THE BOOK

Darwin's Racism: The Definitive Case, Along with a Close Look at Some of the Forgotten, Genuine Humanitarians of That Time should be available on book sites, like Amazon, in the next 4 to 6 weeks.

In the meantime, I thought I would list the chapter titles:

1  Evolutionary Theory is Safe

2 Savages: The Polished and the Melancholy

3 Racism: By Any Other Name

4 Slavery, Emancipation, and Continuing Racism

5 Evidence, Evidence, Evidence

6 Man in The Origin of Species

7 Some Lessons from Mathus

8 Something Happened Before Darwin Arrived

9 What a Difference a Worldview Makes

10 Euphemisms Be Damned

11 Genocide By Any Other Name

12 Restoring Messiness to History

It's a big book.

© 2016 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com

MY BOOK

As I am busy finishing proofreading and indexing my book, I won't post anything this month.  The title of the book is Darwin's Racism: The Definitive Case, Along With a Close Look at Some of the Forgotten, Genuine Humanitarians of That Time.  I hope it will be available by June.

REPARATIONS AND BEAUTY—PART 2

[Part 1 is the previous post, the one for February 2016. I usually post once a month at the end of the month. I am posting earlier this time, so it will follow soon after Part 1.]

Sometimes the news throws up reports on the most diverse subjects, which can lead us to make the oddest connections. Along with a debate about reparations, recent news items have told us about the detection of gravitational waves, confirming part of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. It has produced a lot of excitement. For one thing, there is a hope that new technological devices will ensue. Whenever we discover anything in the west, the first thing scientists start thinking about is how this will give us more domination and control over nature.

But there is more. In response to one person’s query as to what good is this, one scientist, or perhaps it was a journalist who writes on science, responded that one might as well ask what good is Beethoven or Bach. There is a beauty to scientific theories about the universe that is worth pursuing for its own sake. Yes, there is. I agree. But I wonder why we never say that about humanitarian ideas.

There is an incredible beauty in the idea that an attack on humanity anywhere is an attack on humanity everywhere. But how many people really believe that? We consider it deeply problematic, a very big pain in the ass, to defend human rights everywhere. There is the danger, the economic costs, diplomatic considerations. Too much of an emphasis on human rights will interfere with material progress which always comes first. Human rights are something that can be put on the backburner. Humanitarian ideals are nothing like Beethoven or Bach. Great music doesn’t make us feel guilty the way our failures in humanitarianism do. We don’t celebrate humanitarians of the past the way we celebrate Bach or Einstein. We would rather forget.

(In what follows, all emphases in quotations from old authors are original to these authors.)

In the late 17^th century, John Locke wrote that when an “Aggressor … unjustly invades another Man’s Right, [he] can … never come to have a Right over the Conquered …” He compares such unjust rulers to robbers and pirates. An unjust conqueror is like a robber who gains title to a man’s estate by holding a dagger to his throat. “The Injury and the Crime is equal, whether committed by the wearer of a Crown, or some petty Villain. The Title of the Offender, and the Number of his Followers, make no difference in the Offence, unless it be to aggravate it.” Think of what Locke is saying: Not only does might or status not make right, but it makes for less right and magnifies the crime.

(How Locke was rewritten by scholars to make him into a supporter of colonialism and the dispossession of native peoples is too long a story to go into here. For the moment, it is enough to say that their chief method has been to erase all that he said in defense of the native rights of all peoples.)

Locke went further. He argued that even in a just war, when a nation has all the justice on its side you can imagine, such justice does not give the conqueror the right to take away all the land from the conquered nation. The vanquished, especially the women and children, have a right to live and a right to inherit their fathers’ possessions. “But the Conquered, or their Children, have no Court, no Arbitrator on Earth to appeal to. Then they may appeal [to heaven] … and repeat their Appeal, till they recovered the native Right of their Ancestors … If it be objected, this would cause endless trouble; I answer, No more than Justice does, where she lies open to all that appeal to her.” For Locke, this is absolutely true in an unjust war, but even just wars cannot undo the right to inherit and have enough land for survival.

Saxe Bannister, Attorney General in New South Wales in the mid-1820s and later active in the Aborigines’ Protection Society, put it most succinctly: “rights are never forgotten.” There is the right to reparations in a nutshell. It is as beautiful a humanitarian insight as the idea that an attack on humanity anywhere is an attack on humanity everywhere.

Granville Sharp was one of the earliest British abolitionists. He defended many a slave in England in the late 18^th century and was finally successful in getting a judge to decide that slavery in England was illegal (the exact interpretation of the judge’s decision was in dispute, but he was popularly understood to have banned slavery on English home soil). Sharp was deeply aware that the rights of Englishmen were entwined with rights for all humans: “the spirit and equity,” for example, of trial by jury (denied to slaves) would be “entirely lost, if we partially confine that justice to ourselves alone, when we have it in our power to extend it to others” (this point was framed in a rhetorical question). “The natural right of all mankind must principally justify our insisting upon this necessary privilege in favour of ourselves in particular … we certainly undermine the equitable force and reason of those laws, by which we ourselves are protected …” if we do not extend them to all men.

It was this concern for human rights that carried over to the movement to help Aborigines who were losing their land without compensation. Saxe Bannister pointed out that the Parliamentary leaders pushing for the emancipation of slaves had always had colonial Aborigines, or free coloreds, in their minds as well. Sharp himself had made a connection between the causes of slaves and Aborigines. To make Aborigines out to be savages was, like enslavement, to divest them of their humanity, an expression used by Sharp. Sharp had argued that slavery turned human beings into property and that this was a divestment of their humanity. He insisted that no human being can ever be divested of his fundamental human nature and the rights that go with it.

The most important thing to remember about Sharp’s brand of humanitarianism is that he did not just want to free the slaves—he wanted to free them for the right reasons and that included the idea of universal human rights. His ideas, like those of Bannister and Locke, were as beautiful as anything in physics and mathematics.

Twice Sharp tells us that slavery is “destructive of the human species.” (Darwin would say almost the exact opposite when it came to exterminating Aborigines; he believed their disappearance would improve the human race; see below.) Sharp’s statement seems to be based on his belief that the oppression of one part of society, if unchecked, will spread to other parts, particularly to the common people. He notes that the free Negroes, Mulattoes, and Indians in the colonies suffer oppressive measures as a result of the way slaves are treated. There is implied in this a holistic view of human society. The whole binds all the parts together so that injustice cannot be confined to one part; whatever wrongs are done to one will spread to other parts of the whole. Sharp saw connections where racists and slaveholders saw disconnections.

Darwin was more apt to see disconnections. He affirmed connections between humans in the ancient past, but he also believed evolution had created such diversity of character that the end result in our time was that the human races were markedly different in moral and intellectual nature. To one correspondent, Darwin wrote, “It is very true what you say about the higher races of men, when high enough, replacing & clearing off the lower races. In 500 years how the Anglo-saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.” Rank was what counted for Darwin, which is why he depicted lower races as pulling down the human race as a whole. Getting rid of certain human races, not reparations, was what Darwin envisioned for the future.

Sharp saw it differently. Injustice is what pulled humanity down and giving justice to a despised group could only pull humanity up. As Locke had said, there is no time limit on calling for injustice to be rectified. All human beings are entitled to rights (which never go away, as Bannister had emphasized), so much so that, in Sharp’s view, the denial of rights to any one group would have devastating consequences on all other human beings. He was a holistic thinker. Would he have approved of reparations? I think so. He would have understood that lifting up a people as a counter-measure to the injustices they had suffered would have beneficial results for everyone else. Reparations fit his general way of thinking.

There is a beauty in all this that we would do well to remember. Rights are never forgotten and can never be abandoned. As long as there are descendants to remember these things. That is as beautiful as a gravitational wave, isn’t it? To the ones I have mentioned here, many other forgotten names could be added, like Charles Napier, J. Langfield Ward, and Georg Gerland. Napier had argued how destructive an obsession with national wealth is and Gerland asked us to remember that indigenous people had not rejected civilization, rather civilization had rejected the indigenous.

They all asked us to remember that the line between civilized and savage runs through every human society, and should never be used as a marker to distinguish between cultures. Every society has the capacity to sink back into savagery, as Gerland said, and the so-called savage cultures give us high examples of humanity.

Unfortunately, we have chosen not to remember the humanitarians who taught us these lessons. We do not honor their names the way we honor the names of scientists who enhanced the power of western civilization. We’ve brushed them aside. We’ve dis-remembered them. We don’t value what they stood for. Reparations here would mean remembering what they thought was important and remembering that we have rejected their offerings. It’s that double memory that twists us up inside. We don’t know how to face what our neglect has done to them.

Whatever the merit and benefits of financial reparations, the ultimate reparations are memories. The reparations of remembering history accurately is what we need more than anything else. Whether the future holds promise or gives us an abyss depends on how we remember the past. It is the most dangerous kind of reparation because part of this is remembering how bad we have been at the task of memorializing humanitarians who tried so hard to give us something better. We have erased them from history. If we have any heart at all, we should do our utmost to reverse that.

© 2016 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com

REPARATIONS AND BEAUTY—PART 1

[Part 2 will come next month, March 2016.]

There has been a lot of talk recently about reparations for slavery. It is not of course the first time this has been brought up. I recall sometime in the mid-1980s there was a newspaper article about African-American Congressmen raising the issue of reparations. I was on a subway train seated behind two black women, one of whom had the paper opened to that article. She asked the other what she thought about this. Her friend replied, “I don’t know nothing about no slavery. My family was never slaves. We were always free. I got nothing to do with that.” She seemed quite indignant that anyone would associate her or her family with that demoralizing institution. As I recall, that was the end of their conversation on that.

The original hope for reparations was the forty acres and a mule that every freed slave was supposed to get. That never got done. In general, I don’t think there is such a thing as historical justice. The only true justice would be to have prevented the original injustice from happening or to have made a correction very soon after it happened. Once you pass a certain point, justice is a fantasy. But a semblance of it might be worth going after, if only as an acknowledgment that past injustices continue to reverberate into the future.

We forget that British colonies went through this with Aborigines (and, I believe, are still going through it in places like Australia, though I don’t know enough about current proceedings there). Humanitarians had pointed out that colonial wealth was built on stealing land from the original proprietors. Some argued that it would be only right if, say, ten percent of this wealth went back to the natives. That idea never picked up steam. The greed that demanded we take everything from Aborigines was too stingy to allow even a small percent to go back to the first inhabitants.

In testimony before the House of Commons Select Committee on Aborigines in the mid-1830s, one minister thought the best compensation we could offer would be to bring them Christianity and the benefits of western civilization. This would be a fair recompense for the land we took. One member of the Committee pointed out that this was the only compensation we could afford.

Meanwhile, some money was set aside to help new immigrants settle in Australia, but almost nothing went to help the displaced natives. They were very stingy about how they allocated funds. The problem with asking for reparations (which I fully agree with, despite its problems) is that we are asking this of a society that has never acknowledged the extreme greed that led to slavery and colonization in the first place. The dominant culture from the beginning has wanted it all and has been unwilling to share or give up even a small piece of the wealth to be had.

Yet we ask this culture to be more sharing now. What are the chances of success as long as our society refuses to acknowledge how deep are the tentacles of greediness in all that we do?

I don’t think that most 19^th century abolitionists ever thought about reparations. They conceived that once slavery was abolished, freedom was the only reparation necessary and white people could wash their hands of it, as Thomas Huxley once put it (which I will get to in a bit).

I don’t see any signs that Charles Darwin thought about a continuing need to address injustice. One slight exception is from his Beagle Diary where he commented, “The Chilean authorities are now performing an act of justice by making retribution to these poor Indians, by giving to each Cacique twelve quadras of land …” This is not at all typical of Darwin’s sentiments, not to mention that it seems almost perverse that he would pick out one case of some justice being attempted, while ignoring the innumerable instances of dispossessing natives without any attempt at compensation.

More typical of Darwin are the following comments from his Diary. Just a couple of months after the above remark, Darwin notes how poor one group of Indians is and writes, “I really think a boats crew with the Spanish flag might take the island of Chiloe.” He can make this observation despite the notorious reputation the Spanish empire had. In the same month, he indifferently observes that many islands in South America are unpopulated: “I should suppose the tribe has become extinct; one step to the final extermination of the Indian race in S. America.”

Then there is this: In Argentina, as General Rosas led a campaign of genocidal slaughter, Darwin opines, “If this warfare is successful, that is if all the Indians are butchered, a grand extent of country will be gained for the production of cattle: & the vallies [of various rivers] will be most productive in corn.” A month earlier, he had written, “The war of extermination, although carried on with the most shocking barbarity, will certainly produce great benefits.” Sad to say, it is thoughts like these which Darwin expresses most often.

These remarks were eliminated from the published version of his Diary. But in the published Journal, he made the same point in a more sophisticated way. On the removal of all the Tasmanian Aborigines from their land, Darwin said, “Van Diemen’s Land enjoys the great advantage of being free from a native population.” He called it a “most cruel step” but “quite unavoidable.”

One advantage of complete extermination is that the invaders/colonizers will never have to think about paying reparations to the descendants because there won’t be any descendants. Darwin and many of his contemporaries believed that extermination of indigenous peoples was inevitable. There were many reasons for believing in this inevitability, which I discuss in my book (perhaps available in a few months). One was just this—that it would obviate the need, even the very question of, reparations. I cannot be sure which person believed in which reasons, since there was such a complex at work here, and so in Darwin’s case, I don’t know all his reasons for believing in the inevitable doom facing Aborigines everywhere, but it is possible that getting rid of any claim for reparations was one of them.

The humanitarians of the age insisted on some reparations. Even more, they were capable of arguing that anyone who believed in the inevitable extermination of any human population was himself a barbarian. In essence, this supposed law of inevitability was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or as Herman Merivale, a professor at Oxford, put it in 1841 or 1842, this was an imaginary law; he identified Darwin as one of those who supported this imaginary law. Another Englishman called the extermination of Aborigines a national crime, the perpetrators of which should be punished.

When I started this post, I had no idea of how long it was going to be. I am going to leave the beauty part of reparations for next month’s post. I will bring up John Locke, Saxe Bannister, and Granville Sharp for the sublimity of their thoughts that rights are never forgotten.

Since I mentioned Huxley above, I should conclude this post by presenting his thoughts on the matter of what, if anything, was due ex-slaves. His answer was basically nothing. Like Darwin and their friend Joseph Hooker, Huxley was an abolitionist. But all three held strong racist beliefs.

At the end of the American Civil War, Huxley was glad that slavery had finally been defeated in the west. He was not hopeful about the future for former slaves. Their own inferiority would keep them down. In a lecture, he stated that there were “good grounds for repudiating half the arguments which have been employed by the winning side,” that is, by those fighting to end slavery. What bothered him most was the argument of equality between the races: “no rational man, cognisant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man.” Whatever happens to the Negro from here on in, “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 forever more.” This was “the real justification for the abolition policy”—that is, to give us a clean conscience.

Obviously, there is no room here for anything like reparations. A philosophy that worked against any idea of reparations was built into the system of emancipation from its inception. There must have been some guilt over what slavery had accomplished, otherwise emphasizing a clean conscience would not have been voiced. This clean conscience enabled them to pretend that slavery and colonization had not created disadvantages for ex-slaves and ex-colonial subjects. We are still pretending.

Would Darwin have agreed with Huxley? Most likely, yes, but I have no specific evidence to prove that. He opposed slavery primarily, perhaps exclusively, for one reason—for its enormous cruelties, including the breaking up of slave families. It was not economic injustice that concerned him or even social inequality. He always believed that social inequality was a good thing. He was opposed to trade unions and cooperative societies because they seemed to him to work against the principle of competition; they tried to make everyone too equal. In New Zealand, he noted with some disappointment that slaves and their owners did not always observe the formalities of class distinctions. A slave should not know cruelty, but he should know his social place. I doubt that Darwin would have been concerned with reparations for former slaves, most of whom were now part of the class of poor people, a group that did not concern Darwin very much.

© 2106 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com

MY BOOK IS ALMOST HERE

I am in the final stages of preparing Darwin’s Racism: The Definitive Case, Along with a Close Look at Some of the Forgotten, Genuine Humanitarians of That Time for publication. Hopefully, it will be available in a couple of months.

In the meantime, immediately below is the description of the book that will appear on websites and the back of the book:

Throughout the 19^th century in the British Empire, parallel developments in science and the law were squeezing Aborigines everywhere into nonexistence. Charles Darwin took part in this. Again and again, he expressed his approval of the extermination of the native “lower races.” The more interesting part of the story is that there were plenty of voices, albeit a minority and mostly forgotten now, who objected on humanitarian grounds (and sometimes scientific grounds as well). Europeans, they said, were becoming polished savages and dehumanizing the Other. Darwin was very aware of this criticism and cared not one whit. As he said in a letter to Charles Lyell, “I … care not much whether we are looked at as mere savages in a remotely distant future.” But he well knew it was not a remote future. He had read several writers who accused Europeans of being the real savages. For a brief moment in his youth in his Diary, he himself dabbled in such criticism, even though he already believed in the inferiority of indigenous peoples. That belief grew firmer as he matured. Darwin did not dispute humanitarians so much as he ignored them. It’s a sad story. But oh those humanitarians, how they inspire.

That is the description. There are three components to the book: 1) presenting all the evidence to establish that racism was a systemic part of Darwin’s anthropology; this includes evidence from his published writings, Notebooks, and correspondence; 2) looking in detail at some of his contemporaries who strongly objected to the racism of their culture and to the genocidal policies practiced in the colonies; and 3) remembering the evolutionists who preceded Darwin and who were more holistic and humane than he was; they would have taken evolutionary theory in a different direction, but we have consigned them to oblivion.

This book is about rescuing voices from the past. If one line sums it up, perhaps it would be a line from the end of the film A Thousand Acres. One of the sisters, dying in the hospital, says that her single accomplishment in life was this: I saw and I did not flinch from telling.

© Leon Zitzer 2016

zitzerleon@gmail.com

PATERNALISM OR RACISM?

How serious are the prejudices in Charles Darwin’s writings? Unlike someone like Adam Gopnik who is in complete denial about these prejudices, Stephen Gould recognized in The Mismeasure of Man that you cannot make Darwin out to be an egalitarian. Darwin definitely believed in a hierarchy of cultures, with European civilization at the top. But Gould tries to soften Darwin’s views into a kind of gentle paternalism. Based on his own standards, that does not hold up.

Before I get to that, I should say that Gould made the inaccurate claim that “All [in Darwin’s time] were racists by modern standards,” though earlier he had made an exception for Alfred Wallace who has been “justly hailed as an antiracist.” So in a sense, Gould was admitting that Darwin might well have been a racist, but that is excusable because everyone in that time was. The problem is that Gould erased plenty of antiracists besides Wallace. Just one more example is Charles Napier, a British military hero. In 1835, he objected to the ranking of races and indignantly denied that Australian Aborigines formed a missing link between man and monkey. Darwin, like so many other racists of his time, pondered the question of which race was the lowest and had a hard time deciding whether it was the Australians or the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. For someone like Napier, this was nonsense.

Even taking at face value that remark about all being racist, Gould acknowledged that there were harsher racists and kindlier racists. Here, he said, is how we can distinguish them: “those we now judge most harshly urged that inferiority be used as an excuse for dispossession and slavery, while those we most admire in retrospect urged a moral principle of equal rights and nonexploitation, whatever the biological status of people.” I ask: Which one most accurately describes colonialism?

In the very next sentence, Gould claimed, “Darwin held this second position along with the two Americans best regarded by later history [Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln].” That is true for Darwin only in regard to legal slavery. It is an untrue statement when it comes to the issue of colonialism and the extermination of the colonized. On that score, Darwin held the first position—the inferiority of savages justified Europeans taking their land. Colonialism was as dispossessing and exploitive as slavery. Darwin supported it as one of the consequences of native inferiority. It would be people like Wallace, Charles Napier, Georg Gerland, John Stokes, Saxe Bannister, Langfield Ward, and many members of the Aborigines’ Protection Society who really fulfilled (in varying degrees) the position Gould admired. Darwin turned his back on what colonization and the idea of savage inferiority were doing to natives. Gould never addressed this. He brought his usual historical curiosity to a full stop.

There is evidence in The Descent of Man that Darwin considered signs of savage inferiority in their biological make-up, for example in their having a better sense of smell than white people, which put savages closer to the world of animals. His most serious biological assessment of them was that they had smaller brains, which would indicate lower intellects. Gould ignored this direct evidence of Darwin’s biological determinism.

Even if we assume that Gould was right about Darwin believing savages were improvable and therefore not trapped in biological inferiority, it turns out to be a distinction without a difference. In another essay in The Mismeasure of Man, Gould eloquently describes the effects of believing in biological determinism: “Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.” That is exactly what colonialism did, when it wasn’t murdering people. It stunted life, denied opportunities, and imposed this from without, while claiming the limitations were due to the internal nature of savages.

So does it really matter if Darwin was technically a biological determinist or not, if ultimately he gave his tacit or explicit assent to the colonial project? I can’t see that it does. It’s the same difference, no matter how you slice it or dice it. Paternalism is a misdirection that Gould gave himself so that he wouldn’t see the evidence of Darwin’s support for the colonial enterprise and its stunting of life. Gould also missed that Darwin linked natural selection to the colonial enterprise and in doing so, he made a biological theory (natural selection) supportive of colonialism.

Gould quotes a famous passage from Descent in which Darwin says that over the next few centuries, “the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world” (Darwin also states here that anthropomorphous apes will be exterminated too). Gould actually quotes a longer portion of it. He cites the passage to show that Darwin did believe certain human races were inferior and that Darwin ranked savages between apes and white people, which in Gould's view makes Darwin a paternalist. But Gould completely ignores the part about extermination! There is nothing more stunting of life than extermination. I fail to see how that can be called paternalism. And I find it mindboggling that Gould could completely miss that.

© 2015 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com

REVIEW OF "THE SHAPE Of THE NEW"

The following is a review of a part of The Shape of the New: Four Big Ideas and How They Made the Modern World by Scott Montgomery and Daniel Chirot, published in May of this year, which I recently put up on Amazon.

MORE MYTH THAN HISTORY ON ONE ISSUE

This is not a review of the whole book. I always limit my reviews. In this book, what concerns me is the section on Darwin and evolution. That is all I feel qualified to comment on. They make too many errors for this to be called accurate history.

They treat Darwin as a hero (always a good sign that we are being confronted more with myth than with history). They try to cover themselves by stating early on that Darwin “was not the true originator of all that he wrote about.” But they contradict that as they continue. In fact, in the very same paragraph they claim that common descent was one of his new ideas and they repeat this later on, claiming common descent was “original to Darwin.”

This is completely false. The idea that species were evolving or descending from previous species, going back to a common origin for all life, preceded Charles Darwin by a long shot. Not only the idea of this, but offering evidence for it was going on long before Darwin. His own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, proposed that perhaps life had developed from a single living filament and presented enough evidence to make it a reasonable hypothesis to pursue. In his day, it was known as generation (one species generating another species just like the births of individuals). The authors of this book mention Erasmus Darwin only once in connection with some family problems, but never say anything about the work he did to establish evolutionary theory.

They briefly mention Lamarck, who published an important book on this the year Charles Darwin was born, and Robert Chambers whose book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was published in 1844 and then nine more editions before Origin of Species appeared. Throughout most of the 19^th century, more copies of Vestiges were produced than Origin. It is true that Vestiges had a fifteen year head start, but it took much more than fifteen years for Origin to catch up. In the days of Chambers, evolution was known as the development hypothesis and he presented a mighty strong case for it.

There are two ways people can be erased from history. One is to completely ignore them and the other is to give them brief mention while understating or even suppressing their achievements. Authors Montgomery and Chirot choose to do the latter for Lamarck and Chambers. They completely miss what these two figures accomplished. Chambers presented much of the same evidence for common descent that Darwin would and in fact proved that evolution or development was far more probable than the theory of independent or special creation. Yet he never gets credit for it.

The authors rightly praise Darwin for linking man to the rest of nature, but Chambers did just as good a job and went further. Chambers stressed that human beings were related to all other forms of life and especially to the lower animals (an expression they all used, including Darwin); even in intelligence, there were differences in degree only. Since we are all related, Chambers concluded that we had to respect the rights and feelings of other animals. Darwin would never go that far. When Darwin testified before a Royal Commission Committee on the question of vivisection, he pleaded with them not to ban outright all experiments on living animals, as mankind might derive some benefits from this, but he did object to experiments without anesthesia if they could be done with anesthesia. However, he would never go so far as putting man and animals as sympathetically close together as Chambers did.

Montgomery and Chirot also play down Darwin’s connection to later developments of Social Darwinism and eugenics. I agree with the authors that Darwin would have been horrified at some of the later things that were done with his theory of natural selection, but he would not have been horrified by all of it. Darwin himself stressed that the lower races of human beings would be exterminated by colonialism and suggested that humanity would rise higher because of this. The authors completely fail to say anything about this. They make Darwin appear more humane than he actually was.

The authors mention that Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton initiated eugenics thinking, but they leave out two crucial points. First, Darwin liked his cousin’s book on this. Second, when Galton argued that nature does not care for individuals, but only uses them to make superior races, Darwin only slightly disagreed. He pointed out that there are many extinct species which shows that nature may not care much for species either. But Darwin added that maybe the right way to express all this was that “Nature cares only for the superior individuals and then makes her new and better races” (he framed this in a rhetorical question). Darwin never thought about what it would be like to carry this to a logical conclusion, but we cannot say that Darwin did not supply plenty of grist for the Social Darwinist mill.

The authors present Darwin as a champion for what they call “the final secularization of the living world.” Long ago, Darwin was made into a great hero in the fight between science and religion (ironically, he never approved of this bogus combat and was always happy to see anyone reconcile religion and science), but when anyone is made into a hero, it means other people or their accomplishments have to be erased from history in order that the hero can shine more. It is that falsification of history to which I object.

The key point is this: When people are erased from history, it is usually the humanitarians. Chambers and other evolutionists were more holistic than Darwin who saw nature as a hierarchy of groups subordinate to groups. For Chambers and others, it is the whole that evolves and all the parts, including humanity, need each other in this scheme. Chambers was a more humane evolutionist than Darwin. We have lost a lot by forgetting this part of history.

© 2015 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com