The application of "Darwinian principles" to society, rather than to biological evolution, has generally been the province of the political right, with the crackpot ideas of Herbert Spencer and his followers -- the philosophical school later called Social Darwinism -- being used by the Robber Barons and their ilk as a good excuse to ignore the inordinate amount of sheer human misery their activities caused: all the poverty, starvation and suffering, all the destroyed lives, were worth it because that was the price that had to be paid for species advancement. My, you could almost look upon the Social Darwinists as saints and saviours. And, of course, we cannot forget the Objectivists, the disciples of the even more crackpot Ayn Rand.

What Singer attempts to do in the pages of this extremely slender volume is to lay out a few ground rules for what he doesn't call a Social Darwinism of the left, a political philosophy that relies less upon the "nature red in tooth and claw" aspects of Darwinism (that phrase anyway predated the announcement of the Darwin/Wallace theory) and more upon those aspects that recognize the value of characteristics like cooperation, aspects that the Spencerians simply ignored in their orgy of pseudoscientific cherrypicking. Since it had never struck me before that Singer's point was one that actually had to be made, that it wasn't wholly evident to anyone possessed of reason, I'm not sure I was actually the audience he was aiming at; at the same time, the book's very nattily written and sparkling with pertinent observations so I regret not one second of the time I spent reading it. Here's one item that had me punching the air in admiration:

[T:]o leave a group of people so far outside the social commonwealth that they have nothing to contribute to it, is to alienate them from social practices and institutions in a manner that almost ensures that they will become adversaries who pose a danger to those institutions. [. . .:] Social Darwinists saw the fact that those who are less fit will fall by the wayside as nature's way of weeding out the unfit, and an inevitable result of the struggle for existence. To try to overcome it or even ameliorate it was futile, if not positively harmful. A Darwinian left, understanding the prerequisites for mutual cooperation as well as its benefits, would strive to avoid economic conditions that create outcasts. [. . .:] When the free operation of competitive market forces makes it hazardous to walk the streets at night, governments do well to interfere with those market forces to promote employment. (p53)

Singer was writing before the recent exponential increase in the gap between rich and poor in many of the developed nations. It is depressing how much more poignant his observation has become than it was a mere decade ago. ( )