Savages and Civilized Races

LET US, THOUGH, FOR the moment assume that Darwinian explanations are in general true and do not apply to the Darwinian theory itself, and let us see what that theory implies about human development. It turns out that Darwin’s early reaction to the Tierra del Fuegans was not an anomaly, but is all of a piece with the core doctrine of continuous improvement through natural selection. He refers to them again at the end of The Descent of Man in 1871: ‘They possessed hardly any arts, and like wild animals lived on what they could catch; they had no government, and were merciless to everyone not of their tribe’. And opening out his discussion, he goes on to say that he would prefer to be descended from a monkey or a baboon who manifested traits of loyalty and self-sacrifice as from ‘a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.’ (The Descent of Man, second edition, John Murray, London, 1898, Vol II p 440.)

Earlier in the main body of The Descent of Man Darwin had written a whole chapter on the way inferior races had been replaced by superior ones; even ‘at the present day civilised nations are everywhere supplanting barbarous nations, excepting where the climate opposes a deadly barrier’. (Vol I, p 197)  This is due, he suggests, to the working out via natural selection of the effects of better intellectual and moral faculties and sensibilities, which give their possessors advantages in the struggle for survival, which, together with their ‘daring and persistent energy’ (also a product of natural selection) go some way to explaining the ‘remarkable success of the English as colonists’ and ‘the wonderful progress of the United States.’ (p 218) Indeed part of Chapter V of The Descent of Man is devoted to rebutting the contrary suggestion that all races started at the same level, with some declining over time. For Darwin, as an evolutionarily progressive thinker, the descent of man implies ascent both from lower species and from lower stages of human development. As early as 11 October 1859, in a letter to Charles Lyell, Darwin had written ‘I look at this process as now going on with the races of man; the less intellectual races being exterminated.’ (The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Cambridge University Press, 1983-2004, Vol 7, p 345.)

As late as 1881 Darwin wrote: ‘The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.’ Admittedly this is in a letter (the same one, in fact, already referred to), but that remark (redolent as it may be of the contemporaneous talk of ‘Bulgarian atrocities’ and of ‘sick men of Europe’) is precisely in reply to a correspondent who was doubtful that the struggle for survival and natural selection had done much to contribute to human progress. In 2011 it is hard not be disturbed Darwin’s casual reference to the elimination of endless numbers of lower races, and even more by the way this sort of thinking was taken up by his followers such as Haeckel and von Treitschke, who in turn influenced Hitler.  Moreover the remark in question is all of a piece with the teaching of The Descent of Man, even if more forcefully expressed.

The question we have to face here is not whether Darwin held the views ascribed to him. He clearly did. The question is whether those views follow from the theory of natural selection. The inescapable conclusion is that, if that theory is to be applied to human history, it is hard to see how, in some form, it can fail to do so.

The very first chapter of that book is entitled ‘The Descent of Man from Some Lower Form’, so clearly no species egalitarianism there. It is indeed just what we had been led to expect from the conclusion of The Origin of Species where we were promised that the theory of natural selection would through light on origin of man and his history. For if natural selection is a doctrine of progress and if it applies to human history as well as to human origins we must expect that humans will be better than animals in significant respects and that some humans will be significantly better than others. There is, of course, an elision in Darwin’s thinking between better in the struggle for existence and more civilized. Bulgarian atrocities aside, there is no necessity here.

Indeed when we come to human affairs, the whole thing becomes rather ragged. We might indeed think that the Bulgarian atrocities are small beer compared to the atrocities produced by the ‘civilized’ peoples of the twentieth century (or indeed to those perpetrated in the French Revolution and by Napoleon just a bit earlier.). Is the society which produces reality television (or television at all) more civilised than that which produced Chartres Cathedral and the Divine Comedy? Is there progress from Beethoven and Schubert to Stockhausen and Sir Harrison Birtwhistle (or even the Beatles)? For all our universal literacy have we produced any writers to compare with Aeschylus or Shakespeare, or thinkers to compare with Plato or Kant? These questions are, of course, undecidable, as is what lies behind them. It is impossible to see any general trend in human affairs towards progress or universal improvement, partly (but not only) because the terms in question are inherently vague, and where not vague are likely to be essentially contestable. What is, though, more clear to us than it may have been to Darwin is that in human affairs the struggle for existence is not in itself a guarantee of progress in any dimensions other than those of surviving and reproducing.