DOOMED RACES?

Darwin was not alone in thinking that the native races of the world were bound for extinction, with a little help from their European friends. The question has been asked why they were so sure of this, why were they constantly trumpeting this news. What did it mean to them that they felt compelled to repeat it so often? I should note that there were humanitarians who were horrified by this exterminatory boasting. They saw nothing good in the disappearance of native peoples, nor did they think it was inevitable. James Bonwick in 1870 quoted one author who believed that anyone who suggested the extinction of natives was inevitable was himself a barbarian. Darwin and most of this fellow scientists did not see it that way. They seemed positively glad to see it coming.

 
It must have made them feel so superior for one thing. Walter Bagehot, editor of the Economist who also wrote a series of articles that Darwin favorably referred to in The Descent of Man, noted that savage tribes were not in danger of being exterminated when confronted with the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome, but they are facing that danger at the hands of modern civilization. This was a good observation according to Darwin. It proves, Bagehot argued, how superior we are not only to savages but to the ancient world which could not exterminate the people we are capable of eliminating.
 
For many European intellectuals and scientists, the ability to annihilate other people was evidence of superiority. As Henry Reynolds has put it, in their world, there had to be winners and losers in nature’s battleground. The fact of there being losers confirmed that the winners were all the more so.
 
Other reasons have also been given for the prevalence of this belief that extermination would be the destiny of inferior peoples. Russell McGregor has suggested that the advocates of inevitability were pessimistic over the ability of savages to improve and adopt western civilization with all its material benefits. I think there is some truth to that, but I don’t think it was a deeply earned pessimism. After the first few decades of the 19^th century, these doomed race theorists were so quick to conclude the natives must be so inferior, since they have advanced so little. Their conclusion was cheap and arrived at with very little thought. Bonwick more sensibly pointed out that it was irrational to suppose that savages could arrive in a few years at a place it took Europeans thousands of years to reach.
 
One of the more obvious reasons for believing in the inevitable decline and disappearance of natives, especially considering how much Europeans were adopting policies pushing them in this direction, is that it relieved European nations of any moral responsibility. If extinction was natural, then Europe has nothing to feel guilty about. Not that humanitarians at the time did not try to make the exterminationists feel guilty. John Lort Stokes, a Commander in the Royal Navy (and later on an Admiral), was one such. “I am not willing to believe,” he wrote in 1846, “that … there is an absence of moral responsibility on the part of the whites; I must deny that it is in obedience to some all-powerful law, the inevitable operation of which exempts us from blame, that the depopulation of the countries we colonize goes on.” But an all-powerful law is exactly what Darwin and so many others believed in.
 
Then there is the matter of greed. If you are going to take everything from a people—their land, their resources, their freedom of movement—then it logically follows that the people have to go also. British colonists were very clear that they wanted it all, especially the land. And how are the people supposed to live if you take all their land from them? The all consuming nature of the greed demands that extermination must follow. Human greed makes it inevitable, if it is inevitable at all.
 
They turned out to be wrong. The widespread extermination they predicted never took place. It was a bad theory. McGregor points out they did not have the empirical data to back it up. But Herman Merivale had made this point in 1841 and no one was listening. It was worse than a bad theory. They proclaimed the inevitable demise of native races as if it were a fact, only it was a false fact. As Darwin well knew, false facts do plenty of harm to science. They are hard to get rid of. False facts are tenacious. Darwin was the one who usually exposed false facts. But this was one time, it got away from him and he fell for a false fact hook, line, and sinker.
 
© 2014 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

WHY ALL THE MYTHMAKING?

It’s been hard to find the time to post this month and answer the question I posed at the end of last month’s entry. I will be concise, I hope.

 
The obvious answer is that mythmaking is usually carried out by people in power. They need to invent lots of things to hold onto that. A myth or a hero serves both as a symbol of power and to consolidate power. Darwin, whether he liked it or not, was made to serve as a weapon in a contrived battle between science and religion.
 
Even apart from any conflict (real or imagined) with religion, every field of endeavor—and science is no exception—seems to need powerful figures that others must be made to worship. Whether science serves mainly the rich or also the poor and middle class is a question that is trumped by worship of invented heroes. Professional science turns out to be not much different from organized religion.
 
Much more could be said about all this, but I am interested in a more subtle reason for mythmaking. Not only do myths create a false reality, they are also used to obliterate parts of reality that really do exist. They create a forgetfulness. Heroes are often used to erase some quite genuine heroes we would rather not know about, or actually, those in power would prefer we not know about them. And here I will give a concrete example.
 
Darwin and his fellow scientists sometimes pondered the dubious question: Which human race is the lowest? For Darwin, it was a toss-up between the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego and the Aborigines of Australia. This belies the idea that Darwin was a great humanitarian. Those who do acknowledge that Darwin thought like this usually make the excuse for him that everyone at the time indulged in this kind of thinking.
 
Well, not everyone. We’ve been made to forget.
 
By making an idol out of Darwin, we have covered up those who were the real genuine humanitarians of the day. I can give no better example than a certain British military officer whose name I won’t reveal just yet. I’ll keep that card close to my chest. A couple of decades before The Origin of Species, he was denouncing racism and, among other things, the use of science to make men rich. He knew he was reaping “the ineffable contempt” of men of science and political economists, but he could not help it. As he said, “[W]hen David slew Goliath, he gave great encouragement to little men!”
 
This military men was well aware that many people held opinions about the lowest races and often characterized Aborigines as the missing link between man and monkey. This disgusted him. He insisted that only individuals could be ranked, not races or nations. He believed that the Creator had endowed savages with physical and mental faculties equal to ours. They might wear different clothes or no clothes at all, but under the skin, we were all the same. Savages had the same intellectual capacities or potential as ourselves.
 
All this is as clear an anti-racist position as any that has ever been expressed. And this officer did not stop there. He demanded that all must be treated equally under the law. As you might guess, he severely criticized the brutality of colonialism. So did many others.
 
In particular, another British military officer called “the depopulation of the countries we colonize” a “national crime” and said that the supposed inevitability of the extinction of Aboriginal races (which Darwin, by the way, believed in) should not be used as an excuse to evade moral responsibility.
 
It is remarkable that two military officers should have been so far ahead in humanity than most scientists. Not to be outdone, an Oxford professor argued that the law of the inevitability of Aboriginal extinction, as espoused by Darwin (whom he otherwise admired) and others, was imaginary. On a slightly different point, that second military officer said that colonists have believed in “an erroneous theory, which they found to tally with their interests … That the aborigines were not men, but brutes … and what cruelties have flowed from such a doctrine.”
 
Erroneous theories and imaginary laws—of science, no less. The first military man thought all these bad ideas came from an obsession with national wealth (he complained that his countrymen were always bragging that Britain was the wealthiest nation on earth). National wealth was used to justify everything from child labor to nasty treatment of the Irish to the brutal ways of colonialism. To say he was distressed by this, and by the misuse of science to enhance wealth rather than create true happiness, would be an understatement.
 
I don’t ask that everyone should agree with all this man argued for. But that he stood for the equality and fair treatment of all human beings is undeniable, and that he risked speaking truth to power about these things must also not be denied. If that does not make him one of the real heroes in our western history, I don’t know what would make anyone a hero.
 
I apologize for not revealing the names of these worthy humanitarians. Let my withholding of their names serve as a symbolic reminder of the injustice done to them by the many historians and scholars who have erased them from history. I will certainly reveal all of them in my book, whenever it is done, which won’t be for a while yet.
 
© 2014 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

MODERN MYTHMAKING—FORGETTING WHO GAVE US EVOLUTIONARY THINKING

We like to think that ancient peoples were mired in myths and that we have evolved beyond that. But if anyone were to list all the myths we still believe in, it would fill more than one volume. I am not concerned with all myths. Just the ones about Darwin and the history of science are my main concern. These myths are so firmly ingrained. You cannot read any article or book about Darwin or that relates to Darwin in some way without being bombarded with sheer ignorance about this history.

 
On January 19, 2014, in the Sunday Times Book Review, there was a review of a book about how species spread around the globe. The reviewer, Jonathan Weiner, wrote that in Darwin’s day, “the reigning explanation was supernatural: God put them there. Darwin’s thinking was more mundane.” Everyone wants to believe that 1859, when The Origin of Species was published, inaugurated a revolution in biological thinking. That is about as far from truth as one can get.
 
Long before Origin, other scientists were thinking mundane, as Weiner might put it. Robert Chambers made his points in public fifteen years before. He was as critical of the idea of special creation by God as an explanation of anything as Darwin was. His book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) was exceedingly popular. Darwin’s book did not overtake Vestiges in sales until the 20^th century. Darwin was not influenced by Chambers. He was making the same points privately in his unpublished essays of 1842 and 1844. But what has to be remembered is that Chambers was preparing the public for mundane thinking. There were ten editions of his book before Origin. The public and many fledgling scientists were gobbling it up. They were impressed for a good reason. Chambers did a good job.
 
By the time 1859 rolled around, special creation was no longer the reigning explanation. Herbert Spencer had also previously joined in the attack (in an 1852 essay which was republished in an 1858 book). Special creation may not have been quite knocked out of contention, but there was more doubt and confusion than there had been in 1844. It was more the case that Darwin’s book took advantage of the changing times than that he started something new. Credit also has to go to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the French naturalist who was arguing for the evolution of human beings from apes, and the evolution of all living things, in 1809, the year Darwin was born. Darwin would not talk about human evolution until 1871 in The Descent of Man.
 
I was also startled to see some odd comments in an article on new ideas about plants in a recent issue of The New Yorker (Dec. 23 & 30, 2013) by Michael Pollan. Here too Darwin is a revolutionary. This time, the revolution is the idea that man is continuous with the rest of nature and Darwin is the man who singlehandedly started it. “Since ‘The Origin of Species,’ we have understood, at least intellectually, the continuities among life’s kingdoms—that we are all cut from the same fabric of nature.” Darwin, Pollan says, “brought the humbling news that we are the product of the same natural laws that created animals.” These are quite the overstatements. There were many others who had pressed for this understanding and while it is true that Darwin also promoted this, his main effort lay elsewhere.
 
What Darwin emphasized was that there is a hierarchy in nature, groups subordinate to groups, some weaker, some more dominant and stronger, with man at the summit as he tells us at the end of Descent. Even in Origin, also at the end, he takes the view that evolution has been leading to “the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving … the higher animals.”
 
Everybody put man at the top. Robert Chambers did it too, just like Darwin. Well, we all do, if we are honest. But with Chambers, there is a profound difference. Chambers brought the truly humbling news that every place in nature, even the highest place occupied by man, is just one part of the whole and the whole is more important than any one piece, no matter how high it may be. Lamarck too stressed the whole of nature over individuals. Darwin stressed dominance and weakness and individuals in fierce competition.
 
Darwin and Chambers both believed that human and animal intelligence were different in degree only—yes, others fought for the idea of gradations and made the public aware of it; Darwin was no sort of lone knight—but Chambers drew a conclusion that Darwin never would. Because of our close relationship to animals, “We are bound to respect the rights of animals … even their feelings.” Darwin would never say that. “LIFE is everywhere ONE” is what evolution meant to Chambers and from this he concluded that this new view of nature, as he called it, “extends the principle of humanity to the meaner creatures also.” It is Chambers we have to thank for this kind of thinking, not Darwin. (Brevity forces me to omit how much Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck contributed to holistic thinking. Not to mention more obscure personalities who thought about what was sometimes called ‘network theory’, and all this before Charles Darwin put his two cents in. His two shillings?)
 
It is true that Darwin hated cruelty towards animals, but he was not prepared to go as far as Chambers did in his remarks. In 1875, Darwin testified before a Royal Commission investigating experimentation on live animals. At the end of his testimony, he made his feelings clear about experiments done without anesthesia if was not absolutely necessary to do so. But the whole purpose of his testimony was to plead with the Commission not to ban such experiments altogether. Darwin stated, “I am fully convinced that physiology can progress only by the aid of experiments on living animals.” It would be “a very great evil,” he said, to prohibit them altogether. In a letter to a professor that was later published in the London Times, he called the prohibition of these experiments a crime against mankind. Respecting the rights and feelings of animals was not the way he would have expressed himself.
 
So why all this mythologizing of Darwin? And why the misrepresentation of all that evolutionists accomplished before Darwin? Since this post is getting quite long, I will try to answer these questions in the next one.
 
© 2014 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

HOLISTIC THINKING

Every thinker is holistic in the sense that they want to explain the whole of life with one principle. Even someone who advocates pluralism wants to bring everything under that umbrella. Who isn’t a holistic thinker? You can count Darwin in on this too. But true holistic thinking is about making the whole more important than the parts, and that does not fit Darwin’s vision.

 
Decades before Darwin’s Origin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who deserves more credit for helping to establish evolution than he usually gets, gave what could be considered a classic statement of holism:
 
“Nature—that immense assemblage of various existences and bodies … an eternal cycle of movements and changes controlled by laws—an assemblage that is only immutable so long as it pleases her sublime Author to continue her existence—should be regarded as a whole made up of parts, with a purpose that is known to its Author alone, but at any rate not for the sole benefit of any single part.” He goes on to say that “each part has an interest which is contrary to that of the whole; and if it reasons, it finds that the whole is badly made.”
 
The reasoning of a selfish being (like man, though he does not explicitly say this) does not really understand the whole and will misconceive what benefits the big picture. Darwin’s system is not so much about the wholeness of nature as about those parts, each struggling for its own aims. The reasoning creature places all things in a hierarchy of groups (which the whole, if it reasons, would probably not do) and puts a particular emphasis on dominant groups beating the weaker in the struggle for life. Every organism falls under the rule of competition. Darwin’s entire thinking is about distinguishing between success and failure, and banishing the failed groups to non-existence.
 
It is easy to be a racist in Darwin’s scheme. Or, let’s say his thinking serves racism well because superior and inferior are constant categories. It is much harder to be a racist in holistic thinking because superiority, success, and dominance are not key elements.
 
I am not arguing that every system of thought necessarily has fixed consequences. One could be holistic and yet believe that inferior and superior groups are a part of life and that the inferior must suffer the consequences. And one could embrace the competitiveness of natural selection and still think that the stronger groups must care for the weaker and not abuse them. These are not impossibilities. But it does not usually work out this way.
 
Darwin took the competition embedded in natural selection as far as it could go—to the detriment of all those “lower races” that he anticipated would be exterminated by Anglo-Saxons. On a personal level, he was more compassionate than that, but compassion is not inherent in the design of Darwin’s theory. Even in Descent where he speaks of the patriotic and brave as sacrificing themselves for their country, it feels tacked on to the theory. In Origin, he told us that every individual is out for its own good and that natural selection will never produce a change in one organism for the exclusive purpose of benefitting another.
 
Whereas someone like Robert Chambers, who was as genuinely holistic as Lamarck, believed that man had only a place in the whole and that this place, even if exalted, did not give him any superior rights. Animals, for example, had rights and feelings too, which had to be respected by mankind—not something Darwin would ever say. So although holistic thinking is no guarantee of compassion and humanitarianism, it is far more likely to get you there.
 
© 2014 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

WALLACE, DARWIN, AND MALTHUS

When scholars give examples of the influences of Darwin’s work, especially as to the extremes his ideas could be taken to, they love to cite Alfred Wallace’s 1864 essay “The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of ‘Natural Selection’”.  Wallace states his belief that Darwin’s law of the struggle for life “leads to the inevitable extinction of all those low and mentally undeveloped populations” and this results from “the inevitable effects of an unequal mental and physical struggle” with Europeans who are superior. The lower races are doomed.

 
Of course, scholars could have quoted Darwin making the same point, but they rarely do. Darwin says the same thing as Wallace in The Descent of Man (1871) and he made this point even earlier in letters. Just before On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, Darwin informed Charles Lyell that he believes natural selection is continuing to work on the human intellect with “the less intellectual races being exterminated.” Three years later, he is telling another correspondent that when all the lower human races are gone, “in consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.” But many scholars would prefer to stick it to Wallace or other Darwinists rather than Darwin himself.
 
Wallace would grow to have doubts about applying natural selection to mankind in the same way it is applied to plants and animals, but even in that early paper, he revealed a tendency to be less severe than Darwin. He recognized that savages (“the rudest tribes”) are “social and sympathetic” and take care of their sick and feeble, so that “The action of natural selection is therefore checked.” Darwin objected to this positive assessment of savages as social and scribbled in the margin of his copy of this paper, “Does not act … only civilized man!” Already, despite all they had in common, Wallace was thinking a little differently about human beings.
 
In another paper, only a year after “The Origin of Human Races”, Wallace considered that competition with western civilization was detrimental to savages and that Europe should draw back from going full tilt at these native cultures. It is “unwise and unjust,” he said, to “expose them at once to the full tide of competition with our highly elaborated civilisation …” Such competition will lead to their extermination. He clearly did not think this was inevitable or something to be celebrated.
 
He was not the only one to see the dangers of competition to Aborigines. In 1837, the Rev. Montagu Hawtrey, a missionary in New Zealand, argued that even if we gave natives full equal rights with white people, we would still end up destroying them. “[W]here one of the parties is immeasurably inferior to the other, the only consequence of establishing the same rights and the same obligations for both will be to destroy the weaker under a show of justice.” Why does this happen? In a word: Competition. Britain, he says, has become a highly competitive society where “every individual is more or less in a state of competition with every other individual.” The natives will not be able to keep up. Unfettered competition will drive Aborigines to extinction. Hawtrey’s comments are a reminder that this social world of intense competition was Darwin’s cultural context.
 
Near the end of Darwin’s life, Wallace wrote to tell him that he was rethinking whether the Malthusian population principle (which had inspired both of them, as Wallace reminded him) can work with human beings in the same way as with the rest of nature. He said an American socialist had made this suggestion. Darwin responded to this letter, but not to this point. He did tell Wallace that he hoped he would not abandon science for politics. And applying the lens of competition to nature is not political?
 
What everyone, including Wallace and Darwin, had forgotten was that Malthus himself had pointed out that his population principle does not work out among human beings as it does with nature in the wild. It is purer, severer, more intense in the natural world than it is in human society. Also, Malthus did not like what he saw in colonialism, in its tendency to exterminate native peoples. He had no philosophy that the lower races must be doomed and wrote that “the right of exterminating, or driving [them] into a corner where they must starve … will be questioned in a moral view.” It was immoral and unthinkable for him.
 
I take note of these aspects of Malthus because some scholars blame him for the harshness in Darwin’s vision of natural selection. But Malthus did not make Darwin interpret the struggle for life as ruthlessly as he did for human beings. Malthus’ advice would have been to hold back from that. Humans are not like other animals who have no control over their situation. Darwin took Malthus, or his principle, to a place he did not want to go. Darwin did this all on his own without any instruction from Malthus.

Of the three, Darwin was the most extreme. Fatal competition was at the heart of Darwin’s system for both nature in general and for humanity. He could live with it if competition sometimes had devastating effects. Some form of the word appears about 70 times in Origin. It is not surprising that he would be unmoved by Wallace’s suggestion to reconsider how the pressure of limited food production affects human population. That pressure creates competition which was key to his thinking. It also just so happens that competition was a major component of British society. Wallace was capable of questioning his own basic assumptions. Darwin not so much.

 
We have three thinkers—Wallace, Darwin, and Malthus—all of whom saw the importance of the principle “more are yearly bred than can possibly survive” (as Darwin phrased it), yet each of them employed it in different ways with respect to humankind. How does one explain this? Different temperaments perhaps.
 
All three were British and Christian, but those are broad categories. It means they shared some cultural context. Wallace in addition was working class and had gone to work at an early age. That does not necessarily mean one would have more sympathy for the downtrodden and powerless, but in Wallace’s case, it did. Malthus has been interpreted as a mean-spirited economist, indifferent to the fate of the poor. But he was critical of Adam Smith for devoting too much attention to the wealthy and not enough to poor people. He believed there was little one could do for the poor, but little did not mean nothing.
 
Maybe it all does come down to temperament. Maybe there were adults who influenced then as children. Whatever it was, it is important to see how distinct each one was, even where they relied on a shared, crucial insight.
 
© 2014 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

SOMETIMES, IT IS RELATIVE

In previous posts, I have explained why Darwin’s racism cannot be defended on the grounds that everyone was racist in his time (as Stephen Gould once claimed) or that our standards of racism cannot be projected back into Darwin’s time (as Gould and Adam Gopnik have argued). Not everyone was a racist back then. Racism was a recognized phenomenon in the 19^th century and a sizable minority was opposed to it. I have presented some of this evidence before and won’t go over it again. Darwin did not even remain true to some of his own standards. He accused his friend Lyell of being indifferent  about the break-up of slave families, but he himself was equally indifferent to what happened to Aborigine families.

 
When it comes to the larger question of humanitarianism, then relative standards do come into play. On our current standards, we consider it inhumane to trivialize or denigrate other cultures. They did not feel that way in the 19^th century. Almost everyone believed that western civilization was superior. So-called savage cultures were detested by almost everyone, Darwin included. They assumed western civilization would bring benefits to everyone and any rational person should welcome this.

The best humanitarians of the time did not oppose colonialism itself, only the way it was being carried out. They assumed that western civilization was a good thing. They had no illusions that savage cultures would have to disappear, but not through murder, torture, heart-rending destruction of families. One humanitarian in 1841use the expression “the … Euthanasia of savage communities.” He considered this inevitable, as did Darwin. Nineteenth century humanitarians wanted to save lives, not cultures. They wanted to give the natives the best Europe had to offer and save them from the worst.
 
They assumed that “the encroaching tide of European population” was irresistible. Native cultures would have to give way. It was individuals devoid of any connection to their culture who might be saved. It was an idealized conception of individuals who would hopefully be enticed by an idealized conception of Europe. It was a kind of utopian dream. Many humanitarians dreamed of an amalgamation of races within European civilization. Culturally, it was assumed there could only be one race.
 
Darwin was in line with the idea that European culture was superior and would remain dominant. He remained committed to the colonial enterprise, but whereas others denounced the way colonialism was being carried out, he would not. In the end, it was all fine with him. One Australian newspaper produced a series of editorials called “The Way We Civilize” and detailed some of the atrocities. Darwin never joined in on this effort to denounce and reform the extreme violence which colonists perpetrated on indigenous peoples. This is not judging him by a later standard. There were more than enough humanitarians who did stand up for the rights of native people to make this a plausible standard for that time period.
 
Of course, it is also true that even this limited humanitarianism did not build into a popular movement in the same way that the anti-slavery cause became a popular issue. Darwin was very much in conformity with the majority which turned its back on the injustices committed against Aborigines. But opposing the worst that colonialism had to offer was not something that had to wait for later generations. It was very much in evidence among Darwin’s contemporaries.
 
Darwin preferred not to look too closely at what was happening in the colonial empire. We know he read books that reported some of the same cruelties that had been committed against slaves. In fact, some people argued that dispossessing native peoples turned them into de facto slaves, but Darwin paid no attention to this. If anything, he used his science to buttress colonialism, not criticize it. And that is a shame.
 
© 2013 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

THE IMPLICATIONS OF NOT PURSUING HUMANITARIANISM

One of the remarkable things about 19^th century British colonialism is how many officials forcefully stated their opposition to human rights abuses and made it the official position of the British government to promote humanitarianism. This ranged from officials in the Colonial office, like Lord Glenelg and James Stephen, to governors in colonies like New Zealand and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). They were very sensitive to criticisms made by active humanitarians, especially after the formation of the Aborigines Protection Society in 1836 but even before that. Some Christian missionaries made it their business to inform the government of what was going on and demand reform.

 
Less remarkable is that much of the government’s efforts were fruitless. They accomplished very little. The pressure from settlers to keep up the pace of colonialism and to protect them at all costs, even to the detriment of the natives, was relentless. It was ultimately the white people that the British government cared most about. And very few white people supported the noble intentions of government policies. In his 1852 history of Tasmania, John West wrote, “… the success of humane suggestions depended on the doubtful concurrence of ignorant cotters and wandering shepherds.” There was precious little success in bringing over the average white settler to respect the rights of aborigines.
 
But some of the failure was due to a failure of nerve on the part of officials and even some duplicity. A lot of lip service was given to the principle that whites and blacks would be punished equally when injustices were committed, but it was on the dark-skinned natives that the brunt of punishment fell. The government had a habit of winning over natives by telling them what they wanted to hear, with no real intention, it seems, to carry it out.
 
In the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi with the Maori in New Zealand, in the first Article, the chiefs ceded to the Queen of England absolute sovereignty. To the Maori, it was explained that this meant there would be one law, one justice for all, so that both natives and settlers would be living under one consistent system of law, but they would maintain possession of their own lands (which was stated in Article Two) and in Article Three, the Maori were even guaranteed the rights of British subjects. It turned out that the British government had something else in mind. Sovereignty to the British meant that the Queen would control all the land.
 
And when push came to shove, the Maori did not have all the rights they thought they had; they especially had an idea that their chiefs were somehow equal to the Queen in governance, but that wasn’t so. The goal for the British was to get all the land or as much of it as possible, and that is more or less what happened.

In Van Diemen’s Land, a board with four painted panels was authorized by Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur to be shown to the Tasmanian Aborigines. The first two panels depicted racial harmony and conciliation between the natives and the British military. The last two showed a black man killing a white man and being hung by the authorities, and a white man killing a black man and getting the same punishment.
 
One could see that it was just the thing that black natives would have liked to hear and that might help to convince them to peacefully surrender and accept European civilization. It did not work out that way. Some blacks were executed for murder, but no white man was ever executed or even put on trial for all the murders and massacres that occurred over the years. Even at the time, it was obvious that this is the way things were working out, as one colonial newspaper noted in 1836 that “the Government, to its shame be it recorded, in no one instance, on no single occasion, ever punished, or threatened to punish, the acknowledged murderers of the aboriginal inhabitants.”
 
Yes, there were good intentions galore and lots of correctly stated principles of justice to be observed. Somehow, it never got done. Maybe this was in part due to insincerity to begin with and maybe in part to pressure from the majority who wanted to take everything from natives and give nothing in return. The point is that there were never enough voices demanding that things be done differently. Voices were lacking. In the case of slavery, a popular movement built up. In 1788, there were 103 petitions with thousands of signatures demanding the end of the slave trade. By 1833, there were 5,000 petitions with 1.5 million signatures demanding the abolition of slavery.
 
Demands for the rights of aborigines never reached that level or anything like it. Notably lacking were also the voices of prominent people. The anti-slavery campaign was joined by so many celebrities of the time. It was a cause that everyone wanted to be associated with. Practically Charles Darwin’s whole family was anti-slavery. But his voice as well as that of many other scientists and literary figures were absent from the aborigines protection campaign. Their absence gave greater encouragement to the plenitude of voices that said Europeans had the right to dispossess natives because Europeans were more productive.

In his Beagle Diary, Darwin wrote, “It is impossible for an Englishman to behold these distant colonies, without a high pride and satisfaction. To hoist the British flag seems to draw as a certain consequence wealth, prosperity and civilization.” These words remained about the same in all published versions of the Diary. So many prominent figures would have agreed. Their lack of support for aborigines’ rights and their withdrawal from any consideration of justice for the natives is an important reason why injustice and a drifting towards genocide became the future legacy of Europe.
 
© 2013 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com