EPISTEMIC CLOSURE, OR, LYING IS ITS OWN REWARD

[My post this month exactly parallels the current post on my other blog, http://historicaljesusghost.blogspot.com. Same title and the same first six paragraphs. Each post then gives examples appropriate to each field of how scholars blind themselves to the evidence.]

 
When I was a kid, sometime in high school, I think, I bought a paperback book called “30 Days To A More Powerful Vocabulary”, or maybe it was a better vocabulary. I think I still have it, buried in a box somewhere. I got my money’s worth with that book. It did its job and I did feel my word power grow. It made learning an entertaining exercise. I remember it had single-panel cartoons throughout the book. The one that stuck with me was of a young boy who had just returned home from school and says to his mother, “I learned a new word in school today, Mom. Try and surmise what it is.” It still gets a laugh out of me.
 
A couple of weeks ago, I learned a new term from a journalist on NPR: Epistemic closure. He described it as a condition in which a person is so sure of his own position that he will not hear any evidence to the contrary. I have been talking about that for years and never knew there was an expression for it. I was kind of delighted that there is now a name for it, but then I immediately had doubts about its usefulness. Is it good to have a name for something, and a fancy one at that? Sometimes naming something can help bring attention to a problem, but with something like this, the condition has been described for a long time and where has it gotten us?
 
And would a simpler term or description be more useful?
 
For a very long time now, I have frequently quoted Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haitian historian among other things, who wrote, “Worldview wins over the facts.” (I recently checked on Amazon and found that his incredibly enlightening book Silencing the Past has recently been reissued in an anniversary edition.) Trouillot’s simple sentence is a more powerful description of what epistemic closure points to. You could also say ideology wins over the facts. He used it to describe how Europeans could not accept that there was a slave rebellion going on in Haiti which was defeating European armies. So they explained the facts away to fit their worldview that, on the one hand, slaves were too docile to desire much less fight for freedom, and on the other hand, they were not skilled enough to defeat European might.
 
If “Worldview wins over the facts” does not hit your over the head like a ton of bricks, I don’t see why epistemic closure would be any more instructive. In True Jew, I described the same condition this way: The less we see, the more we know. That captures what scholars in many fields do. All these expressions do. Usually what happens is that tradition has handed them a certain point of view, and while scholars are fond of spinning it in ways that sound like something new is being said, nothing new happens at all. The same tale gets told over and over again, and everybody is convinced, “We don’t need no stinking evidence” because our worldview or ideology tells us everything we need to know. Our knowledge is closed down. It closed a long time ago. It would be too much trouble to open it up now.
 
Let’s face it: It’s all about telling lies and getting away with it. Lying is its own reward. What is shocking is that the lies can be bold-faced and still they get away with it. You know it’s a closed discussion when everybody is content with the lies that are being told.

Look at what happens in Darwin scholarship. If you read a thousand books on Darwin or evolution, you will be told a thousand times, or more likely two thousand, that Darwin was a revolutionary. They claim he gave us the theory that man and all life forms are descended from lower life forms. Sometimes, they also mean he gave us a more humble understanding of man’s place in nature. But Darwin gave us neither of these ideas. They were a gift from previous evolutionists and they rarely get any credit for their accomplishments.

 
It was scientists like Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Constantine Rafinesque, and Robert Chambers who enthusiastically spread the news that a theory of the development of species made more sense of the evidence. All admitted that no one quite understood how it was happening, but they all saw important pieces of evidence that demonstrated that organisms were related to each other and to previous species. Erasmus Darwin compared the generation of species to the generation of individuals; so did his grandson in his early Notebooks.
 
Charles Darwin was the first to offer an explanation (natural selection) as to the mechanism of species development, but he was definitely not the first to suggest or even prove the greater probability that evolution was indeed occurring. So if there is a revolution in the very idea of the gradual change of life forms on this planet, it was brought to us by several investigators who came before Charles Darwin. Darwin was a latecomer to the field, through no fault of his own as he was born later. But why should the last to enter the field get the credit for the revolution?
 
As for the lesson of humility for mankind, credit for that really belongs to those who pushed that into the consciousness of the public, and again that was not Charles Darwin. Erasmus Darwin and Robert Chambers did so much to stress that all forms of life were related to each other. Chambers more than anyone else drew the conclusion that this should make us incredibly humble. He even argued that we should respect the rights and feelings of animals, something Charles Darwin would never say. What Chambers, E. Darwin, Rafinesque, and Lamarck argued was that all life is netted into one great whole which is more important than any one part, including humankind.
 
Scholars have taken this teaching and claim it is one of the essential lessons of evolutionary theory, and further claim that it comes from Charles Darwin, but he never declared this as much as the others did. He rather gave himself to almost the opposite idea. What Darwin saw was a hierarchy of life, an order and ranking, not an interconnectedness into a whole. Over and over in The Origin of Species, he told his readers that life gives us groups subordinate to groups, yielding dominant groups that beat feebler groups in the struggle for life. What is revolutionary about “let the strongest live and the weakest die”, the last words of Chapter VII of Origin?
 
Charles Darwin was far more a medieval thinker than the preceding evolutionists who all had a holistic approach to nature. In theory, Darwin should have been as holistic as his predecessors, but in practice, he stressed the subordination of groups and ranked groups from lowest to highest. He made the dominant more worthy of life than the weak and small. I cannot see a revolution in any of this. He applied medieval theology to biology and gave comfort to the ruling classes. Considering the accomplishments of the others who came before him, Darwin was more of a counter-revolutionary.
 
That’s not the way most scholars tell it. The point is not just that they are exaggerating what Charles Darwin did, they are erasing the important work of the first evolutionists who were taking the theory in a more holistic and humbling direction than Darwin ever would. I suppose they need a heroic Charles Darwin in their ideological combat with religion, but whatever their reasons, it is a dishonorable way to study history. They are embracing the same motto historical Jesus scholars follow: The less we see, the more we know.
 
They are spinning the evidence, and erasing portions of it, until it says nothing we do not want to hear. Whatever you call that—epistemic closure, worldview winning over the facts, or anything else—it is the end of learning anything.

© 2015 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com
 

EVOLUTIONARY THEORY IS SAFE

The biggest worry that people seem to have about Darwin’s racism and his devotion to colonialism is that if established as thoroughly true, then this will undermine the theory of evolution. It won’t. No matter what Darwin’s prejudices were, no matter even if he misused the theory of evolution, the science of evolution is safe. That is because there is more than one way to be an evolutionist. Even when it comes to natural selection, Darwin’s version of evolution, there is more than one way to pursue it.

 
People forget a basic fact of history: Darwin does not own the idea of evolution. He was not the first to propose it or even the first to prove that it is more probable than special or independent creation (the belief that God created each species separately). Evolutionary theory has a history that goes back well before Charles Darwin entered the picture. By the time Darwin’s The Origin of Species appeared in 1859, probably a majority, or at least something close to a majority, of the general population in England believed that the birth of new species, in descent from older species, made sense. It was an attractive idea and its popularity was due in part to Robert Chambers, who put together enough evidence (in 1844) to demonstrate that it made more sense than the prevailing theory of independent creation.
 
The majority of professional scientists was still stuck in the older idea. This was one case where the people were ahead of the scientists. It was the reason why Chambers had such a hard time of it and had to publish anonymously. His book, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, caught the people’s fancy, but scientists gave him quite a knocking. Almost half a century earlier, Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, enthusiastically promoted evolution, called generation in his time, and while he may not have proved it, he presented enough evidence to make it a reasonable theory to pursue. A common argument made by many was that the generation of new species was very much like the generation, or birth, of new individuals, and that the birth of a new species was as normal as the birth of a baby. Just a few months before Chambers’s book, Emma Martin was handing out pamphlets in the street, comparing the two types of generation.
 
But the intellectual atmosphere was still too hostile. In France, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck would make the theory more reasonable still, but his name became a term of abuse among English scientists. In America, Constantine Rafinesque wrote a long poem, which is really more of an essay, called The World, or, Instability, arguing that we should welcome constant change as a law of life. He was also one of the first to argue that racism against other human beings was irrational.
 
The previous evolutionists were much more holistic than Charles Darwin. They saw each part of the whole, including the various races, as serving the whole in some way. Darwin changed that. He saw nature as a hierarchy of groups, with dominant groups becoming ever more dominant and wiping out the weaker groups. You can already see the seeds of disaster in that point of view. But whatever prejudices and preconceptions Darwin dragged into this, his way was not the only way to espouse evolution and his way was not the original way to be an evolutionist.
 
For some evolutionists, having a common ancestor would engender a feeling of brotherhood among all peoples. Darwin unfortunately did not see it that way. For him, the common ancestor evolved into varying descendants, descendants that were so different that some could be said to be higher than others.
 
It is important to distinguish between a theory and the ways it can be misused. If it turns out that Charles Darwin made a contribution to both, that does not invalidate the former. If we remember how many people made evolutionary theory a reasonable theory (before and after Darwin), then it should not be upsetting to learn that Darwin did not always advocate the theory in the purest, most objective way. His failings are independent of the theory. If we don’t pay careful attention to this history, we will miss a much needed lesson in humility.
 
© 2015 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

AHEAD OF ONE'S TIME

We say it so easily and we mean it as high praise. He was ahead of his time, what a genius! We choose not to think about how painful and frustrating it was to be in that condition. No one who’s been through it will tell you it was a good thing. Wake them all up from the dead. They’ll tell you it was a raw deal. Ahead of your time? You might as well be told you have cancer or you’re bleeding to death. And nobody would go through it again, if they had a choice.

 
Well, it’s all so ironic because, in fact, no one is actually ahead of their time, as Gertrude Stein reminded us. Whatever you come up with, you got it from the materials available to you exactly in your time. It did not come from a lightning bolt out of the blue. It came precisely from its time and place. It’s just that, as Gertrude Stein pointed out, everybody else was busy creating for the same time; they were busy with their own vision, and no one had a need for yours. Your vision will come into its own only when a future generation needs it and responds to it. You needed something before everyone else did. It was that need that came early, not your ideas.
 
Think about that when we look back at people or ideas that were “ahead of their time”. It’s about needs, and who needs what and when. The possibilities were always there, available to all. It could have happened much earlier. It didn’t take a genius to see the goodness of a certain idea. It only took a feeling that we need it and want it. The shame of it is that so many decided we don’t want it, and then later, they cover up by saying that other guy was ahead of his time, so it’s not our fault we didn’t see it. Oh, but it is our fault. We saw it, we weren’t blind. We rejected it because we had other needs.
 
We will say something was ahead of its time because it startles us to see it so early in history. When Josephus, the ancient Jewish-Roman historian, writes that Jewish law requires that no one can be put to death without first getting a trial by the Sanhedrin, we think how advanced that is. We don’t expect to see such a clear statement of due process. But it is not all that surprising. The legal system of any culture will have procedures and it is not unreasonable to foresee that people will demand adherence to those procedures. That’s due process.
 
More surprising is that some Pharisees argued that everyone, including kings and nobility, are subject to the Constitution (Torah) and rules of law. The first few times they tried imposing this, they lost. In fact, I’m not sure they were ever completely successful at establishing this principle. It was only one Pharisee, maybe a couple, who insisted on it. The majority were nervous about defying a king or other aristocrat. We don’t need this, we don’t want it, it’s too much trouble. In that sense, this idea was ahead of its time. It was conceivable, but it was unwanted.
 
British humanitarians of the 19^th century were sometimes ahead of their time and on other points were not. Many humanitarians saw the need to make the justice system in the colonies more equitable. They believed that natives should be allowed to give testimony in court. A lot of people were suggesting this and gradually it got done. As an idea, it was not too advanced for its time.
 
But when someone like Saxe Bannister, Attorney General in New South Wales in the mid-1820s and later one of the founders of the Aborigines’ Protection Society, suggested that when natives can still not get judgments executed, then governors should indemnify them, that was going much further than anyone else of that time wanted to go. He also recognized that the Colonial Office could not possibly serve both the white colonists and the Aboriginal population, as the interests of these groups were often diametrically opposed to each other. Therefore, an independent body should be appointed to look out for the interests of the natives and that body should include people of color. It does not take a genius to realize that Bannister’s proposals would go nowhere. Not because his ideas were incomprehensible, but because they did not serve the needs of the white colonists.
 
Bannister was truly ahead of his time. Another humanitarian was actually capable of saying that Bannister was mentally deranged (probably in response to some points he made about overhauling the colonial system in South Africa). The outlook of the majority was that what we need is lip service to the idea of justice for indigenous peoples, but not actual justice. To put it another way, what even many good humanitarians recognized was that one could push the majority of whites only so far. They knew when to quit in the fight for justice. Bannister was a purist. He thought about what pure justice required and then said it. What he spoke up for was not that hard to see. It was just that everyone else was telling him that we don’t need this. It doesn’t serve our interests.
 
Which brings me to Charles Darwin, who was definitely not ahead of his time. Few people in history have been more in tune with what the zeitgeist will and will not allow. He knew exactly what he could deliver without having the door slammed in his face. He gave his generation what it, and he, wanted to hear: The dominant species are the most important thing ever. What no one wanted to hear was that the whole was more important than any one piece. All the previous evolutionists—Erasmus Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Constantine Rafinesque, Robert Chambers—were ahead of their time in this respect. Actually, they stood for two ideas, one of which was just right for that time and place, and the other was apparently too soon.
 
The first idea was transmutation of species. The early evolutionists were right for their time in their belief that creation was on-going and species continued to develop. That idea appealed to people long before Charles Darwin came along. The upper classes did not like it, but the majority of people lower down felt the need for it. We like the idea that life (and by implication, human society) is not fixed but fluid. So the idea of species change gained ground. But the other idea evolutionists advocated for was that nature as a whole is evolving and every piece of nature, small or large, strong or weak, has a role to play.
 
Lamarck pointed out that any part of nature that could reason might try to assert itself as most important because it would perceive its own interests to be contrary to that of the whole. The powerful might not like the idea that they too are only temporary and might have to give way to the next change because it would serve the whole. I believe it was this kind of reasoning about the whole that caused so many of the scientists who came from the upper classes to reject the theory of evolution or development. It was not until Charles Darwin offered natural selection to establish that the dominant species will become ever more dominant that scientists began to find evolutionary theory appealing. Ironically, while natural selection was hotly debated, it was appealing enough even to those who rejected it.
 
In theory, Darwin saw that everything was potentially temporary. Natural selection, he said, acts only tentatively. But he never made that the mainspring of his system. He put his emphasis on the success of the strongest or most dominant species. It was a theory that was well-suited to his colonial age. It was perfect for its time. But the holistic thinkers were out of touch with the needs of their time. Not stupidly out of touch. I think they knew where they stood. They just could not help speaking the truth about seeing things from the point of view of the whole. It is still ahead of what we perceive to be our needs.
 
© 2015 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

AT WHAT COST?

In these days of religious terrorism which seeks only to commit ungodly murders and which confers absolutely no benefits on anyone, western imperialism can seem like a blessing. At least it can claim not to be an unmitigated evil. But this has nothing to do with our responsibility to confront our own peculiar mixture of good and evil.

 
The defenders of western imperialism take one of two approaches: Either they refuse to discuss its deep faults (such as excessive greed, violence, arrogance) and refuse to consider whether and how much this contributed to the success of the west, à la Nicholas Wade in A Troublesome Inheritance, or they acknowledge but understate the harm inflicted and claim that whatever the injuries, the benefits outweighed them, à la Niall Ferguson in Civilization: The West and the Rest. Both approaches play up the benefits, hoping to blind us to anything that might detract from a story of unparalleled good.
 
Given that western imperialism did some good things, the question that is just begging to be asked is: At what cost to the indigenous peoples were these benefits accomplished? No one knows better than Ferguson that “At what cost?” is always the supreme question. He has no hesitation asking this question for other political societies or systems.
 
Ferguson is clearly no admirer of the French Revolution and I cannot blame him for that. Whatever value came out of the French Revolution, it has to be weighed against its costliness in blood and repression. Ferguson is glad to bring up this point for France’s radical turn towards liberty and equality. He calls it “the first demonstration in the modern age of the grim truth that revolutions devour their own children.” He is proud of Edmund Burke for having seen so early what was happening in France. Ferguson nails Stalin’s regime in a single sentence: For the years of increased industrial production from 1929 to 1932, “few asked how many people died for every ton of steel produced under Stalin (the answer was nineteen).”
 
Ferguson knows that “At what cost?” is the real bottom line in history. Yet he makes sure to stay very far from asking this question about European imperialism. He adopts a double standard in the study of history. (The only time he asks about the costs of imperialism, he means the cost to the imperial country.) The victims of the French Revolution and Stalin matter enough to Ferguson to cast doubt on the overall value of those political events, but the victims of European imperialism do not matter enough to shake his conviction in the supreme worth of western empires.
 
Ferguson will acknowledge that some bad things happened as the west pursued its imperialism. “Western civilization is far from flawless. It has perpetrated its share of historical misdeeds, from the brutalities of imperialism to the banality of the consumer society.” One of his techniques is to occasionally acknowledge some brutality here and there, so that he can claim to have been historically honest, but he never gives it his full attention as he does the positive aspects of western culture. Page after page extols the west, with only an occasional interruption to lament a rare mistake. Ferguson is almost always brief about western misdeeds and never sees them as part of the reason for material success. They are aberrations that do not deserve to be incorporated in his central story.
 
In his preface, Ferguson claims that he is writing not merely “a history of the West but a history of the world” and that the peoples subjugated by the west “are equally important members of the drama’s cast.” But if you removed these lines from the preface, you would never glean these thoughts from the rest of the book. The full story of these peoples is absent. They matter to Ferguson only in so far as they prove the west’s ability to westernize everyone.
 
Ferguson gives us only the most positive factors in western civilization to explain its material success (Wade does this too)—things like an open society, a spirit of innovation and the freedom to innovate, healthy competition, consumerism, advances in medicine, the rule of law, the work ethic, and more. Words like justice and injustice do not appear in his analysis. Nor does he consider whether extreme greed may have been a factor. The west may have gained more because it wanted more and was willing to be ruthless about it. Ruthlessness was not an element in this success as he sees it. I don’t mind celebration when it honestly presents itself for what it is—there is a lot to be genuinely celebrated—but why call that objective examination of the evidence, which is what both Ferguson and Wade claim to be doing?
 
Everything is slanted in favor of appreciating the west’s greatness. Ferguson never clarifies for his readers that the rule of law applied to the invaders and their relationships to each other as they competed for wealth. It never applied to the natives. Europeans had mixed motives, he tells us. “Some came to invest, others to rob.” But how does one invest, in the legitimate sense of the word, in land and resources that were stolen to begin with?
 
The presumed bottom line which Ferguson uses for his arguments is that the benefits of imperialism have far outweighed any harm inflicted. He has little patience with criticism that would see it any other way. “Empire has become a dirty word, despite the benefits conferred on the rest of the world by the European imperialists.” Even contemporary criticism of imperialism was wrong: “perhaps contemporaries should have praised the English ‘savings glut’ rather than grumbled about imperialism.” Ferguson’s position is easy to sustain as long as you understate the harm that what was done.
 
If we reject Ferguson’s double standard, the question has to be asked—just as we ask it about the French Revolution or Soviet Communism or unrestrained capitalism or monopolies or protest movements or anything—what was the cost? What was the cost of colonialism to indigenous peoples? Forsake the glib answer that, oh yes, well, of course, there were some bad things, but the benefits were greater than the injuries. How could anyone know this without a full investigation? It might be more difficult to come up with numerical answers in some colonies. How many Aborigines in Australia died for every ton of wool produced? In Tasmania, an island, the population was more or less fixed and could not deteriorate below zero, so the ratio of people killed to tons of wool produced might not be as dramatic as in Stalin’s Russia. But there will be ways of totaling up the good and the bad and finding a reasonable measure of the real costs and benefits.
 
The trouble with the celebration of western imperialism is not just that it is dishonest about the full truth of the subject, but that it is dishonest about what it really wants, about its own greed to have it all. Granted that there are some benefits to imperialism that we can hold onto, the celebrants of it seem to be saying that it is not enough that we have invaded, we conquered, we stole, and we killed—we were the outright victors—we must also win in history. We must take over your history too, or else our victory is incomplete. We must be vindicated. We must be seen and remembered as good and beneficent. We gave more than we took. We need total control of history to hammer home that point and ensure the final victory. We must show either that we did nothing wrong or that the benefits we brought far exceeded the harm, and that these benefits were unquestionably the result of the good things and not the bad stuff like rapacity and bloodthirsty violence.
 
The need to make such an argument may be very great, but this is not objective history. This is loaded history. This is greed raised to the n^th degree. This is history made to serve a complete takeover by the powerful.
 
The defenders of western colonialism are making large claims, but in another way, there is a smallness to their vision. It is like saying we have a right to defend our way of life but you don’t have a right to defend yours. The hypocrisy of this is heightened by the fact that the western way of life contains a lot of aggression, whereas the indigenous way is relatively passive—certainly less grasping and more content to enjoy the given—and yet we think they have less right to form their homeland security and defend their quieter lives. We have shrunk our sense of right and wrong.
 
Ferguson wants to believe that what’s done is done. All we can do is look back and say we regret the excesses that took place, the violence and denigration, and hope it is all truly behind us. Is that all we can do? Could we not also look back and give a full accounting? Do we owe that much? What does it mean to regret the violence and the stealing? How do we regret without telling the full truth? Do we also regret our arrogance and self-righteous attitude that God or nature or history ordained us to be the winners? Most societies and systems will create a mixture of victims and beneficiaries. The question Ferguson knows is right but is unwilling to face is: The imperial success of the west was achieved at what cost to the indigenous populations?
 
The ultimate question for western civilization is whether humanitarianism can become as strong a force as our hunger for continual material improvements. Can it make an equal claim on our desires? Or will we forever let it slide into second place?
 
© 2015 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

 

LISTEN TO THIS ONE VOICE FROM THE 19th CENTURY

There are so many ways voices can be suppressed. In the case of Georg Gerland, it’s easy. Just don’t translate him. His book Über das Aussterben der Naturvölker (On the Extinction of Primitive Peoples) was published in 1868. As far as I know, it has never been translated into English. There is a French edition which has helped me, but I’ve consulted the German too. It ought to be considered a classic of humanitarianism. Instead, hardly anyone knows about it.

 
Gerland was a German professor of geography, anthropology, and more. Darwin mentions his book a bunch of times in The Descent of Man. He read it very carefully in preparation for Descent, making a running translation in the margins as he went along and also keeping a few pages of notes. His interest in it, at least as far as the references in Descent go, was quite limited. He extracted some information about infanticide among savages and notes some points about dwindling numbers of a group leading to extinction, but he never tells his readers how rich Gerland’s book is and how sympathetic he was towards the plight of savages (which is how Darwin translates Naturvölker).
 
Darwin and Gerland together provide a good example of how two authors might agree on some general points yet interpret those points quite differently. Thus, both find that there are multiple causes threatening the existence of native peoples, but they do not arrange them in the same order of importance. For Darwin, the infertility of the women was a major cause. He also looked at infanticide and the susceptibility of savages to new diseases. He emphasizes what might be called biological causes.
 
Gerland looked at these causes too, but he also paid considerable attention to the bloodthirstiness and violence of Europeans towards natives. Besides overt violence, he made a big issue of what we would call culture shock. In the best of circumstances, if Europe had approached indigenous peoples in a friendly manner, adapting to another culture would be extremely difficult. It is mentally and spiritually exhausting. And savages never had the advantage of amicable relations with European invaders. Trying to assimilate a conquering culture has depressed the hell out of natives. Gerland was very sensitive to this. He also knew this was aggravated because of the racism of Europeans. Gerland usually refers to racism as arrogance and even racial arrogance. He singles out the English and the Dutch for their arrogance and hatred towards all people of color.
 
None of this enters into Darwin’s own examination of causes and he never tells the full story of what Gerland really thinks.
 
Both Darwin and Gerland believed that man was a part of nature, but here again they are so far apart from each other. Gerland looked at things from the point of view of the whole. He did not think that Europe was the center of the universe. Every human race is a part of the whole of nature and each part makes some contribution to the whole. Europeans have no right to decide when some part’s contribution has come to an end. Gerland believed that nature wants each of its components to thrive and progress. Savages must somehow play a role in this too. Europeans should not be cavalier about the extinction of any group and certainly should not be helping any group along to its demise. If Europe does that, it will be sinking back into savagery.
 
Darwin knew all this about Gerland because he translated many of these points in the margins of his copy of Gerland’s book, but he is silent about it in Descent. Compared to Gerland, Darwin’s approach to the impending extinction of savages is incredibly arrogant. Their extermination for Darwin was inevitable precisely because, in his view, savages are inferior and Europe superior. For Gerland, it is not inevitable unless Europe makes it so and that would be a barbaric thing to do.
 
As I said, Gerland’s book is a classic, combining science and humanitarianism. It has been suppressed primarily, I think, because it is such a contrast to Darwin’s work. It is yet another 19^th century book that identified racism as a major cultural problem for Europe that can be ignored only at its own peril. He was the far more prescient thinker.
 
© 2014 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

THE FIRST LIE IS HARD, THE REST GET EASIER

Lies generally don’t stand alone. They breed, they multiply. Getting away with it once seems like a piece of cake and that should be the end of it. But every lie needs a cover-up and that means more lies. Ironically, the proliferation ultimately makes it easier to undo the whole mess—that is, assuming anybody cares about what is going on.

 
If someone told a lie about Charles Darwin and it was just limited to him, I could understand the argument that he should be let off the hook. So what if Darwin was not exactly like the lie would have it? So what if there is some racism in his work and some tolerance for genocide? He was just like everyone else in his time in this respect (there’s another lie right there). He also did a lot of good work and we should let that erase the bad parts. Darwin was a great man and great men are entitled to the myths we create about them. Myths like that do more good than harm.
 
It sounds like a reasonable, even a humane, argument. But that argument has a lie at its heart. No lie is ever self-limiting. This isn’t just about Darwin. This is about so many other lies that go beyond (and before) Darwin. If scholars pass off some erroneous information about one man, they are bound to get it wrong about so many other people in this history. They are obligated to keep up the falsehoods so that the first one is never discovered.
 
There are scholars who try to portray Darwin’s science as kinder and gentler than it really was, but there is some harshness there, so who to blame that on? They will pin it on Thomas Robert Malthus or Herbert Spencer. There has been some good work on the fact that Social Darwinism can be found in Darwin himself. It is more likely Spencer came by his stern views because of Darwin’s influence than the other way around. I will reserve that for another time. I will instead say a few words here about Malthus.
 
If there was a supposedly kinder and gentler Darwin before Malthus, then Malthus must be the one to blame for Darwin’s turn for the worse. We forget, or erase the fact, that Malthus warned his readers not to apply his population principle to human beings in the same severe way that it applies in nature. We forget that he believed both extreme poverty and extreme wealth were bad for society. We forget that Malthus pointed out the inhumanity of exterminating native populations, he found it unthinkable, whereas Darwin found it quite acceptable. Suppressing the humane side of Malthus is an injustice, but it is necessary in order to create that kinder Darwin.
 
The accomplishments of the evolutionists before Darwin also have to be erased to make Darwin’s achievement seem all the greater. Darwin is often credited with being the first to prove evolution—not so, it was actually Robert Chambers who first made the case that evolution was more probable than special creation.
 
More significantly, Darwin’s theory is presented as one that makes the whole world a web of organic creatures, binding us all together. Darwin did not really do that. He emphasized a hierarchy of species in which some are dominant and others subordinate. Ranking groups was his thing. The living web of creatures was really the point of evolutionists like Erasmus Darwin and Chambers. Their great achievement has to be eliminated and given to Charles Darwin so that the myth can be maintained.
 
Natural scientists like Erasmus Darwin and Chambers more openly avowed a purposeful and progressive system than did Charles Darwin (there is purpose for him too, if more hidden), but these previous evolutionists held the whole to be more important than any one part. Chambers was emphatic that the highest place in the system was still only one place and had only one part to play in the whole. Erasmus Darwin celebrated ants and worms as our sisters and brothers. Chambers said the whole system and our relationship to other creatures mean we have to respect the rights and feelings of lower animals. Charles Darwin would never go this far. It is easy to forget his place in the history of evolutionary thought if we erase the work of those who went before him.
 
Charles Darwin usually gets credit for putting evolutionary theory on the map and making it a respectable scientific doctrine. But how many evolutionists before Darwin should get the credit for that? We have almost completely forgotten that a few months before Robert Chambers’ book came out in 1844, Emma Martin was in the streets, passing out one of her pamphlets (4,000 copies) arguing for evolution, and after the Chambers book appeared, she was going around giving lectures on it. So many people made evolutionary theory respectable, but we have to lie about that so that one man can be elevated above the rest. Ah, there’s justice for you.
 
© 2014 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

YOU CAN’T BE A RACIST IF YOU ARE THINKING ABOUT THE WHOLE

Most of the evolutionists before Charles Darwin—his own grandfather Erasmus, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Constantine Rafinesque, and Robert Chambers—were far more holistic than he was. What was going on in the whole of nature grabbed their attention. They were excited by the idea that all creatures were related to each other and that this relation existed within the whole that gave each organism its part to play. Each of them may not have emphasized this idea in equal measure, but all of these naturalists gave it some force in their system of thought.

 
Lamarck argued that nature constituted a whole which did not act for the benefit of any one part. The whole might have a purpose, but whatever it is, the parts have no knowledge of it. Indeed, the parts of the whole may have a tendency to be very selfish and exaggerate their own importance. If a part could reason, it would probably say the whole is somehow deficient. In reality, the whole is perfectly organized and no one part may substitute itself for the whole.
 
For Lamarck, the development of the whole requires constant change in the parts—this is evolution, or la marche de la nature, as Lamarck called it—and if each part had a choice in the matter, it might wish to put a stop to that. But wherever evolution is headed, it must be good—at least, from the point of view of the whole.
 
Constant change was the key characteristic of evolution for Rafinesque. It should teach us, he argued, tolerance and love. We should honor the changes we see in nature. His view was that this is better than gloomy uniformity—which Chambers would call endless monotony. Chambers too celebrated variety and diversity in nature and our relationship to all other creatures. We all belong together in one vast system. This should teach us to respect the rights and feelings of lower animals. These are not my words. Rights and feelings are exactly the way Chambers put it.
 
Erasmus Darwin concluded we should love our brother emmets (ants) and sister worms. Rafinesque said the world was an organized animal rolling in space. Chambers compared nature to a pregnant woman going through stages of gestation. If they saw destruction and death in nature, as Erasmus Darwin and Rafinesque certainly did, they also saw rebirth in it. The continual birthing of new life forms gave them hope.
 
This is very different from the way Charles Darwin saw evolution. He did not emphasize wholeness and familial relationships so much as he emphasized a hierarchy of life forms with the dominant, (supposedly) most fit species on top. That is what comes through in The Origin of Species. Competition is perhaps the key factor in his scheme of evolution. Rafinesque abhorred competition. He believed it was destructive of human society.
 
Interestingly, Alfred Wallace, who came up with a version of natural selection similar to Darwin’s, also had ideas about the harm that competition among humans can do, especially competition between unequal parties—as, for example, competition between European nations and indigenous cultures. He wanted Europe to pull back from its ruthless pursuit of conquest and competition with societies that were not prepared for it.
 
And here is one of the most interesting points in all this: When we find racism in Darwin’s scientific thoughts about savages, it feels systemic. He builds it right into the system of nature as he saw it. Racism will sometimes rear its head in the writings of these other naturalists because it was a part of the society they lived in, but they never made it integral to their way of thinking. It rather appears as an aberration, something that does not really belong there. Racism has a kind of ideological permanency in Charles Darwin, but the others were headed in a very different direction. In their holism, racism does not play a part, even if this prejudice accidentally pops up on occasion.
 
Despite the deliberate overstatement in the title of this post, I would not say that holistic thinking is the only way to defeat racism, but it can help. And I would not say that anyone who fails to be holistic must inevitably incline towards racism. But it is interesting how often holism and anti-racism have gone together and it is especially instructive to see that there were other ways of being an evolutionist before Darwin, other ways which encouraged humanitarianism far more than he did.
 
©2014 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com