DARWIN AND SLAVERY

(My new email:  zitzerleon@gmail.com)

 
The primary reason most scholars consider Darwin a great humanitarian and a non-racist is that he strongly opposed slavery. They make it seem like a simple issue:  Slavery was an absolute evil and anyone against it was on the side of absolute good. That is a very false summary of the situation. The question really is: What kind of an emancipationist was Darwin? There were a variety of positions that people in his time took. This is about much more than Darwin’s personal views.
 
First, it was possible to be in favor of emancipation and yet also be a severe racist. This was true of Darwin’s friends, Thomas Huxley and Joseph Hooker. Anthony Trollope is another example. This was actually quite common, and without specific evidence for Darwin, it makes it difficult to say where he stood.
 
At the end of the American Civil War, Huxley gave a lecture in which he said that he was glad slavery was finally over (i.e., in the west), its doom being just, but he added there were “good grounds for repudiating half the arguments which have been employed by the winning side.” The main argument he wanted to reject was the argument for equality: “It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognisant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man … The highest places in the hierarchy of civilisation will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest.” It is possible that all that abolition will have accomplished is that “emancipation may convert the slave from a well-fed animal into a pauperised man” but that is because “The doctrine of equal natural rights may be an illogical delusion.”
 
Huxley was speaking for a lot of abolitionists. Was he also speaking for Darwin? I have not found any evidence one way or the other. But if so many people felt like this, why were they against slavery in the first place? One major reason was that the legal institution of slavery had come to be regarded as some sort of moral stain on the conscience of the west—a “monstrous stain” as Darwin called it in an early letter. Their goal was not the welfare of the slaves and ex-slaves, but simply their own conscience. As Huxley also said in that lecture, “whatever the position of stable equilibrium into which the laws of social gravitation may bring the negro, all responsibility for the result will henceforward lie between nature and him. The white man may wash his hands of it, and the Caucasian conscience be void of reproach for evermore.”
 
That brings me to my second point: How much concern was there for what the freed slaves would face in society? Very little, it seems. They were on their own now, which is how Huxley and so many others felt about it. Very few gave any thought to the considerable racism they would face.
 
One of those few was Goldwin Smith, a professor of history at Oxford, who asked, “How can there be real political equality without social fusion, and how can there be social fusion while the difference of colour and the physical antipathy remain?” He posed that question in a letter to an American friend around the same time Huxley gave his lecture. It is not the kind of question you find in Darwin, so it is hard to tell whether he agreed with Smith or Huxley. In general, the civil rights of poor, working class people (which is where freed slaves found themselves) was not on Darwin’s agenda.
 
Third, despite legal emancipation, illegal slavery, or forced labor, continued in many places. In the United States, it was known as the peonage system; also, there was the practice of renting out black prisoners to businesses, which happened in places like Texas. In the Pacific South Seas, it was called blackbirding. Very few actively opposed the continuation of illegal slavery and I don’t see anything to indicate that Darwin expressed grave concerns about this. Opposing legal slavery was a good but limited position. We really cannot tell how much of a humanitarian Darwin was until we explore all the issues surrounding slavery.
 
Fourth, with the end of legalized slavery, some abolitionists moved to help aborigines in the British colonies. Darwin did not make that move. Thomas Fowell Buxton was one of the leading advocates for both slaves and aborigines. In testimony to the House of Commons Select Committee on Aborigines (1837), he tried to convince Parliament to take the plight of aborigines as seriously as it had finally taken slavery. After commenting on Britain’s final rejection of the slave trade and slavery itself, he said, “An evil remains very similar in character, and not altogether unfit to be compared with them in the amount of misery it produces. The oppression of the natives of barbarous countries is a practice which pleads no claim to indulgence.” Darwin would never make such a comparison.
 
Fifth, what was expected of the freed slaves? The main hope in Britain seems to have been that they would join the working class and help the empire’s capitalist economy become more prosperous. That did not happen. In Jamaica, for example, the former slaves did not like working on the sugar plantations. Wages were not good and working conditions were lousy. What they preferred was acquiring and working their own small plots of land, supplementing that with occasional plantation work. The sugar plantation economy basically collapsed—for many reasons (like the effects of free trade) and not just because of the unavailability of workers.
 
Nevertheless, many abolitionists overlooked the complexity of causes and blamed the ex-slaves for the collapse. Anthony Trollope in particular was incensed that the freed slaves preferred their own small peasant holdings to the big capitalist plantations. Like many others, he saw their refusal to work for rich white people as a sign of inborn laziness. In 1859, he wrote, “The negro’s idea of emancipation was, and is, emancipation not from slavery, but from work.” He continued: “To lie in the sun and eat breadfruit and yams is his idea of being free … Jamaica, as it now exists, is still under a devil’s ordinance.” He concluded among other things that “As far as we at present see, the struggle [to end slavery] has produced idleness and sensuality, rather than prosperity and civilization.” So much for the goodwill of abolitionists.
 
Did Darwin blame the freed slaves for the perceived failure of emancipation? I have no idea. He says little to nothing about most of these issues. And yet based on an almost total lack of information about these vital matters, scholars willy-nilly declare Darwin a great humanitarian. I am not criticizing Darwin who had no obligation to be great on every level. I am criticizing scholars for making categorical statements without evidence and covering up the real situation.
 
One concern white abolitionists had was that emancipated slaves, who had at least partly adapted to British culture when they were slaves, would revert back to a state of savagery in their new freedom. Again Trollope: “To recede from civilization and become again savage—as savage as the laws of the community will permit—has been to his [the negro’s] taste. I believe that he would altogether retrograde if left to himself.” He actually reaffirms here that “emancipation was clearly right” but we expected too much from it. Like Huxley, he believed that the main thing was that we white people have cleansed ourselves from the sin of slavery.
 
Too little information from Darwin is again the problem, but in general, we know that the argument about reverting to a state of savagery is an argument that would have made some sense to him. He would not have readily dismissed it. He had his own concerns about the low morality and civilization of savages (which he harps on in The Descent of Man). He would have been sympathetic to Trollope’s point and listened very carefully. Perhaps he would have said that we should wait and see how this develops.
 
Darwin was a low level humanitarian for opposing legal slavery, but he does not score high, or even at all, on all the other issues around slavery and emancipation. Most disappointing to me was his failure to see colonialism and slavery as similar evils. But as I said, this goes way beyond Darwin. Western civilization has patted itself on the back just a little too much for this one limited act of setting the slaves free. It actually did precious little to make sure that emancipation would be a full success. Huxley pointed out that emancipation benefitted the master more than the slave. Yup, that’s about the size of this great humanitarian act.
 
© 2013 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com

MONTE REEL'S "BETWEEN MAN AND BEAST"

Lately, I've taken to reviewing the occasional book and posting it on Amazon.  They are never full-scale reviews.  I just focus on one particular issue, usually having to do with historical accuracy.  Below are my comments on Monte Reel's Between Man and Beast, which is about the man who brought gorillas to the attention of Victorian England:

If you are looking for a book that deals with one particular issue (gorillas and evolution) that took place in one narrow moment of time, then this book is as good as any. It is melodramatic in places, but that serves the storytelling. It’s a good read, as people say.

 
I have only one major complaint. This book continues a myth that we have become very fond of:  The discovery of gorillas combined with Darwin’s theory of evolution started a great new debate about the origins of man. Not only did it not start a new debate, I don’t think we can even say it reignited an old one. The “old” debate had never gone away. Before gorillas, it was orangutans and baboons. Europeans had long expressed a fear that we might be descended from apes or monkeys.
 
When Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) offered his evolutionary speculations in the 1790s, the poet Coleridge accused him of promoting a theology of the orangutan to replace Genesis. Something similar happened to Robert Chambers in the 1840s when scientists attacked him for trying to improve the human race with descent from baboons. Chambers boldly argued (fifteen years before Darwin’s “Origin”) that all human beings sprung from one stock. He stressed that the scientific evidence supported this. Ironically, neither Erasmus Darwin nor Chambers were all that interested in descent from apes. Their big pitch was for development from marine life. “Life has, as it were, crept out of the sea upon the land,” as Chambers wrote. In response to his books, Benjamin Disraeli wrote a very funny satire of the idea of humans coming from fish. It is hilarious, regardless of your beliefs about evolution.
 
There is a lot more evidence that a heated debate over human ancestry was going on before gorillas and “Origin of Species”. Monte Reel never mentions any of this. Erasmus Darwin does not appear at all and Robert Chambers is mentioned once with an inaccurate summary of his theory. Also not discussed is the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck who made a very precise stab in 1809 at how human beings might have evolved from apes (and one that most evolutionists today would find essentially correct). All this was in the wind well before the 1850s.
 
One other irony:  Darwin did not think that descent from apes was all that interesting or controversial; that is, not in comparison to another problem. His main concern was our close relation to human savages, the “uncivilized”. The hairy monkey ancestor was nothing. At the end of The Descent of Man,  he tells us how horrified he still was that we could be related to savages. It was something he never quite got over. And it has a lot to do with racism.

© 2013 Leon Zitzer
luckyzee@earthlink.net

HOW MUCH BLAME?

This is a follow-up to the post below. Some people would like to oversimplify the issue of racism in Darwin’s work by putting it into one question: Are you saying that Darwin and other scientists of his time are to blame for the Nazis? I agree that it would be very unfair to make them responsible for that evil. But that is not the end of the story. It is not even a very good question. It is taking advantage of what I said below about the Nazis having ruined the conversation about racism by making themselves appear to be the only kind of racism. Let us agree to absolve Darwin of Nazism and we can all go home. Well, not quite. There is something more to be resolved.

 
There are much better questions to ask than the absurd question of who is to blame for ultimate evil. Were Darwin and others responsible for something much closer to home, colonialism and its attendant injustices? Why do we have to go to the extreme case to assess responsibility? Isn’t it bad enough that so many 19^th century scientists pursued theories that were based on racist assumptions, even given the standards of their time? Racist, unjust, and inaccurate concerning the native peoples they claimed to be studying.
 
Colonialism would have proceeded apace with or without an underlying scientific ideology. The ideology made it easier, it made the colonizers feel less guilty, and perhaps it added a measure of ruthlessness and callousness, since it gave them the confidence that everything they did was in accord with nature. A racist evolutionary theory did not cause colonialism or Nazism. Has it occurred to anyone that, at least with respect to the colonial venture, maybe it was the other way around? Maybe colonialism caused evolutionary theory. It might have provided the model that Darwin and others were looking for.
 
But again: Why is absolute causation (in one direction or another) the only answer when trying to judge how pernicious were the consequences of a theory? If a theory was misused in racist ways at its very birth, isn’t that bad in its own right? Why can’t the original event be discussed on its own terms? And as for events that followed, can’t we talk of something being a contributing factor? Does it have to be absolute? Some degree of contribution may be the most appropriate answer.
 
But there are people who seem obsessed with the idea that if anyone investigates Darwin’s racism, he will be unfairly charged with being the primary cause of Nazism. As I said, I agree that would be unjust. This overlooks that there is another side to this kind of historical untruthfulness. It is also inaccurate to declare that Nazism arose out of nothing, out of spontaneous combustion. In the post below, I pointed out that the Nazis did not do the unthinkable. They were not a bizarre phenomenon that came out of nowhere. Nineteenth century science, which included Darwin, made the later Nazi ideas about inferiority and extermination very thinkable. So, by the way, did religion. Too many Christian writers suggested that exterminating Jews was a possible solution to the European problem with Jews, but one that should be avoided. Still, they said, it was a possibility.
 
The Nazis are an example of how bad this kind of thinking can get. The scientists of the previous century cannot be blamed for not anticipating this. But their racist interpretation was bad enough all on its own. They are more directly to blame for why humanitarianism could not make stronger inroads into an imperialist culture. The best scientists of the day made racist science and racist colonialism highly respectable. They claimed to represent the best that Progress had to offer.  Humanitarianism was dismissed as an interference with that.
 
No one thought that Progress would lead to anything like the Nazi program of extermination. But they did conceive that Progress justified the extermination of inferior, savage cultures. The Nazis could and did claim to be inspired by that and by western efforts to herd aborigines onto reservations. How much blame does this put on western civilization? I’m not sure. But the answer is not zero. It is some number above that.

© 2013 L. Zitzer
luckyzee@earthlink.net

QUIET RACISM

It has been said before and it cannot be said often enough: The Nazis ruined the conversation about race.  Because they sucked all the evil unto themselves, they erased any other kind. Bring up the problem of racism in any individual or institution and the response you get is, “How dare you! Are you accusing us of being Nazis? That is malicious and unfair. We utterly deny the charge.” But there are other kinds of racism besides the Nazi kind.

 
It is possible to quietly create a world of putting down any culture that does not celebrate triumphalism. Racism can sneak up on you. It seeps into our way of seeing the world. It feels comfortable, like a second skin. It’s not a virulent hatred and soon it’s normal to think: One culture is superior and all the others are doomed to extinction. Nothing wrong with that, especially if the dominant culture brings so many benefits. At its most successful, even the allegedly inferior cultures come to agree. Resistance is futile. The culture that has been given second-rate status lapses into a coma. And when that happens, the superior people say it was inevitable and it was deserved, otherwise there would have been more resistance.

Quiet racism is mostly unconscious and invisible (or almost so). For these reasons, it is difficult to combat. People are reluctant to acknowledge anything that is not obviously out there and open to view. It is easier to pretend it is not there.

 
Darwin was not strident about his racism. Not generally. Occasionally he slips up and lets slip a more brutal remark. There is a moment in one letter where he crows that “The more civilized so-called Caucasians have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence,” which is followed by a comment he makes even in The Descent of Man, “Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.” While it is true that, most of the time, he is low-key and prefers to insidiously promote ideas of inferiority, we should remember that ‘beat’ is a word he loved and used frequently in The Origin of Species — as when he speaks of dominant species beating the less dominant — so that even in his more subdued moments, the quality of his racism does not change.

What Darwin did in his quiet way was to make scientific racism more respectable. He was not the worst racist. He did not invent scientific racism. And whatever he did, he did not do it alone. But because of his status, he helped to advance this way of thinking.


What the cutting edge of evolutionary scientists, like Darwin and Huxley, did was that (and here I am borrowing from another writer) they “picked up the pre-existing prejudices and stereotypical attitudes of European and white colonial societies, repackaged them as scientific theory, and then mirrored them back to a literate public.” That’s the way Neil MacMaster puts it in Racism in Europe, 1870-2000. He does not specifically refer to Darwin and Huxley here. He makes some scattered references to Darwin throughout his book, while preferring to talk more about Social Darwinists, but his comment about repackaging prejudice as scientific theory applies just as well to what Darwin did (I just want to be clear that MacMaster himself did not explicitly refer to Darwin in this remark).
 
Anthropological racism not only became acceptable, it was considered top-notch science. Again, it’s worth quoting MacMaster:  “What distinguished the late nineteenth century was not so much the elaboration of a new science of race, in spite of all the talk of a Darwinian Revolution, but rather the sheer speed with which a discourse of radical biological difference was diffused within European science and became an almost universally accepted way of thinking about history, contemporary politics and national identity.” One of the items that became so well-accepted was the talk of extermination and extinction of native peoples. It had come to seem natural and obvious, even objective. Europeans were not making this happen. This was nature’s doing. Natural selection, not injustice, gives us extermination.
 

The top scientists of the day would have been incensed if we accused them of racism (the latter being a word they did not use, but they would have recognized ‘complexional misanthropy’ or antipathy or even simply prejudice). They would have denied any feelings of hatred. But it would have been harder for them to deny fear — their fear that inferior races could have a harmful effect on the superior race. That fear of degeneration was widespread. They just would have claimed it was an objectively valid fear.
 

This cultural attitude was not limited to science. The Catholic Church did its fair share of talking about extermination. Many Christian writers spoke of exterminating Jews as a possible solution to their Jewish problem, and were usually quick to add that they could not pursue this option because they were Christian after all, but the key point is that they made extermination a thinkable idea. There is no need to accuse any of these nineteenth century thinkers and writers of being Nazis. They weren’t that. But it is equally false to say that the Nazis did the unthinkable. Europe had made the elimination of so-called inferior races a very thinkable idea. And Darwin made a contribution. He helped everyone to think of inferiority and lower races and extermination as normal ideas, and he never qualified any of this as having potentially dangerous consequences, just as the Church did not see the danger in bringing up extermination. 
© 2013 Leon Zitzer
luckyzee@earthlink.net

 

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
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