Impact of Darwin’s, Spencer’s and Nietzche’s ideas on shaping American identity

An influential movement in American public thought during this period tried to interpret Darwinian struggles for existence and natural selection as confirmation of the familiar puritanical notion that “only a select few souls are destined to be saved, and the rest deserve their fate.” Darwinism, therefore, easily turned into "Calvinism with a scientific face", almost a religious reflection of the era, which, unfortunately, increasingly operated with utilitarian values. This element of social evolutionism and the American thinkers of the last third of the nineteenth century adopted it in order to build a new doctrine of national consciousness on its basis.

A significant influence on the American Philosophical and historical prose of this period was exerted by the school of evolutionary thought associated with the name of Herbert Spencer, who extended Darwinian doctrine of evolution to society, and first of all, because it resonated with certain elements in national traditions.... Herbal Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” that originated from Charles Darwin`s contribution about evolutionary theory. The phrase was vulgarized.Spencer, like the Americans who still saw themselves as God's Chosen People, noted a hidden desire to unite and reconcile science and religion...

Spencer, in fact, proposed a new natural religion, an alternative to Orthodox Christianity...Spencer's principles of” freedom and diversity " became the scientific basis of laissez-faire individualism and economics, interpreted as progressive gains, which soon attracted the lion's share of American entrepreneurs, economists and sociologists to the side of evolutionism. Spencer, who, in fact, owns the extremely popular phrase “survival of the fittest”, which quickly turned into “survival of the fittest”, argued that natural selection works only in primitive societies and in the early stages of Social Development. This stage will soon be overcome in America, to which he predicted the great future of the crown of civilization, considering its democratic rule the highest form of government. Moreover, Spencer portrayed the struggle as a struggle between man and man, but rather as a clash of individuals with the conditions of the “environment”, the sacrifices of which were justified by the future flourishing of civilization.

Various facets of American Dream

In the era of the revolution, when the American consciousness, under the influence of turbulent socio-political events, is experiencing a radical scrapping, forming largely on the basis of educational ideas that do not follow from the divine law and traditions, and from legal and civil norms, the American dream is also transformed. Like the secularized American consciousness, it sheds its theological robes. The American Dream, which originally contained the seeds of political and social idealism, becomes the embodiment of the educational ideal of a free individual and a democratic society based on the equality of all people, for whose self-realization, unlike in the Old World, there are no obstacles. But even in its transformed form, the American dream retains many of its original features: a focus on a new world and a new person, free from the vices of Europe generated by centuries of oppression, injustice, poverty and disenfranchisement of some, omnipotence, arbitrariness, luxury and idleness of others. No less significant in the American dream is the realization of their exclusivity, their selectivity – God or history, which has prepared America for a high mission – to serve as a model and guiding star for the rest of humanity.

It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position... The American dream, that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of merely material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been much more than that. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.