The Mismeasure of Man

by Stephen Jay Gould

  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 this 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 naïveté, by women of the parish. There on the tip of South America, 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. (Fitzroy’s names for his charges also reek with paternalistic derision. How would you like to be named Chrysler Building—the secular modern American counterpart to York Minster?) 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 incessandy struck, whilst living with the Fuegians on board the “Beagle,” with the many title 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 as termini of an old spectrum. The egalitarian 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 along with the two Americans best regarded by later history: Thomas Jefferson and Darwin’s soul-mate (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 crush 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 a 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.

  Thus, if we must convene a court more than 150 years after the event—a rather foolish notion in any case, though we seem driven to such anachronism—I think that Darwin will pass through the pearly gates, with perhaps a short stay in purgatory to think about paternalism. What then is the antidote to paternalism and its modern versions of insufficient appreciation for human differences (combined with too easy an equation of one’s own particular and largely accidental way
with universal righteousness)? What else but the direct and sympathetic study of cultural diversity—the world’s most fascinating subject in any case, whatever its virtues in moral education. This is the genuine theme behind our valuable modern movement for pluralism in the study of literature and history—for knowing the works and cultures of minorities and despised groups rendered invisible by traditional scholarship.

  I don’t deny that occasional abuses have been perpetrated by people with strong emotional commitments to this good cause; what else is new? But the attempt by even more zealous conservatives to distort and caricature this movement as a leftist fascism of “political correctness” ranks as a cynical smoke screen spread to cover a power struggle for control of the curriculum. Yes, Shakespeare foremost and forever (Darwin too). But also teach about the excellence of Pygmy bushcraft and Fuegian survival in the world’s harshest climate. Dignity and inspiration come in many guises. Would anyone choose the tinhorn patriotism of George Armstrong Custer over the eloquence of Chief Joseph in defeat?

  Finally, think about one more Darwinian line—perhaps the greatest—from the slavery chapter in the Voyage of the Beagle. We learn about diversity in order to understand, not simply to accept:

  If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

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