(On the subject of sexual freedom in women, so long an issue and legend for all Tahitian travelers from Captain Cook to Fletcher Christian, FitzRoy remarked: “I would scarcely venture to give a general opinion, after only so short an acquaintance; but I may say that I witnessed no improprieties.” Nonetheless, FitzRoy did admit that “human nature in Tahiti cannot be supposed superior to erring human nature in other parts of the world.” Darwin then added a keen observation on hypocrisy in Western male travelers who do not sufficiently credit missionaries as a result of their private frustration on this issue: “I do believe that, disappointed in not finding the field of licentiousness so open as formerly, and as was expected, they will not give credit to a morality which they do not wish to practise.”)
Many arguments float back and forth through this interesting article, but the dominant theme can surely be summarized in a single word: paternalism. We know what is good for the primitives—and thank God they are responding and improving on Tahiti by becoming more European in their customs and actions. Praise the missionaries for this exemplary work. One comment, again by FitzRoy, captures this theme with special discomfort (to modern eyes) for its patronizing approach, even to royalty:
The Queen, and a large party, passed some hours on board the Beagle. Their behavior was extremely correct, and their manners were inoffensive. Judging from former accounts, and what we witnessed, I should think that they are improving yearly.
Thus, we may return to my opening issue—the theme of juvenilia. Shall we rank this article on the “Moral State of Tahiti,” Darwin’s very first, in the category of severe later embarrassments? Did Darwin greatly revise his views on non-Western peoples and civilizations, and come to regard his early paternalism as a folly of youthful inexperience? Much traditional commentary in the hagiographical mode would say so—and isolated quotations can be cited from here and there to support such an interpretation (for Darwin was a complex man who wrestled with deep issues, sometimes in contradictory ways, throughout his life).
But I would advance the opposite claim as a generality. I don’t think that Darwin ever substantially revised his anthropological views. His basic attitude remained: “They” are inferior but redeemable. His mode of argument changed in later life. He would no longer frame his attitude in terms of traditional Christianity and missionary work. He would temper his strongest paternalistic enthusiasm with a growing understanding (cynicism would be too strong a word) of the foibles of human nature in all cultures, including his own. (We see the first fruits of such wisdom in his comment, cited previously, on why sexually frustrated travelers fail to credit Tahitian missionaries.) But his basic belief in a hierarchy of cultural advance, with white Europeans on top and natives of different colors on the bottom, did not change.
Turning to the major work of Darwin’s maturity, The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin writes in summary:
The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatisation, and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual faculties. Every one who has had the opportunity of comparison, must have been struck with the contrast between the taciturn, even morose, aborigines of S. America and the lighthearted, talkative negroes.
The most striking passage occurs in a different context. Darwin is arguing that discontinuities in nature do not speak against evolution, because most intermediate forms are now extinct. Just think, he tells us, how much greater the gap between apes and humans will become when both the highest apes and the lowest people are exterminated:
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes…will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
The common (and false) impression of Darwin’s egalitarianism arises largely from selective quotation. Darwin was strongly attracted to certain peoples often despised by Europeans, and some later writers have falsely extrapolated to a presumed general attitude. On the Beagle voyage, for example, he spoke highly of African blacks enslaved in Brazil:
It is impossible to see a negro and not feel kindly towards him; such cheerful, open, honest expressions and such fine muscular bodies; I never saw any of the diminutive Portuguese with their murderous countenances, without almost wishing for Brazil to follow the example of Hayti.
But towards other peoples, particularly the Fuegians of southernmost South America, Darwin felt contempt: “I believe if the world was searched, no lower grade of man could be found.” Elaborating later on the voyage, Darwin writes:
Their red skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, their gesticulation violent and without any dignity. Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures placed in the same world…. It is a common subject of conjecture, what pleasure in life some of the less gifted animals can enjoy? How much more reasonably it may be asked with respect to these men.
On the subject of sexual differences, so often a surrogate for racial attitudes, Darwin writes in The Descent of Man (and with direct analogy to cultural variation):
It is generally admitted that with woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization. The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands.
Darwin attributes these differences to the evolutionary struggle that males must pursue for success in mating: “These various faculties will thus have been continually put to the test, and selected during manhood.” In a remarkable passage, he then expresses thanks that evolutionary innovations of either sex tend to pass, by inheritance, to both sexes—lest the disparity between men and women become ever greater by virtue of exclusively male accomplishment:
It is, indeed, fortunate that the law of the equal transmission of characters to both sexes has commonly prevailed throughout the whole class of mammals; otherwise it is probable that man would have become as superior in mental endowment to woman, as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen.
Shall we then simply label Darwin as a constant racist and sexist all the way from youthful folly to mature reflection? Such a stiff-necked and uncharitable attitude will not help us if we wish to understand and seek enlightenment from our past. Instead I will plead for Darwin on two grounds, one general, the other personal.
The general argument is obvious and easy to make. How can we castigate someone for repeating a standard assumption of his age, however much we may legitimately deplore that attitude today? Belief in racial and sexual inequality was unquestioned and canonical among upper-class Victorian males—probably about as controversial as the Pythagorean theorem. Darwin did construct a different rationale for a shared certainty—and for this we may exact some judgment. But I see no purpose in strong criticism for a largely passive acceptance of common wisdom. Let us rather analyze why such potent and evil nonsense then passed for certain knowledge.
If I choose to impose individual blame for all past social ills, there will be no one left to like in some of the most fascinating periods of our history. For example, and speaking personally, if I place every Victorian anti-Semite beyond the pale of my attention, my compass of available music and literature will be pitifully small. Though I hold no shred of sympathy for active persecutors, I cannot excoriate individuals who acquiesced passively in a standard soci
etal judgment. Rail instead against the judgment, and try to understand what motivates men of decent will.
The personal argument is more difficult and requires substantial biographical knowledge. Attitudes are one thing, actions another—and by their fruits ye shall know them. What did Darwin do with his racial attitudes, and how do his actions stack up against the mores of his contemporaries? By this proper criterion, Darwin merits our admiration.
Darwin was a meliorist in the paternalistic tradition, not a believer in biologically fixed and ineradicable inequality. Either attitude can lead to ugly statements about despised peoples, but practical consequences are so different. The meliorist may wish to eliminate cultural practices, and may be vicious and uncompromising in his lack of sympathy for differences, but he does view “savages” (Darwin’s word) as “primitive” by social circumstance and biologically capable of “improvement” (read “Westernization”). But the determinist regards “primitive” culture as a reflection of unalterable biological inferiority, and what social policy must then follow in an era of colonial expansion: elimination, slavery, permanent domination?
Even for his most despised Fuegians, Darwin understood the small intrinsic difference between them in their nakedness and him in his regalia. He attributed their limits to a harsh surrounding climate and hoped, in his usual paternalistic way, for their eventual improvement. He wrote in his Beagle diary for February 24, 1834:
Their country is a broken mass of wild rocks, lofty hills and useless forests, and these are viewed through mists and endless storms…. How little can the higher powers of the mind come into play: what is there for imagination to paint, for reason to compare, for judgment to decide upon? To knock a limpet from the rock does not even require cunning, that lowest power of the mind…. Although essentially the same creature, how little must the mind of one of these beings resemble that of an educated man. What a scale of improvement is comprehended between the faculties of a Fuegian savage and a Sir Isaac Newton!
Darwin’s final line on the Fuegians (in the Voyage of the Beagle) uses an interesting and revealing phrase in summary: “I believe, in this extreme part of South America, man exists in a lower state of improvement than in any other part of the world.” You may cringe at the paternalism, but “lower state of improvement” does at least stake a claim for potential brotherhood. And Darwin did recognize the beam in his own shipmates’ eyes in writing of their comparable irrationalisms:
Each [Fuegian] family or tribe has a wizard or conjuring doctor…. [Yet] I do not think that our Fuegians were much more superstitious than some of the sailors; for an old quartermaster firmly believed that the successive heavy gales, which we encountered off Cape Horn, were caused by our having the Fuegians on board.
I must note a precious irony and summarize (all too briefly) a bizarre and wonderful story. Were it not for paternalism, the Beagle might never have sailed, and Darwin would probably have lost his date with history. Regret paternalism, laugh at it, cringe mightily—but grant its most salutary, if indirect, benefit for Darwin. Captain FitzRoy had made a previous voyage to Tierra del Fuego. There he “acquired,” through ransom and purchase, four Fuegian natives, whom he brought to England for a harebrained experiment in the “improvement” of “savages.” They arrived at Plymouth in October 1830 and remained until the Beagle set sail again in December 1831.
One of the four soon died of smallpox, but the others lived at Walthamstow and received instruction in English manners, language, and religion. They attracted widespread attention, including an official summons for a visit with King William IV. FitzRoy, fiercely committed to his paternalistic experiment, planned the next Beagle voyage primarily to return the three Fuegians, along with an English missionary and a large cargo of totally incongruous and useless goods (including tea trays and sets of fine china) donated, with the world’s best will and deepest naiveté, by women of the parish. There FitzRoy planned to establish a mission to begin the great task of improvement for the earth’s most lowly creatures.
FitzRoy would have chartered a boat at his own expense to return York Minster, Jemmy Button, and Fuegia Basket to their homes. But the Admiralty, pressured by FitzRoy’s powerful relatives, finally outfitted the Beagle and sent FitzRoy forth again, this time with Darwin’s company. Darwin liked the three Fuegians, and his long contact in close quarters helped to convince him that all people share a common biology, whatever their cultural disparity. Late in life, he recalled in the Descent of Man (1871):
The American aborigines, Negroes and Europeans differ as much from each other in mind as any three races that can be named; yet I was incessantly struck, whilst living with the Fuegians on board the ‘Beagle,’ with the many little traits of character, showing how similar their minds were to ours.
FitzRoy’s noble experiment ended in predictable disaster. They docked near Jemmy Button’s home, built huts for a mission station, planted European vegetables, and landed Mr. Matthews, avatar of Christ among the heathen, along with the three Fuegians. Matthews lasted about two weeks. His china smashed, his vegetables trampled, FitzRoy ordered him back to the Beagle and eventually left him in New Zealand with his missionary brother.
FitzRoy returned a year and a month later. He met Jemmy Button, who told him that York and Fuegia had robbed him of all his clothes and tools, and left by canoe for their own nearby region. Jemmy, meanwhile, had “reverted” completely to his former mode of life, though he remembered some English, expressed much gratitude to FitzRoy, and asked the captain to take some presents to his special friends—“a bow and quiver full of arrows to the schoolmaster of Walthamstow…and two spearheads made expressly for Mr. Darwin.” In a remarkable example of stiff upper lip in the face of adversity, FitzRoy put the best possible spin upon a personal disaster. He wrote in conclusion:
Perhaps a ship-wrecked seaman may hereafter receive help and kind treatment from Jemmy Button’s children; prompted, as they can hardly fail to be, by the traditions they will have heard of men of other lands; and by an idea, however faint, of their duty to God as well as their neighbor.
But the strongest argument for admiring Darwin lies not in the relatively beneficent character of his belief, but in his chosen form of action upon these convictions. We cannot use a modern political classification—Bork vs. Marshall on affirmative action—as termini of an old spectrum. Thurgood Marshall’s end did not exist for the policymakers of Darwin’s day. All were racists by modern standards. On that spectrum, 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.
Darwin held this second position with the two Americans best regarded by later history: Thomas Jefferson and Darwin’s soulmate (for they shared the same birthdate) Abraham Lincoln. Jefferson, though expressing himself tentatively, wrote: “I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks…are inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and of mind.” But he wished no policy of forced social inequality to flow from this suspicion: “Whatever be their degree of talents, it is no measure of their rights.” As for Lincoln, many sources have collected his chilling (and frequent) statements about black inferiority. Yet he is national hero numero uno for his separation of biological assessment from judgments about moral issues and social policies.
Darwin, too, was a fervent and active abolitionist. Some of the most moving passages ever written against the slave trade occur in the last chapter of the Voyage of the Beagle. Darwin’s ship, after calling at Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa (where FitzRoy and Darwin submitted their bit of juvenilia to a local paper) stopped for a last visit in Brazil, before setting a straight course to England. Darwin wrote:
On the 19th of August we finally left the shores of Brazil. I thank God I shall never again visit a slave-country…. Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to cru
sh the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal. I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean…. I was present when a kind-hearted man was on the point of separating forever the men, women, and little children of a large number of families who had long lived together.
In the next line, Darwin moves from description to refutation and plea for action:
I will not even allude to the many heart-sickening atrocities which I authentically heard of;—nor would I have mentioned the above revolting details, had I not met with several people so blinded by the constitutional gaiety of the negro as to speak of slavery as a tolerable evil.
Refuting the standard argument for benevolent treatment with a telling analogy from his own land, Darwin continues:
It is argued that self-interest will prevent excessive cruelty; as if self-interest protected our domestic animals, which are far less likely than degraded slaves to stir up the rage of their savage masters.
Though I have read them a hundred times, I still cannot encounter Darwin’s closing lines without experiencing a spinal shiver for the power of his prose—and without feeling great pride in having an intellectual hero with such admirable human qualities as well (the two don’t mesh very often):
Those who look tenderly at the slave owner and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter; what a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope of change! Picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children—those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own—being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder! And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbors as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty.
Eight Little Piggies Page 26