution of present injustices as well as excuse past ones. As Spencer himself evolved ideologically, he came to repudiate his early argument for common land as too close to socialism, and began to argue women’s suffrage had to be delayed indefinitely to the future, since women were much too willing to vote for state intervention. In the long run, Spencer hoped the state would wither away. But for it to do so, the unworthy had to be kept out of power at all costs, before they could hijack the train of progress. Increasingly he opposed democracy itself. His contemporary Karl Marx wrote that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” In many ways— the only exception being his opposition to war, and that with a very large asterisk— Spencer believed exactly the opposite: the purpose of his philosophy was to make sure that no one could consciously change the world at all.

And while Spencer’s star began to fade in late 19th-century England, it began rising in America.

(In the next installment of this series, I’ll talk about his role in American conservatism in the early 20th century. If you aren’t already a subscriber, hit the button below to be sure you get to read that too. This newsletter is free— and always will be, though I plan to add a paid tier for bonus content when I am in a position to produce it— so don’t hesitate if you’re interested!)