Last month, I posted my review of
A.N. Wilson’s Charles Darwin: Victorian
Mythmaker (published in Britain in September, but not available here until
December). Despite his criticisms of Darwin, he goes very easy on Darwin’s
racism, in effect excusing it as being part of another culture that we should
not judge by our standards. It is a nonsensical defense of Darwin, but quite
common. Recently, I discovered another article that also minimizes Darwin’s
strong racist proclivity.
There is so much that is wrongly
slanted in the essay “Apes, Essences, and Races” by Brendan O’Flaherty and Jill
S. Shapiro in the collection Race,
Liberalism, and Economics (2004; edited by David Colander and others). I am
talking about the part of the article that deals with Charles Darwin. They
acknowledge Darwin’s racism, but do everything they can to soften it. They
blame other scientists and even Darwinists for promoting racism, but in
Darwin’s case, they make his racism seem like an accident that went against
what his theory really stood for.
The authors write, “Darwin
unintentionally bolstered the idea of fixed types, reinforcing, instead of
undermining, essentialistic thinking.” There was nothing unintentional about
it. Darwin was devoted to identifying superior and inferior groups. But these
authors think “it was all too easy to misinterpret his meaning to see races as
forming an evolutionary scale,” completely missing that this is exactly what
Darwin was striving for. Darwin suggested to his cousin Francis Galton that
Nature uses superior individuals to create new and better races. These authors
fail to confront how deeply embedded racism was in his view of nature. Even in Origin, he constantly promotes the view
that nature is a scheme of groups subordinate to groups. Higher and lower
figure in Origin as much as in his
later work in Descent.
O’Flaherty and Shapiro state that
as a result of Darwin’s Origin,
“Humankind was once again united as one species, now the product of
evolutionary processes.” But the idea that humanity was one had long been the
prevailing view (they do recognize this and give it appropriate attention).
Breaking up humanity into separate species was relatively new. Darwin did
nothing to reverse that. He rather encouraged it. He hardly united humankind
when he insisted how divided the races were in intelligence and moral values.
These authors call racist
essentialism “the direct antithesis of Darwin's focus on populational
variability.” But Darwin’s ideas about
variability did not affect his greater stress on the differences from group to
group. In Descent, he would argue
that disparity in brain size cannot tell us anything about the relative
intelligence of two individuals, but when averages are taken, it can tell us a
lot about the differences between human groups, and then he went on to cite
statistics that put Australian Aborigines at the low end of cranial capacity. When
these authors discuss 19th century scientific racism in the study of
the brain and cranium, they leave out Darwin’s embrace of this.
Racism worked itself deeply into
Darwin’s thinking. That is the Darwin no one wants to remember. The authors
list (on p. 36) eight European scientists who advocated the belief that
non-Europeans were biologically inferior. They do not include Darwin, yet he
belongs there as much as anyone (he even argued in Descent that moral qualities were inheritable and that this would
explain the differences between human races). Most staggering to me is that
when the authors get to their brief discussion of the European belief in the
extinction of inferior races, they once again fail to even mention that Darwin
too was fully committed to this genocidal idea.
The authors are certainly right
when they say, “Darwin did not provide any new facts about humans or refute any
old ones.” But that was the point for Darwin. He wanted to justify what
Europeans already believed about race. He did not want to overturn anything. O’Flaherty
and Shapiro miss this. They still think of Darwin as revolutionary and later
Darwinists as regressive: “Darwinism was thus compatible with the idea that
each race has its own essence, so the idea of racial essence survived the
Darwinian revolution intact.” In fact, Darwin performed no revolution. He was
as stuck with and firmly believed in racial categories as many other scientists
of his day.
These two authors call later
Darwinism with its emphasis on inequality of the races a “skewed take on
Darwinian theory.” There was nothing skewed about for Darwin. Darwin believed
that producing inequality was one of the major results of evolution. Some
people did oppose this racializing of the world, but O’Flaherty and Shapiro tend
to skip the true humanitarians of the time who defied the idea that savages or
dark-skinned people were inferior in mind and body to Europeans.
With respect to animals too, they
try to make Darwin seem like a great revolutionary. “In regard to apes,
Darwin's ideas served to provide a natural, not merely a conventional and
nominal, tie between them and humans.” The truth is that for Darwin, the tie
was more nominal than real. In Descent,
Darwin imagines that if an ape could talk, it would have to admit that it was
inferior to human beings in every way. Inferior-superior, or lower-higher, was
an important category to Darwin. It was always on his mind, whether he was
considering animals or humans.
I must note here one part of this
article by O’Flaherty and Shapiro that I found invaluable. They emphasized that
many of the older natural scientists, such as Linnaeus, Buffon, and Blumenbach,
who studied human groups, did not rank human beings in a hierarchy. They
treated all humans as equal in rank, varying with the environment. They
recognized that differentiating human groups was a somewhat arbitrary process.
These early naturalists were much less judgmental than later scientists would
be—which makes the next point so interesting. (These naturalists were not
entirely free of judgments. For example, they believed environmental conditions
could make one group ugly and another beautiful.)
One interesting trend the authors
spot makes their exemption of Darwin especially odd. At the very beginning of
their article, the authors point out that, as evidence about races accumulated
in the 19th century, the science of races became worse and worse.
Knowledge did not help to dispel a wrongheaded racism, it just more deeply
entrenched it. What they miss is that this was as true for Darwin as for other
scientists of the day. In Descent, he
was eager to latch onto any reports of evidence that put darker skinned people
closer to animals than white Europeans. We may all be descended from lower
animals, according to Darwin, but he also believed that some human groups
retained that close connection more than others. From almost every angle,
Darwin introduced a racist perspective into evolutionary thinking.
The authors conclude that while some
scientists were discovering that distinguishing human races was a futile
exercise, racist thinking went on: “There was still faith in the reality of
racial distinctions that were innate, biologically based, and, through their
relative worth, indicative of evolutionary success.” What they refuse to admit
is that Darwin contributed to this. Every word of their conclusion (innate,
etc.) applies just as much to Darwin’s science.
Why does any of this matter? Many
people would argue that as long as scientists and scholars today reject
scientific racism and seek to expose it whenever it appears, the racism of a
scientist of long ago does not matter. I can think of several responses to
this. First, there is a kind of hypocrisy in this argument. If scholars today
were so kind to all racists of the past, then understandably Darwin could be
included in this generosity, But current scholars do think the racism of
yesterday’s academics matters because they identify and discuss 19th
century racist scientists and academics all the time; they simply omit Darwin’s
contribution or understate it.
Second, by playing down the
severity of Darwin’s racism, they are sending a message that racism is
acceptable if it is expressed by a big enough name. Third, one has to wonder
how many other exceptions they are willing to make. Would their dismissal of
racism stop with Darwin? Is he the only favored racist in history? And will
such generosity be extended to anyone in the future? Fourth, and perhaps most
important, as the German Jesuit Max Pribilla said in the 1930s, sometimes the
truth has to be told for no other reason than simply that it is true—because if
we don’t, the world suffers a moral blow that will be very hard to recover
from.
It is that last reason that
applies especially to Darwin. Darwin’s racism was not slight. It went very
deep. If we let him off the hook because of his status, it sends two messages:
1) we value personality and power more than truth; and 2) we allow racism to
continue in insidious ways. Academia says that it holds truth to be the most
important, even sacred, object of our studies. Yet it often promotes exceptions
to this and for no discernible good reason. When students encounter Darwin’s
work, especially in The Descent of Man,
they can see how obvious his racism is and then they go to their professors who
either deny it or dismiss it. What’s up with that? There are no good lessons to
be drawn from this dishonest treatment of what Darwin said.
If we grant racism a safe place
or a hiding place anywhere, whether in Darwin or in anyone else, we have no
hope of defeating it. Racism is hard enough to defeat anyway, maybe impossible,
why give it any extra help?
© 2017 Leon Zitzer
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