Social Darwinism
In the words of the historian Charles A. Hale, the term social Darwinism “has become a universal catchword for late nineteenth-century social attitudes.” Attitudes that could be labeled social Darwinist indeed abounded in Porfirio Díaz’s Mexico, but they were at times more contradictory than in agreement. None of the influential intellectuals of late-nineteenth-centuryMexico ever would have called himself a social Darwinist. To begin with, the Catholic Church reviled Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man as the work of the devil; to identify oneself with Darwinism of any sort invited bitter criticism in heavily Catholic Mexico. Moreover, most of the leaders of Porfirian Mexico acted on an intuitive sympathy with Darwinian ideas rather than a systematic study of Darwin’s work. Nevertheless, the set of ideas commonly known as social Darwinism —the belief that Darwin’s notion of natural selection as “the survival of the fittest” applies to social relationships —exerted a powerful influence on Mexican elites of the late-nineteenth century and remains influential today.
The reception of social Darwinism in Mexico constituted a double transfusion of concepts and ideas. First, the British sociologist Herbert Spencer transformed Darwin’s ideas on the origin of species into a social theory. Following the influence of Spencer, social Darwinism emerged as a set of two related assumptions: 1) human progress is the product of intergroup competition; and 2) elites are biologically conditioned to lead society. Then, Mexican intellectuals, acting on intuitive sympathy with Spencer’s and Darwin’s works, applied this social theory to their own country. Some of them combined Spencer’s ideas with Auguste Comte’s notion that society followed the same hard, inexorable laws that scientists found in chemistry, biology, and physics; others interpreted them as a call for order and progress as a prerequisite for attaining the economic development of the United States and the perceived cultural sophistication of Europe. In general, social Darwinism a la mexicana justified a rigidly stratified social pyramid, and it rationalized an authoritarian, technocratic regime. Within this overall consensus, however, the reception of Spencer’s and Darwin’s ideas entailed profound disagreements among Mexican intellectuals.
Mexican intellectuals such as Federico Gamboa, José Y. Limantour, Francisco Bulnes, and Justo Sierra agreed that their country faced a disadvantage in the global struggle for survival. Mexico, they concurred, lacked the technological sophistication of the industrializing nations of the North Atlantic. In Gamboa’s mind, this disadvantage was a relative one: he portrayed the small Central American nations as much more “backward” than Mexico and in need of Mexican tutelage. Compared to the United States and Europe, however, it was Mexico that was backward in the view of Limantour and Bulnes. The more racist and pessimistic Bulnes even asserted that the Mexican people had not “progressed” since Independence, remaining barbarian and living in darkness.