Darwin, Transcendent Science and British Cruelty

            Darwinism is basically a theory of history. As I indicated earlier in my discussion of Philip II, Darwinism was an idea imagined long before Darwin. It embodies various beliefs, such as the supremacy of the human intellect over nature, and the supremacy of 'civilization' over 'savagery', that go back at least as far as Columbus and the ravaging of the Americas.

             Evolution replaced the creation stories. Creation stories helped control behavior by stigmatizing some behaviors and approving of others. The century long fight between the Creationists and the Darwinists is a fight over control of cultural memory. The Creationist point of view has been largely eclipsed. Or rather, more accurately, the creationist ideology whose basis is Christian teleology mutated into the evolutionary scheme. The Christian system of knowledge seeks to give man power over the cosmos by 'saving' man from original sin. The agent of change is Christ, who embodies supreme knowledge. Evolutionary theory is a system of knowledge which also gives man power over the natural world, which a Christian would call the 'fallen' world. It elects man's intellect as the sole and unique master over nature, able to manipulate nature or genes to conform to human intentions, usually profit making intentions, Both Christian and Darwinian teleology assume the goal of history is to obtain control of nature, which is conceived of as being lower than man's intellect on a hierarchical scale. Both Christian teleology and Darwinism are theories of man's supremacy. They conceive of this supremacy in somewhat different terms, Christianity emphasizes Christ as the super-conscious end of history, whereas evolution emphasizes man as the self conscious end of history. But these differences are slight in comparison to the similar over-all thrust of the two systems. Both are theories of history that glorify types of knowledge in order to secure power over nature and the world. My concern is not to enter into the creation-evolution debate, which is really a struggle for influence and social control.[1]  My concern is the values implicated by the Darwinian theory and their contribution to generating powers and injustices..

            The theory of evolution,  however 'objective' it is, does advocate certain values. As Marx claimed, "it is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labor, competition, opening up of new markets, [natural selection]  'inventions', and the Malthusian 'struggle for existence". [2] Jeremy Rifkin, the critic of the genetics industry which seeks to colonize life forms themselves and turn them into a terrain for profit, expresses  a similar appreciation of Darwin's science of Natural Selection.  

The bourgeoisie was in need of a 'proper' justification for the new factory system with its dehumanizing process of division of labor. By claiming that a similar process was at work in nature, Darwin provided an ideal for those capitalists hell-bent on holding the line against any   fundamental challenge to the economic hierarchy they managed and profited from.[3] 

Bertrand Russell draws a similar conclusion. He writes, "Darwin's theory was essentially a extension to the animal and vegetable kingdoms of laissez-faire economics, and was suggested by Malthus's theory of population".[4]

            Darwin found justification for British imperial colonization in the 'facts' of nature. He wrote that "when two races of men meet they act precisely like two species of animals- they fight, eat eachother, bring diseases to eachother, etc. but then comes the more deadly struggle, namely, which have the best fitted organization, or instinct (i.e. the intellect of man) to gain the day".  Darwin draws an explicit relation between the intellect, by which he means science, and imperialism. This is important.

            He also claimed that the empire of the intellect, because of a supposed competitive edge or innate superiority, would and must triumph, and that it was only a matter of time before "endless numbers of lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world". Darwin supposed that natural selection occurs with even more 'deadly struggle' on the cultural than the biological level.  For Darwin, the law of nature is not cooperation, despite all the evidence for this, but competition,  and he concludes that mankind sublimates biological cruelty into cultural cruelty. Darwin writes that "the varieties of man seem to act on eachother as different species, the stronger extirpating the weaker". [5]  Darwin's theory, however accurate it may be in selecting some facts from nature, is nevertheless a justification for English imperial practice projected onto the natural order. [6] Darwin himself held many of the views, if not all, that would later come to be expressed by the Social Darwinists.

            The development of science, racism and the conquest go hand in hand.  David Hume, whose ideas are important both to the history of science and imperial politics,  had written that "I am apt to suspect that Negroes and in general all other species of men...to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white". [7]  Darwin, like Hume invoked 'civilization', or the empire of the intellect  and its "higher" purposes to excuse atrocity.

             In the view of Darwin, Hume and other apologists of the British Empire, the destruction of native populations was demanded by a higher mission or a manifest destiny.  The mathematician and social Darwinist, Karl Pearson, for instance wrote, in an essay entitled, "National Life from the Standpoint of Science", that native peoples, Native Americans and Africans, Hindus and Australians are inferior: 

Educate and nurture them as you will, I believe you will not succeed in modifying the stock .History shows me one way, and only one way, in which a high state of evolution has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race....[the British or Europeans] must go and completely drive out the inferior race....that is what the white man has done in North America....The struggle for existence between white and red man, painful and even terrible as it was in its details, has given us a good far out-balancing its immediate evil. In place of the red man, contributing practically nothing to the work and thought of the world, we have a great nation, mistress of many arts, and able...to contribute   much to the common stock of civilized man...[8] 

            For science, civilization and the nation, its is permissible to attempt to wipe out an entire continent of people, and the theory of natural selection is there to justify it. Hitler and Himmler, as we shall see, used similar justifications.  Like Plato, another advocate of the empire of the intellect, Darwin advocated eugenics to keep 'weaker' and 'inferior' men from breeding. Darwin writes that the unless there is an increase in the breeding of superior men and women and maintain conditions that would "prevent  the reckless, the viscous and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will retrograde". [9] Elsewhere, Darwin writes that "we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, the sick; we institute poor laws... thus the weak members of civilized society propagate their kind  No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man" [10]. Elsewhere he concludes that "hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed".[11] Class and race prejudice is part of the Darwinian science, and not merely the result of exaggerations by the later Social Darwinists, though certainly there were some exaggerations. Darwin's science, implicitly and in its selection, emphasis and arrangement of facts, promulgates values, and these values correspond to the Imperialistic melieu of Britain at the time that Darwin lived.

            Indeed, there is not much difference between Darwin's views and those of Cecil Rhodes, tycoon and tyrant of the De Beers diamond company of South Africa, who wrote that the English should take Africa, because "Africa is lying ready for us and it is our duty to take it...more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race, more of the best, the most human, most honorable race the world possesses". [12] It is the White Man's Burden to be shouldered with the responsibility of having to  'civilize', or eliminate the lower races. It is for the benefit of the world that England conquer it. I do not know if anyone has ever tried to calculate the death toll that resulted from the British Empire and the brutalities in committed in the Americas, the slave trade, Australia and Tasmania, Africa, India, China, Burma and elsewhere but it is certainly many, many millions. Darwin's theories would also prove useful to the American industrialists. Andrew Carnegie, the Robber Baron and tyrant of the steel industry, was a avid Darwinist and reader of Herbert Spencer, a friend and advocate of Darwin's ideas. Darwin was part of industrial imperialism, not directly, but through his science and the values it advocated.

             Darwin would have agreed with Cecil Rhodes, no doubt.  Darwin, like Cecil Rhodes and Joesph Chamberlain, were sure that English brutality and imperial colonization were necessary for history and human progress. Chamberlain wrote that Indians and Africans, ,were killed in the process of building an Empire  and justified this on the basis that "you cannot have omelettes without cracking a few eggs".[13] This grotesquely homely understatement, as if killing Indians were like having a bourgeoisie breakfast, underscores the indifference of the conquerors to those they killed. A similar, but more developed statement of the relation of science, civilizationist racism and the cant of beneficent conquest was enunciated by a French advocate of colonialism. Jules Harmand wrote that:           

We belong to a superior race and civilization...The basic legitimation of conquest over native peoples is the conviction of our superiority, not merely our mechanical, economic, and military superiority, but our moral superiority. Our dignity rests on that quality and it underlies our    right to direct the rest of humanity. Material power is nothing but a means to that end.[14] 

            Darwin has a similar attitude. His superiority is assumed covertly in his science, and behind his presumption of scientific neutrality is his belief that his culture will eliminate other cultures and that this elimination is part of the laws of nature. Darwin's science has a religious fatality, an implicit historical inevitability that assumes European man's supreme status. Darwin's race and class prejudices are built into his theory, and are part and parcel of the supposed neutrality with which books like the Origin of the Species were written. In Darwin's case, as in the cases of Descartes and Newton, examined earlier, the presumption of scientific neutrality has largely served as a cloak for complicity in regimes of knowledge/power and the atrocities that have resulted from these regimes. The ethic of neutrality is a means of creating distance from responsibility for the consequences of destructive systems.

            There is a continuity between the service of science to the European imperial and colonial ambitions and more recent developments.. Many examples of civililizationism and scientific chauvinism can be found in advocates of American forms of imperial politics.  For instance,  the history of the state of Minnesota supplies and example of Darwinian Manifest Destiny and scientific chauvinism. The U.S. government forced the Dakota Indians of Minnesota to sign a treaty under threat of extinction if they did not sign. The treaty granted Indian land to settlers and the Indians were driven off their own land. Payments for the land were not made and the Indians began to stave and beg. Eventually they organized and tried to fight to get their land back. The whites, led by the US army defeated them and created mock trials were 38 out of over 200 were sentenced to death by hanging. All 38 were hung at the same time on the same scaffold on December 26, 1862 in Mankato, Minnesota. That night William W. Mayo, creator of the world famous Mayo clinic, and his men, dug up the mass grave. Barbara Freezor Stewart, a Dakota Indian, recounts that "they didn't even let the bodies get cold before they dug them up...They stripped the flesh off the bones of these people [to] take them away to teach anatomy...To me [this is] the height of hatred for the Dakota people". [15] In other words, whites stole the Native lands, and even stole Native bodies to increase the stock of knowledge and further science, progress and civilization. In this case, as in many others, 'disinterested' science served the interests of land theft, the gathering of wealth and the creation of imperial institutions, in this case a medical institution. Mayo assisted in trying to kill a culture in the name of a hospital devoted to gathering profits and healing White people.  Like Mayo, Mengele, in the Nazi camps, would use Jewish bodies for similar purposes and with similar rationales.

            Colonial exploitation and the racism that accompany it are not merely political and cultural matters, but are also implicit in the scientific enterprise. Another example of the seamless unity of scientific progress and Darwinian manifest destiny is the politics of George Kennan's doctrine of 'containment'. One of those who enacted Kennan's cold war policies was Henry Kissinger. Henry Kissinger, echoing Darwin in one of his essays, writes that the developed countries have the superior system of knowledge and believe that  "the real world is external to the observer, [and] that knowledge consists of recording and classifying data, the more accurately the better". The inferior, 'developing' countries have a "pre-Newtonian view that the real world is almost completely internal to the observer" and are thus 'subjective'. Kissinger's view, which is the view of the superior, developed countries like America, is "post Newtonian", "external", and "objective". Kissinger's essay, called "Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy", describes the empirical, orderly world of western capitalist states, according to Said as, "attractive, familiar, desirable"  and the 'developing' world as "menacing, peculiar and disorderly". Said concludes that:           

both the traditional orientalist...and Kissinger conceive of the difference between the two cultures, first, as creating a battlefront that separates them, and second, as inviting the West to control, contain and otherwise govern through superior knowledge and accommodating power.[16] 

            As a result of this attitude, really a form of scientific racism, Kissinger himself would become a senior advisor to President Nixon and be instrumental in advising the bombing of Cambodia, which resulted in 600,000 deaths of Indochinese men, women and children. Kissinger, a Harvard professor, was well in tune with the sources of Western science, objectivity and cultural superiority however much other scientists, like Chomsky, for instance, may have held different views on the Indochinese war. Science serves the powerful as well as those who dissent against the powerful, but the dissenters are rarely listened to and science ends up serving the violators of human rights.  I am using Kissinger as a recent example of this mentality. But it should be observed that Kissinger's 'objective'  justification for imperialism is by no means unique. The belief in the superiority of western civilization, science and culture stretches back to Columbus, Descartes, Newton and Shakespeare.

            The idea of scientific progress is a myth, akin to a religion, that orchestrates and organizes purposes.. The myth functions as an interpretive structure for history.  In our society acceptable history is largely a history that accepts and promotes a scientific view of the world. Along with Heims, Zinn, Feyerabend, Rifkin and others, this is what I mean to question. The result of this I have already recounted in earlier discussions of Darwin, the English and American Imperialists were convinced that the "post Newtonian" model of scientific theory, practice and progress, based on the belief that all reality is external to a 'neutral' observer, gave the West a superiority over all other cultures.  The concept of natural selection, which is a theory of history in scientific and cosmological garb, would help justify the elimination of the 'brutish' cultures that must necessarily be second best.  While it is obvious that Darwin and Kissinger were right and science and scientific civilization have eliminated most other cultures, peoples and many plant and animal species, thus proving superior in callousness and indifference to the suffering of others, this is hardly something that ought to go unquestioned. The discoverers and explorers assumed their superior right to inquiry and investigation. Kipling observes in his poem the "Explorer" that  the hidden land of geographic or scientific truth that the explorer or discoverer seeks is "white man's country past disputing" and is "God's present to our nation".[17] Curiosity, ambition and greed drive the quest of science and conquest and the military or corporate profiteers are not far behind.[18]

            Human rights democracy enters the rosy picture of Western and scientific triumphalism as an interloper. It had to be subverted, because the whole game of imperial conquest and global power would have been brought into question had it been allowed to exist in any reasonably egalitarian form.  Democracy, understood as a notion of human rights and equality, would have negated capitalism, the conquest, and the exploitation of lands and people's that accompanied the rise of science and industry. Indians lands could not have been taken, Columbus would have lost his beloved gold. European missionaries could not have imposed their gods. This is why the concept of the corporation as a legal individual was considered so important in the late 19th century. If the corporation could be set up as a legal individual, neither science, nor imperialism could be brought seriously into question. The corporations could exploit scientific discoveries in their own interests at the same time as they pursued imperial subjugation of other cultures through so called "free trade" or "trickle down" or "liberal" economic strategies. Scientists, firmly veiled behind the pose of value neutrality would seem to be merely serving humanity. But except for the rare scientist, ecologist, researcher or chemist with a conscience, such as Jane Goodall, mostly it was corporations, banks and the wealthy that were and are served.[19]

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