Sunday, April 29, 2018

DOUBLE STANDARD


I continue to be amazed, and disheartened, by the way in which Charles Darwin’s racism is handled by the majority of scholars. Mostly, it is not handled at all; they prefer to write it out of history. But when some scholars do from time to time bring it up, they almost always understate it. In essays that are otherwise brilliant discussions of issues concerning colonialism, human rights, racism, anthropology, and any number of related matters, the same author who provides clear insights into these issues will either treat Darwin as a saint and/or minimize his racism and commitment to genocide.

Tom Lawson is a good example of this in his superb essay on Tasmania in a 2014 issue of the Journal of Genocide Research. He discusses the ways in which Britain has remembered and not remembered the genocide in Tasmania. Though some of his comments apply to our time, his focus is on the way they were memorializing this at the time of the events in question. They expressed regret at the demise of the Indigenous population and yet celebrated it as the triumph of their superior culture. Lawson is very hard on Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope for their racism and endorsement of the inevitability of genocide. But he applies a softer touch to  Darwin, even though just about everything he says about the racism of others applies just as well to Darwin.

There are two comments he makes about Darwin that I find rather odd. One is that Darwin “had been unwilling to declare the ‘extinction’ of ‘Aboriginal’ races inevitable in earlier publications” (i.e., earlier than The Descent of Man where genocide is treated as natural and inevitable). I have no idea what earlier publications he is talking about. Darwin always had an inclination to treat extermination as inevitable, even in The Origin of Species. While I am not aware of his using the word ‘inevitable’ in that book, his constant talk of the way the strong or dominant beat the weak and small has the whiff of inevitability about it. But I doubt that Origin is the book Lawson has in mind.

Lawson might be referring to the publication of Darwin’s Beagle Diary, which came out under various titles, the last being The Voyage of the Beagle. In that publication (the first edition being roughly two decades before Origin), he famously remarked, “The varieties of man seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of animals—the stronger always extirpating the weaker.” (A similar statement about the weak and strong would appear in the last sentence of Chapter VII of Origin.) While Darwin does not explicitly call this extirpation inevitable, it is certainly implied in that ‘always’.

In Darwin’s unpublished remarks, in his letters, you can see the same sentiment expressed over and over, and at times, more harshly. In a letter to Charles Lyell, he affirmed that the more intellectual races will exterminate the less intellectual. In a letter to Charles Kingsley, he stated that when all the lower races are gone, humanity as a whole will rise higher. Darwin tended to be more discreet in his published work, but he was no different in these views than Dickens and Trollope. So why give Darwin an easier time? What makes him worthy of being treated relatively as a saint?

The other odd comment Lawson makes is putting Darwin in the same camp as other humanitarians of his day and relying on Darwin’s abolitionism to do this. That is way off the mark. Darwin was not a humanitarian in the same vein as many of those in the Aborigines’ Protection Society (the example Lawson gives). They subscribed to the motto on the medallion struck by Darwin’s grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, which declared that all men are brothers. In one of his Notebooks, Darwin expressed doubts about this saying. The differences between the races of men spoke to him as contradicting this sentiment. Darwin believed that evolution created these stark differences in the descendants of a primordial ancestor. He was no believer in the idea that all men are brothers. That is not the direction evolution took.

Another truth about Darwin’s life is that in his Diary he expressed no problem with the enslavement of Indians in South America, particularly the children. He did not believe there was anything to complain of in their treatment. Despite the fact that his hero Alexander von Humboldt denounced the slavery of Indians, Darwin could not go along with it. He limited his abolitionism to African slavery. He was not in the same caliber as other humanitarians of his age.

There is no justification for making Darwin more humane that he actually was—except that this is the way almost everyone writes about Darwin. He has become such a saint that no one dares to defy the way mainstream academia has changed the facts of his real beliefs. By giving Darwin’s racism and genocidal ideas permission to go on unchallenged, we open the door to doing this for others as well. We are saying that racism and genocide are acceptable if someone of iconic status promotes them.

© 2018 Leon Zitzer