ATHEISTS AND MYTH-MAKING

Back in July 2012, I put up a post about some of the false claims the Christian right makes about Darwin. It seems only fair that I give equal time to some of the nonsense coming from atheists.

 
One of the things I learned from Thomas Holt’s beautifully detailed The Problem of Freedom (on emancipation and its aftermath in Jamaica) is that we have never really left the 19^th century. We are still living in that long century, as it has been called. Our obsession with so many ideas about life and ourselves comes from that era: Technology is the key to improving our lives, we are the end product of civilization, continual progress is ours for the asking, our civilization is more humanitarian than any other, the free market will never fail to improve our lives, the desire for luxuries is the engine of progress (this idea is actually older than the 19^th century), people can learn to acquire this desire, if they don’t already have it, and more. All were there well over a century ago from our present. We are just living out their dream.
 
I will go back even further. I don’t think we are all that superior to ancient peoples. We like to think that the ancients were prone to inventing gods and myths, and were far less intelligent than us. We are not really any different. We often hold ideologies to be superior to any intelligent solution of a problem. We love mythmaking and we have no compunctions about playing fast and loose with the evidence to get there. Historical study of Charles Darwin is a case in point.
 
There of course was a real, historical Darwin, but scholars have manipulated the evidence to create a myth. The Darwin so many people believe in is quite a fiction.
 
I recently made some comments on an atheist website that Darwinists have deified him. I got a lot of flak for that. My main objection is that one cannot deify a man who was so cavalier about the extermination of native peoples. When I mentioned his racism, they were quick to deny it. When I presented just a little bit of evidence, they said, So what? I later realized that there is a fascinating bit of history that tends to confirm my point about the deification of Charles Darwin (which he would have hated, by the way; I don’t lay his glorification at his feet; this is strictly the fault of later academics).
 
Before it was known as the theory of evolution, it was known as the theory of development or the development hypothesis. It went by other names too (like the transmutation of species), but development was the most popular. Benjamin Disraeli wrote a hilarious satire of it which served as a scene in his 1847 novel Tancred. The satire was based on the theory as expounded by Robert Chambers, but it also reads like a send-up of Origin of Species a dozen years before it was published. Disraeli may not have been very fair, but it is incredibly funny all the same.
 
One of the interesting things about this theory in its early days is that atheists and atheist publications did a lot to promote the development hypothesis. No one did as much as Chambers (who was not an atheist), with the publication of Vestiges (1844), but atheists were instrumental in getting everyone used to the idea that species have developed from a common ancestor (or ancestors) and that this was a sensible suggestion.
 
Emma Martin, an atheist and active feminist, distributed 4,000 copies of her pamphlet First Conversation on the Being of a God just a few months before Chambers’ book appeared. Part of it argued for the development of species. Her friend Henry Hetherington wrote an article a couple of years earlier affirming the validity of the development of species, noting that the only mystery was how it happens. Atheists were interested in the theory because it meant you could explain life on earth without reference to God and, not incidentally, undermine the authority of religious teachers and clerics.
 
Actually, this was not so much about God as it was about challenging religious authorities’ control of society. It was about breaking free of the prison of theology and the claim of clerics to speak for God. One might say that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Today the prison is academic ideology and it takes just as much effort to challenge it as any old-time theology.
 
By the time Origin was published in 1859, probably a majority of people (except for the die-hard professional scientists) believed evolution was plausible. Darwin did not start a revolution, he joined one in progress, as I have said a number of times in my work.
 
Since atheists were instrumental in bringing this about, you would think that atheists today would celebrate this. But as far as I can tell (and I am no expert on atheism), atheists, like many academics, have erased this part of history. Why would they do that? Why would atheists ignore an accomplishment in their own history that they have every right to be proud of? One obvious answer is that they need to glorify Darwin as a unique revolutionary who had no equals—a lone, saintly hero battling reactionary forces. In short, a god. A god cannot have any competition.
 
This may not be the only reason for the peculiar attitude atheists have towards their own past, but I think it does demonstrate a tendency to glamorize Darwin beyond human dimensions. It is an intriguing irony that atheists would delete some important predecessors for the sake of making one man larger than life. It also illustrates the dangers of modern mythmaking. When the desire to create myths is so strong that it can cause people to alter and suppress parts of their own story, it is a force to be reckoned with. The drive to mythologize is alive and well in the 21^st century, even among people who consider themselves perfect rationalists.
 
There is a lesson in this for all of us: Good science and scholarship require constant vigilance. They are never a fait accompli. Even an atheist can become a reactionary force.
 
© 2013 Leon Zitzer
luckyzee@earthlink.net

ONE MORE TIME

I have been belaboring this point for the last few posts:  Racism certainly existed in the 19^th century and is not an anachronistic idea to describe some of the conflicts of that time. I think most people know this. I would think it is pretty obvious. The only reason I am going over it again is that some Darwin scholars seemed very concerned to assert anachronism as a defense against this criticism of Darwin. Sometimes it seems like every sane person in the world realizes that racism was a serious problem back then and only Darwin scholars don’t see it.

 
However, the very denial of the existence of racism forces one to look for specific evidence for it, and while I knew the evidence would be there, I myself am pretty shocked to see just how much evidence there is for this. A good place to look is at the British experience with slavery and its abolition, particularly in the West Indies and especially in Jamaica.

Just as a little background to this:  Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in the colonies in 1833. The latter went into effect in August 1834 which began a period of apprenticeship leading to full emancipation in 1838. But before 1833, you should know that there had long been a number of free coloreds and blacks (they made a lot of color distinctions at that time). The free coloreds were gradually growing in numbers and wealth, and were fighting for equal rights, as well as better conditions for the slaves, before emancipation came along. Out of my rough memory of this, I believe they achieved equal rights around 1830 or 1832. At least in theory they had obtained equality. The first colored members were elected to the Jamaican House of Assembly shortly thereafter, but they would always be a minority, even though the black population outnumbered the white by an enormous amount.
 
The other major piece of this history to note here is that in 1865 the very frustrated ex-slaves in Jamaica erupted in a riot or insurrection known as the Morant Bay Rebellion. It was brutally suppressed by Governor Edward Eyre who declared martial law for a month. Further controversy ensued when some people tried to have Eyre and a couple of military officers tried for murder. The group seeking this prosecution was the Jamaica Committee, formed around January 1866. Taking the opposite position was the Eyre Defence Committee.
 
That may be a little more background than necessary, but now to get to the point. In the last post, I mentioned Governor Sligo, governor of Jamaica from 1834 to 1836, who used an expression, ‘complexional distinctions.’ Some officials in the Colonial Office, especially Lord Elgin, were very concerned to remove all such distinctions from the laws of the colonies in the West Indies because they wanted emancipation to succeed. They tried, but the racism of the white planters proved to be too strong.
 
In 1823, Richard Hill, one of the colored leaders, used this term for what we would call a racist:  ‘complexional misanthrope.’ It shows you how lively language can be and can capture things more truly when you lack official terminology. Godwin Smith, a professor of history at Oxford, and a supporter of the North in the American Civil War, referred to ‘the difference of colour and the physical antipathy’ which would be obstacles to creating social fusion and political equality.
 
At the end of July 1866, in a Parliamentary debate over the question of censuring Eyre and the officers who had committed atrocities, W.E. Forster, former Under-Secretary for the Colonies, wondered whether this would have happened if the victims had been white (possibly the answer to that would have been yes if the whites in question had been Irish). He spotted the problem as being a feeling of contempt for those regarded as an inferior race. There should be one code of morality for black and white. In 1868, a liberal weekly, the Spectator, reached a similar conclusion when all attempts at prosecuting Eyre and others had failed. It actually said, “The upper and middle class of the English people, especially the latter … are positively enraged at the demand of negroes for equal consideration with Irishmen, Scotchmen, and Englishmen.”
 
I am only scratching the surface here. With a more assiduous effort, I have no doubt that much more evidence could be compiled. Many people knew racism existed and tried to do something about it. But when the overwhelming majority is dedicated to maintaining a racist system of privileges, it is very difficult to bring about major changes.
 
It was more than possible, by the way, to be opposed to slavery and yet have racist feelings of superiority. Anthony Trollope was one. I suppose this should be a subject for another post. As for Darwin, he joined the Jamaica Committee, but there is no writing which I am aware of where he explains why. For his friend Thomas Huxley and for many others, the controversy over the Jamaican massacre was about the protection of constitutional liberties. The misuse of martial law was particularly troubling. Huxley did not want what happened in Jamaica to set a precedent. In answer to a direct inquiry, he said he was not moved “by any particular love for, or admiration of the negro.” It was simply a constitutional question.
 
The evidence I have laid out here was only for the purpose of demonstrating that there existed an awareness of racial prejudice and its consequences. So if Darwin expresses any such prejudices in his writings, that is no anachronism. And in his time, these feelings could easily co-exist with opposition to slavery and a desire for justice when cruel acts were committed. Darwin always hated acts of cruelty, but that is very different from being free of ideas of racial superiority. These ideas in and of themselves were not cruel in his view. It was just nature.
 
© 2013 Leon Zitzer
luckyzee@earthlink.net

WHAT KIND OF RACISM EXACTLY?

This is another follow-up to what I’ve put up in the last two months. In my post for November 2012, I explained why the allegation that there is racism in Darwin’s scientific work is not an anachronism. Racism certainly existed in Darwin’s time. When people are denied political and civil rights on the basis of a belief that they are intellectually and emotionally inferior, you can call that racism. People in the 19^th century knew it existed because some opposed it. The existence of anti-racists means there were racists, no?

 
The word ‘racism’ was not used but that is immaterial. They had other words to identify the same thing. I recently came across some quotations from Lord Sligo, governor of Jamaica from 1834 to 1836 (the first years of the abolition of slavery and the commencement of the apprenticeship period), who happily (and a bit prematurely) wrote to his superior, Lord Stanley, the colonial secretary, “on the part of the Whites all feelings of complexional distinctions had been done away [with] …” It wasn’t quite true, but the point is that he and others were very aware that racial prejudice existed and that it was holding back the blacks and the browns (in Jamaica in this case, where color distinctions were quite numerous and petty).
 
In my last post, for December 2012, I briefly discussed a few writers who exaggerate how liberal and humanitarian Darwin was. They simply ignore the evidence for how much Darwin believed most native peoples were doomed to extinction precisely because they were intellectually inferior to Europeans. I noted that Russell McGregor pointed to just a little of this evidence and still called Darwin “a man of liberal humanitarian outlook” (Imagined Destinies, 30).
 
Now I want to follow up on another comment McGregor makes on the same page. He says Darwin “was dismayed by the racial views of polygenists.” That is technically true in a sense, but it is misleading and partially false. The polygenists believed there were separate, distinct lines of human development, so that the various human races were not related. The monogenists believed all human beings were descended from a common ancestor. Darwin of course was in the latter group. So was Alfred Wallace, Robert Chambers, and many more. So, yes, Darwin disagreed with those who argued there were separate lines of humanity. On that one, very specific point, Darwin objected to the polygenists.
 
As to other racial views of polygenists concerning the intellectual and moral qualities of various peoples, Darwin did not disagree. Common ancestry did not confer equality or brotherhood. Not in Darwin’s view. Too many scholars constantly forget that evolution for Darwin not only meant development from an ancient source, but also incredible diversity in that subsequent development. Humans and apes also share a common ancestor, but Darwin did not believe they were intellectual equals. In The Descent of Man and in some of his letters, he reiterated that there was a huge gap between the highest apes and the lowest humans.
 
That gap is a big part of Darwin’s system. And he did believe there were lowest humans. There is another gap between them and the highest humans, not as big as the first one but still it is there. There are many places in Descent where he looks for signs that certain groups of humans are closer to the animal world than white people or Europeans are.
 
I won’t here go over the evidence in Descent. You don’t have to be a genius to find it. Darwin made no effort to hide his prejudices. What I object to are ambiguous statements by scholars that do not fully and fairly convey what the evidence is. Darwin disagreed with polygenists on one particular point, but otherwise backed their ideas on racial differences that exist now.
 
In Darwin’s favor, it must also be said that he was not a hard-core racist. He allowed that there was individual variation within a group. If someone demonstrated intelligence as much as the average white man did, then Darwin could accept that and not hold race against that person. A deeper racist would regard any such demonstration as merely the effort of a monkey imitating its master. Darwin was not that bad.
 
But a little bit of racism does seep into even his more generous position. The measure of intelligence and morality for him was how well a member of another race could adopt and adapt to European standards. He would have called it the ability to improve. Without acculturation to European society, the individual and the race remained inferior. In his comments on women in Descent (in Chapter 19), Darwin sees women’s faculties (such as intuition and rapid perception) as indicative of the lower races and a lower state of civilization. This is much more than paternalism, as Stephen Gould claimed. This was Darwin’s version of biological inferiority.
 
© 2013 Leon Zitzer
luckyzee@earthlink.net

CREATING A GOD ACADEMIC-STYLE

This is a follow-up to the post below. I explained there why Darwin could be considered at best a limited or moderate humanitarian. The evidence for his belief in racial differences which would lead to the inevitable extermination of inferior races is just too strong to put him in any higher category of humane thought. He was opposed to slavery and cruelty to animals, and for that, he should get credit, but he limited his humanitarian positions quite severely.

What continues to shock me is how many writers still misrepresent Darwin by making him out to be much more liberal than he actually was. Russell McGregor in Imagined Destinies, an excellent study of the 19^th century commitment to the idea that there were doomed races, calls Darwin a liberal humanitarian. And this from a writer who sees very clearly that Darwin believed in a hierarchy of races and was as susceptible to the fiction of doomed races as anyone else of his time.
 
Adam Gopnik, in his book on Lincoln and Darwin, places Darwin among “the highest—that is, the kindest and most humane—voices of his time.” As I pointed out in the post below, Darwin could not even be placed among the voices of the Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS) and that society was limited in how much it tried to fully protect the rights of indigenous peoples. There was a lot the APS did not get (like how bad imperialism was for natives and separating children from their parents) and Darwin got even less than they did.
 
Gopnik mentions the trivial fact that Darwin used the word ‘savage’ and quite rightly excuses that as a sign of the vocabulary of that time. But he never mentions, not even obliquely, that the issue is not Darwin using a certain word, but what he said about them, and that included alleging their mental and moral inferiority. At least Stephen Gould acknowledged that Darwin had severe prejudices.
 
Gould’s problem in The Mismeasure of Man is that he is willing to call Darwin a paternalist but not a racist. He too has to create a false impression of the evidence to maintain this. He would place Darwin among those from the past whom “we most admire in retrospect [because they] urged a moral principle of equal rights and nonexploitation, whatever the biological status of people.” As far as I know, Darwin never raised his voice in protest over the imperialist exploitation of natives. He seemed to regard it as quite natural no matter how badly it turned out for the indigenes. The most you might get from him is a little melancholy at the prospect that entire peoples would be exterminated. Tough luck, but according to natural selection they had it coming to them.
 
My aim is not to criticize Darwin or take him down several pegs. I can accept the real, historical Darwin as he was. What bothers me is the incredible liberties with the evidence taken by established writers, academics, and professionals.
 
Over the last several hundred years, we have become quite good at criticizing religious institutions and their representatives for not living up to the precepts of their religion. It is safe to say that religion no longer has the authority it once had. This is sensible. Religion deserves the criticisms aimed at it. But we give a free pass to scientists and academics. They have inherited the mantle of authority and power from religious officials. We have somehow granted them the weird right to tell the most extraordinary lies about history. We do not hold them to account. We do not ask them to live up to the precepts of science and its main duty of honoring the evidence. Whatever they say goes even if it is in defiance of all the known evidence.
 
There is something else. Our culture considers itself quite liberal, sophisticated, and advanced compared to ancient peoples. We mock their embrace of gods and ridicule their creation of gods and myths. We simply never spot the log in the eye of our own culture. We love to create gods just as much as the ancients did. Charles Darwin is a case in point. We have made him stand for everything holy and good and liberal, as Gopnik and Gould have. The real Darwin was very limited and modest in his humanitarian aims. That historical reality should be enough for us.
 
But too many have said it is not, he must be so much more, he must function for us as the gods of old did. Darwin would have called it a monstrous exaggeration, as he did when one writer said his theory explains the whole universe. He would have shuddered at the idea of his being made into an idol. Who gave academics the right to create new gods? Who gave them the right to lie about the evidence? And why is there so little challenge to this?
 
© 2012 Leon Zitzer
luckyzee@earthlink.net

RACISM BY ANY OTHER NAME

One of the defenses made on Darwin’s behalf is that to accuse him of any racism is an anachronism. It is claimed that just about everybody in Europe at that time had prejudices against the darker races (as they were sometimes referred to). Darwin was no different. To judge him severely for this is to use a standard from a later time. Stephen Gould defended him in this manner.

 
This defense does not hold up. It is not quite true that everyone was a racist back then. There were anti-racists. What is an anachronism is the term ‘racist’. That was not in use. That does not mean that the attitudes which we designate as racist and anti-racist did not exist in the 19^th century.
 
I think we can take racism, in any day and age, to mean a combination of denial of political, voting, and civil rights, and allegations of intellectual, moral, and cultural inferiority. Certainly these things went on in the 19^th century. Imperialism was more than just invading other countries and stealing land, resources, and labor. It was a whole system of thought in which legal and scientific fictions were invented to make the subjugation of natives seem moral and natural.
 
For my purposes here, there are two important things to note:  1) there were some Europeans, not many, who vigorously opposed this racism towards native peoples, and 2) Darwin was not one of them. Oh, let’s add a third:  Mainstream science, of which Darwin was a representative, was mostly on the wrong side. And a fourth:  The historical study of science, with a few exceptions, has generally covered this up.
 
There were some who were in an in-between position. They were opposed to the more inhumane aspects of imperialism, but not opposed to imperialism per se or the notion that European civilization was superior. It is not clear if Darwin supported even a limited humanitarianism towards colonized peoples. He certainly did not protest their gradual extermination. That was acceptable to him.
 
The British Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS), 1836-1909, and most of its supporters and members occupied the intermediate position. They were mainly interested in protecting natives from undue harm and especially from extermination. But they were never big advocates of rights or self-determination. Darwin may have attended one early meeting for the purpose of having input for a questionnaire that would be used to gather information about various tribes before they disappeared from the earth forever. But his interest in the Society did not extend beyond this. I don’t think that Darwin can be counted among even the moderate opponents of racism. Many of the Society’s original members came over from the anti-slavery movement (which had reached one of its major goals of banning slavery in the colonies in 1833). Darwin did not make that move.  
 
The real test that racism existed in his time and is not an anachronism is that there were staunch anti-racists. The existence of anti-racists would make no sense unless racism had been a reality. The level of anti-racism varied quite a bit, but among the strongest I would count Alfred Wallace and Harriette Colenso who was active in South Africa. I don’t want to say too much at this point because I’m still doing research. There were probably others like Wallace and Colenso whom I have yet to discover.
 
As for these two, I am pretty sure this much can be said:  Wallace had a much higher opinion of native cultures than Darwin did and was deeply concerned that western colonialism and competition would lead to their extinction unless steps were taken to prevent it. Harriette Colenso went beyond the idea of protection embraced by the APS and fought for the rights of Zulus to maintain their culture and land. I hope I’ve got that right, as I know the least about her life and career, but I hope to change that very soon.
 
The point is that some people in Darwin’s time were very concerned about the sheer brutality and savagery of the British empire and the arrogant assumptions made about natives. Interestingly, Darwin once wrote to Charles Lyell that he did not care whether present-day man (i.e., European man) will one day be regarded as a savage. That says it all. And he didn’t even have to wait for a remote future, as he put it, to hear this charge. It was being made in his very own time.
 
© 2012 Leon Zitzer
 
luckyzee@earthlink.net

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