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A raça negra no Brasil é historicamente marcada pela discriminação, desvalorização e desrespeito. Tal realidade é reforçada por produtos culturais midiáticos que definem os estereótipos que depreciam o negro e o seu lugar na sociedade. Na literatura, é possível perceber que se por um lado existem autores que tentam dar voz a esses sujeitos, por outro reforçam e reverberam preconceitos. Compreendendo a possibilidade da utilização da literatura para se promover discussões de temas sensíveis, em especial no campo dos Estudos Organizacionais, o objetivo deste artigo é compreender como a obra de Monteiro Lobato, O Presidente Negro, contribui para a construção de imaginários sociodiscursivos e interdiscursivos racistas, que ainda hoje reverberam dentro das organizações. Para tanto, recorremos à Análise do Discurso, particularmente ao arcabouço teórico-metodológico dos linguistas franceses Charaudeau e Maingueneau, com os conceitos da Semiolinguística de Imaginários Sociais e de Interdiscurso, respectivamente. Conforme apresentado na análise, os imaginários e interdiscursos aqui analisados se apresentam como representações que permeiam a memória coletiva e acabam por evidenciar uma problemática estrutural. Além disso, foi possível observar que a obra é marcada por outros discursos como a filosofia iluminista, teorias racistas e teoria do darwinismo social que reforçam a ideia dos posicionamentos preconceituosos com relação à raça.

Drawing on a framework offered by Bauman and literature from disability studies and other sociological areas, this article argues that the experience of austerity for disabled people in Sweden is one of bureaucratic violence, shaped by disablism. The article aims to broaden the sociological conceptualisation of bureaucratic violence to include disablist austerity within its purview. It utilises fieldwork data from interviews with disabled people in Sweden to explore how welfare bureaucracy isolates and dehumanises disabled people. It also examines how Swedish welfare bureaucracies obscure the impact of austerity on this population. Due to the convergence of neoliberalism and austerity in Sweden, the exploration of bureaucratic violence opens up important questions regarding the Social Darwinist elements in neoliberal theory. Ultimately, bureaucratic violence is a useful concept for sociologists for two reasons: it sheds austerity of its technocratic veneer and connects lived experiences of welfare reform to the lethal consequences of austerity.

This article investigates whether the doctrine of social Darwinism had any bearing on the Labour Party’s decision to support Britain’s participation in the First World War. Many socialist intellect...

First, this paper identifies education as one of the main livelihood needs of refugee children, but addresses the “knowledge that lies” inherent in the axiological aspect of the context. Second, this article examines a philosophical understanding of an argumentative situation in which the whole problem of children's education reveals a series of gaps in the political and pedagogical value system. And The articles main purpose is to problematize the system of refugee education through the uncertain narratives of cultural relativity. Using a qualitative approach and several data collection techniques such as observation and literature study and interactive analysis, the researchers found that politics plays a major role in education for refugees, their anger and surveillance are very humane, why politics seems so lame cannot act with certainty given the suffering of refugees all over the world, because it is politics that has co-opted and fears social Darwinism in its power narrative

In der Klimadebatte ist derzeit ein neomalthusianischer Reflex zu beobachten: Der Klimawandel wird über statistische Berechnungen in Zusammenhang mit einer wachsenden Weltbevölkerung gebracht, und Strategien der Geburtenkontrolle werden nahegelegt. Der Text diskutiert diese gefährliche Entwicklung kritisch: Untote Geister eines Denkens in der Kategorie 'Bevölkerung' werden wiederbelebt, die untrennbar mit ihrer kolonialrassistischen und sozialdarwinistischen Geschichte verwickelt sind. Zunächst werden die Argumentationslinien sehr unterschiedlicher Akteur*innen rekonstruiert, die sich auf diese Rationalität einlassen: ein ökologischer Mainstream, der Bevölkerung als schädlichen ‚Faktor‘ berechnet, die extreme Rechte, für die biopolitische Argumentationsmuster eine Andockstelle an den Klimadiskurs darstellen, und feministische und klimaaktivistische Aufrufe zum ‚Gebärstreik‘. Daraufhin werden drei Dimensionen in diesen Argumentationslinien unterschieden: die abstrakte statistische Konstruktion eines Zuviels an menschlicher Bevölkerung, die historisch tief verwurzelte Zuschreibung dieses Zuviels an die 'Anderen', sowie totalitäre Planungsvisionen einer global zu managenden ‚Fertilität‘. Im Schlussteil plädiert die Autorin aus einer Perspektive reproduktiver Gerechtigkeit für ein radikales Zurückweisen dieser Verknüpfung von Bevölkerung und Klimawandel. A neo-Malthusian reflex can be observed in the climate debate: Statistical calculations link climate change to world population growth and suggest strategies for birth control. The text discusses this dangerous development: undead ghosts of thought referring to the category of ‘population’ are being revived, together with their colonial-racist and social-Darwinist history. First, the arguments of very different actors engaging in this rationality are reconstructed: an ecological mainstream that calculates population as a harmful ‘factor’; the extreme right, for whom biopolitical strategies represent a docking point to the climate discourse; and feminist and climate activist calls for a 'birth strike'. Three dimensions in these lines of argumentation are then distinguished: the abstract statistical construction of an excess population; the historically deeply rooted attribution of this excess to the 'Others'; and totalitarian planning visions of global ‘fertility’ management. In the conclusion, the author argues from the perspective of reproductive justice for a radical rejection of this population climate change link.

There is an agreement about the role of literature in Brazil in the assimilation of the European sociological contributions in the end of 19th century, particularly the influence of social Darwinism and Determinism on the discussions about race and context. The movement known as regionalist literature was deeply influenced by these themes. This paper aims to reflect on the works of this literary movement, whose authors dedicated themselves to the theme of drought in Northeast Brazil, pointing to some of its repercussions on the construction of an alleged Northeastern identity. The paper is divided in two parts. The first deals with the idea of the Northeast as a constructed region and the emersion of drought as a social calamity. In the second part, the drought in the regionalist novel is discussed, highlighting the discursive elements that express social relations in cities that acted as “receptors” of rural populations during drought periods. It concludes that these novels had a denunciative role, but they rarely reflect the reactions of the political subjects. They therefore contribute with the reproduction of old images as symbols that stigmatize identity and political actions much more related to permanence than to change.Keywords: regionalist literature; Northeast; drought images.How to citeCOSTA, Liduina Farias Almeida da. Entre a denuncia e o fatalismo: natureza, sociedade e sertanejos-retirantes na literatura que evoca o Nordeste das secas. Estudos Sociedade e Agricultura, Rio de Janeiro, v. 28, n. 3, p. 571-593, out. 2020. DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.36920/esa-v28n3-4.Received on August 1, 2020. Accepted on August 28, 2020.

Tanzimat Dönemi’yle birlikte hızlı bir Batılılaşma sürecine giren Osmanlı İmparatorluğu, aynı zamanda, Batılı güçlerle yoğun bir savaş halindeydi ve bu durum Batılılaşma hareketinin her alanı için düşünce üreten Ahmet Midhat Efendi için son derece önemliydi. Ahmet Midhat Efendi’nin Zâbit (1891) ve Edvâr-ı Askeriye (1891) adlı deneme kitapları onun bu konuya gösterdiği önemi ortaya koymaktadır. Bu kitaplarında öne sürdüğü modern askerlik ve savaş anlayışıyla ilgili düşüncelerini Batılı kaynaklara dayandırdığı anlaşılan Ahmet Midhat Efendi’nin “asker-millet”, “sosyal Darwinizm” gibi militarist düşünceyle özdeşleştirilen kavramlardan faydalandığı görülmektedir. Ayrıca, Ahmet Midhat Efendi bu düşüncelerini 1897 Osmanlı-Yunan Savaşı’nın ardından yayımladığı Türk edebiyatının ilk savaş romanlarından biri olan Gönüllü’ye (1897) yoğun biçimde yerleştirerek daha geniş kitlelere ulaştırmıştır. Bu makalede Ahmet Midhat Efendi’nin, Zâbit, Edvâr-ı Askeriye ve Gönüllü adlı eserlerinde askerlik ve savaş konularına dair görüşlerindeki ortaklıklar ve başta militarizm olmak üzere, bu üç eserde referans noktası olarak kullandığı Batılı düşünce ve ideolojiler tespit edilmiştir., Ottoman Empire entering a fast Westernization process with the onset of Tanzimat Period, was, at the same time, in a constant battle against Western powers. Ahmet Midhat Efendi, who wrote about all sides of Westernization movement, was closely interested in this situation. Ahmet Midhat’s Zâbit (1891) and Edvâr-ı Askeriye (1891) confirms his deep interest in military service and war. Considering his writings in these books it could be derived that Ahmet Midhat Efendi adapted his views on modern military service and wars from Western sources, and he used such concepts as “soldier-nation” and “social Darwinism”, which are mostly associated with militarist thought. Furthermore, he conveyed these views to larger masses by using them intensively in his novel titled Gönüllü (1897), which is published after 1897 Ottoman-Greco War and is one of the first war novels in Turkish literature. This article examines similarities in Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s views on military service and war found in Zâbit, Edvâr-ı Askeriye and Gönüllü, and Western thoughts and ideologies, notably militarism, he used as reference points in these three works.

I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people as the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which we meet. I pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. I deeply respect and admire the ability of the Ngunnawal, and of many other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, to have survived invasion and violent dispossession of their land and to have maintained the richness of their cultural, linguistic, legal and spiritual traditions. On the subject matter of my lecture, humanity as a constraint on the conduct of war, I acknowledge that many of our Aboriginal peoples were extended little, if any, humanity in the colonial violence to which they were subjected. This is certainly true of the frontier wars in my own State of Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land) in the 1820s and 1830s which resulted in the near annihilation of Aboriginality in the colony. Social Darwinism influenced the justificatory view that the Aboriginal people of Van Diemen’s Land were not only an obstacle to the settlement enterprise but that in their ‘savage’ state they were sub-human and doomed to extinction.

Three pernicious myths that have been perpetuated about Robert E. Park merit our present attention. These myths are important because they now foreclose almost any chance of him ever becoming recognized as the true progenitor of the interactionist school of thought or of latter-day sociologist from building on his work. The first myth, which lays the foundation for the other two, is that he was a social Darwinist. The second and third myths, which directly follow from the first one, are that Park concocted a racist and conservative sociology. An inquiry into his sociological works published over more than a quarter of a century, however, reveals that these myths are based more on fiction than fact. Although these myths are widely maintained among present-day sociologists, they appear to be driven more by prevailing ideology than supported by hard evidence (i.e. the full written record of what Park actually argued in his sociological publications). This confusion underscores the danger of advocacy research, an approach currently in vogue in the field of sociology.

Piotr Kropotkin był najważniejszym przedstawicielem tzw. darwinizmu rosyjskiego oraz teorii pomocy wzajemnej, która podkreślała znaczenie współpracy wewnątrzgatunkowej w procesie doboru naturalnego oraz walki o byt. Na jej kanwie rosyjski badacz wysunął tezę o ewolucyjnych źródłach moralności, będącej problem badawczym w niniejszym artykule. Stanowi to jednocześnie powód dlaczego poza przedstawieniem wspomnianej tezy i jej założeń, w publikacji zilustrowana została także teoria pomocy wzajemnej. Zaproponowana przez Kropotkina wizja moralności suponowała, iż stanowi ona „przyrodzoną” właściwość ludzkiej natury. Podstawę dla niej stanowić ma instynkt społeczny oraz jego przejawy, takie jak: równość, solidarność, sprawiedliwość, itd., a także pomoc wzajemna. Stawiało to propozycję rosyjskiego darwinisty w opozycji wobec dominujących trendów w myśleniu o ludzkiej moralności na przełomie XIX i XX wieku, zwłaszcza wobec tzw. darwinizmu społecznego i charakterystycznego dlań dualizmu moralnego. Ponadto zrywała z antropocentryzmem zakładając, iż poza gatunkiem ludzkim, także inne gatunki cechują się uczuciami moralnymi.

This paper examines socialism in Edwardian public schools. It concentrates on understanding their students’ responses to, and conceptions of, socialism’s core tenets. For, existing scholarship has depicted these Edwardian institutions as almost uniformly conservative and proficient in inculcating students with pro-social hierarchy, anti-social innovation views. Any ideological tensions, then, stemmed from the interaction of popular, conservative-compliant, dogmas within school contexts: social Darwinism, imperialism, athleticism, muscular Christianity and so on. This paper, however, draws on new Eton College archive sources to enhance and complicate this view. It argues socialism captivated the students’ attention and garnered a strong supportive minority that, at times, advocated complete collective ownership. Moreover, the school administration showed tolerance to even the most outspoken socialists, and its non-hegemonic, semi-decentralized nature gave rise to local, independent sites of support. Accordingly, this research is important to understanding Edwardian public school ideologies and socialization processes. In wider terms, too, it casts insight on Edwardian socialism’s penetration into secondary education and inter-class acceptance.

This paper presents an attempt to analyze the interrelation between American domestic policy and the Social Darwinist ideology at the turn of the XIXXX centuries. Soviet and Russian historiography presents a deep analysis of socio-economic and political processes in that period in terms of criticism of liberal ideology and market economics. Significant social stratification was explained by insufficiently developed socially directed normative base, illegal interaction between representatives of large business and politicians, the purpose of which was personal enrichment, etc. In general, the economic and political system of the United States in the late XIX early XX centuries was criticized from Russian scientists. In Soviet literature the conclusion was made about the insolvency of bourgeois ideology, with elements of criticism of Social Darwinism as a minor component of this ideology. American historiography considers the subject of our study more wholly. Foreign historiography, basically, analyzes the connection of American domestic policy with the activities of financial magnates, who were becoming a new serious power in American politics. This paper attempts to explain the connection between the American domestic policy and the Social Darwinist discourse, which was an undoubted part of the intellectual and daily life of citizens in that historical period. The author points to the significant influence of the Social Darwinist ideology in the adoption of key inner-political decisions by the government of the United States.

Artículo evaluado por pares El microsistema de recepción temprana de la filosofía deNietzsche en el Río de la Plata se configuró a través de al-gunos operadores discursivos: el anarquismo, el idealismoarielista, el dandismo, el materialismo, la psicopatología,el anticlericalismo, el darwinismo social y el nacionalis-mo. En la disputa actual por la significación política de lasideas nietzscheanas, tanto la llamada “hermenéutica de lainocencia” como la interpretación “apolítica” de la filologíano historizan la fuerza ilocucionaria de los conceptos. Encambio, la perspectiva de la historia conceptual, entendidacomo pragmática de los conceptos, ofrece la alternativade comprender el efecto político del nietzscheanismo. Si-guiendo esta última línea de análisis, este trabajo estudiala relación entre la corriente del anarconietzscheanismoy las prácticas de la eugenesia durante la hegemonía delpositivismo. Recibido el 15/06/2019Aceptado el 30/08/2018

Ellsworth Huntington: considerations on the “distribution of civilization” map of “Civilization and Climate” Abstract: Coming from an author who was significantly influenced by Social Darwinism, Ellsworth Huntington’s (1876-1947) intellectual efforts played a decisive role in strengthening American Human Geography in the early twentieth century. The article aims to contribute to the enlightenment of an important episode that occurred during the expansion period of the academic Geography in the USA. It was the elaboration, by this geographer, of a map of “distribution of civilization” that sought to rank the regions of the world on a scale from 0 to 10. The map was published in one of the chapters of “Civilization and Climate”, a book that had its first edition in 1915 and a third extended edition in 1924. That work is one of the first more systematic attempts to discuss a specific geographic epistemology and to elaborate a geographical theory of history that were produced in the USA, which is why it has an unique importance in the history of Geography. Key-words: History of Geography, Social Darwinism, Human Geography in USA, Ellsworth Huntington.

This research paper focuses on the evaluation of historical connections and interactions between psychology, psychiatry, psychologists, beliefs and religions. The argument of this research is; for developing future perspectives on psychology, religion can possibly provide historical and modern tools, as well as various other contributions. Within the scope of this research paper, the main idea and some other relevant arguments have been developed by evaluating historical facts and scientific analysis presented under the sub-sections of this essay, namely; psychology, beliefs and interdisciplinary connections, nonmaterial beliefs in cultural psychology, science and religion: a synergetic approach is possible, studying psychology and religion, psychology of religion, psychological benefits of religion, interpreting and utilizing new brain sciences of neurotheology and cognitive science. The conclusion briefly summarizes diverse understandings formed through the evaluation of these sub-sections. This research illustrates the coexistence of religious and scientific knowledge using the emergence of modern psychology. On the other hand, some arguments regarding the commercialization of research targets, the transformation of science into neoliberal market discourses leading to some kind of social Darwinism, or regarding some of the influences of some of the sponsors; some of the leaders; some of the foundations; some of the scientism ideologies; and various global agendas are shared to illustrate the necessity to be cautious.

Reanimation of long-discredited aspirations of hermetic symbolic philosophy, social Darwinism, eugenics, social hygiene, and now also transhumanism in order to solve the problems of social and individual human existence by technical means of biomedical manipulation of scientific expression of a kind of "obsession" with utopian projects of scientific-technocratic ideologies. However, resisting the threats of anthropological catastrophes and environmental crises is not a molecular genetic or biomedical problem. This is the problem of overcoming social antagonisms (class, ethno-cultural, etc.), revealed in the form of contradictions and conflicts, immanent to the present variety of activities of modern capitalism in nature and society.

By the late 1800s, elaborate concepts – the vocabulary of “bosses” and “machines” – had emerged in the United States for arguing over the systematised corruption that industrial urbanisatio...

Actuality . Management as a phenomenon of culture and an exclusively unique object of scientific knowledge occupies a special place in the life of society. As historical development of mankind is complicated as organizational structures, as well as the culture of management and a set of theories that describe them. However, modern science does not take into account that radical changes in organizational reality occur not continuously, but during the bifurcation of civilization. A specific culture that arose precisely in such conditions is mechanistic management, the study of which is devoted to this article. Purpose and methods . The purpose of the article is a theoretical and historical analysis of the culture of mechanistic management, the identification of the basic determinants of the genesis of this management culture and the formation of the main directions of its development in conditions of industrialism. The methodological basis of the research is the dialectical principle of cognition, systemic, civilization, historical approaches to the study of social phenomena and processes, and the fundamental provisions of the theory of management. Results. The objective preconditions of the formation of a culture of mechanistic management are determined: European science and mechanism arising from the Newtonian picture of the world – the presentation of organizational reality as a machine, as well as atomism, rationalism and social Darwinism as a "natural law" about inter-species struggle; Protestant ethics as a justification of profit; political economy, which introduced the economy in the form of a machine operating under the laws of Newtonian mechanics; great scientific and technical discoveries, demanding new forms of organization of production. The essence of the article is given, comparative characteristics are given and prospects of further application of the main directions of culture of mechanistic management: scientific organization of labor and management are outlined; administrative management; the bureaucracy. Conclusions and discussion . Scientific novelty of the obtained results consists in identifying the key determinants of the genesis of the culture of mechanistic management and generalization of the peculiarities of the independent trends of this culture, and practical significance is seen in expanding the perceptions of the theory and history of world culture, including in them previously practically not explored in the cultural-historical context ideas, thoughts, views and concepts of mechanistic management.

The present paper focuses on main points of Thomas H. Huxley's lecture 'Evolution and Ethics', which addressed current social and political debate about application of evolutionary principle of competition on society. Huxley, a well-known proponent of Darwin, was strictly opposed to such application as he threatened that ethics, the base of civilized society, would disappear. He claimed that ethical process kept natural processes under control and made men truly human. He stressed that while evolution governed the biological realm of nature, ethics was domain of human conscience and society.Even though Huxley was well established scholar, ideas of his contemporary colleague Herbert Spencer often gained much more popularity amongst general public. This was certainly true in China, where Spencer's evolutionary ethics gained tremendous popularity. The Theory of Evolution in China was immediately dragged into debate about national survival. Spencer's thought was paradoxically introduced to China by translation of Huxley's critical lecture 'Evolution and Ethics'. Chinese intellectuals were, however, far more interested in the concept of struggle and competition than in philosophical questions about meaning of ethics in human society, which troubled Thomas Henry Huxley in his public lecture presented in 18th May 1893.

Loosely based on a gruesome fait-divers from 1878, Paul Bourget’s Le Disciple and L’Etape, Alphonse Daudet’s La Lutte pour la Vie, and Maurice Barres’s Les Deracines present the figure of the strug...

The uses of natural selection argument in politics have been constant since Charles Darwin’s times. They have also been varied. The readings of Darwin’s theory range from the most radically individualist views, as in orthodox socio-Darwinism, to the most communitarian, as in Peter Kropotkin’s and other socialist perspectives. This essay argues that such diverse, contradictory, and sometimes even outrageous political derivations from Darwin’s theory may be partially explained by some incompleteness and ambivalences underlying Darwin’s concepts. “Natural selection,” “struggle for existence,” and “survival of the fittest” are open concepts and may suggest some hierarchical and segregationist interpretations. Circumstantially, Darwin accepted social “checks,” such as discouraging marriage of “lower” individuals to prevent them from reproducing, in a vein of Malthusian politics. This makes Darwin’s theory of selection by struggle collide with his theory of social instincts, by which he explains the origins of morality. It also favors reading Darwin’sOn the Origin of SpeciesorThe Descent of Manfrom opposite, mostly ideological perspectives. Darwin’s position is ambivalent, although hardly unreasonable. The recognition he makes of social instincts, as well as the use of the concept of artificial selection, entails accepting the role of human consciousness, by which social evolution cannot be reduced to natural evolution, as socio-Darwinians did next and as some neo-Darwinists seem to repeat. On these grounds, this essay argues the inadequacy of the conventional model of natural selection for understanding politics. If we want to describe politics in Darwin’s language,artificialrather thannatural selectionwould be the concept that performs better for explaining the courses of politics in real society.

Was rubber exploitation really seen as an opportunity for Peruvian development at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century? In the present essay, it is considered that there was a perception of lost opportunity both in the social and in the economic plane. In the first place, this economic activity was overshadowed by the reports of atrocious crimes against the indigenous population in Putumayo. The seriousness of the abuses put into the public debate a reflection on a human sense of civilization, as opposed to a manipulation of the theories of social Darwinism that were used to defend the indefensible. Secondly, the depredation of resources and the absence of a vision of the future were other variables that at the time were perceived as defects to establish true development. This two dimensions shapes of the sensation of lost opportunity. ¿La explotación del caucho fue vista realmente como una oportunidad para el desarrollo peruano a finales del siglo XIX y a comienzos del siglo XX? En el presente ensayo, se considera que hubo una percepción de oportunidad perdida tanto en el plano social como en el plano económico. En primer lugar, esta actividad económica se vio ensombrecida con las denuncias de crímenes atroces en contra de la población indígena en el Putumayo. La gravedad de los abusos puso en el debate público una reflexión sobre un sentido humano de civilización, frente a una manipulación de las teorías del darwinismo social que se emplearon para defender lo indefendible. En segundo lugar, la depredación de los recursos y la ausencia de una visión de futuro fueron otras variables que en su momento se advirtieron como taras para establecer un verdadero desarrollo. Todo ello configura dos dimensiones de la sensación de oportunidad perdida.

Este artículo explora la relación entre la ignorancia, la autoridad y el nacionalismo en el pensamiento y la práctica neoliberales para argumentar que, lejos de señalar su fin, el reciente surgimiento global del demagogo neoliberal está firmemente arraigado en el neoliberalismo. La primera parte actualiza el concepto estético de lo sublime para explorar el lugar central que ocupa y su papel mediador entre la ignorancia y la autoridad. La segunda parte argumenta que el neoliberalismo tiene su propia forma de nacionalismo que se sustenta en una lógica social darwinista. Es aquí donde encontramos la base para la intersección entre el neoliberalismo y las formas de nacionalismo vitriólico y xenófobo que han ayudado a impulsar el ascenso global del demagogo neoliberal. En la sección final se argumenta que, en un contexto de creciente desigualdad e inseguridad, el demagogo falsea las relaciones sociales en aras de mantener el statu quo y carga a los pretendidos “enemigos del pueblo” con la culpa de los fallos del sistema.

"This article proposes a comparative analysis of Brazilian and Japanese Naturalism with a focus on two seminal novels, O Mulato (1881), by Aluisio Azevedo (1857-1913), and Hakai (1907), by Shimazaki Tōson (1872-1943), which are regarded as each country’s starting points for Naturalism. These novels gave rise to conflicting critical interpretations, being charged both with reproducing the biases of social Darwinism and Eurocentric scientificism, and with voicing the condition of oppression in authoritarian societies. This article discusses both sides of the debate and reads these foundational works based on the concepts of stigma and abjection. Such a reading will suggest that what the detractors of Naturalism perceived as its prejudiced stance, identified in its crude descriptions of social pathologies, could in fact be interpreted as a portrayal of social injustice and a call for social change. This article’s reading of Naturalism that recognizes it as socially progressive gives rise to a discussion of the relation between its aesthetic innovations and the rise of human rights discourse in Brazil and Japan, approached from the standpoint of the political and intellectual implications existing between Naturalism and Abolitionism in Brazil, and between Naturalism and the Buraku Liberation Movement in Japan."

This piece surveys the trajectory of Western movement culture in America and its alignment with oppressive ideologies such as eugenics, Social Darwinism, and Muscular Christianity. Citing the pathologizing of the female body in the development of an American bodily philosophy, the essay examines the performance of gender through movement as a litmus test for an idealized femininity characterized by passivity, affluence, and Whiteness. Focusing first on exercise in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and mapping a historical journey to the present, Yoga Asana and the Performance of Gender in American Exercise connects philosophies and aesthetic trends that hold the performance of asana to a type of spectacle in the public sphere that undermines the agency of the white women it appears to celebrate, while denying the femininity of poor women and women of color, or erasing them from the sphere of yoga in the West completely. In response to the dualistic discourse presented in the first half of this chapter, this piece culminates in a brief exploration of the ways yogic philosophy and practice include areas of slippage that allow for a more inclusive gender experience. A set of guiding questions and a small handful of readily applicable practices offer nuanced alternatives to the norms that persist in American society, while providing possible avenues into a more accepting and affirming future of yoga in America.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, epidemics ravaged South Pacific islands after contact with Westerners. With no existing immunity to introduced diseases, consequent death tolls on these remote islands were catastrophic. During that period, a succession of significant Anglo-Western writers visited the South Pacific region: Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Louis Becke, Jack London, and Fredrick O’Brien. In a remarkable literary conjunction, they each successively visited the Marquesas Islands, which became for them a microcosm of the epidemiological disaster they were witnessing across the Pacific. Instead of the tropical Eden they expected, these writers experienced and wrote about a tainted paradise corrupted and fatally ravaged by contact with Western societies. Even though these writers were looking through the prism of Social Darwinism and extinction discourse, they were all nevertheless appalled at the situation, and their writing is witness to their anguish. Unlike the typical Victorian-era traveller described by Mary Louise Pratt as the “seeing-man”, who remained distanced in their writing from the environment around them, this group wrote with the authority of personal felt experience, bearing witness to the horrific impact of Western society on the physical and mental health of Pacific Island populations. The literary voice of this collection of writers continues to be not only a clear and powerful witness of the past, but also a warning to the present about the impact of ‘civilisation’ on Pacific Island peoples and cultures.

One of the most productive ways to engage today’s students with Wharton’s fiction is to have them focus on the theme of survival versus thriving in hostile social environments, an issue which helps them see the relevance of Wharton’s work to contemporary American society. This approach works best when Wharton is taught in a comparative context with other novels by American women writers of the Progressive Era, such as Edna Ferber, Jesse Redmon Fauset, or Zora Neale Hurston. This chapter focuses on teaching Wharton’s The House of Mirth alongside Ferber’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, So Big. Guiding students through a series of scaffolded assignments, reading the texts simultaneously in serial form to facilitate direct comparison, and building small-group Venn diagrams help them engage the philosophy of social Darwinism in Progressive Era literature and understand issues of social mobility and resilience in their own lives.

This article analyses the modern historical trajectory of the wordfendou(奋斗, ‘struggle’), from its emergence in the early twentieth century to the present. Originally embedded in a Social Darwinist philosophy of struggle,fendouwas later co-opted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As one of its key ideological shibboleths, it was typically used to mobilize the Chinese people to ‘struggle’ for the goals of the nation. However, as these goals varied significantly in the course of the history of the People's Republic of China (PRC), the actual meanings and uses offendouevolved accordingly, following shifts in the ideological paradigms that characterized the different eras. By studying how this term was used as an ideological keyword over time, it is possible to observe the continuities and discontinuities in the visions of struggle, and the relevant ‘pedagogies of struggle’, promoted in different periods by the Chinese state. The article, in particular, analyses the use offendouin both contemporary official discourse and popular culture, suggesting that in promoting the formation of a competitive subject in line with the aims of the ‘socialist market’,fendoustill, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, expresses and disseminates a predominantly Social Darwinist world view.

Health data bear great promises for a healthier and happier life, but they also make us vulnerable. Making use of millions or billions of data points, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are now creating new benefits. For sure, harvesting Big Data can have great potentials for the health system, too. It can support accurate diagnoses, better treatments and greater cost effectiveness. However, it can also have undesirable implications, often in the sense of undesired side effects, which may in fact be terrible. Examples for this, as discussed in this article, are discrimination, the mechanisation of death, and genetic, social, behavioural or technological selection, which may imply eugenic effects or social Darwinism. As many unintended effects become visible only after years, we still lack sufficient criteria, long-term experience and advanced methods to reliably exclude that things may go terribly wrong. Handing over decision-making, responsibility or control to machines, could be dangerous and irresponsible. It would also be in serious conflict with human rights and our constitution., Journal of European CME, 10 (1), ISSN:2161-4083

Old age has been central to public health rationalities and contestations of the 2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic. This article thinks through what age is and does in pandemic times by juxtaposing four domains of ethical publicity in which age comes to matter: (1) mass fatality of old persons under conditions of variable unpreparedness; (2) circulation of social-Darwinist argument for herd immunity through culling of the weak; (3) everyday challenges of late life care as these are amplified under quarantine; and (4) long-term conditions of economic and political impasse and environmental collapse, experienced as failure of older generations and abandonment of younger ones, a situation here termed generational affect. It asks to what extent the figure of the cullable old renders racialized disparities natural and makes sense through a generational affect in which the world feels as if the survival of the young is in question.

The primary discussion in this article is the classification of the typical reactions of social groups in various nations as nationalist and globalist. Subject to the new coronavirus pandemic, nationalists have adopted extreme national security policies, namely, “the nation’s interests prevails;” globalists have adopted moderate policies by complying with the faith of society in the recommendations of the scientific community. The disparate contrasts in values and actions between the two groups are extensively manifested in domestic disease control, attitude toward the World Health Organization, identification of the disease’s source, vaccine research, international cooperation, and social reaction. This research indicates that nationalists largely consist of conservative country leaders, “social elites,” populists, and individuals in the middle-lower class, many of whom uphold racism and extreme nationalism, and that globalists largely consist of international organizations and regional leaders, medical practitioners, intellectuals and philanthropic entrepreneurs, the middle-upper class population. This social group distinction is clarified in accordance with converse ethical value perspectives, ideologies, social group-economic interests, and even national competition positions. Regarding cultural and institutional basics, nationalists uphold neoliberalism, social Darwinism, the law of jungle, and individualism, whereas globalists advocate for social democracy and collectivistic ethnic codes. The two parties have been competing for the high moral ground during and the pandemic, thereby profoundly affecting the relationships of nations worldwide.

Most of us agree about the rules or norms of morality, what philosophers call substantive or normative ethics: be kind to small children, do not cheat on exams and return your library books on time. The big disputes come over foundations, metaethics. This article considers the four main positions. Firstly, religious ethics : Here you appeal to the will of God. The problem is not everyone believes in God, and could God make it okay to mark up library books and not return them? Secondly, platonic ethics : Ethics exists eternally in a super-sensible world, along with mathematics. The problem is why it should appeal to us and how do we know about it? What if different people have different intuitions? Thirdly, objective naturalised ethics : Here, value is found in nature, probably in the processes that led to the beings of greatest value, humans. The problem is how this happened because the main theory of evolution, Darwinism, denies that there is any direction to the developmental process. Fourthly, subjective naturalised ethics : It is all a question of the emotions that evolution has given us to get along in life and produce more humans. The problem is that this makes ethics relative. If we had evolved like bees, females’ greatest imperative would be to kick their brothers out of the house as winter approaches. What to do? What to do? Next time ask a preacher not a philosopher! Contribution: The time has come for philosophers generally and students of ethics particularly to come to grips with the fact that human beings are modified monkeys (evolution) not modified mud (Genesis). This essay compares two approaches to ‘evolutionary ethics’ – Social Darwinism and moral non-realism – expressing a decided preference for the latter.

Oscillations are ubiquitous features of brain dynamics that undergo task-related changes in synchrony, power, and frequency. The impact of those changes on target networks is poorly understood. In this work, we used a biophysically detailed model of prefrontal cortex (PFC) to explore the effects of varying the spike rate, synchrony, and waveform of strong oscillatory inputs on the behavior of cortical networks driven by them. Interacting populations of excitatory and inhibitory neurons with strong feedback inhibition are inhibition-based network oscillators that exhibit resonance (i.e., larger responses to preferred input frequencies). We quantified network responses in terms of mean firing rates and the population frequency of network oscillation; and characterized their behavior in terms of the natural response to asynchronous input and the resonant response to oscillatory inputs. We show that strong feedback inhibition causes the PFC to generate internal (natural) oscillations in the beta/gamma frequency range (>15 Hz) and to maximize principal cell spiking in response to external oscillations at slightly higher frequencies. Importantly, we found that the fastest oscillation frequency that can be relayed by the network maximizes local inhibition and is equal to a frequency even higher than that which maximizes the firing rate of excitatory cells; we call this phenomenon population frequency resonance. This form of resonance is shown to determine the optimal driving frequency for suppressing responses to asynchronous activity. Lastly, we demonstrate that the natural and resonant frequencies can be tuned by changes in neuronal excitability, the duration of feedback inhibition, and dynamic properties of the input. Our results predict that PFC networks are tuned for generating and selectively responding to beta- and gamma-rhythmic signals due to the natural and resonant properties of inhibition-based oscillators. They also suggest strategies for optimizing transcranial stimulation and using oscillatory networks in neuromorphic engineering. Author Summary The prefrontal cortex (PFC) flexibly encodes task-relevant representations and outputs biases to mediate higher cognitive functions. The relevant neural ensembles undergo task-related changes in oscillatory dynamics at beta- and gamma frequencies. Using a computational model of the PFC network, we show that strong feedback inhibition causes the PFC to generate internal oscillations and to prefer external oscillations at similar frequencies. The precise frequencies that are generated and preferred can be flexibly tuned by varying the synchrony and strength of input network activity, the level of background excitation, and neuromodulation of intrinsic ion currents. We also show that the peak output frequency in response to external oscillations, which depends on the synchrony and strength of the input as well as the strong inhibitory feedback, is faster than the internally generated frequency, and that this difference enables exclusive response to oscillatory inputs. These properties enable changes in oscillatory dynamics to govern the selective processing and gating of task-relevant signals in service of cognitive control.

By and large, an individual's average evolutionist is as sexually conventional as his/her average philosopher. We must, and can, show that Darwinism’s undercutting of the foundations of common sense morality does not plunge us into an unrestrained nightmare of sexual frenzy—or any kind of moral frenzy for that matter—but why, nevertheless, has the common sense view of morality such a hold on us all, philosophers and biologists. Could it be that natural selection is clever enough to undermine common sense morality but also to make it very implausible psychologically that natural selection is clever enough to undermine common sense morality? This chapter addresses such questions. Evolutionists created powerful new models—kin selection, reciprocal altruism, evolutionary stable strategies—to explain social behavior. Traditional evolutionary ethics, which in the end does not accept the ought distinction, is often known as Social Darwinism.

This paper is devoted to one of the first commercial Mongolian publishing houses in Republican China, which was founded in Mukden in 1926/27 and existed until the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. With its broad spectrum of publications, which included a textbook for primary education, translations and advices for self-improvement, its educational approach differed from earlier Mongolian publishing activities. Its founders saw themselves on a mission for education and aimed to spread knowledge relevant for Mongols in a globally connected world by making Mongolian language print material easier accessible to a wider public.The paper argues that the founders of the publishing house were fueled by ideas of social Darwinism and saw competition not only on a global scale but also within the Chinese Republic. For this reason, their publishing project was meant to strengthen Mongols as a distinct, unitary group within the multinational Chinese Republic. At the same time, they raised their own profile as cultural translators and presented themselves as a scholarly elite. The Mukden publishers tried to set themselves apart from the institutions, which had dominated the field of Mongolian book production so far, but made reference to familiar concepts of sponsoring in order to strengthen their arguments for commercial publishing.

This chapter explores Kim Tongin’s (re-)invention of Western aestheticism in colonial modern Korea in his literary and literary-critical works from the late 1910s to the 1930s. I relate Kim’s notion of the autonomy of art to the prevailing ideological concepts of the day—that is, the East Asian versions of the liberal concept of freedom and the social Darwinist ideology of power. The second part of the chapter considers the enduring legacy of Kim’s aestheticism in the later entrenchment of the opposition between pure art and engaged art during the authoritarian era. It argues for the potential of aestheticism in deconstructing this dichotomy and in differently politicizing art, a la Ranciere, by further diversifying and broadening the meaning of politics in/as art.

Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) has become famous, and perhaps infamous, for many reasons. Presently, he is probably most widely-known for his paintings of plants and animals in his very popular book, Art Forms in Nature, originally collected and published in 1904. However, in addition to Haeckel’s art, he is also well-known for his advocacy of Darwinism and Social Darwinism, for first coining the term ‘ecology,’ for having his work utilized by Nazi pseudo-scientists (Dombrowksi in Tech Commun Q 12:303–319, 2003), and for famously (perhaps fraudulently) producing drawings of animal and human embryos so as to confirm his biogenetic law (Gould in Nat Hist 109:44–45, 2000). Something Haeckel is not as well-known for today is the fact that he seemed to be both a strenuous critic of the metaphysical and moral philosophies of Immanuel Kant and yet also something of an adherent to Kant’s aesthetic views. In terms of metaphysics and morality, Haeckel sought to exorcise Kant’s ideas as much as possible from twentieth century views on science, humanity, and nature; however, in terms of aesthetic theory, Haeckel seemed to embrace a distinctly Kantian approach to art and artworks. This essay proposes to: (1) carefully examine Haeckel’s refutations of some of Kant’s central metaphysical concepts, (2) explore some of the, arguably Kantian, assumptions underlying Haeckel’s approach to aesthetics and his artistic practice, and (3) combine these two lines of inquiry into a portrait of Haeckel’s mind as one that is conflicted about the role Kantian philosophy, and more specifically Kantian noumena, should play in twentieth century science and art. This unresolved tension in Haeckel’s mind regarding Kant’s noumenal realm is what I propose to call his ‘Kant Problem’.

Generally speaking, criminological literature views the market economy as a driving force behind profit-driven crime with titles such as Crime as an American Way of Life (Bell, 1953) and Crime and the American Dream (Messner and Rosenfeld, 2007). Basically, US-American capitalism is taken as a critical example of a culture of rigid competition conveying the values of social Darwinism in which solidarity and consideration for others are alien concepts (Currie, 1997; Hagan et al., 2000). Although there is much justification for this criticism of the dominance of the economic system, particularly by the institutional anomie theory of Messner and Rosenfeld (2007), it fails to differentiate between not only driving but also preventive effects of the market economy.

This chapter further juxtaposes the water vision with the literary city of London, the former a vision of urban social Darwinism to be displaced and de-structured by the latter’s city-ness, which is an implosive quality extrinsic to the order of global capitalism. Literary psychogeography amalgamates the vagueness of Situationism with the defamiliarizing aspect of literature, and its lens is trained upon the layers of darkness below the waterscape of London; specifically upon the voices silenced to bring the narrative of English Heritage coherence. Owing to its palimpsestic structure, the literary psychogeography of London is impossible to take in at first glance.

The focus of this chapter is on mutual aid disaster relief and associated forms of preparedness instantiated by anarchist and allied autonomous social movements. In order to understand the state perspective on grassroots action, it begins with some background on the current policy context, particularly changes in understanding that have occurred in the shift from Fordist social democracy to post-Fordist neoliberalism. This chapter then considers the phenomenon of mutual aid disaster relief: the current conjecture has seen an unprecedented proliferation of self-identifying mutual aid groups in the UK and globally. While these groups often form the basis of ‘feel good’ news stories, this chapter situates mutual aid in the history of anarchist political thought, first coined by Kropotkin as a radical alternative to the social Darwinism of his era, and in working-class social practice. This chapter presents the contemporary anarchist position drawing on sources written by anarchists in response to the COVID-19 crisis, particularly in the form of internet articles and blogs. It is argued that mutual aid is part of a broader anarchist movement, which engages in more confrontational activities such as strikes and occupations as well as longer-term co-operative infrastructure and permaculture projects, in order to defend a sphere of autonomy from capitalism. The anarchist response links local, immediate actions like mutual aid to structural critiques of capitalism, and to longer-term infrastructure building, and needs to resist attempts by state and capital to recuperate and co-opt their radical activities into bureaucratised and regulated forms of ‘social capital’.

The ascendancy of the global capitalist regime in Africa ushered in by colonial capitalist modernity altered the continent’s political, social, economic, and power relations through violence, plunder, and dispossession. This chapter asks the following question: what kind of society was produced when Africans were incorporated in the specificities of the global capitalist regime? The aim of this chapter is to advance a theoretical understanding of the evolution in Africa by revisiting the social science debates in Africa’s twentieth century. This quest is not a novel task, as classic Marxists, neo-Marxists, and liberals have debated this age-old question. While such scholarship emphasized class struggle as a sine qua non to overthrow bourgeois societies, the chapter draws on a discursive idea of history and analogy from critical radical pan-Africanist scholarship. Central to capitalist expansion and colonial modernity was the extension of property rights and commodification of the African body. The chapter argues that capitalism needs to be understood as a violent ideology, which was cemented when European societies shifted from feudalism to a new mode of production in the 1500s. Capitalism was further entrenched as ideas of social Darwinism gained momentum throughout its evolution. Capitalism as a world system is predicated on anti-Black racism and dismemberment of Africans from the global human canon, which has ramifications for Africa’s contemporary political economy of development.

Hackworth and Smith’s ‘Changing State of Gentrification’, published in 2001 and focused on New York City, is a definitive landmark. As you read these words, ‘New York City 2001’ might seem distant coordinates in the accelerating time‐space of knowledge production, but it’s not very far when understood in the time horizon of humanity’s urban evolution. Hackworth and Smith’s work helps us rethink today’s theoretical frontiers (especially postcolonial attacks on gentrification theory as a neocolonial imposition on the Global South) as well as long‐forgotten traditions. Ruth Glass’s critique of gentrification in 1964 was already a global, postcolonial challenge to the imperial epistemic violence that consolidated the West – neoliberal doctrines of human competition premised in nineteenth‐century social Darwinism and eugenics. Understanding the changing state of gentrification today requires confronting the planetary politics of urbanised human competition and hijacked theories of human evolution, and deciding what kinds of humans we wish to become.

O artigo desenvolve o argumento de que a cooperação é uma característica natural dos seres humanos, resultante da interação entre a dimensão biológica e social no curso evolutivo da nossa espécie. Contrariando o darwinismo social, inúmeros estudos recentes corroboram a abordagem evolucionista inaugurada por Kropotkin do mutualismo como principal fator da evolução humana. Tal abordagem desafia os cânones predominantes ainda hoje no direito, na economia e na política, que oscilam entre o Leviatã e o mercado. Para sustentar a tese da índole cooperativa da nossa espécie são apresentadas evidências de pesquisas da biologia, da neurociência, da psicologia e das ciências sociais sobre as bases bio-psicossociais da cooperação: vínculos sociais, necessidades básicas, empatia e predisposição altruísta. O texto desdobra-se em cinco tópicos. Inicialmente são expostas as teses do egoísmo natural e da sociabilidade; em seguida, são explicitados os conceitos de vínculos sociais, necessidades básicas, empatia e altruísmo; depois, as diversas formas de cooperação; e, por derradeiro, indicativos sobre transformações sociopolíticas necessárias à vigência de um paradigma colaborativo em políticas públicas. O método é histórico-crítico e a técnica de pesquisa é bibliográfica.

This essay attempts to show how the Social Darwinist thinking of white racial superiority, and so, ultimately, white supremacy, came to be institutionalised in law in South Africa. It looks specifically at the making and institutionalisation of the School Board Act (SBA) of 1905 of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope. It argues that the SBA contains one of the first constitutive moves that are made in the South Africa that is to emerge with the Act of Union in 1910 with respect to classification, ranking, and ordering in the country’s long history of race-making. It precedes better-known pieces of legislation such as the Population Registration Act of 1950 which the apartheid government institutes almost 50 years later. Through the SBA, “race” as a social fact is entrenched in legal and juridical terms. The essay examines how this process is institutionalised through legal judgements provided by the courts of the Cape Colony

This paper explores how the television series Breaking Bad argues about the ethics of Social Darwinism as dominant to the interest of the community, and why this is not just philosophical or religious question. It also makes a brief comparison with the ethical situation as portrayed in another television series, The Wire, claiming that these substantially different series, (one approaching morality and ethics through sheer individualism and free will, another through social determinism) both teach similar lessons about ethics. Having its main theme centered around ethics, Breaking Bad sees causes of socio-economical crises primarily in the moral destruction of modern society that destroys its institutions, not the other way around. In contrast, The Wire finds human morality in a dichotomy of an idealist-pragmatist type of man trapped inside the social systems that brutally arrange human lives through ‘the Game’ – in essence the socio-economical rules of urban life. I argue that Breaking Bad offers more arguments for not engaging in ‘Darwinist’ ethics, showing us in both literal and metaphorical ways the entire process arising from totalitarianism as today’s most feared form of social system. Article received: May 10, 2018; Article accepted: May 14, 2018; Published online: October 1, 2018; Original scholarly paper How to cite this article: Kovačević, Sanja. "Tricky Questions and Straight Answers About Ethics in Breaking Bad and The Wire." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 17 (2018): 59−69. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i17.270

The problem with current social work practice in Africa is that following its development in the West, it came to Africa grounded in values and ideologies stemming from capitalism, social Darwinism, the protestant ethic and individualism, all of which are un-African. Western ideas permeated social work institutions despite the ethical conflicts between traditional African cultures and values and the Western Judeo-Christian norms on which social work was based. Despite the political independence of most African countries, the profession has remained stuck in Western methods, values, principles and standards. Some of the traditional social work principles seem alien in African contexts. The social work principle of individualisation, for example, is un-African as it promotes individualism and yet life in Africa is communal. The content used in social work education and training in most institutions in Zimbabwe originated from elsewhere outside the African continent and as a result does not respect Africana values, beliefs, mores, taboos and traditional social protection systems. As it stands, social work in Zimbabwe in particular is a ‘mermaid’ profession based on Western theory but serving African clients. If social work in Africa is to decolonise, practitioners should have an understanding of and respect for African beliefs and practices. This is mainly because there is no clear separation between the material and the sacred among indigenous African people. This article therefore challenges African scholars to generate Afrocentric knowledge that should be imparted to African students for them to be effective in the African context. Afrocentric social work should be based on, improve and professionalise traditional helping systems that were in place prior to the coming of the Whites to the African continent.