Okay, I should not have listed Rerum Novarum since it was not published in Darwin’s lifetime. However, the other authors I listed did publish in Darwin’s lifetime. But we don’t really need to get into lists of authors to establish what was a standard approach to issues of poverty; common sense will do. Were there people in that period who had a more positive attitude towards the poor? I think so. For starters, I’m willing to bet that the 90-95% of the population that was poor probably would not agree that diseases wiping out poor people were a good thing. Throughout the 19th century, there were numerous social movements aimed the plight of workers in England. It is simply not the case that the attitudes of Darwin were ubiquitous everywhere.
But even if we suppose that Darwin lived in a social environment where everyone he encountered believed these things, would that make them reasonable things to believe?
I would like to suggest that if you had started the thread in this tone, we would have skipped straight over a page of ‘Yeah, so?’ responses and knee-jerk accusations of Creationism.
The theory of evolution is NOT ‘Darwinism’; an honest and critical review of Darwin, and the social and economic theories of his time, is necessary to understand both his contribution and limitation, and the current theory.
I really wish you had started this thread with a less inflammatory title.
From this it appears that you have bought into the idea of “Social Darwinism,” (not that you believe it to be true or accurate, but that you believe that it is a legitimate extension of Darwin’s work).
However, in this you are as much in error as those who actually advocated “Social Darwinism.” Nothing that Darwin published supported or even provided tacit support for the notion. He did not incorporate “survival of the fittest” into his Origin of Species until the fifth revision. He borrowed the phrase from Herbert Spencer in the hopes of clarifying his presentation of the concept of natural selection; it was not something he dreamed up, himself. Beyond that, in Darwin’s worldview, “survival of the fittest” would never have meant the destruction of the poor or those he considered savages, either by aggressive act or by malign neglect. His view was that the “fittest” was whatever species had the best fit to its environment, not that only the most advanced individuals of any species would survive, so the whole notion that he championed some sort of class or race discrimination is founded on a misreading of his actual statements.