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
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