Spencer How Would Herbert Spencer Have Viewed

Spencer

How would Herbert Spencer have viewed post-modern society?

Applying the theories of the sociologist Herbert Spencer to modern society may seem, on its surface, a heroically anachronistic effort. After all, Spencer is known for his totalizing attempts to subsume human development into a single overreaching theory of sociological and biological development. Over the course of his writings, Spencer attempted to apply Darwinian biological principles to the evolution of human society. In doing so, he created a sense of inevitability in terms of the march of human society. The currently popular philosophy and style of post-modernism, in contrast, tends to view the progression of human affairs, not as pre-programmed, or as the generation of the strongest, best, or most fit. Rather, post-modernism frames ideas as part of a fragmented constellation of social products.

For instance, the biological ideas so favored by Spencer, according to post-modern ideas are simply another cultural product or cultural framework. Biology is not an explanation for human society. It is only one schema of thought that has been created in the morass of contemporary cultural ideas. Evolution in sociological terms as viewed by Spencer, and as noted in Contemporary Sociological Theory and Its Classical Roots: The Basics, by George Ritzer, a chronicler of Spencer, was a linear system of societal progression. Post-modern thought does not search for such a progression and denies such a linear purposefulness to history.

However, post-modernism also has a deterministic tendency that is reinforced by some of Spencer's concepts. Ideas have a sense of inevitability of cultural production in post-modern thought, because they are viewed as the products and combinations of other ideas. Spencer, of course, because of his biological emphasis, might see post-modernism as a progression from the modernist emphasis upon the alienated self. While modernism viewed the sense of disconnection with despair, post-modernism formed as a reaction to view this despair with humor, and to view fragmentation as a positive rather than a negative development. Although Spencer would not have seen fragmentation as a positive himself, he would still see post-modernism's stress upon non-linearity of cultural production, its stress upon societal fragmentation, and its stress upon discursive thought as an evolution from an earlier era and a psychological, biological defensive technique of the human mind. Out of the need to view the alienation of human life with humor, post-modernism was generated by the animal mind as a defense mechanism, and spawned a functional culture that made dysfunction 'normal.'