Last
month I put up my letter to the NY Times Sunday Book Review on the review of
the Peter Cozzens book (see below).
Since then, I put up my own review of the book on Amazon. I gave it 2
stars mainly because Cozzens never directly confronts the issue of genocide and
pretends that white invasion of Indian lands was a result of natural forces,
not moral choices. I will post my review here next month, but this month,
something else caught my eye about Darwin in another Times review.
Here
is a good example of how popular writing about Darwin constantly mythologizes
him. They give us a fictional Darwin who never existed. In a New York Times review
of a book on the causes of World War I (Sunday Book Review, Dec. 11, 2016, p.
16), Margaret MacMillan, a professor at Oxford, writes, “Struggle, so Darwin
could be twisted to say, was a natural part of human existence.” I suppose she
means to imply that Darwin was more humane than that. She wants to distinguish
Darwin from “social Darwinism and the racialist theories it spawned.” But you
don’t have to twist Darwin to make him elevate struggle as the primary feature
of all life or to make him espouse racist ideas of inferiority and superiority.
He says these things himself.
Chapter
III of The Origin of Species is
entitled “Struggle for Existence”. The last words of Chapter VII are “let the
strongest live and the weakest die.” Those words remained in place through all
six editions (in the sixth edition, this was at the end of Chapter VIII). For
the first ten pages or so of “Struggle for Existence”, Darwin is reminding the
reader of the great destruction of life in nature, and using plants as an
example, states that “the more vigorous … gradually kill the less vigorous.” No
one has to make Darwin say any of this. He is quite clear about it and never
tries to pretend that he sees life as anything less than a struggle to the
death. “Fatal competition” as he says at the end of Chapter IV on natural
selection. Extinction itself, which is the subject of one of the sections of
Chapter IV, plays a large role in Darwin’s thinking. And lest we forget (how
careless of me to leave this as the last example), the struggle for life was so
important to Darwin that he put it in the subtitle of his book: The Preservation of Favoured Races in the
Struggle for Life.
I
think the reason writers have felt enabled to so shamefully misrepresent
Darwin’s views is that Darwin (the fictional Darwin) has been encapsulated into
one sentence. This is the last sentence of Origin,
which in truncated form reads as follows: “There is grandeur in this view of
life … from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most
wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” This is the romantic Darwin and
it is the chief source of the idealistic vision of him. But the real Darwin
also wrote a sentence immediately before that, in which he explained how this
evolution comes about. It results “from the war of nature, from famine and
death.” This gives us, says Darwin, “the production of the higher animals.” And
in the sentence immediately before that, he references “a Struggle for Life”
and “the Extinction of less-improved forms.” These sentences, the second and
third from the end of Origin, express
and capture what most of The Origin of
Species is about. The last sentence is a romantic departure from the main
thrust of Origin.
That
last sentence, quoted probably more often than any other from Darwin, has been
used to create the fictional Darwin. No one ever bothers to tell you how
atypical it is for the historical Darwin. The real Darwin can be found in the
sentences leading up to the uncharacteristic last one. That Darwin would go on
to make clear twelve years later in The
Descent of Man that he believed Indigenous peoples all over the world were
among the forms of life that would soon be exterminated by Europeans and
particularly by Anglo-Saxons. He regarded this extermination of human beings as
a natural process of extinction of the less improved forms of life. This historically
real Darwin has been erased by the majority of writers and scholars who
continue to present to the public their romanticized, dream-like image of him.
That image may be attractive to many people, but he never existed.
©
2016 Leon Zitzer
