I think the main reason Darwin’s The Origin of Species is considered such
a classic is because it promotes the worldview of that time and ours—that is,
that conquering is good and the culture that does it the best or the most is
the premier, superior culture on earth—and his book makes us feel good about
this very selfish point of view by demonstrating that this is not a moral or
immoral choice we are making, but simply, what nature wants, so we don’t have
to feel guilty about it or the disappearance of other cultures, or feel
anything at all but unqualified joy that we are so blessed.
I once heard an author of
self-help books say in an interview on the radio that the first piece of advice
he gives to anyone who wants to publish a successful book or create any kind of
successful business is that you must not challenge the worldview of your
audience. As I see it, that’s why western culture often seems to be a closed
circle, we are all talking to each other within set parameters, thinking about
how to advance our culture, while we pretend we are making objective discoveries
about the world or adding something new to our world, when it’s always the same
old same old.
But didn’t Darwin challenge the
worldview people had that man is at the center of the universe and that
organisms are fixed and could not possibly be changing as time goes by? No, he
did not. There are two points to make about that.
First, man is still at the center
of things in Darwin’s system, he is the goal of evolution, and not just any
man, but European man, or even more specifically, British man. At the end of The Descent of Man, he calls man “the very
summit of the organic scale” and at the end of Origin, he calls the higher animals, “the most exalted object which
we are capable of conceiving.” In Origin,
he expresses his pride in the superiority of British life forms and the
superiority of Britain’s ability to artificially create new varieties and
export them to different parts of the world. It would not be a stretch to say
that Origin was written to make British
imperialists proud of their achievements (in case they were having any doubts).
Darwin embraced the idea of changing species in a limited way. In his world,
change reinforces the dominant species, so nothing ever really changes. The
strong get stronger, the weak weaker.
Secondly, even if someone
insisted that there is in evolutionary theory a completely different
understanding of nature than the standard worldview of Darwin’s time, that
credit should go to the evolutionists who preceded Darwin. In the limited space
of this blog post, I will single out Robert Chambers who more than anyone else made
the public comfortable with the idea of gradual change in the organic world,
producing new species over long periods of time. Unlike Darwin, he did it in a
radical way and did not strive to make evolution fit the imperialist mode. Achieving
ever more dominant species was not Chambers’s vision of evolution.
As far as Chambers was concerned,
evolution blessed all life on earth, the strong and the weak, all have a
valuable place in nature, and in fact, the world was constantly changing so
that a life form that was down one day could be up the next. For Darwin,
evolution was about dominance and any life form that did not do that was on
“the high road to extinction.” For Chambers, there was no inevitable
extinction, nature was always ready to hand out blessings even to the weak and
the small. Social classes were not fixed either. In a sense, for Chambers, all
life was upwardly mobile. That was not true for Darwin who held all life to be
divided into three categories—dominant, extinct, or on the way to extinction.
If anyone challenged our
worldview, it was Chambers, which is probably the main reason his reputation
has not fared so well. Chambers saw the meaning of evolution in the whole of
nature in which mankind is just a piece. We get our dignity and our humility
from being a part of the magnificent whole, not from being superior to other
organisms. Chambers was delighted that human beings are descended from previous
animal forms, making us a late arrival on earth, and drew the conclusion that
because we are related to so-called lower animals who were here before us, we
are bound to respect them and treat them well.
Darwin found the meaning of
evolution in hierarchy and dominance. With the help of friends, he managed to
make himself appear to be a revolutionary, while giving aid and comfort to the
ruling classes. Very early in Origin,
Darwin told his readers that dominant species “become still more dominant”
which is exactly what the upper classes wanted to hear. He believed lower
animals are here to serve us and while we should not be wantonly cruel towards
them, we are entitled to experiment on them, including performing surgery on
live animals, if necessary to find ways to improve the human condition. He
pleaded with a Royal Commission not to recommend placing an outright ban on
experimentation on living animals.
Darwin accepted the ranking of
organisms that was popular in his time and had been popular at least since the
Middle Ages. Darwin was a biological theologian. He made the theology of
“groups subordinate to groups” (a phrase he frequently uses in Origin) the centerpiece of his system of
thought. The previous evolutionists like Chambers and Erasmus Darwin challenged
this stilted worldview. We still cannot forgive them for that. As long as
western culture thrives, we will deprecate their insights and achievements.
So it goes. As historian
Michel-Rolph Trouillot put it, “Worldview wins over the facts.”
© 2018 Leon Zitzer
