01.31.09
“Darwinism,” then, was never distinct from “social Darwinism.”
The theory of evolution is regarded as a triumph of disinterested scientific reason. Yet, on the 150th anniversary of “On the Origin of Species,” new research reveals that Darwin was driven to the idea of common descent by a great moral cause Adrian Desmond
I was at first a little suspicious that this new book by Desmond and Moore, authors of a good bio of Darwin, would be some sort of new brand of Darwin propaganda, but as this selection shows (below) the critical tone of the previous book seems to have entered the depiction.
Although Social Darwinism is blamed on Spencer, Darwin remains equally culpable, as Desmond points out here. As he puts it, “Darwinism,” then, was never distinct from “social Darwinism.”
There is a kind of urgency getting past the pseudo-science spawned by Darwinists, and in looking at new forms of post-theory on the evolution question, theories that don’t suffer the Oedipus Paradox, or generate violent unconscious ‘applied evolutionist scenarios’ in those who confuse theory and action.
The study of the eonic effect foots the bill here, first by showing how ‘evolution’ actually occurs in world history, and by producing a new kind of post-theory, where the ‘observer’ and his ‘theory’ are immersed in the ‘evolution’ being described. The depiction is on two levels, to keep the confusions of teleology at bay, and the description of evolution is always bound up in a special kind of ‘eonic sequence’, which can never act in the observer’s present, thus preventing the kind of confusion we see in Social Darwinism.
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Resolving the Oedipus Paradox As we discover the eonic effect, we will see this problem resolved by creating a new kind of historical model that unites in tandem the definitions of ‘evolution and history’, the one emerging from the other. ‘Evolution’ is always seen looking backwards, and never applies directly to the free potential of the present, and the agent acting out history. In the interaction of these two we see the direct appearance of ethical evolution/behavior, induced and ‘free’, or on the way to being free, its evolution and self-evolution (i.e. history) connected yet separate. It’s pretty obvious, with this new model, an ethical override arrives to induce a ‘should’ about murder and botched theories with their inducements of mayhem.
Here’s the selection from Desmond:
There is, also, a sadder irony. Darwin’s was a blinkered humanism. It reflected the conflicted nature of British society, where half the nation was trying to free slaves, while their expatriate peers in Australia and elsewhere were busy exterminating nomadic aborigines in the name of economic progress. In the economic depression that began in the late 1830s, some 400,000 unemployed were shipped from Britain to the colonies annually. The boatloads devastated local cultures to the extent that the annihilation of all aboriginal peoples was projected within a century.
Darwin himself had witnessed ethnic-cleansing on a world scale: the pampas Indians in Argentina butchered by General Rosas’s gauchos to clear the ground for cattle; the last Tasmanians herded into camps. The Beagle arrived amid the Xhosa wars in the Cape, at the start of the Boers “great trek.” Such events prefigured a darker side to Darwinism; and Darwin’s own vision became bleaker after he read Malthus on the wars and famine stemming from population pressures. He used Malthusian ideas to normalise and naturalise the colonial genocide, making it part of the evolutionary process, suggesting how such conflict was not only “natural,” but beneficial (inasmuch as the “fitter” survivors carried the human race forward). The uncivilised peoples of the plains were going the way of the megafauna he found fossilised under their feet. But Darwin took colonial conflict as an inevitability to be explained, not a policy choice to be challenged. It is a supreme irony that the gentle, squeamish abolitionist should end up justifying colonial eradication.
He didn’t see the incongruity. And as the years passed he adopted more of the attitudes of his gentlemanly class about the “higher” moral, technological and intellectual order achieved by white Europeans. Sixty-two by the time he announced his views on human evolution, in The Descent of Man (1871), he was now mired in his contemporaries’ “ladder” image of world cultures, with whites on the top civilisational rung and blacks at the bottom. The notion of a unilinear “higher” and “lower,” denounced in his old notebooks as meaningless, was effectively reinstated in cultural terms. He was following the trend, but in shifting the emphasis from a biological racial kinship to a single cultural yardstick for all races, standardised on western achievements, his science failed to live up to its early emancipatory promise.
“Darwinism,” then, was never distinct from “social Darwinism.” It is traditional to deflect blame away from Darwin himself for all the unpleasant social implications of this phrase, keeping his theory of natural selection scientific and ideologically untainted—the blame is conveniently shunted off on to his young contemporary Herbert Spencer. But this attempt to protect the purity of Darwinism won’t wash. Indeed, Darwin, who thought Spencer a windbag, would not have recognised a separate category of “social Darwinism”—for him, the “social” was integral to his system. He dealt with race, slavery, genocide and colonial conflict from the first: his theory of evolution was intended to explain society.
So one has to live with Darwin warts and all. He was a man of his time, a mirror to his culture; racist while also race-saving, distressed by cruelty as he naturalised genocide, able to pass the blame to nature, rather than man. History is messy and Darwin was always a paradoxical thinker, the more so as he began to bend with the breeze late in life.
To celebrate historical figures we have first to understand them. In 2009, 200 years after his birth, it is time to switch the spotlight onto the younger Darwin—the man whose belief in human brotherhood transmuted into an evolutionary theory of common descent. Rather than being morally subversive, as his Christian critics claim, Darwin’s achievement was morally grounded. Rather than being a dispassionate practice, his science had a humanitarian drive. It made brothers and sisters not only of all human races, but of all life.