How
serious are the prejudices in Charles Darwin’s writings? Unlike someone like
Adam Gopnik who is in complete denial about these prejudices, Stephen Gould
recognized in The Mismeasure of Man that
you cannot make Darwin out to be an egalitarian. Darwin definitely believed in
a hierarchy of cultures, with European civilization at the top. But Gould tries
to soften Darwin’s views into a kind of gentle paternalism. Based on his own
standards, that does not hold up.
Before
I get to that, I should say that Gould made the inaccurate claim that “All [in
Darwin’s time] were racists by modern standards,” though earlier he had made an
exception for Alfred Wallace who has been “justly hailed as an antiracist.” So
in a sense, Gould was admitting that Darwin might well have been a racist, but
that is excusable because everyone in that time was. The problem is that Gould
erased plenty of antiracists besides Wallace. Just one more example is Charles
Napier, a British military hero. In 1835, he objected to the ranking of races
and indignantly denied that Australian Aborigines formed a missing link between
man and monkey. Darwin, like so many other racists of his time, pondered the
question of which race was the lowest and had a hard time deciding whether it
was the Australians or the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. For someone like
Napier, this was nonsense.
Even
taking at face value that remark about all being racist, Gould acknowledged
that there were harsher racists and kindlier racists. Here, he said, is how we
can distinguish them: “those we now judge most harshly urged that inferiority
be used as an excuse for dispossession and slavery, while those we most admire
in retrospect urged a moral principle of equal rights and nonexploitation,
whatever the biological status of people.” I ask: Which one most
accurately describes colonialism?
In
the very next sentence, Gould claimed, “Darwin held this second position along
with the two Americans best regarded by later history [Thomas Jefferson and
Abraham Lincoln].” That is true for Darwin only in regard to legal slavery. It
is an untrue statement when it comes to the issue of colonialism and the
extermination of the colonized. On that score, Darwin held the first position—the
inferiority of savages justified Europeans taking their land. Colonialism was
as dispossessing and exploitive as slavery. Darwin supported it as one of the
consequences of native inferiority. It would be people like Wallace, Charles
Napier, Georg Gerland, John Stokes, Saxe Bannister, Langfield Ward, and many
members of the Aborigines’ Protection Society who really fulfilled (in varying
degrees) the position Gould admired. Darwin turned his back on what
colonization and the idea of savage inferiority were doing to natives. Gould
never addressed this. He brought his usual historical curiosity to a full stop.
There
is evidence in The Descent of Man
that Darwin considered signs of savage inferiority in their biological make-up,
for example in their having a better sense of smell than white people, which put
savages closer to the world of animals. His most serious biological assessment
of them was that they had smaller brains, which would indicate lower
intellects. Gould ignored this direct evidence of Darwin’s biological
determinism.
Even
if we assume that Gould was right about Darwin believing savages were
improvable and therefore not trapped in biological inferiority, it turns out to
be a distinction without a difference. In another essay in The Mismeasure of Man, Gould eloquently describes the effects of
believing in biological determinism: “Few tragedies can be more extensive than
the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity
to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified
as lying within.” That is exactly what colonialism did, when it wasn’t
murdering people. It stunted life, denied opportunities, and imposed this from
without, while claiming the limitations were due to the internal nature of
savages.
So
does it really matter if Darwin was technically a biological determinist or
not, if ultimately he gave his tacit or explicit assent to the colonial
project? I can’t see that it does. It’s the same difference, no matter how you
slice it or dice it. Paternalism is a misdirection that Gould gave himself so
that he wouldn’t see the evidence of Darwin’s support for the colonial
enterprise and its stunting of life. Gould also missed that Darwin linked
natural selection to the colonial enterprise and in doing so, he made a biological
theory (natural selection) supportive of colonialism.
Gould
quotes a famous passage from Descent
in which Darwin says that over the next few centuries, “the civilised races of
man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout
the world” (Darwin also states here that anthropomorphous apes will be
exterminated too). Gould actually quotes a longer portion of it. He cites the
passage to show that Darwin did believe certain human races were inferior and that Darwin ranked savages between apes and white people, which in Gould's view makes Darwin a paternalist. But Gould completely ignores
the part about extermination! There is nothing more stunting of life than
extermination. I fail to see how that can be called paternalism. And I find it
mindboggling that Gould could completely miss that.
©
2015 Leon Zitzer
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