In a previous post, I ruminated on an imaginary encounter between Charles Darwin–visionary of a secularized anthropology–and a working class widow begging for alms with her orphaned children on a cold and rainy street in central London. I named the woman and the street where she stood after Mrs. Gumdrop (Katerina Marmelodova), a character in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. That novel depicted the effects of an anthropology–or vision of humanity–in which people are no longer the image of God (imago Dei), the greatest standard by which a creature can be evaluated and the source of transcendent human dignity. Instead, people are beings–even animals–belonging to a genus-species named Homo sapiens. Measured biologically rather than theologically, man came to have a value only as great as his contribution to the natural order in which he lived. In a time of industrial competition and liberal individualism, this may have made those at the top of society great. But it made those at the bottom of society less than great, and even expendable.

Yet the plight of Mrs. Gumdrop and those like her grew even worse by the end of the nineteenth-century in which Dostoevsky and Darwin both lived. In Britain especially, a school of social thought arose called Social Darwinism. It applied the biological law of natural selection remorselessly to all of human society. Accordingly, people are subject to the principle of “the survival of the fittest,” by which the mentally and physically fit rise to wealth and influence and the unfit fall into poverty, obscurity, and even early death. Social Darwinists were not kind to the likes of Mrs. Gumdrop.

The most renowned of them was Herbert Spencer (d. 1903). It was actually he who, upon reading Darwin’s Origin of Species, coined the term “survival of the fittest.” A disciple of the atheistic founder of modern sociology, Auguste Comte, Spencer believed only the empirical sciences can provide the values by which human beings live. Christianity certainly can not. Its commandment to love sacrificially those in need by giving to the poor was a superstitious distortion of a natural instinct by elites toward largesse. There could be no question, he insisted, about the harmful effects of any collective effort to help those whom nature had selected for elimination. As he passed along Mrs. Gumdrop Street, he might have tossed a coin into the woman’s jar because it was his upper-class privilege to do so, but a concern for her long-term well being was non-existent.

Mrs. Gumdrop fared even worse when another Social Darwinist named Francis Galton (d. 1911) headed her way. He too was a social scientist in the thrall of natural selection. But he went further than Spencer in applying the laws of biology to society. If the poor are indeed selected by an objective nature for elimination due to their inferiority, then helping them in any way–even personal–is not a virtue but a vice. To sustain artificially the unfit is to cause harm to the human race, for the unfit will be not only a drag on progress but a source of poison within the gene pool. Better to march past Mrs. Gumdrop without regarding her altogether. She and the hungry children huddled at her side deserve nothing because nature has given them nothing.

It was Galton who coined a new word in the vocabulary of post-Christian Western anthropology: eugenics–the science of “good breeding.” He helped form a Eugenics Education Society and that lobbied Parliament to pass a Mental Deficiencies Act requiring the institutionalization of the unfit. Other countries in the West did likewise. In this spirit, for instance, some 2500 “imbeciles” were involuntarily sterilized in distant California.

According to Christendom’s old anthropology, grounded as it was in traditional Christianity, Mrs. Gumdrop could have hoped for more from the West. But a new anthropology was taking over as the twentieth century dawned. It would eventually, after the First World War, culminate in movements like America’s Planned Parenthood. In Nazi Germany, it would provoke the Holocaust.

Even in the Soviet Union, it would inspire the elimination of millions of “class enemies.” For as I will show in my next post, even when concern for the working class provided the ideological basis for social values, as it did with Marxism, post-Christian Christendom’s new anthropology was not a benefit but a bane for the society of the West.