The Lying Stones of Marrakech
Not so long ago, I received a part-time appointment as visiting research professor of biology at New York University. I was given an office on the tenth floor of the Brown building on Washington Place, a nondescript early-twentieth-century structure now filled with laboratories and other academic spaces. As the dean took me on a casual tour of my new digs, he made a passing remark, intended as little more than “tour-guide patter,” but producing an electric effect upon his new tenant. Did I know, he asked, that this building had been the site of the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, and that my office occupied a corner location on one of the affected floors—in fact, as I later discovered, right near the escape route used by many workers to safety on the roof above. The dean also told me that, each year on the March 25 anniversary of the fire, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union still holds a ceremony at the site and lays wreaths to memorialize the 146 workers killed in the blaze.
If the debate between Huxley and Wilberforce defines a primary legend of my chosen profession, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire occupies an even more central place in my larger view of life. I grew up in a family of Jewish immigrant garment workers, and this holocaust (in the literal meaning of a thorough sacrifice by burning) had set their views and helped to define their futures.
The shirtwaist—a collared blouse designed on the model of a man’s shirt and worn above a separate skirt—had become the fashionable symbol of more independent women. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company, New York City’s largest manufacturer of shirtwaists, occupied three floors (eighth through tenth) of the Asch Building (later bought by New York University and rechristened Brown, partly to blot out the infamy of association with the fire). The company employed some five hundred workers, nearly all young women who had recendy arrived either as Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe or as Catholics from Italy. Exits from the building, in addition to elevators, included only two small stairways and one absurdly inadequate fire escape. But the owners had violated no codes, both because general standards of regulation were then so weak, and because the structure was supposedly fireproof—as the framework proved to be (for the building, with my office, still stands), though inflammable walls and ceilings could not prevent an internal blaze on floors crammed full of garments and cuttings. The Triangle company was, in fact, a deathtrap—for fire hoses of the day could not pump above the sixth floor, while nets and blankets could not sustain the force of a human body jumping from greater heights.
The fire broke out at quitting time. Most workers managed to escape by the elevators, down one staircase (we shall come to the other staircase later), or by running up to the roof. But the flames trapped 146 employees, nearly all young women. About fifty workers met a hideous, if dramatic, end by jumping in terror from the ninth-floor windows, as a wall of fire advanced from behind. Firemen and bystanders begged them not to jump, and then tried to hold improvised nets of sheets and blankets. But these professionals and good Samaritans could not hold the nets against the force of fall, and many bodies plunged right through the flimsy fabrics onto the pavement below, or even through the “hollow sidewalks” made of opaque glass circles designed to transmit daylight to basements below, and still a major (and attractive) feature of my SoHo neighborhood. (These sidewalks carry prominent signs warning delivery trucks not to back in.) Not a single jumper survived, and the memory of these forced leaps to death remains the most searing image of America’s prototypical sweatshop tragedy.
All defining events of history develop simplified legends as official versions—primarily, I suppose, because we commandeer such events for shorthand moral instruction, and the complex messiness of actual truth always blurs the clarity of a pithy epigram. Thus, Huxley, representing the righteousness of scientific objectivity, must slay the dragon of ancient and unthinking dogma. The equally oversimplified legend of the Triangle fire holds that workers became trapped because management had locked all the exit doors to prevent pilfering, unscheduled breaks, or access to union organizers—leaving only the fire escape as a mode of exit. All five of my guidebooks to New York architecture tell this “official” version. My favorite book, for example, states: “Although the building was equipped with fire exits, the terrified workers discovered to their horror that the ninth-floor doors had been locked by supervisors. A single fire-escape was wholly inadequate for the crush of panic-stricken employees.”
These traditional (indeed, virtually “official”) legends may exaggerate for moral punch, but such interpretations emerge from a factual basis of greater ambiguity—and this reality, as we shall see in the Triangle case, often embodies a deeper and more important lesson. Huxley did argue with Wilberforce, after all, even if he secured no decisive victory, and Huxley did represent the side of the angels—the true angels of light and justice. And although many Triangle workers escaped by elevators and one staircase, another staircase (that might have saved nearly everyone else) was almost surely locked.
If Wilberforce and his minions had won, I might be a laborer, a linguist, or a lawyer today. But the Triangle fire might have blotted me out entirely. My grandmother arrived in America in 1910. On that fatal March day in 1911, she was working as a sixteen-year-old seamstress in a sweatshop—but, thank God, not for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. My grandfather, at the same moment, was cutting cloth in yet another nearby factory.
These two utterly disparate stories—half a century and an ocean apart, and with maximal contrast between an industrial tragedy and an academic debate— might seem to embody the most unrelatable of items: the apples and oranges, or chalk and cheese (the British version), of our mottoes. Yet I feel that an intimate bond ties these two stories together in illustrating opposite poles of a central issue in the history of evolutionary theory: the application of Darwinian thought to the life and times of our own troubled species. I claim nothing beyond personal meaning—and certainly no rationale for boring anyone else— in the accidental location of my two offices in such sacred spots of history. But the emotion of a personal prod often dislodges a general theme well worth sharing.
The application of evolutionary theory to Homo sapiens has always troubled Western culture deeply—not for any reason that might be called scientific (for humans are biological objects, and must therefore take their place with all other living creatures on the genealogical tree of life), but only as a consequence of ancient prejudices about human distinctiveness and unbridgeable superiority. Even Darwin tiptoed lightly across this subject when he wrote The Origin of Species in 1859 (though he plunged in later, in 1871, by publishing The Descent of Man). The first edition of the Origin says little about Homo sapiens beyond a cryptic promise that “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” (Darwin became a bit bolder in later editions and ventured the following emendation: “Much light will be thrown …”)
Troubling issues of this sort often find their unsurprising resolution in a bit of wisdom that has permeated our traditions from such sublime sources as Aristotle’s aurea mediocritas (or golden mean) to the vernacular sensibility of Goldilocks’s decisions to split the difference between two extremes, and find a solution “just right” in the middle. Similarly, one can ask either too litde or too much of Darwinism in trying to understand “the origin of man and his history.” As usual, a proper solution lies in the intermediary position of “a great deal, but not everything.” Soapy Sam Wilberforce and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire gain their odd but sensible conjunction as illustrations of the two extremes that must be avoided—for Wilberforce denied evolution altogether and absolutely, while the major social theory that hindered industrial reform (and permitted conditions that led to such disasters as the Triangle Shirtwaist fire) followed the most overextended application of biological evolution to patterns of human history—the theory of “Social Darwinism.” By understanding the fallacies of Wilberforce’s denial and social Darwinism’s uncritical and total embrace, we may find the proper balance between.
They didn’t call him Soapy S
am for nothing. The orotund bishop of Oxford saved his finest invective for Darwin’s attempt to apply his heresies to human origins. In his review of The Origin of Species (published in the Quarterly Review, England’s leading literary journal, in 1860), Wilberforce complained above all: “First, then, he not obscurely declares that he applies his scheme of the action of the principle of natural selection to Man himself, as well as to the animals around him.” Wilberforce then uncorked a passionate argument for a human uniqueness that could only have been divinely ordained:
Man’s derived supremacy over the earth; man’s power of articulate speech; man’s gift of reason; man’s free-will and responsibility; man’s fall and man’s redemption; the incarnation of the Eternal Son; the indwelling of the Eternal Spirit,—all are equally and utterly irreconcilable with the degrading notion of the brute origin of him who was created in the image of God, and redeemed by the Eternal Son.
But the tide of history quickly engulfed the good bishop. When Wilberforce died in 1873, from a head injury after a fall from his horse, Huxley acerbically remarked that, for once, the bishop’s brains had come into contact with reality—and the result had been fatal. Darwinism became the reigning intellectual novelty of the late nineteenth century. The potential domain of natural selection, Darwin’s chief explanatory principle, seemed nearly endless to his devotees (though not, interestingly, to the master himself, as Darwin remained cautious about extensions beyond the realm of biological evolution). If a “struggle for existence” regulated the evolution of organisms, wouldn’t a similar principle also explain the history of just about anything—from the cosmology of the universe, to the languages, economics, technologies, and cultural histories of human groups?
Even the greatest of truths can be overextended by zealous and uncritical acolytes. Natural selection may be one of the most powerful ideas ever developed in science, but only certain kinds of systems can be regulated by such a process, and Darwin’s principle cannot explain all natural sequences that develop historically. For example, we may talk about the “evolution” of a star through a predictable series of phases over many billion years from birth to explosion, but natural selection—a process driven by the differential survival and reproductive success of some individuals in a variable population—cannot be the cause of stellar development. We must look, instead, to the inherent physics and chemistry of light elements in such large masses.
Similarly, although Darwinism surely explains many universal features of human form and behavior, we cannot invoke natural selection as the controlling cause of our cultural changes since the dawn of agriculture—if only because such a limited time of some ten thousand years provides so little scope for any general biological evolution at all. Moreover, and most importandy, human cultural change operates in a manner that precludes a controlling role for natural selection. To mention the two most obvious differences: first, biological evolution proceeds by continuous division of species into independent lineages that must remain forever separated on the branching tree of life. Human cultural change works by the opposite process of borrowing and amalgamation. One good look at another culture’s wheel or alphabet may alter the course of a civilization forever. If we wish to identify a biological analog for cultural change, I suspect that infection will work much better than evolution.
Second, human cultural change runs by the powerful mechanism of Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characters. Anything useful (or alas, destructive) that our generation invents can be passed directly to our offspring by direct education. Change in this rapid Lamarckian mode easily overwhelms the much slower process of Darwinian natural selection, which requires a Mendelian form of inheritance based on small-scale and undirected variation that can then be sifted and sorted through a struggle for existence. Genetic variation is Mendelian, so Darwinism rules biological evolution. But cultural variation is largely Lamarckian, and natural selection cannot determine the recent history of our technological societies.
Nonetheless, the first blush of high Victorian enthusiasm for Darwinism inspired a rush of attempted extensions to other fields, at least by analogy. Some efforts proved fruitful, including the decision of James Murray, editor of The Oxford English Dictionary (first volume published in 1884, but under way for twenty years before then), to work strictly by historical principles and to treat the changing definitions of words not by current preferences in use (as in a truly normative dictionary), but by the chronology and branching evolution of recorded meanings (making the text more an encyclopedia about the history of words than a true dictionary).
But other extensions proved both invalid in theory, and also (or so most of us would judge by modern moral sensibilities) harmful, if not tragic, in application. As the chief offender in this category, we must cite a highly influential theory that acquired the inappropriate name of “Social Darwinism.” (As many historians have noted, this theory should really be called “social Spencerism,” since Herbert Spencer, chief Victorian pundit of nearly everything, laid out all the basic postulates in his Social Statics of 1850, nearly a decade before Darwin published The Origin of Species. Darwinism did add the mechanism of natural selection as a harsher version of the struggle for existence, long recognized by Spencer. Moreover, Darwin himself maintained a highly ambivalent relationship to this movement that borrowed his name. He felt the pride of any creator toward useful extensions of his theory—and he did hope for an evolutionary account of human origins and historical patterns. But he also understood only too well why the mechanism of natural selection applied poorly to the causes of social change in humans.)
Social Darwinism often serves as a blanket term for any genetic or biological claim made about the inevitability (or at least the “naturalness”) of social inequalities among classes and sexes, or military conquests of one group by another. But such a broad definition distorts the history of this important subject—although pseudo-Darwinian arguments have long been advanced, prominently and forcefully, to cover all these sins. Classical Social Darwinism operated as a more specific theory about the nature and origin of social classes in the modern industrial world. The Encyclopaedia Britannica article on this subject correctly emphasizes this restriction by first citing the broadest range of potential meaning, and then properly narrowing the scope of actual usage:
Social Darwinism: the theory that persons, groups, and races are subject to the same laws of natural selection as Charles Darwin had perceived in plants and animals in nature…. The theory was used to support laissez-faire capitalism and political conservatism. Class stratification was justified on the basis of “natural” inequalities among individuals, for the control of property was said to be a correlate of superior and inherent moral attributes such as industriousness, temperance, and frugality. Attempts to reform society through state intervention or other means would, therefore, interfere with natural processes; unrestricted competition and defense of the status quo were in accord with biological selection. The poor were the “unfit” and should not be aided; in the struggle for existence, wealth was a sign of success.
Spencer believed that we must permit and welcome such harshness to unleash the progressive development that all “evolutionary” systems undergo if allowed to follow their natural course in an unimpeded manner. As a central principle of his system, Spencer believed that progress—defined by him as movement from a simple undifFerentiated homogeneity, as in a bacterium or a “primitive” human society without social classes, to complex and structured heterogeneity, as in “advanced” organisms or industrial societies—did not arise as an inevitable property of matter in motion, but only through interaction between evolving systems and their environments. These interactions must therefore not be obstructed.
The relationship of Spencer’s general vision to Darwin’s particular theory has often been misconstrued or overemphasized. As stated above, Spencer had published the outline (and most of the details) of his system nearly ten years before Darwin presented his evolutionary theory. Spe
ncer certainly did welcome the principle of natural selection as an even more ruthless and efficient mechanism for driving evolution forward. (Ironically, the word evolution, as a description for the genealogical history of life, entered our language through Spencer’s urgings, not from Darwin. Spencer favored the term for its vernacular English meaning of “progress,” in the original Latin sense of evolutio, or “unfolding.” At first, Darwin resisted the term—he originally called his process “descent with modification”—because his theory included no mechanism or rationale for general progress in the history of life. But Spencer prevailed, largely because no society has ever been more committed to progress as a central notion or goal than Victorian Britain at the height of its colonial and industrial expansion.)
Spencer certainly used Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection to buttress his system. Few people recognize the following historical irony: Spencer, not Darwin, coined the term “survival of the fittest,” now our conventional catch-phrase for Darwin’s mechanism. Darwin himself paid proper tribute in a statement added to later editions of The Origin of Species: “I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection…. But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.”
As a mechanism for driving his universal “evolution” (of stars, species, languages, economics, technologies, and nearly anything else) toward progress, Spencer preferred the direct and mechanistic “root, hog, or die” of natural selection (as William Graham Sumner, the leading American social Darwinian, epitomized the process), to the vaguer and largely Lamarckian drive toward organic self-improvement that Spencer had originally favored as a primary cause. (In this colorful image, Sumner cited a quintessential American metaphor of self-sufficiency that my dictionary of catchphrases traces to a speech by Davy Crockett in 1834.) In a post-Darwinian edition of his Social Statics, Spencer wrote: