AFTER ALL THIS TIME ...

After all this time you'd think that educated people would give up on making "scientific explanations" for their bias and prejudice. You'd think that they'd recognize how powerfully important it is to success to be born white, male, handsome or pretty. If one then has the luck of a well-connected brain and a well-connected family, one has a really good chance of succeeding at whatever non-athletic endeavor one pursues.

In the summer of 2003, while teaching a summer session for freshmen-level U.S. History, I was surprised at a student who voiced the opinion that the gift of financial success is genetic and a family passes success from generation to generation in a "natural" process. Certain families, he ruled, were destined to become the elite class because they passed success along in their genes. Successful families, like successful people survived and "made it", he said, simply because they deserved the reward for protecting the family and passing the genes of success along.

After all this time, you'd think that either the racist-classist bigotry common in my youthful years had either passed away or at least were no longer articulated in "good" society. "Was this an idea reinforced in classes you have taken at your university of choice," I asked him. He had made a point to make the point to me and to the class that he was "not really a student" at our university. He was only attending summer classes in order to "beef up" his GPA. He was (still is, probably) a student at one of the extremely well-known church-related universities in Texas. "Well, yes and no," he responded. He'd learned it at home, and his university instructors seem to have done little to enlighten him.

"I am a Social Darwinist," he proclaimed proudly. "I don't believe people should be given anything. The should either make it or fail. Sink or swim. Survive or perish." This from a person who did not have to work for his car, for his tuition to his rather exclusive university of choice, pay for his own health care, or was willing to do much, beyond the bear minimum, to "beef up" his GPA.

To him--this potentially bright student who has not yet turned on the lights--I dedicate these musings.

Usually one presents a case (as even did the Social Darwinists who used their arguments---and even still use their arguments as self-proclaimed elitists---in favor of justifying power, sexism, racism, etc.) in support of Social Darwinism by applying the theories of Darwinism (evolution, selected breeding, survival of the fittest, etc.) to society, or more to the point, to western European and American society. Long before Darwin, back into the times long before Europeans begin settling the New World, exploiting the Ancient Asian world, exploiting and devastating the human and cultural world of Black Africa, there were religious and science-type answers for European, male, elitism.

Then along came Darwinism and once again easy answers. Come the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, reformers accepted nearly all of this and said, then, that we can have Reform Darwinism, meaning that in fact the "laws of nature" can be manipulated to benefit one group of persons or another.

Then, in order to justify the accumulation of wealth and power, one argued that (note Andrew Carnegie) that there was a divine purpose for this process, and that was to use the power and wealth to help others. Carnegie was part of what was called the "Gospel of Wealth" movement.

Really, he was more of the leader of the movement, since he was one of the few who ever actually gave, or tried to give, his wealth and power away in order to benefit others--not all of the others, but some of them. Philanthropists often explained themselves and believed themselves to be divinely gifted and that they owed a responsibility (based on biblical interpretation) to share their wealth and use their power to uplift others. See Julius Rosenwald, William Mayo, or several of the Public Television sponsors and educational founders, like Vanderbilt, Duke, et al.

Looking for scientific answers to social issues is an American tradition, one that at least dates back to the era of the Enlightenment and to concepts of Natural Law. Jefferson applied them, most notably, when he talked about Nature and Nature's God in the Declaration of Independence. Sadly, he and thousands of others, also applied this "divine law" to explain the "natural" inferiority of Native Americans and African Americans, and to argue that their civilizations would (and/or did) not survive, because they were "weak" and unable to combat the "superior" white man's culture. On this basis he and his followers, however humanitarian they may have felt themselves, built a century of Indian wars and over two centuries of racism (including another 75 years of black enslavement) and sexism.

It is true that Jefferson (who never relented) and other idealists of his era were never able to truly live by their egalitarian idealism, but it is also true that because their idealism had been articulated and was repeated in the name of "democracy", American elitists could never rest comfortably with the self-serving use of wealth and power. Even slaverites began to talk of "social responsibilities" that went along with their privileged positions.

But those who had inherited their wealth, power, and elitist social positions, especially those white southern males, found it extremely difficult to apply their words of social responsibility to real life. Even their ministers, of all people, began to seek holy justification for their exploitation of their fellow humans. Church organizations split (most notably the Baptists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Mormons) over the belief in slavery and white racial superiority.

As we entered the last years of the 19th century and became more and more cognizant of the role science played in western culture, the more our intellectual elite once again looked for scientific explanations to society. They did this either to justify events that had happened or were happening, or, on an increasingly popular level, to justify, oppose, and/or explain changes.

Even the quite unscientific Abraham Lincoln reflected this somewhat Puritanical belief when, in his Second Inaugural address, he talked about the Civil War as if it had come not so much from human belief and actions as from destiny. True, he attributed human belief systems to setting the stage for it, but he talked in terms of the inevitability of the war; he wanted to begin the healing process then and there. It satisfied many, as it left room for heroes and reduced the need for villains.

As America began to develop its capitalist state, Jeffersonian idealism became increasingly unpopular among the economic elite and the men who worked for them. Hamiltonianism, the belief that the common man was basically depraved (he once called "the people", which Jefferson referred to as "The Democracy", a "beast") and that the best they could hope for is to be led by their "betters". These "betters", the early American landed-properties aristocratic elite, Hamilton argued, had, should have, and should be given power and position because of their "vested interested" in society---that is their wealth and position. "A rising tide lifts all boats", he might have argued while keeping the price of boats rather high.

As long as the common man went ignorant and simply absorbed the belief system of the elite, this "scientific explanation", which eventually found a name in "Social Darwinism," went for the most part unchallenged. As the 19th century came to a close, however, a few clergymen, a few social reformers, a few champions of the underdogs raised the flag and began to stake out positions based on the first lines of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, began to point to the biblical teachings of Jesus, Jacob, and others in the Judeo-Christian world, and found justification in social responsibility which was less self-serving when in service of humanity. There was still an elitist tint ("little brown brother", "colored people", "yellow people", "redman", etc.) to the colors they used; a new picture emerging.

As is so often the case, novelists were the first to popularize this criticism and to suggest a new approach to American capitalism. The words had not come yet, but in time it would be called "democratic capitalism", meaning capitalism with a social responsibility, and capitalism where the voters determined its drift and outcome. Mark Twain, O'Henry, Stephen Crane, and countless others began to write and raise the value of this image of common people and to find value in their "common sense". Common Sense Philosophy became increasingly popular, once again.

Universities, especially those with private funding, responded to this rising tide of social criticism by establishing schools of "Social Science". Self-defense was a priority--as professors were hired or fired based on how well they stuck to the philosophy of the founders of the college or school. This given, these social scientists were commissioned to look more and more for scientific explanations to such things as poverty and to propose "scientific" ways to study and modify society. As in any study, of course, the movement towards answers depended on asking questions. As most of us know, however, once one allows questions to be asked, someone will ask a question that challenges a belief system. It began to happen and eventually led to reform movements.

Among the first of the elite to ask questions and pontificate responsibilities was Andrew Carnegie. He grew to believe, after his mother had died, that with God's help he had been raised from relative poverty and obscurity in Scotland to wealth and power in America because God had a plan for him. Biographers of Carnegie also speculate that his increasing age and his feeling of guilt--- about the way he had used his wealth and power to exploit others and to allow others to commit horrendous acts of violence against his employees (witness the Homestead Strike), encouraged him to try to "get right with God" before it was too late. We don't know for sure. What we do know is that he began to teach the "Gospel of Wealth" and to encourage others to become the rich young ruler and listen to what Jesus had to say. There was danger, he felt, in ignoring or trying to explain away the suffering of others. There was meaning for our time, he and his ghost writers said, in ignoring this question: "What does it profit a man that he gain the whole world and loose his soul?"

His message began to ring true (or at least opportunistic) among some elitists in the business world, and they became philanthropists. His message also resonated among some religious leaders who began a new reform movement, titled "Social Christianity". A popular name for these people was "Christian Socialists". They were Methodists (Washington Gladden), Baptists (Walter Rauschenbusch), Catholic (Father John Ryan), and new religionists like the Christian Scientists, who began to look upon their religious responsibilities and missions among the poor. This included not only preaching social responsibility to the poor about their need to reform, but to the elite and to their need to ask themselves, "What would Jesus do?"

Stop the slaughter and destruction of a culture, cried Helen Hunt Jackson, defender of Native American culture and people.

Educate and uplift, with intellectual liberty and honesty pleaded W.E.B. DuBois and George Peabody.

Cease the murder of innocents, demand anti-lynching laws, insisted Ida B. Wells.

Extend a hand, even to the "fallen women", begged Jane Addams.

Go among the poor---and listen and look--intoned Jacob Riis.

Feed the poor, clothe the naked, visit the prisoners, walk with the lonely and troubled, moaned Dorethea Dix, promoters of the YMCA, YWCA, and Salvation Army. Heal and love, they encouraged, unmindful of the rewards.

In the world of humanist Christians and Jews this was a moral movement. In the world of the sensitive economic elite and some of their fellows who became political leaders (like Theodore Roosevelt) it became the Progressive Era. In the world of the Darwinists and Social Darwinists who accepted the new moral code, it became Reform Darwinism. Among the advocates of social science, it became the New Social Science and found its explanations in New Sociology and Modern Historiography and Educational Reform. Among those who looked for political answers to social ills, it not only became the belief that progress can and will indeed be made through government action, but that the surest way to find good political answers was through political reforms, such as its increased democratization and its social consciousness.

The white elite, did not give up easily, however. New arguments were made in favor of natural laws, natural selection, and racial survival. Out of their mouths and their schools came new arguments that the poor were poor because of their "nature", that women were "naturally weak" and in need of "male protection", that non-whites and some Europeans were by nature inferior, and that in order to protect white "purity" and insure white American superiority, races had to be separated, interracial sex (miscegenation) forbidden, "contamination" from abroad forbidden. Out of this grew an American version of scientific social planning that would one day frighten the world. Out of this grew the Eugenics movement. Nietze, then spokesman for the "Uebermensch" and "Untermensch", would once again become popular and his philosophy perverted. Graf de Gobineau, the French social philosopher, who talked about contamination of French culture by impure and inferior peoples, became the intellectual weapon for an entire, altogether frightening movement--Nazism and ethnic cleansing.

Still left unswered at the end of the 19th century (and perhaps even today) is which approach to the American dream will win out in the end. Will it be the selfish, self-serving elitist approach? Or will it be the idea that the elite, because they are the elite, have a social responsibility to extend a hand to those in need? Will it be "dog eat dog", "root hog or die", or will it be the idea that "a rising tide lifts all boats", and that we need more boats---that is more opportunity to rise--and a stronger tide? Will be protect ourselves from change, or will we change ourselves to protect ourselves?

College students who struggle with ideas struggle with the same ideas as students in the late 19th century struggled. It is important to struggle this way. There is always the danger, as we move more and more into specialization and incorporate less and less of the education for civic virtues, that we will further disconnect ourselves from anyone who is not within our active vision, our narrowing focus. We could sacrifice our greatest promise as children of the Supreme Being and descendants of brave ancestors--the virtue of civil responsibility.

Will your generation find a better, more equitable solution than mine has? As citizens of the richest nation on earth, as representatives of people who are the world's and history's greatest mass consumers, as citizens of the only super power on earth, as a people with the greatest potential to do good the world has ever known, the world is counting on you to be wise, generous, devoted, virtuous custodians of he gifts an older generation has earned for you. Be better than we were.