INEVITABLE EXTINCTION?

Throughout the 19th century, European scientists were obsessed with the impending extermination of native peoples around the world. It is startling how scientists were so eager to proclaim the extinction of the Tasmanians, and then “grieved” over the death of Trugannini, the so-called last Tasmanian, in 1876. It is all the more startling considering that it never happened. The myth of the total elimination of Tasmanians (which I was taken in by for a long time) is one that scientists helped to create. There are presently about one thousand descendants of the Tasmanian aborigines. I don’t know if any of them are “pure”. They may be mixed with Europeans and other Australian aborigines, but Tasmanians have survived and inhabited the land in one way or another.

Extinction was something European scientists believed in, hoped for, relished, and lamented. There was more wish fulfillment in it than objective analysis. Patrick Brantlinger mentions a number of reasons why the myth became prevalent, including pessimism over the idea that aborigines could be improved and the usefulness of the myth in reinforcing the belief that scientists were right about aborigine inferiority and about other peoples soon becoming extinct. One case of extinction meant more were coming. The myth would be particularly useful a century later when the (white) Tasmanian government denied special rights to Tasmanians because they don’t exist.

As for that pessimism, Darwin reflected it as well as some impatience, when he wrote in his Notebook D 111, around September 1838, “How long will the wretched inhabitants of NW. Australia, go on blinking their eyes. without extermination, & change of structure.” I believe that last conjunction should be ‘or’. Darwin was saying that it is not natural for any species or race to live long in misery, so that it either will improve in structure or go extinct. As he says earlier in the same Notebook at 49, on August 27, “animals must tend to improve;” yet fish, he says, are same or lower, and so he adds “for a very old variety will be harder to vary, & therefore more apt to be extinguished.—???”)

Darwin once pointed out that there was a high proportion of speculation to facts in his grandfather’s work. He never noticed, however, that he himself was doing the same thing with the extinction of human beings. That betokens an effort to make it true rather than an objective fact that was discovered and believed. Nor was Darwin interested in the myriad ways a people employ to survive. I once heard Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer say in a lecture that, for the Jewish people, it is a long way from being sick to dying. For 19^th century scientists, there was no distinction. They fantasized their way from one to the other.                    

© 2012 Leon Zitzer
luckyzee@earthlink.net

SOME ONGOING HISTORICAL INJUSTICES

The key word above is some. If I attempted to discuss all historical injustices, or only a majority of them, this post would take up the whole Internet and beyond. So I am just going to stick to a couple of what might be called personal injustices which could easily be rectified but have never been and probably never will be.

William Tyndale. Undeniably a linguistic genius. He translated all of the New Testament and a good part of the Hebrew scriptures from their original languages (instead of the Latin version) into English. The King James NT is mostly a takeover of his work. Estimates of 83% to 90% have been given for how much of the King James is Tyndale. Yet he has never acquired the credit he is due, though from time to time you might come across a scholar who acknowledges his accomplishment. The majority of scholars, while giving lip service to his achievement, spend more time praising the King James. Oddly, when they quote verses of the King James they are fond of, it is usually pure Tyndale, a fact they conveniently omit.
 
Think what that is like. Imagine if someone, say, named Johnson, took Shakespeare’s plays, made changes to about 10% of the dialogue, put his own name on it, and ever after, when people quote from these plays, they cite Johnson as the source. It would be an outrage. In fact, it would be so outrageous, it would never happen. But this is exactly what has happened to Tyndale. For 400 years and it shows no signs of ending. Why?
 
Or consider Robert Chambers, author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). Fifteen years before Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Chambers proved a theory of evolution, as it is called now, but known as development in his time, of species descending from previous species. He proved it is more probable than the theory of independent or special creation (each species being created separately and apart from each other). He too never gets credit. Why is it that when Darwin assembles evidence A, B, C, D, E, it counts as proof, but when Chambers offered the same evidence to prove the greater probability of common descent, it gets ignored?
 
Scholars will argue that Chambers was not the diligent, thorough scientist that Darwin was. There is a little bit of truth to that, but only a little. Chambers is too often unfairly dismissed as an amateur. The greater truth is that Chambers saw what all the other professional scientists of the time failed to see: That facts like the fossil record, commonality of structures (like the resemblance between bones in the wing of a bat and the bones in a human hand), similarities in embryos of very different adult animals, immense time making slow, gradual changes a possibility, and more, all pointed to the development and transmutation of species from common ancestors. So who was the real amateur? Along the way, Chambers made some silly mistakes, but so did Darwin. One is forgiven, the other not. Why?
 
I am not claiming that Chambers’ priority means he influenced Darwin. Darwin made his essential case in two early essays (1842 and 1844) that were never published in his lifetime and were completed before Vestiges appeared. This was a case of two great minds thinking alike. Yet one has been virtually erased from history. Why?
 
My third case is probably the most severe travesty—a good man being labeled evil. The Reverend John Philip was a Christian missionary in South Africa in the early 19^th century. He made it his business to expose the oppression of colonialism and the attempted extermination of natives. I learned about him from Patrick Brantlinger’s Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930 (2003; see 77-80). Philip was accused of lying, fanaticism, and holding back the progress of prosperity and civilization. The startling thing is not just that British and Boer settlers hated him, but that his reputation was so blackened that it lasted at least to the 1960s. Very much as was done to Judas, John Philip’s name became a synonym for wickedness, and also as in the case of Judas, it was entirely undeserved. South African schoolchildren were indoctrinated into this false legend (see Brantlinger, 209 n.13). Hopefully, it has changed by now, but the long-lasting vicious reaction to him was a shock to read about. Why did it happen?
 
I am sure that in all three cases, there are specific reasons for the ongoing injustice unique to that case. It would be interesting to analyze them all. For example, in the case of Chambers, his approach to evolution was more holistic, as it might be called today. He did not wed evolution to capitalism and imperialism as Darwin did. You could say Chambers was out of touch with the zeitgeist of his day. Chambers believed very much in the interconnectedness of all things, so that any injustice committed by one part would come back to bite that part in the ass. That is not what the authorities wanted to hear.
 
If I had to pick one reason that might be common to all three, I would say that all of them were perceived to be a threat to the powers that be. Perhaps not so ironically, it was Tyndale who coined the expression ‘the powers that be’ in his translation of Romans 13:1. It has since been dropped in more recent translations like the RSV and NRSV. (The King James followed Tyndale to a T, as it usually did; it was from the King James that Tyndale’s language made it into the common parlance.) More ironic is that Paul was speaking of giving respect to these powers because they were appointed by God, yet the term came to connote something evil and devious.
 
But it was not only the powers of their time that deemed these people should be stricken from the record. The succeeding powers did not let up. There is this commitment to making sure that the injustices should be continued. That is what is so hard to take. They cannot be corrected because to do so would be to admit that a conspiracy of power takes place over time. We cannot admit that we have ever made a mistake, not a serious one. If we ever admit one profound error, our whole system would fall apart. We have to protect future authorities. We owe them a continuation of power more than we owe Tyndale or Chambers or Philip justice. Authorities stand packed together and that line must be protected rather than achieving justice. This may not be the profoundest conclusion one can get out of this. This is just my first crack at it. I consider this a draft for further reflections.
 
© Leon Zitzer 2012
luckyzee@earthlink.net

VIOLENCE WITHOUT WEAPONS

Ah, the west. What can be said about western civilization that hasn’t been said already? It’s not that I aim to be critical. I just want to understand. It’s like Pascal said about man and the universe. The universe may crush man, but the universe doesn’t really know what it is doing, while man at least understands what is happening and in that one small way vaults himself above the universe (which may or may not have been Pascal’s final point). I just want to be clear before I’m crushed.

The difference in this case is that western civilization is not the universe. It’s run by men and women, mostly men. It often would like to claim that it is unconscious of what it is doing and not really intending certain consequences, but who are they kidding? Themselves, for the most part. The leaders of a culture are more conscious of what they are doing than they are willing to admit. If any of us get crushed, it won’t be by an unknowing civilization.
 
It might seem odd, but we do not have the same Pascal advantage over a culture that we have over the immense universe. I want to understand western civilization, but it already understands better than I what it is doing. The only thing anyone can hope to gain is to be able to say, “I know, finally I know, and you the culture know what I know, and now I get to fully realize what you tried to keep me ignorant of.” Combating ignorance is the only tiny victory you can gain in a world of superior forces. It’s not much at all, but maybe God hears.
 
I am not going to reduce western civilization to one thing. I don’t believe any culture has a single essence or one overall quality that captures it perfectly and completely. All cultures have multiple threads running through it. The Bible, for example, has not an essence. It has many themes. Western civilization is no different.
 
One thing about western civilization I never noticed until very recently. It almost seems as if the goal of our culture has been to learn to be more and more effectively violent but without the use of guns or other weapons. By ‘violence’, I mean the exertion of overwhelming force which we in the west have learned can be done without resorting to bloodshed. We get what we want — utter domination — and keep our hands clean.
 
Suppose a government or a political party does not want certain kinds of people to vote. They could send men with rifles to the polling places and these men will turn away the unwanted voters. A step down from that would be to send the same men in the middle of the night to ride through the targeted neighborhoods, warning people not to go to the polls if they know what’s good for them. But why do any of this if you can get the same result without the ugly business of threatening death and destruction?
 
Just a short while back, in Pennsylvania, they passed a law requiring voters to have ID with them when they come to cast their ballot. I don’t know all the details (like whether the ID will have to have a photo and address). (In NY, once you are registered, the only verification they use is your signature which should match what they have on record.) Many poor people who get social services of some kind will likely have some type of ID, but I don’t know if that ID will meet the requirements of the PA law. The working poor may have no ID at all as many low-paying jobs provide none. Suffice it to say that this law seems designed to knock out a lot of low income voters. And all without guns.
 
Many years ago in a county in some state somewhere, another brilliant strategy was used to undo the right to vote. The county councilors (about nine?) were all white. Every year, they divided the county revenues equally among them and each used his portion to improve his neighborhood. The black community never got anything. After the civil rights laws were passed, one black man was finally voted onto the council. So now the black neighborhood would finally get something, right? Wrong! They changed the rules of the game. Instead of each councilor getting a share of the pot, they kept all the funds in one huge pot, and the council voted on how to distribute it. Since it was eight to one, the black community once again got nothing.
 
The case was litigated as a violation of the voting rights act on the premise that when you vote, you are voting for two things: 1) a certain individual, and 2) to put that person into an office with specific powers. Since the powers of the office were changed in this case, the right to vote had been violated. The Supreme Court did not buy that argument and once again a subtle form of violence triumphed. I don’t have updated information on this case or what is happening in PA, but still, these examples serve to illustrate the ways in which domination can be achieved without overt violence. Who said this isn’t a beautiful world?
 
So many are the ways you can do violence to people. Telling lies about their history is a major one. You might even get them to cooperate in spreading these lies about their own culture. This has been a major technique used against Jews and other minorities. It is my impression that most Jews have a low opinion of ancient Jewish culture (believing it to have been excessively tribal and ritualistic) and even believe that ancient Jewish leaders conspired against Jesus. It forms a dark spot on Jewish self-consciousness. Once a people think badly of themselves due to lies about their culture, you can do almost anything you want to them.
 
That brings me round to Darwin and the theory of evolution. How so, you ask? Funny you should ask ne that because I was wondering how I’m going to pull this off. Let’s go back to the Bible for a moment. Torah, the Hebrew scriptures. It has many threads, as I said. One is a concern for justice, for the outsider, for the weak, for the unfittest. But that bumps up against a lot of violence. Theologians (who with some exceptions know less about the Bible than any group on earth) are fond of telling us that the God of the Hebrews was a violent deity.
 
I don’t see it that way. What I see is that violence was a very real part of their world. They did not want to erase it and pretend all was rosy. How to make sense of it, account for it, respond to it, reconcile it or not with their fuller experience of the world and God.
 
Darwin was faced with a similar problem. There is violence in the world and plenty of it. Does it add up to any kind of sense? Is it just random? Is human violence on the same order as violence in the larger world of nature or does it have its own sources and meaning? Darwin and all evolutionists are no different from the writers of Torah. They are not better, wiser, more sophisticated. They are just human beings like those ancient human beings trying to figure things out. Both are worth listening to. Both have answers worth paying attention to, even if you disagree with their particular answer.
 
Here’s another biblical thread: These Torah people, they hated power and abuse of power. They hated violence, though they had to stomach it. You shall make no graven image. This is often interpreted as opposition or resistance to idolatry. There’s more to it, I believe. I think they saw images as symbols of power and wanted to undermine, in any way they could, power and the violence that goes along with it. Elsewhere, God says to Moses, No man shall see my face and live (Ex 33:20; I’ve rephrased it just slightly). Even God shall not be a source of power. No one sees him, no one owns him, no one controls him. We shall not be governed by kings, priests, or God, and especially by anyone who claims to have special access to God.
 
How then shall we live? We shall be governed by a Constitution (the Torah) and rational debate over its meaning. It will be as democratic a process as possible. There will be no hereditary class of interpreters. Merit will determine who joins in on the debate.
 
The writers of Torah tried to create a society that would be conscious and self-conscious about the problems of power and how it imposes itself. Get a handle on power and the desire for power in yourself, and you can get a handle on violence, both the unsubtle and subtle kind. It is probably impossible to entirely eliminate abuse of power from any society. The antidote to that is to maintain a consciousness of what it means to grab for power. That’s what the authors of Torah tried to do and pass on to their descendants, the Pharisees and rabbis, who picked up on this inheritance pretty well.
 
And that’s where western science has singularly failed and where it could, if it had a mind to, learn a great lesson. These ancient Jews thought a lot about power and tried to create a system into which they built this concern for what might go wrong. They made questioning power—the power of authorities, including the learned people of society—part of the system. Western civilization has not done the same. We prefer to be unconscious about power and invisible about violence. I say ‘we’, but I’m thinking primarily about scientists who assume they are always objective. They never question whether science too is greedy for power.
 
We say we want to understand the world, nature, other peoples, but is our presumed knowledge sometimes a way of committing violence? Many native peoples object to anthropology. Why? Because they are against knowledge? No. Because in their experience anthropology is often used to control them and misrepresent their heritage. It is almost impossible for human beings to be objective in the study of other human beings. Darwin is a good example of how easy it is to deceive ourselves about that.
 
In Origin of Species, Darwin is pretty blunt describing the violence in nature. He does not try to soften it or make it look pretty. He uses some very strong metaphorical language—beat, dominate, battle, and much more. But he resorts to euphemisms in The Descent of Man when he talks about Europeans and savages. I’ll save the details for my book on Darwin. He doesn’t mind telling us that savages make war on other savages, but he has a lot of difficulty saying the same for Europeans and savages.
 
Rather famously, in fact, he regards the disappearance of natives as something of a mystery. “Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal,” he wrote in his Beagle journal (The Voyage of the Beagle, 375; a few pages into Chapter 19, if you have an edition with different pagination). He believes there is “some more mysterious agency” in addition to some obvious causes of destruction. In a letter to his sister Caroline (May 19-June 16, 1837), he writes, “I am very much inclined to suspect that there is some such mysterious law connected with the destruction of the Aborigines in both Americas.”
 
This is admittedly early in his career. By the time of Descent, he sees some causes (shrouded in euphemism), but he never emphasizes that there was simply a lot of killing or that dispossessing the natives of their land and culture was an act of silent violence. He does his best to make it invisible. There is an irony here. Darwin is famous for supposedly making man a part of nature. But he is really a part of an older tradition in western culture of setting man apart. He seeks to make violence as visible as possible in the natural world, while making it invisible in civilization. Not that Darwin could, or even desired to, get rid of it altogether. Perhaps I should say he tried to make it less visible. Whereas the writers of Torah sought to make human violence palpable and to find a cure.
 
Woody Guthrie said it best: Some people will rob you with a gun, some with a fountain pen. Today it would be a computer. They might even back it up with science.
 
© Leon Zitzer 2012
luckyzee@earthlink.net

THE FALSE CLAIMS OF THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT

I suppose I should spend a few words on the difference between what I am doing and what right-wing Christians are saying about Charles Darwin. I cannot lay claim to any great amount of knowledge of the program of conservative Christians. I’ve looked at one book by one such author on Darwin and if I never read another, it will be too soon for me. The author’s goal is not to accurately understand the racism in Darwin’s work, but to make him look as ugly and as defective as possible—and by the usual foul means, such as quoting out of context, half-quoting, and ignoring significant information.

‘Ugly’ is the key word. The author gives us a distorted Darwin, a fun-house image of him, making him look like a creep. It seems to be part of the conservative agenda to defeat the theory of evolution by discrediting Darwin as a scientist and as a human being. There is a legitimate case to be made to establish Darwin’s racism (which I outlined in my post for May, two posts below this one), but if this book is any indication, conservative Christians are not making it. They are only interested in sullying him.

I just want to go through a few of the things this particular author does. He is Jerry Bergman and his book is The Dark Side of Charles Darwin.

Before he gets to his chapter on racism, Bergman makes various false charges against Darwin: he was a sadist, disloyal to his colleagues, mentally ill, and more. When I say this is an ugly book, I kid you not. I want to focus on the messed up case he presents on racism, but first, I need to say a few things about that sadism charge. He is talking about the pleasure Darwin took in his early years in hunting and killing animals. Darwin was very honest about it in his Autobiography. He gradually gave it up in his early twenties while on the Beagle voyage and replaced it with a love of observation and collecting natural facts.

Bergman acknowledges that Darwin eventually abandoned the killing life, but glosses over it in a few sentences (at the end of Chapter 7). Instead, he relishes every admission Darwin made about his boyhood passion. What Bergman does not discuss is that at the same time that Darwin was indulging his fondness for destroying animals, he was also an orthodox Christian believer. He gradually gave up both his violent tendencies and his religious beliefs. Is that a coincidence? Is there a connection here? For the moment, I would hesitate to make that argument, as it is too speculative. But I could see someone arguing that the arrogance of religious people and the arrogance of violence go together. It was not until Darwin became more of a scientist that he lost his killing inclination. And it wasn’t institutional religion that saved him.

A related point:  In 1865, Alfred Wallace published an essay “How to Civilize Savages” (perhaps ironically titled) near the end of which he detailed some of the abuses Europeans were committing against natives. One friar in Brazil told him that he saved the government the expense of a war with the Indians by placing clothing infected with smallpox among the Indians. In the same essay, Wallace was critical of other Christian missionary efforts and advocated the teaching of morality without religious dogma attached to it.

I mention this because the moral failures and harm caused by Christian missionaries had been known for a long time. In fact, about thirty years earlier, Christian missionaries had been severely criticized for being destructive of native cultures, but Darwin leapt to defend them. It was his first public piece of writing, co-authored with Captain Robert FitzRoy of the Beagle, and printed in a South African Christian newspaper. They defended the job missionaries were doing and adopted the usual attitude of the superiority of Christian values to that of savages who were much inferior. One might say that Darwin’s first public expression of racism was of the cultural kind and not biological. Bergman is of course silent about all this.

Now I can get to Bergman’s chapter on racism. In the first three pages, he uses the terms ‘racist’ or ‘racism’ 15 times (including chapter and section headings); 9 times on the first page alone! It is as if he wanted to browbeat the reader with the notion that Darwin was a racist. Constant repetition of a charge does not make it true. If you have the evidence, let that evidence speak for itself. Bergman is not content to do this. He has to bully his readers into believing his charges.

What is the first piece of evidence he presents? It is a letter (Nov. 9, 1836) Darwin wrote to his sister Caroline expressing his concern that their brother, Erasmus, might marry a certain woman who would work him very hard and turn him into her “nigger”. Bergman leaves out a couple of things. Darwin was reporting his brother’s perception of the matter (“He begins to perceive …”) and he introduces that ugly word by saying “(to use his own expression)”, that is, his brother’s expression. It was not the way Darwin would prefer to put it. He is a little bit uncomfortable with the word, maybe not too much, but a little. Bergman hides this from his readers so that they will think this is Darwin’s usual way of speaking.

Bergman wants to arrogate to Christianity the belief that all humans are descended from a common ancestor (on 211 in his book). He later says that “Darwin’s works … supported the polygenist view of human origins …” (225), which was the view that the human races were separate species descended from different sources. That is completely false. One of the points of Darwin’s theory was that all humans have a common ancestor. He was not the first scientist to make this point. Before him, Robert Chambers also argued that all humans are descended from one stock. In The Descent of Man, Darwin expressed the hope that as a result of the theory of evolution, “the dispute between the monogenists and the polygenists will die a silent and unobserved death” (Descent, 210; I am using the Moore and Desmond edition).

Perhaps the worst thing Bergman does is to misrepresent Darwin’s belief about the intelligence of savages (to use the popular terminology of 19^th century Europeans) and that of animals. Bergman mangles some quotations to make it appear that Darwin believed savages were only slightly more intelligent than animals. He takes one quote out of context (on 222 in his book) from Descent (86) to hint that for Darwin there is no fundamental difference between savages and higher animals in their mental faculties. Then (on 228 in his book) he openly states Darwin agreed with the conclusion that the brains of savages are only a little above that of many animals. Without going into all the details, what he does is to misquote Alfred Wallace and then misattribute the misquotation to Darwin and make a mess out of what both Wallace and Darwin believed.

Darwin was consistent in stating that the intelligence of the lowest savages was far above that of the highest apes. In fact, if you look on the prior page in Descent (85), Darwin says, “… the difference in this respect [mental power] is enormous, even if we compare the mind of one of the lowest savages … with that of the most highly organised ape.” He also says the same in some of his letters. What is true about Darwin is that he sometimes unattractively compared savages and animals and could make it seem that savages were lower than animals. He was expressing his disgust with what he thought was the culture of natives (often taking his ideas from the reports of others). This was cultural racism, not biological racism, though this too can be found in Darwin’s work. Cultural racism (and all racism, even the biological kind, is essentially cultural) is not something Bergman wants to discuss because it would raise the question of how much Christianity contributed to this.

Bergman does present some authentic evidence for Darwin’s opinions of savages, their inferiority and eventual extermination. But he misses a lot more. Why would he fail to make the best case that could be made? Because the full case would explore Darwin’s cultural and biological racism (if you think one should even make such a distinction) and discuss the relationship between scientific and religious racism. That is not something right-wing Christians want to get into. Understanding racism is not their goal.

Interestingly, Darwinists, in their attempts to make Darwin look better than he was, use some of the same methods Bergman uses—quoting out of context, half-quoting, ignoring some important issues. Conservative Christians and Darwinists well deserve each other. You won’t get an accurate and fair picture of Darwin from either group.

This post turned out to be longer than I had planned. I think that’s because I do not intend to return to the subject of the unfair tactics of the right-wing again, so I wanted to get it completely off my chest now.

Copyright 2012 Leon Zitzer
luckyzee@earthlink.net

OBJECTIONS

I will be fairly brief in this post. A full explication with all the evidence awaits my book. There are three main objections raised against the possibility that Darwin incorporated a fair amount of prejudice into his science of man: 1) racism is an anachronism for Darwin’s time; 2) Darwin’s theories have nothing to do with races and groups; he was concerned only with individuals; and 3) to the degree that there is any prejudice in Darwin’s work, it smacks of paternalism rather than racism.

There is virtually no evidence to support any of these arguments and there is more than enough evidence to demonstrate the opposite of each of these contentions. Racism is certainly not an anachronism for the 19^th century. There some anti-racists in Darwin's time, and if there were anti-racists, there must have been racism. They were not opposed to a chimera. Alfred R. Wallace would be one notable example of an anti-racist.

As for groups, the whole point of Darwin’s theory was to explain how species originated, not individuals. The title of his book tells us it was about The Origin of Species, not the unreality of species. And how do new species come into existence? The rest of the title tells us: By Means of Natural Selection. The sub-title adds that this is also about the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The idea that natural selection was intended to explain only the development of individuals is nonsense. Throughout Origin, Darwin returns again and again to this main theme: Natural selection gives us both the birth and extinction of species. Those species or races that survive are superior.

As for paternalism, this is too weak a characterization of Darwin’s actual opinions. It was mainly Stephen Gould who argued that Darwin was a paternalist, not a racist. In my book, I will rely on Gould’s distinction between racism and paternalism to establish that racism is a more accurate designation for Darwin's views.

All these objections are easily dispatched. There is a fourth objection which is even easier to get rid of. Gould does a good job, so I don’t need to devote much attention to it. Gould writes, “The common (and false) impression of Darwin’s egalitarianism arises largely from selective quotation. Darwin was strongly attracted to certain peoples often despised by Europeans, and some later writers have falsely extrapolated to a presumed general attitude” (The Mismeasure of Man, 417). Gould goes on to quote Darwin’s favorable impressions of African slaves and his low opinion of Fuegians.

Selective quotation is a problem throughout Darwinian scholarship. Gould himself, unfortunately, is not averse to making some evidence about Darwin disappear—for himself and not just for his readers. We get half the picture from so many scholars. The full picture reveals that the above objections turn out to be quite specious.

The real objection to the allegation that there is any racism in Darwin’s work is two-fold: 1) an a priori conviction that Darwin is such a great scientist and a humanitarian representative of the best that materialism or secularism has to offer that it is (a priori) impossible that he was a racist; and 2) we will just erase any evidence to the contrary. It is essentially an emotional argument. The troubling part is that emotions are used to suppress evidence. There is a concomitant implication that mainstream science can commit any errors it wants to and never be called to account because it controls what evidence will be admitted into the discussion. When I speak of erasing evidence, I of course do not mean a literal erasure, but an erasing from our consciousness. It’s there, but no one wants to see it.

Copyright 2012 L. Zitzer
email: luckyzee@earthlink.net

IN A NUTSHELL

Darwin's racism is so simple and obvious, it can easily be explained without beating around the bush. Natural selection acts not only on corporeal structures, as Darwin would put it, but on the mental faculties as well. There is a continuum of intelligence from the lowest animals up through man. Darwin was not the first to make this point. Notably, before Darwin, Robert Chambers in 1844 in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation also saw gradations of intelligence from animals to mankind. We are bound up, said Chambers, "by an identity in the character of our mental organization with the lower animals ..." Man is different in degree, not in kind.

Are all human beings on the same level of intelligence and moral or social values? Darwin didn't think so. He believed the savage races were less intelligent and less moral than Europeans, and, as a direct result of this, they would soon become extinct. That's what happens to inferior groups. He used 'extinct' and 'exterminated' interchangeably.

Darwin was not vicious about it. He did not exult in the white man's superiority (actually, there is one slight exception to that in one of his letters). He did not use nasty epithets to describe savages, though he made his revulsion at their way of life quite plain. He simply used, or misused, his science to claim they were inferior in the struggle for survival. Their extermination was inevitable and he expressed no qualms about it. It cannot be stressed enough that Darwin was convinced this extinction was the result of a biological process, namely, natural selection, and not injustice.

Darwin did believe all human beings had a lot in common (like emotions) and he thought many differences were trivial (like skin color and hair texture). But intelligence was not a trivial difference. It had serious consequences.

It also has to be remembered that even though Darwin believed we were all evolved or descended from a common ancestor, this did not confer any kind of equality in his view. Natural selection may proceed from shared origins, but it goes in the direction of incredible diversity. Apes and human beings were related too, but Darwin in no way believed they had the same degree of intelligence (he thought apes would become extinct too).

It's true that Darwin was opposed to slavery—but not because he thought all men were equal. He opposed it because it was cruel and he hated all forms of cruelty. Wasn't colonialism also cruel? Yes, but here he was prepared to look the other way. He seems to have accepted imperialist cruelties the way he accepted the many harsher aspects of nature (like the wasp paralyzing its prey so that it could be used as live food for the wasp larvae).

There are two extremely puzzling things about Darwin: 1) how he could tolerate certain kinds of human cruelty, but not others, and 2) how he could use science to sanction the extermination of entire peoples, savage or not.

There is a lot more than can be said about all these details, but that's the story in a nutshell.

Copyright 2012 L. Zitzer

TAKING A CHANCE, OR NOT

In May, I am going to put up a post giving a very brief explanation of Darwin's racism.  I will try to keep my posts fairly short in the future.  (The one below this on survival of the fittest is long, but it's interesting.)

In the meantime, I just want to mention that I discuss Darwin a bit in the current April post on my other blog on the historical, Jewish Jesus:  http://historicaljesusghost.blogspot.com  I give a brief statement on why it is wrong to ascribe chance to Darwin as one of his beliefs.  The comparison to what New Testament scholars do is that in both fields, ideology trumps the actual evidence.  I kind of believe that to rescue the real people who once lived in history from the clutches of academic ideology might qualify as a noble task.  But even if it doesn't, I'm going to do it anyway.