TOO LITTLE SILENCE, TOO FEW GAPS:

The Darwin legend: a review of Darwin by Adrian Desmond and James Moore (Richard Webster, 1991, The Tablet)

One of the many disjunctions in Darwin’s thought which they fail to explore is the huge disparity in intellectual quality between his work on species, and his reflections on human society. So long as Darwin focused his attention on the world of animals and plants he showed himself as a scientist of unparalleled sensitivity, imagination and theoretical acuteness. He was above all immensely tolerant of the rich complexity of the natural world, and almost entirely free of the metaphysical arrogance that ‘disdains to dwell upon particulars’ which Bacon identified as the enemy of science and objective truth.

But if we turn from The Origin of Species to consider the pronouncements on human nature which Darwin included in The Descent of Man we will be struck not only by a drastic impoverishment in the quality of the arguments which are advanced but also by an equally drastic fall in the quantity of data which Darwin is prepared to consider. In his role as a naturalist Darwin regularly drew upon an extraordinary wealth of evidence. He had become, as he put it ‘a complete millionaire in odd and curious little facts’. ‘I am like Croesus,’ he said on another occasion, ‘overwhelmed with my riches in facts.’ Yet in his writings on human society and human history the millionaire suddenly becomes a pauper who, with only a few pennies of evidence in his pockets, fills them with prejudices instead.

Again and again in The Descent of Man theories are used not as hypotheses but as pathways to conduct the reader across abysses of missing evidence. Again and again conclusions hastily reached are laid one upon another in order that the habits and beliefs of Victorian society may be enclosed within the safe stronghold of science. Unconsciously, it would seem, Darwin feels himself driven to fortify with falsity the very ramparts of orthodoxy which he has attacked with truth.

On a number of occasions the authors touch upon the most genuinely radical and subversive of all Darwin’s intellectual attitudes, his ‘shockingly relative outlook’. ‘It is absurd,’ wrote Darwin in his notebook, ‘to talk of one animal being higher than another. We consider those, where the intellectual faculties most developed, as highest. - A bee doubtless would [use] instincts [as a criterion]’. As a succinct expression of Darwin’s evolutionary philosophy this rivals the most precious of all his precepts: ‘Never use the words higher and lower.’ His biographers correctly observe that ‘In his bee’s eye view man was no longer the crown of creation.’ But what they refrain from observing is that Darwin repeatedly perpetrated in his writings about human nature and society the very absurdities he so expertly dissected in his notes about species. Thus he talked not only of the ‘exalted’ status of the ‘higher’ animals but also of the manner in which ‘man’ with his ‘god-like intellect’ had ‘risen ... to the very summit of the organic scale.’

Darwin’s reckless and profoundly unscientific use of such metaphors, and his unthinking embrace of social orthodoxies, were far from being trivial or benign. Whereas, in his work on species, he acquits himself as an empirical scientist of genius, in his writings about human nature he emerges – and this is the most difficult crux in all intellectual history to seize imaginatively – as both a pseudo-scientist and a racialist.

The pseudo-scientific status of Darwin’s pronouncements on human nature is a matter of debate. His racialism, however, is a matter of fact. For he did not hesitate to apply to the problems of race the hierarchical thinking he had ruled out in relation to species. He talked without embarrassment about ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ races. In The Descent of Man he looked forward with equanimity, and even with a degree of scientific approval, to the day when the ‘civilised’ races of man would ‘exterminate and replace’ the ‘savage races throughout the world.’

If ever there was an occasion for posing awkward questions then this is it. Desmond and Moore, however, seem quite unable to face up to the enormity of the ideas which Darwin, at his most extreme, actually endorsed. Although they mention the problem of racial extermination at several points in their book, and even concede that it was ‘written into the equation from the start’, they handle the entire question with an extraordinary moral blandness. At the same time they repeatedly reassure their readers and themselves that Darwin was opposed to slavery, that he was ‘kind’ and that ‘for everyone his gentleness was overwhelming’. They even quote Ernst Haeckel’s description of Darwin’s ‘tender and friendly eyes’, and recount how Darwin, who had ‘seldom seen a more pleasant, cordial and frank man’, handed on ‘freedom’s flame’ to his German disciple. They omit to mention that Haeckel was one of the most significant intellectual precursors of National Socialist race-science and that his writings played a part in shaping Hitler’s philosophy of history. Before long the torch which Darwin handed to the most important of his followers would be used to help light the ovens of Auschwitz.

It would be wrong to suggest that the many gaps and silences in this book are the result of cold calculation or intellectual dishonesty. For to put forward any such view would be to underestimate the power of the sacred legend which has come to be associated with the greatest of all modern scientists.

No sooner had Darwin died in 1882 than The Times canonised him. Not only did it applaud the decision to bury him in Westminster Abbey beneath the monument to Newton but it offered a novel interpretation of the choice of burial-site. Far from the Abbey conferring honour upon Darwin, it suggested that the body of this hallowed scientist would give the Abbey ‘an increased sanctity, a new cause for reverence’.

The view of Darwin which The Times propagated on his death was not entirely new. For, like Freud and many other intellectual revolutionaries, Darwin had carefully superintended the construction of the legend through which he wished to be remembered.

The point is not that his reasoning is any more shoddy when he turns to humans, just that we recognize it as shoddy when applied to us and recoil in horror from where it inevitably led.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 19, 2005 11:15 PM