I
understand why many people regard Darwin as a hero. I understand why people
like having heroes. I have some myself, but I hope I will always keep it to
admiring certain things they did and avoid worshiping them in the abstract.
Worship leads to blindness towards uncomfortable facts, if any should appear.
What
is peculiar about hero worship of Darwin, at least by the general public, is
that he is not admired for some of the best things about him and is rather
adored for things that are not true. Darwin was a great naturalist, a great
observer of flora and fauna, but very few people pay attention to that part of
him. He may have made fascinating observations about earth worms and orchids
and more, but that is not what holds most people’s interest.
Instead,
people have thrust on Darwin a greatness as an anthropologist and observer of
the human condition. That is far-fetched. Some evolutionists did give us that,
but Darwin was not one of them. It was not Darwin who taught that all life is
one, that humans are part of a beautiful whole, and that we should all be kind
to one another. You could call that holistic evolution and it came from people
like Robert Chambers who published his book on evolution 15 years before Darwin’s.
Chambers taught that evolution means we are connected to the entire world of
nature and we must learn to respect the rights and feelings of animals (yes, he
actually said rights and feelings). Darwin never said anything remotely like
that. But many people falsely assume he did.
So
what kind of human science did Darwin give us? He divided the world into
higher and lower races and promoted the idea that the higher races would
naturally and inevitably wipe out the lower ones, at which point humanity would
rise to a higher level, as he said in one letter. The common origin of all life
had no moral or spiritual implications for Darwin as it did for Chambers. What
interested Darwin more was the fact (for him) that the single origin had
diverse descendants who could be ranked on a scale from lowest to highest.
In
theory, Darwin believed that all life is one, since we are all descended from a
common progenitor, but in practice, it meant little to him. His grandfather
Josiah Wedgwood coined a medallion that pleaded the cause of slaves, “Am I not
a man and a brother?”, but in his Notebooks, Darwin expressed doubts about
this. Civilized men and Christians may believe this, he said, but he found it
more striking that, “yet differences carried a long way.”
That
was Darwin’s lesson. Human groups are different and can be legitimately
destroyed by their betters. While he did not believe any humans should be
enslaved, he was shockingly indifferent to their extermination, even teaching
that genocide was natural and not a moral dilemma. That may make many people
very uncomfortable and it should. He was not the only one who contributed to
Europe’s genocidal attitude towards others, but he was definitely one of the
contributors and he did it with all the authority of science. In making him a
great scientist, we are endorsing scientific racism.
In
the end, that is what really bothers me about the adoration of Darwin. If we
let Darwin off too easy and fail to appreciate how racist he was in his work,
not in his personal life, we are teaching a very bad lesson. We are saying that
if someone becomes a big enough icon, then we can overlook some very foul ideas
he stood for. We are saying racism and genocide are excusable if the source is
a worshiped hero.
©
2019 Leon Zitzer
