Darwin
could be described as a gifted man who blew up his gifts into arrogant
assertions. The previous evolutionists, like his grandfather Erasmus Darwin and
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, as also his contemporaries Alfred Wallace, Robert
Chambers, and Georg Gerland, were just as gifted as he, but their effort was to
keep the gifts small and far from arrogant assertions of power. They were
seeking smallness, not greatness, because they believed in the whole which kept
everything in perspective for them.
From
the point of view of the whole, everything is small. That’s why the first
evolutionists have been neglected and unfavorably compared to Darwin. They did
not promote power as mainstream scientists did. The western ability to
manipulate nature went to our heads. We forgot how to live with anybody who
would not conform to our domination. Our domination is a gift from heaven, we
said, and we still expect everybody to buy that. We cannot make up our minds
whether evolution is designed and progressive, or an endless meandering, but it
does not matter, we say, because anyway you look at it, we come out on top and
that’s what is important. We believe in a top and a bottom, a hierarchy, as
Darwin certainly did, and make out one to be more important than the other,
while the first thinkers who saw the possibility and probability of evolution
believed in the bottom just as much as in the top. We still cannot forgive them
for that.
James
Bonwick offered this insight in his 1870 book. “If we meet with a hunting
tribe, we seek to make them farmers and clerks at once. In the processes of
nature, it took, perhaps, thousands of years to effect this transformation with
our own ancestors, when we would fain accomplish it in a year with others.” Nature
allowed us many centuries to get where we are, but we then foist unrealistic
and unnatural expectations of swifter change on those unprepared for this, and
we deem them inferior for failing to achieve something we could never have
achieved either in so short a time. Western civilization has been pushy and
western scientists have inherited that pushiness. Bonwick’s solution was that
we should lose our contempt for Indigenous cultures and look for aspects of
their culture which could more easily blend with ours—and respect those places
where they do not want to bend.
We should always keep in mind
that ideas of hierarchy and racism developed in Europe long before anyone
thought of evolution. Evolutionary theory and even natural selection are not
inherently racist. Darwin did not find racism in evolution and that is because
it isn’t there. He rather brought pre-existing racist ideas to evolution and
incorporated them into a biological process where they do not belong. He
inherited that western desire to be pushy.
There are only three things inherent
in evolutionary theory in its ideal form: 1) a belief that there is a common
ancestor for all life on this planet; 2) therefore, all creatures, including
humans, are genetically related (‘genetic’ was used over and over by Chambers
in one edition of Vestiges); and 3)
the creative force of God or nature is ongoing; it did not spend itself in one
burst a long time ago; life is not fixed but is still in creative ferment,
resulting in a diversity that is not fixed but always changing. The original
evolutionists believed this was a more sublime conception of God or nature, and
I think they were right. Creation does not end. For people like Chambers,
Rafinesque, Erasmus Darwin, Emma Martin, and probably more, it meant that the
classes of society were not final either, but open to change and improvement.
The holistic evolutionists looked
at the world and saw this: Life and nature do not just produce the strong and
the dominant. Nature also produces the small, the weak, the hungry, the low,
the ill-fitted, the bottom. Why? Because from the viewpoint of the whole, every
piece is necessary and valuable. There is no low and high.
Too many human beings make
judgments about ranking things (“survival of the fittest” is about ranking),
but the whole (or nature) does not rank anything. In the whole, everything has
a legitimate place. The whole confirms the existence of the small and weak just
as much as that of the strong and dominant. Neither has more importance than
the other. There is no hierarchy. The struggle for life by the weak is just as
valid as the struggle by the strong. An antiracist view is more true to nature
and natural selection than a racist view. Evolution gives us lessons of
antiracism. Making evolution racist (which is what Darwin did) is an unnatural
twist of logic and the facts of nature; it is a counter-revolution that
destroys objectivity. Nature itself is never racist.
© 2020 Leon Zitzer
