Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the “Other” - JPCS

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies
ISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)
Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the “Other”
Mohamed Hamoud Kassim Al-Mahfedi and Venkatesh P
Abstract
Based on Edward Said’s Colonial Discourse Theory and his concept of Oreintalism,
this paper develops a Saidian reading of the Orientaists’ thought in their relationship
with non-Western people. The paper attempts to decipher the common interface
between Darwinism and Orientalism. Located within the postcolonial framework, the
paper methodologically tries to uncover the pervasively Western intellectual and
scientific mindset which is governed by the Orientalist thought that directs its relation
with the “Other”. The Eurocentric determinism has been shaped and articulated
through theories such as Social Darwinism, Functional Anthropology, Modernism,
Capitalism, etc., which has coincided and materialized in the act of colonialism,
imperialism and globalization. It is to be noted that colonialism, imperialism,
Orientalism are Western-based ideologies that caused the epistemological and
geopolitical drift in the world order, and their aftermaths are still the most discussed
problematics. The present social and politico-cultural world is re-formulated against
and/or set in accordance with those resurrected repercussions. Among the still
debated issues are cultural supremacy and political hegemony, and both are
legitimized and incited by the “idea” of redemption, in Conrad’s words, or racial
superiority as in Spencer’s theory. This paper tries to probe into the dormant premise
of the Orientalist/colonialist thought, and to lay bare the “idea behind it”, to use
Conrad’s words, too, in order to relate the different parts into the common whole of
Western, hegemonic cultural and political set-up.
Keywords: Edward Said; Enlightenment; ideology; Orientailsm; Othering; the Orient;
politics; power; scholarship; social Darwinism
This paper examines the long-term development of Orientalism as scientifically intellectual,
programmed knowledge of the “Orient”. My analysis will be aided by a theoretical
framework based on a postcolonial and psychoanalytical synthesis. Analyzing recurrent
representation of the Orientals in the European intellectual circles, I attempt to demonstrate
that the Western conception of the East has been built on socio-biological determinism and
racially politico-cultural functionalism. This intellectual fossilization of the “Orient” created
by the Orientalist mind-set was the driving force of the Western colonialism and imperial
expansion. I argue that the fundamental fallacy of Orientalism lay, not in its presumptions
about the ontological differences between East and West, but in its very conscious and
deliberate persistence on creating a dichotomy. Therefore, Darwinism and other social and
anthropological theories have been introduced and utilized to justify the colonial rule whether
under the pretext of civilizing missionaries or democratic redemption.
‘Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the “Other”,’ Mohamed Hamoud Kassim Al-
Mahfedi and Venkatesh P
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Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies
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In order to probe into the latent hidden ideology of the Orientalist construction of the
“Orient”, or the Oriental “Other”, this study sets forth three premises. The first premise is
that colonialism is the ultimate product and the materialized object of Orientalism. The
second premise is that Orientalism as a corporate institutional, intellectual and scholastic
legitimacy of Western colonial and imperial enterprise is based on racism. The third premise
is that the Manichean logic and Darwinian Theory provided the scientific, empirical and
moral justification for the Western colonial and imperial expansionist desire.
Social Darwinism has played a formulating role in the trajectory of Western social, political
as well as ideological assumptions regarding the various “Other”. Social Darwinism can be
defined either strictly, with reference to theories of social and cultural change implied by the
theory of natural selection developed by Darwin, or loosely, as that distinct family of
historical theories that claim to be theories of social and cultural change logically entailed by
Darwinian theory. Social Darwinism, in its different forms defended ethnic, racial, class and
gender inequality as necessary aspects of a wider conflict from which a technically and
morally advanced humanity would emerge. Nonetheless, social Darwinists extended
Darwin's theories into the realm of politics and society to rationalize conflict and conquest.
The Orientalist/colonialist project, thus, has tended to use Darwinism as a rationale for
existing forms of exploitation and their extension, especially but not exclusively, in support
of racism and genocide.
In fact, one of the central planks in the Orientalist thought and doctrine was the evolutionary
theory. According to this theory, all biology had evolved upward, less evolved types should
be actively eradicated and that natural selection could and should be actively aided.
Therefore, the Orientalists/colonialists instituted political measures to control if not to
eradicate all non-Western “racial threat”, whom they considered as “underdeveloped”. The
European Orientalists/colonialists considered themselves by this canon as the higher race
which ought to subject to itself a lower race as a conceivable natural right.
The eminent scientists of Social Darwinism shaped Orientalist conception of other nations
and races and provided what seemed like an irrefutable validation of their racist beliefs
crowned by the fierce imperial and colonial Western domination. The support of Orientalism
by Social Darwinism and other scientific establishment resulted in racist, particularly anti-
Semitic, anti-Islamic thought having much greater influence than would have otherwise been
the case, as well as an enormous reassurance that one’s prejudices were actually expressions
of scientific truth. The East-West or Occident-Orient demarcation was engulfed by the
Orientalist/colonialist ramifications such as colonial and imperial projects, superior/inferior
classification, racism and dispossession, displacement and alienation, global dualities and all
other colonial traumas and legacies.
For long the West has unquestionably maintained to itself the power of drawing the political
map of the world and deliberately persisted on perpetuating the epistemological notion of the
Occident-Orient dichotomy in order to keep its supremacy and superiority over the Eastern
‘Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the “Other”,’ Mohamed Hamoud Kassim Al-
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people and territories. This idea has been encapsulated in the statement of Marx and
epigraphed by Said in his seminal work Orientalism (1978) that “they cannot represent
themselves; they must be represented”. Hence, Orientalism was ultimately a political vision
of reality “whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, West,
"us") and the strange (the Orient, the East, "them").” (43)
The Darwinian scholastic vision of Orientalism can be easily traced in statements of the
Orientalsit writers. Henry Kissinger’s classification of developing countries as pre-
Newtonian cultures, which cannot deal with empirical reality, that is, cultures to which ‘the
real world is almost completely internal to the observer . . .” (47). Alfred Lyall, on the other
hand, has argued that ‘accuracy is abhorrent to the Oriental mind . . .” (38). Hamilton Gibb
has written about ‘the aversion of Muslims from the thought-processes of rationalism’,
blaming his proposition on what he calls ‘the atomism and discreteness of the Arab
imagination’ (106). Ernest Renan had earlier dismissed the Semites as ‘an inferior
combination of human nature’, and their languages as ‘inorganic’, lacking in the capacity to
regenerate themselves, unlike the living, organic Indo-European languages (143).
Chateaubriand saw the Crusades as not only ‘about the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre’,
but also as a fight against a cult that was ‘civilisation’s enemy’, and whose only God was
‘force’(172). Lamartine, on the other hand, preached the advent of the age of European
colonialism. To him the Orient was ‘nations without territory, rights, laws or security . . .
waiting anxiously for the shelter’ of European occupation (197). “The Orient,” Said remarks,
“was therefore not Europe's interlocutor, but its silent Other” and that “as primitivity, as the
age-old antitype of Europe, as a fecund night out of which European rationality developed,
the Orient's actuality receded inexorably into a kind of paradigmatic fossilization.” He has
concluded that the Western distinction between the Occident and its different “Other” “was
constituted out of this radical difference” (Orientalism Reconsidered 93- 94).
The Enlightenment rationality and the Renaissance individuality had been culminated in the
Victorian Darwinism. Orientalism as a corporate institution was aided by those notions. This
is supported by a statement of Charles Darwin himself, in his work The Descent of Man and
Selection in Relation to Sex: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by
centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the
savage races throughout the world” (99). Darwin’s notion of struggle for survival justified
and legitimized the racists’ conception of superior and inferior peoples and nations and
validated the conflict between them. It can be safely if reluctantly concluded that Darwin’s
theory clearly contributed to the death of millions of people in concentration camps, and
about other millions of humans in wars.
Once considered as an objective scientific theory of difference within human populations,
racism has become regarded as an ideology of social domination and exclusion on the basis
of biological and genetic variation. To put it more simply, the biological difference justifies
the dominance of certain races over others. Floya Anthias has observed that “racism is not
just about beliefs or statements. Racism also involves the ability to impose those beliefs or
‘Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the “Other”,’ Mohamed Hamoud Kassim Al-
Mahfedi and Venkatesh P
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world views as hegemonic, and as a basis for the denial of rights or equality. Racism is thus
embedded in power relations of different types”. Racism is “a discourse and a practice
whereby ethnic groups are inferiorised”. (291, 294)
Racism has been the powerful and magical instrument by which a dominant group or culture
justifies its domination, and which often figures prominently in the ideologies that justify and
promote genocide and other crimes against humanity. Dominant social groups commonly use
racial categorizations to differentiate other social groups and justify their exclusion and
marginalization. “The question of racism is treated in a form of bio-politics… a bio-power
which involves the forms of control carried out in name of race for the welfare of the species
and for the survival of the population” (Young 10).
The belief that personality and social behavior are linked to biology and therefore are
unalterable makes physical removal or annihilation the only possible means of
solving the perceived problem of undesirable social groups. So, the Orientalist
thought has been oscillating between the biological base and the cultural face. The
creation of the “Other” has been interwoven with taming of the “savage”. The
“fittest” will “survive” and the “superior” will “dominate”. Saeed A. Khan insists that
Western thought has historically used science to promote racial difference and
superiority (1).
The Orientalist representation of the Oriental “Other” and the racial discrimination against
the non-Europeans were based on biologically determined factors in the first place. In both
the biological Orientalist discourse and the cultural Orientalist discourse racial determinism
has been the decisive factor that blames the “Other” for his biological and social inferiority.
During the Enlightenment, race became a focus of scientific analysis, as biologists and
anthropologists sought to develop objective measures for differentiating between peoples.
Scientists were deeply influenced by the assumption that Caucasians were more evolved than
other races and that Western civilization was superior to all others. The measurement of
physical attributes of various racial groups, phrenology, the quantification of intelligence,
and other supposedly objective tools were used to explain the biological sources of the
preconceived inferiority of non-white groups and to justify their colonization and domination
by Europeans. Comte Arthur de Gobineau's "Essay on the Inequality of the Human
Races"(1855) popularized the idea that social differences were linked to biology, and
inspired extensive scientific study of the biological roots of social distinction and identity.
Francis Galton, adapting Darwin's ideas on evolution to the study of human development,
argued in Hereditary Genius (1869) that selective breeding could be used to create a superior
race of human beings. He coined the term eugenics for this idea, which later influenced the
development of Nazi and fascist and other genocidal ideologies.
Racism also justified colonialism and the massacre and subjugation of native populations by
colonial powers throughout much of the world. Viewing Native Americans as a different,
‘Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the “Other”,’ Mohamed Hamoud Kassim Al-
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sub-human race, for instance, allowed Spanish colonizers to feel justified in enslaving and
slaughtering them in Central and South America, wiping out entire native peoples. The belief
in racial inferiority likewise allowed colonists in North America to displace, subjugate, and
kill Native Americans. Colonial conquest of Asia and Africa was promoted as a moral
obligation for Europeans, the "white man's burden" to bring civilization to supposedly
inferior races. When indigenous populations resisted conquest, these same ideas of their
inferiority were used to justify the use of brutal force against them, as in the German
extermination of the Herero in Southwest Africa from 1904 to 1907. Africa was colonized
after ideas of scientific racism had become widely accepted, and this powerfully shaped
colonial policy on the continent. In particular, the British and Belgians understood ethnic
group differences in racial terms, and discriminated among their colonial subjects on the
assumption that certain "tribes" were better at ruling, others at fighting, and some others at
laboring. Racism has served as a factor in more recent genocides as well. In the early 1990s,
Serbian and Croatian leaders in the states of the former Yugoslavia depicted Muslims not
simply as a religious minority but as a non-Slavic racial group, related to the much-hated
Turks, who had to be eliminated from the territory in order to purify it.
It would seem indisputable that modern colonialism in the early twentieth century involved
racism. Indeed, during colonial occupation, colonizing groups were granted political,
economic, and social privileges denied to the colonized, and the hierarchy was typically
sustained by claims that the latter were racially inferior. The historian Partha Chatterjee
refers to this as “the rule of colonial difference”—the colonized, by virtue of their biology,
were represented “as incorrigibly inferior” (19, 33). Traditional scholarship has thus treated
racism as “a built-in and natural product [of colonialism], essential to the social construction
of an otherwise illegitimate and privileged access to property and power” (Stoler 322). More
recent scholarship in the humanities has added that the very purpose of colonial discourse
was “to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial
origin; in order to justify conquest” (Bhabha 70).
Two sets of ideas have contributed to my analysis of the Orientalist construction of the
“Orient”. This first inspired by Edward Said’s “colonial discourse” in his seminal book
Orientalism (1978). The second is the nineteenth century Victorian progress in natural
sciences which formed the intellectual support of the imperial and colonial enterprise, though
in recent years, there was a shift from the natural biological division among human beings to
the socially constructed, and hence historically variable, meanings. However, both the
biological and the constructivist meanings of racial difference are the underlying premise and
an integral constitutive part of the Orientalist/colonialist thought. At most, those theories and
scholarships intimated the representations of the “other” as well as facilitated and justified
the colonial rule. The Orientalist/colonialist representations of the colonized entailed
“racism” and that “the display of contempt or aggressiveness… [was] based upon physical
differences” (Todorov 370).
‘Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the “Other”,’ Mohamed Hamoud Kassim Al-
Mahfedi and Venkatesh P
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The Darwinist Orientalist mindset was articulated in the works of western academicians,
politicians, statesmen, scholars and scientists altogether. For example, Albert Beveridge’s
speech before the Senate in 1900 referred to the Filipinos as “a barbarous race modified by
three centuries of contact with a decadent race [the Spanish].” Beveridge’s point was that the
Filipinos, due to their biological constitution, were incapable of self-government: “They are
not capable of self-government. How could they be? They are not a self-governing race. It is
barely possible that 1,000 men in all the archipelago are capable of self-government in the
Anglo-Saxon sense. They are Orientals, Malays” ( qtd. in Go 39). Senator Beveridge’s
derogatory discourse revealed the function that all colonial discourse putatively fulfills: “To
construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin in
order to justify conquest” (Bhabha 70).
Race was an operative factor in colonial structure, and that racial difference was deemed to
be the cause of behavior and inferiority. Nature, in terms of a people’s biology, blood, and
stock, was the substance of difference. This colonial racial discourse shared underlying
themes, not least of which was that the Anglo-Saxon “race” was superior and that American
democracy was a sign of that superiority (Burch 78-101).
Orientalism in Saidian sense was based on biological racism, Lamarckian environmentalism
and sociobological distinction. In the Orientalist schema, the “Orient” is the different
“Other”; the opposite of the European. Cromer says, “. . . I content myself with noting the
fact that somehow or other the Oriental generally acts, speaks, and thinks in a manner exactly
opposite to the European” (qtd. in Said 39). S. Seidman suggests that sociologists might
learn from Said’s work and take seriously “the problem of difference” and the “production of
“Otherness” (315). Jukka Jouhki in “Orientalism and India” reflects that “Said obviously sees
many variations and modes in the ways Europeans have constructed the “Orient” ” (3). For
Said the differences between Orientalist writers, their personal style and form of writing have
been explicit, but the basic content of their writing, that is “the separateness of the “Orient” ,
its eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its supine
malleability” has reflected the more or less unified latent Orientalism. Moreover, latent
Orientalism and race classifications have supported each other very well, especially in the
nineteenth century. The “second-order Darwinism,” of Orientalism has seemed to justify
division of races to backward and advanced, and further, using a binary typology, to
backward and advanced cultures and societies. The lesser civilizations have been thought to
have suffered from the limitations caused by the biological composition of their race (Jouhki
3-4). Hence they have been seen as in need of moral-political admonishment and even
colonization by Europeans. As other marginalized people, the Orientals have been seen
through (not looked at) and analyzed as problems (not as citizens), or confined or taken over.
As Said states, whenever something was designated as Oriental, the act included an
evaluative judgment. “Since the Oriental was a member of a subject race, he had to be
subjected” (Said 206–207).
‘Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the “Other”,’ Mohamed Hamoud Kassim Al-
Mahfedi and Venkatesh P
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The Orientalist/colonialist justification is political and, unjustified as its basic theory is,
actually imaginary and unscientific. This proves Said’s proposition that Orientalism is
designed to create and construct the “Orient” for ideological, imperial and colonial purposes.
The dichotomy is forcefully nourished and deliberately maintained as a tool of keeping the
Western domination as the upper hand beneficiary.
In the main linguistic, civilizational and racial characteristics of Orientals were undisputed
central themes in Orientalism during the peak of imperialist era of Europe. Modern
degeneration of cultures, theories about civilizational progress, belief in the White race’s
destiny justified colonialism and formed, as Said states, “a peculiar amalgam of science,
politics, and culture whose drift, almost without exception, was always to raise … European
race to dominion over non-European portions of mankind.” Darwinism was modified to
support the view of contemporary Orientals as being degenerate vestiges of a classical
ancient greatness. Biological and sociobiological “truths” and Darwinist volumes concurred
with the experienced abilities and inabilities of Orientals. Empirical data concerning the
origins, development and character of Orientals seemed to give validity to the distinctions
(Said 232– 233). “The essentialist conception of East-West difference was more extremely
formulated by the evolutionists in the hard sciences, whose racist position surpassed that of
their late eighteenth-century predecessors.” (Hung 270)
The notion of human evolution was more systematically articulated in Esquisse d’un tableau
historique des progre`s de l’esprit humain (1793– 1794) (Outlines of the Historical Progress
of the human Mind (1793 - 1794)) by Marquis de Condoercets, a major theorist of the French
Revolution. The “Orient” or the “Oriental peoples were classified as a society at a low stage
of evolution, retarded by superstition and ignorance and trapped in a static state of being.
Nevertheless, the Orientalist thought was dogged by the ideology of progress which regarded
the idea that Oriental antiquity is representing a Lost Golden Age as nostalgic and running
contrary to the natural law of evolution (262). Romantic Orientalism, for example, found in
the East the exotic primitive childhood of man. The sense of wonder and amusement brought
by the Romantic Orientalists was used to gratify and satisfy the desire as well as to confirm
the superiority of the European “Self” as opposed to the primitive Oriental “Other”.
The Romantics were averse to the evolutionary conception of history and indulged in a
mystical thirst. Jean-Francois Staszak in his article “Other/Otherness” believes that
“Exoticism constitutes the most directly geographical form of Otherness in that it opposes the
abnormality of elsewhere with the normality of here”. He adds that “Exoticism is not, of
course, an attribute of an exotic place, object or person. It is the result of a discursive process
that consists of superimposing symbolic and material distance, mixing the foreign with the
foreigner…” (6). Concomitantly, Romanticism as a resistance to evolutionism dissipated, and
the Romantic respect for the East gave way to scientific racism in the field of Oriental
studies. Muller’s theory of comparative religion was displaced by the evolutionary paradigm
that portrayed all non-Western religions as essentially barbaric, fetishistic, and animistic.
(Hung 269)
‘Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the “Other”,’ Mohamed Hamoud Kassim Al-
Mahfedi and Venkatesh P
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This new locus of knowledge production of the “Orient” undertaken by Orientalist scholars
has been institutionalized into a discourse which covers a far greater fields such as
anthropology, philology, biology, eugenics, sociology, literature and geopolitics. By the
1880s, Darwin’s idea of evolution through natural selection, which began as a controversial
thesis after the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, had been elevated to a biological
orthodoxy and extended to conceptualize the evolution of cultures or races. Darwinist
terminology conquered most academic disciplines, expressing itself as eugenics in biology,
environmental determinism in geography, cultural evolutionism in anthropology, and so
forth. The result was a constructed dichotomy which was nurtured to serve the western
ideology of supremacy. The war against and later the occupation of Iraq by the Western-
American allies was part and parcel of the dictum “ the means justifies the end” ,“civilizing
mission” , a “redemptive endeavor” and “ a message of peace and democracy” against a
“despotic” , “savage” and “incapable” Oriental regime. This recalls Beveridge’s speech on
the Filipinos as “a barbarous race” who are incapable of self-government.
In his The Races of Man: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Influence of Race over the
Destinies of Nations (1862), famous Scottish anatomist Robert Knox asserted that the
“Oriental races had made no progress since Alexander the Great, and that China’s defeat in
the Opium War of 1839–1842 could be explained by the superiority of the white races to the
‘‘semi-civilized Chinamen,’’ who belonged to the ‘‘dark races of men . . . [being] animals of
today, . . . look[ing] not for a to-morrow’’ (qtd in Blue 78). Likewise, in his inaugural speech
as the president of the “Ninth International Congress of Orientalism” (1892), F. M Muller
invoked the name of Darwin repeatedly, and proclaimed that the essential difference between
the ‘‘white and dark men, between the Aryan and the Semite’’ was emphasized as the
fundamental premise of the field. He continued that at some point in the prehistoric period,
there had been a ‘‘complete break between East and West,’’ a ‘‘break in the triumphant
progress of the human race from East to West’’. This break ‘‘determined the course of the
principal nations of ancient history as the mountains determine the course of rivers’’ (qtd in
Hung 269-270). In the eugenicist literature of the early twentieth century, non-Western
peoples were often compared to different kinds of apes. The ‘‘dark races’’ were widely seen
as lower kinds of animals. (Blue 81)
The four-decade period between the Berlin Congress and World War I (1878 –1914),
characterized by Hobsbawm as the ‘‘Age of Empire,’’ was termed as the ‘‘commonplace
assumptions of an imperialist and colonial age’’ that emphasized the ‘‘advanced nature of
Western civilization, the ‘higher’ superiority of the Christian religion’’ (Girardot 192–93).
The new geopolitical reality due to the decline of the bourgeois ideals of liberalism and
rationalism led to the emergence of ethnonationalism as the reigning ideology of the Great
Powers. Under this ideology, the concept of nation was conflated with the biological concept
of race, and the Darwinian tenet of ‘‘struggle for existence’’ was harnessed to justify
international aggression. Among the prophets of biological doom was the Egyptologist W.
M. Flinders Petrie, who saw “no advance without strife” – civilisations only reached full
‘Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the “Other”,’ Mohamed Hamoud Kassim Al-
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expression by enduring centuries of military and mental struggle, after which they
degenerated and that man must strive with Nature or with man, if he is not to fall back and
degenerate. F. W. Headley's Darwinism and Modern Socialism (1909) was an anti-socialist
tract that used biological reasonings to show that the continuance of competition and Natural
Selection is essential to the well-being of a civilised community (Crook 63-97).
The doctrine of colonial discourses defined the goal of colonialism as enlightening and
civilizing non-Western peoples. Yet, this idea was abandoned and replaced by a more racist
doctrine that colonized peoples were intelligently inferior and were incapable of being
civilized. The dark races were going to be extinct in the struggle for existence, and imperial
exploitation needed no moral justification (Adas 318-42). Imperialist policies were regarded
as ‘‘biological necessities’’ (Hawkins 207 -09). The imperialist ideologies of the state
supported by the intellectual hegemony of Darwinism were the dominant academic and
intellectual Orientalist agenda during the colonial era. This is manifested in Muller’s 1892
speech which began with a lengthy acknowledgment of royal patrons and governments for
their protection and support of Orientalist scholarship (Muller 1–2), and ended with a frank
admission that the ultimate end of Oriental studies was to serve imperialism:
England has proved that she knows not only how to conquer, but how to rule. It is
simply dazzling to think of the few thousands of Englishmen ruling the millions of
human beings in India, in Africa, in America, and in Australasia. . . . Under the
personal patronage of H. R. H. the Prince of Wales, a School of Modern Oriental
Studies has at last been established at the Imperial Institute . . . [W]e want help, we
want much larger funds . . . [F]ar higher interests than the commercial supremacy of
England are at stake. (35–37)
Scientists such as Konrad Lorenz and Ernst Heinrich Haeckel built on the Darwinian concept
of ‘the survival of the fittest’, maintaining that the same inexorable law applied to humanity.
These theorists believed that there existed two types of nations – those still vibrant and
destined to survive, and those that were old, stagnant and condemned to decline. However,
the scientific-racist knowledge of the East created another epistemological dichotomy which
is a natural extension of the biologically determined one. The ‘‘soft version’’ of scientific
racism and Weber’s conception of East-West differences that he saw the inferiority of the
East was culturally rather than biologically determined is no less derogatory than a ‘‘hard
version’’ of scientific racism or the evolutionary theory of Herbert Spencer, who derived
most of his data and ideas directly from the biological sciences of his day. It is worth
mentioning here that Spencer’s biological imagination was inherited by many modernization
theorists, who saw modernization following the Western path as a universal, natural, and
evolutionary process, and that social-scientific Orientalist inquiries today are still haunted by
the essentialist conception of East-West differences and the unilinear, evolutionary
conception of social change. (Hung 273- 274)
The Darwinian Orientalist thought continued to foster the racist intellectual discourse in the
contemporary era. In his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998), David Lande’s
‘Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the “Other”,’ Mohamed Hamoud Kassim Al-
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suggests that the Europeans were predestined to become ‘‘the winners of the world’’ because
of their exceptional cultural ethos, and the non-Europeans were predestined to be ‘‘the losers
of the world’’ because of their cultural inferiority. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel
(1997) suggests that physical and biological environments determine the courses of the
evolution of human behavior as much as they determine the evolution of species. The
triumph of the West is predestined by the specific climate and geographical settings of
Europe that give rise to the specific path of human evolution there. Cultural determinism and
evolutionism are back. (Hung 276)
Hence, history in the Western sense was not a class struggle, as Marx asserted, it was an
eternal struggle for existence between races, and politics had to be based upon the direct
application of the laws of nature and struggle. The strongest asserts its will. In short, history
is the history of the triumphant.
Nonetheless, we need to be aware of the difference in the ideological contexts in which they
were embedded. While Darwinian evolutionism at the turn of the twentieth century was used
to justify the conquest and annihilation of the inferior races, the postwar modernization
school was enmeshed with the ideology that less modernized societies could be elevated to
modernity by accepting the domination and guidance of the advanced Western countries.
Consider the following excerpt from a letter written by Charles Darwin to W. Graham, July
3, 1881:
I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress
of civilization than you seem inclined to admit…. 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.
Darwin repeated this sentiment in his book The Descent of Man, he speculated, “At some
future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will
almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world” (178) .
However, Darwin was not alone in his racist ideology. Thomas Huxley, the man most
responsible for advancing Darwinian doctrine argued that “No rational man, cognizant of the
facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man…
The highest places in the hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of
our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the
lowest” (20-1). H. F. Osborn, a prominent American anthropologist of the first half of the
twentieth century proposed an anthropological assumption of evolutionary hierarchy in
which blacks are placed at the bottom, yellows and reds somewhere in the middle, and whites
on top. He argues that “the genus Homo is subdivided into three absolutely distinct stocks,
which … popularly known as the Caucasian, the Mongolian and the Negroid…The standard
of intelligence of the average adult Negro is similar to that of the eleven-year-old youth of
the species Homo sapiens.”(129)
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Early Victorian imperialism was motivated largely by a strong Christian influence. The East
India Company may have been based on exploitation, but it carried missionaries with it. The
Christian base of early Victorian imperialism underwent a subtle change as the nineteenth
century went on. The Encyclopedia Britannica says:
This new period of imperialism at the end of the 19th century found its spiritual
support in…social Darwinism, in all the theories glorifying power and success, which
had swept over Europe…Racial theories seemed to give to this new attitude, which
was in opposition to all traditional [i.e. Christian] values of morality, a justification by
"science" and "nature," the belief in which was almost becoming the dominant faith
of the period (122).
Thus social Darwinism became the driving force behind imperialism. Instead of "taking the
gospel to the heathen," the English came to be more motivated by a feeling of racial
superiority, and felt the need to control "primitive peoples." So there were two motives
behind colonization – the older, Christian motive and the newer motive based on social
Darwinism. This is important to note because it shows that ideas have consequences. The
idea of Darwinian evolution introduced a completely exploitative form of imperialistic
control over "inferior races." The very idea of "inferior races" comes directly out of Darwin's
theory.
Therefore, think of the historical consequences that are the direct and logical results of such
fatal propositions and premeditated Orientalist/colonialist premises which cause a millions
Algerians, millions Africans, millions of dispossessed and displaced refugees from Middle
East, Asia, Africa, Caribbean and crushed races all over the globe. The Western philosophy
of the superiority of the white race over its “inferior” and “subhuman” various “Other” led to
the extermination of millions of Africans, Asians and other minorities across the universe.
It is also significant to note that some of the Crusaders and others who used force to further
their creeds in the name of God were acting in concord with the Oreintalist/colonialist desire.
The Christian missionaries acted against the word of God and played religico- political role
in the Orientalist/colonialist project. The struggle for power, survival of the fittest and all that
did not confine to Orientalist scholarship, hegemonic policy, imperial and colonial
encroachment, but misused religion as an ideological apparatus of what used to be called
civilizing mission and redeeming salvation.
The teachings of Osborn, Huxley, Darwin, Spencer and others like them, however, are
completely consistent with the teachings of the Orientalsits/colonialists in the same period.
Indeed, social Darwinism has provided the scientific substructure for some of the most
significant atrocities in human history. For evolution to succeed, it is as crucial that the unfit
die as the fittest survive. The concept of evolution demands death and “exterminations of the
brutes”. On another plane, Orientalist/colonialist thought has observed an interrelationship
between political economy and biology as trading partners of long standing.
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The notion of the racial superiority of Caucasian race which thus obtains a code of laws and
morals only binding for one part of humanity as endorsed by Orientalist/colonial project have
its ramifications for imperialism, since the empire that launched its imperial enterprise had
erased any possibility of cultural diversity . Thorstein Veblen (1899), for example, proposed
that economics be reconstructed upon Darwinian principles. Alfred Marshall, whose
Principles frontispiece recorded the same motto found in The Origin of Species , natura non
facit saltum, opined that “the Mecca of the economist lies in evolutionary biology . . . ” (qtd.
in Leonard 2)
The concepts of "struggle for existence", "survival of the fittest" and “Might is right” become
the threshold concepts of the colonial and imperial schema. However, James Allen Rogers in
his article “Darwinism and Social Darwinism” remarks that the idea of the struggle for
existence “was not original with Malthus and in one form or another had been a
commonplace in Western thought” (269). In his Descent of Man, Darwin came directly to the
point: “With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of Health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the process of elimination” (501). Darwin’s “Natural Selection” is consistent
with the more accurate expression of Herbert Spencer’s “the Survival of the Fittest”.
Darwin’s biological progress which echoed in Spencer's belief in social progress has been
appropriated by the Orientalist institution, and culminated and materialized in the colonial
project.
In his anthropological classic, Europe and the People without History, Eric Wolf observed
that the Western intellectual tradition tended to view Europeans – the “people with history” –
as the driving force of historical change, and “primitive” societies as pristine, unchanging
survivals from the past – the “people without history” (385). Hence, we can see that
Classicism and Orientalism emerged and developed as complementary concepts. Classicism
was the West’s way of defining “who we are,” while Orientalism was the West’s way of
defining “who we are not.” Classicism preceded Orientalism, with the result that stereotypes
about the East had been laid even before systematic inquiry had begun. (Brownell 3)
Those assumptions were found in the classical Greek texts themselves, and classicists
repeated them and began to elaborate upon them from the eighteenth century on. Herodotus,
Hippocrates, Aristotle, and other ancient authors had already set out some of the main themes
of Orientalism: Asian rulers are despotic and excessive; Asians do not care about individuals;
Asians are faceless hordes of people who live in conditions of servitude. Plato and Aristotle
were the earliest to associate Asia with despotic political systems. Hippocrates wrote,
“Europeans are also more courageous than Asiatics” (qtd. in Brownell 3). Neoclassicism was
an intellectual trend that led to the construction of what we now call “the history of Western
civilization.”
In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said argues that Oriental Studies arose out of the need for and
experiences of colonialism. The “Orient” was a cultural construct of Europe, and that served
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as an image of the “Other” to Europe; it helped the West to define itself by providing a
contrasting image; Orientalism is a style of thought based upon a fundamental distinction
made between the “Orient” ” and the “Occident.” Said’s most important point is to argue that
this intellectual distinction is part of the Western style of “dominating, restructuring, and
having authority over the “Orient”.” Said does not believe that academic texts are “merely
decorative;” they are a form of cultural domination that complements political domination (1-
3). According to an Orientalist ontological schema, the “Orient” is separate, different,
conservative or archaic or barbarian, sensual and passive. Accordingly, the “Orient” is far
away from development; further, its ‘progress’ is measured in terms of, and in comparison to
“the West”, which implicitly and occasionally explicitly maintains its position of the
“inferior Other”. (Richardson 18)
Edward Said has shown that colonialism was premised on Orientalism, i.e. the construction
of an “Orient” which emphasised the “Orient” as an “other” which is distinct, different and
inferior. To emphasise, the inferiority of the “Orient” was established through the device of
essentialising difference – primarily in race and in terms of the universal evolutionary
principles between the ‘Occident” and the “Orient”. Said argues that it is precisely such a
construction that rationalised and made possible the hegemony of the coloniser on the
colonised. Orientaism thus borrowed and was frequently informed by "strong" ideas,
doctrines, and trends ruling the culture. Thus there was ( and is) a linguistic “Orient”, a
Freudian “Orient”, a Spenglerian “Orient”, a Darwinian “Orient”, a racist “Orient” and so on.
Yet never has there been such a thing as a pure, or unconditional, “Orient” (22-23). In the
ideological and epistemological scheme of the Western thought, the “Orient” was destined to
be a scapegoat; a “Calibanic” framework for all that is savage, abnormal, strange, primitive
etc. the Orientalists saw the “Orient” as a locale requiring Western attention, reconstruction,
even redemption. The Orientals were viewed in a framework constructed out of biological
determinism and moral-political admonishment.
According to Said, the rigidly binomial opposition of "ours" and "theirs," was reinforced not
only by anthropology, linguistics, and history but also, of course, by the Darwinian theses on
survival and natural selection. An Oriental man was first an Oriental and second a man.
(227). “Orientalism has been subjected to imperialism, positivism, utopianism, historicism,
Darwinism, racism, Freudianism, Marxism, Spenglerism”. (43)
In his book Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (2004), Joseph
Carroll has observed that many of Arnold’s specific cultural values can be assimilated to a
relativistic Darwinian model of cultural values. Carroll has maintained that in Arnold’s view
Western achievements represent the highest level yet attained by any culture. Arnold’s own
inclusive term of “culture,” is a term that is roughly equivalent to “Western civilization
regarded as culminating in Victorian gentlemen with a predominantly classical education and
refined literary tastes.” In order to sustain his own sense of a universal, disinterested
sympathy, Darwin must also sustain the priority of his own advanced, Western, scientific
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civilization. It is for this reason that, throughout his work, he looks forward with equanimity
or even with satisfaction to the imminent extermination of all primitive peoples (1-12)
If literature is a figurative representation of human experience, and if the fundamental
elements of biological existence are organisms, environments, and actions, the figurative
elements that correlate with these biological elements would naturally assume a predominant
position within most figurative structures. Evolutionary theory can thus provide a sound
rationale for adopting the basic categories as well as the theoretical assumptions that govern
the structural underpinning of human relationship. Hence, in its construction of the “Oriental
Other”, Orientalism tended to assimilate the Darwinian paradigm. This is obvious in the
depiction of the Oriental characters, settings, and actions which constitute a single,
continuous body of stereotypical, essentialist, Orientalist thought. Consider Shakespeare’s
“Caliban”, Defoe’s “Friday”, or Conrad’s “Niggers,” to mention but a few. In his early work,
Kipling had made the landscapes and culture of India a fantasy that recuperates the
sensations of savagery. In She and King Solomon’s Mines, H. Rider Haggard combines tales
of fabulous adventure with ethnographic descriptions of Africa. Much of Conrad’s early
fiction is set in the jungles. In Heart of Darkness, he broods over the spirit of the African
wilderness. Journeying into the wilderness is “like traveling back to the earliest beginnings
of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings’” (40). Marlow
sums his tale of the wilderness as “one of the dark places of the earth” ( 5). In Lord Jim,
Conrad writes “… that 'giving your life up to them' (them meaning all of mankind with skins
brown, yellow, or black in colour) ‘was like selling your soul to a brute.'” (284)
Influenced and encouraged by Darwinism, many Victorians not only scientists and
anthropologists, but also the popular fiction associated with imperialism and the idea of
Empire (Griffith 179). The idea of the incompatibility of ethical or cultural norms, then,
revolved around the sense of racial associations. Diversity, therefore, could be only a codeword
for racial difference.
In fact, Darwinian Theory promotes the idea of war, and regards peace as an element that
retards progress. “Evolutionary anthropology has focused on the origins of war, or rather
ethnocentricity, because it epitomizes the problem of group selection, and because war may
itself have been the main agent of group selection” (Dawson 79). This line of thought is
embodied in Vladimir Jabotinsky’ statement: “Stupid is the person who believes in his
neighbor, good and loving as the neighbor may be. Justice exists only for those whose fists
and stubbornness make it possible for them to realize it . . . Do not believe anyone, be always
on guard, carry your stick always with you – this is the only way of surviving in this wolfish
battle of all against all” (qtd. in Bruzonsky 19). This is actually the Fascist ideology of
Darwinism that continues to pose a threat to the world in the 21 st century. Those who have
the power/knowledge or the force of imposition in the Orientalist/colonialist thought would
survive chiefly because they were the "fittest”, hence more successful at warfare. "The tamest
are the strongest," wrote Walter Bagehot, the first avowed social Darwinist. (qtd. in
Dawson81)
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It should be emphasized that all versions of social Darwinism and other assumptions of racial
determinism, past and present, have been concerned with the evolution of altruism as a form
of competition and a test of the “fittest”. According to Doyne Dawson “Darwinism” is
associated with ruthless competition and exploitation even by the educated” (81). If group
selection is common, then evolution requires group extinction. Though this extinction in
human sociocultural evolution does not necessarily entail the physical extermination of the
"Other", it has been achieved through the imposition of sociocultural dictates of one group
“us” on the other group(s) “them”.
The fundamental principle behind fascism today is Darwinism. Indeed, such claims as "some
races have been left behind in the evolutionary process," and "through survival of the fittest,
the strong survive and the weak need be eliminated" have been the source of numerous
harmful ideologies throughout the 20th century especially fascism. This Darwinian Fascist
system is alleged to have been founded by Lycurgus in the 8th century BC. Under the
Spartan system, peoples’ lives were measured according to whether or not they would be of
use to the state. Strong, healthy male children were dedicated to the state, while unhealthy
babies were abandoned to the mountains to die. This Spartan practice was in no way different
from the Darwinian system that professed the sickly needed to be eliminated to maintain a
"healthy and superior race."
In his famous book, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1969), Karl Popper, one of the
foremost thinkers of the 20th century, has found in Plato's fascist tendencies the first source
of inspiration for oppressive regimes, and called him an enemy of open society. In support of
his contention, Popper refers to how Plato calmly defended the killing of infants in Sparta,
and describes him as the first theoretical proponent of "eugenics":
...[I]t is important that the master class should feel as one superior master race. 'The
race of the guardians must be kept pure', says Plato (in defence of inf anticide…He
asks: 'Surely, there is no difference, so far as their natural fitness for keeping guard is
concerned, between a gallant youth and a well-bred dog?” (51)
In the process of the Orientalists’ construction of the “Orient”, the doctrine of the indefinite
plasticity of culture, sometimes called "cultural determinism", is oscillated with "biological
determinism" attributed to Darwinists. This has been the vision of an integrated scientific
worldview; a beacon of Western scholarship since the Enlightenment. In fact, the old social
Darwinism, inclusive fitness, reciprocal altruism, and other neo-Darwinian theories may be
considered variants of group selection and all were serviceable to every shade of political
opinion. However, anthropology as chiefly Western dominating science has been
monopolized to serve the Orintalist/colonialist desire of creating, and then subjugating and
segregating the “Other”. “It happened that both the first and second Darwinian revolutions
were soon followed by dramatic anthropological discoveries that seemed to confirm
Darwinian interpretations of human evolution” (Dawson 87).
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A prime candidate in the Darwinian Orientalist thought is "ethnocentricity," meaning the
human tendency to form exclusive groups. It is difficult to dismiss the hypothesis that we are
descended from a cunning and devious ape with innate tendencies to ethnocentricity,
xenophobia, and male coalition-building, capable of deadly violence against neighboring
"ethnic" groups when the right triggers were pressed (Dawson 87-90). Cultural preferences
and biological fitness have actually been two detrimental drives in the Orientalist/colonialist
construction of the “Orient”. Groupishness, or ethnocentricity, racism, Orientalism,
imperialism and other socio-political ills are the product of long ages of cultural selection,
quite possibly abetted by assumed Darwinian genetic selection.
Unfortunately, “Multicultural” is actually a euphemistic term for "multiracial" or
"multiethnic," for the ultimate ideology represented by Multicultural West may be described
as cultural determinism and selection. Western culture would not be what it is without
Islamic, Chinese, African, and many other cultural inputs. But, Western Orientalist ideology
pushed to the peripheral limit any cultural input outside Greco-Roman tradition.
Whereas Darwin’s ideas provided the biologically racial determinism of Orientalism,
Malthus’s ideas of “undoubtedly an insufficiency of room and food” motivated the imperial
drive of the colonial powers. Yet, it was Spencer’s notion of competition which preached
“the survival of the fittest” that mostly guided the Orientalist/colonialist tendencies all along.
His main idea was that conflict was necessary for progress, and hence all cultural evolution
must be linked to biological evolution.
In his chapter “Sartre on Racism” in Race after Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism,
Postcolonialism, Jonathan Judaken has remarked that racism legitimated the exploitation that
underpinned colonialism. He has also suggested that Orientalism is drawn on a Manichean
logic, and concluded that the Sartrean Orientalist “gaze”, had frozen the “Orient” to an object
which is stripped from its identity, and thus becomes vulnerable to the different forms of
impositions. The dehumanization and ostracism of racialized “Other” are part and parcel of
the creation of European identity and hegemony (23-41). Talal Asad has put the matter in
anthropological terms:
The complex, unequal relations between Western and non-Western locations, I
maintain, must be understood centrally in terms of a great historical transformation of
people's ways of living through which the West has hegemonized the non-European
world. This change involves not the permanent elimination of boundaries but new
ways of making and unmaking them…It is the evidence of how power has
constructed a particular difference across various similarities. (720)
On his part, Andrew Lass opines that “there remains in our work a “vestigial survivalist
thesis" and that “the study of cultural production, specifically the study of European
conceptual thought, provides it with the opportunity to gain insight into the practice of
theory”. (721,722-3)
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“Othering” is a systematic discipline that goes hand in hand with the Western epistemology
and cultural discourse. “Otherness” is due less to the difference of the “Other” than to the
point of view and the discourse of the person who perceives the “Other” as such. Opposing
“Us”, the Self and “them”, the “Other” allows humanity to be divided into two groups: one
that embodies the norm and whose identity is valued and another that is defined by its faults,
devalued and susceptible to discrimination. In short, Otherness is the result of a discursive
process by which a dominant group constructs one or many dominated groups by
stigmatizing a difference – real or imagined – presented as negation of identity and thus a
motive for potential discrimination (Staszak 1). Saeed A khan has also found that “Western
thought has used science to promote racial difference and superiority”. He adds, “Western
thought has for centuries denied the “Other” as different, inferior, and worthy of subjection to
colonialism”. (1)
This is actually the backbone idea of Orientalism as a corporative, institutional Western
discipline in which the asymmetry in power relationship is central to the construction of
“Otherness”. This trend of thought was very much dominant during the colonial era and
acted as supportive scientific and scholastic evidence to the Orientalist/colonialist project.
The “Orient” was created as a stigmatic “Other” which represents the savage race,
barbarianism, and inferiority. Based on these and other evolutionary empirical data, a form of
institutionalized colonial geography was established, “geographers (European discoveries)
sought to document the particularity of the physical environment and tropical societies”
(Staszak 2).
The Hegelian concept of universal progress allows societies to be organized hierarchically
from the primitive “Other” to the civilized European. Hegel claims that “[T]he History of the
World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of history, Asia the
beginning” (qtd. in Macfie 3). Darwin’s theory in this regard offers a coherent scientific
framework to explain species diversity through natural selection. In doing so, Darwin’s
theory offers a hierarchy of different environments and societies and implemented certain
differences as principles of exclusion (4).
The Darwinian theory of evolution was also an underpinning element of literature. One sees
in British colonial fiction from Defoe’s Robison Crusoe to Haggard’s imperial romances a
sort of savage native behavior particularly cannibalism. In his essay ““The Eucharist of
Hell”; Or, Eating People is Right: Romantic Representations of Cannibalism”, Peter Kitson
argues that “Cannibalism … is the most notorious process of colonial “Othering”, both as an
alleged practice and as a critical construct”. For example, Kurtz’s infamous dictum
“exterminate all the brutes” which is equal to Kipling’s view of “the Whiteman’s burden”
echoed the notorious idea of European expansion as a biological necessity. The eighteenthcentury
natural historian Buffon accounted for human variety in terms of a process which he
called degeneration and which he described as occurring through the influence of climate and
environment – Humanity was originally white with European features but it degenerated into
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various other races. J. F. Blumenbach argued in 1775 in his treatise On the Natural Variety of
Mankind that the originary race of human beings were white and beautiful and that all
present varieties descended from these, with the European or Caucasian as the least
degenerate and the Ethiopian and Mongolian or Calmuck as the most degenerate (Bendyshe
269).
These kinds of theorizing activities and inhuman assumptions endorsed by the
Orientalists/colonialists have caused serious wounds and entailed huge and traumatic split to
the concept of human coexistence. In addition to its dehumanization of the “Other”, the idea
of the supremacy and superiority of the “West” has led to a process of displacement of
history. By these terms I mean that the West has tried hard to dismiss and erase the history of
the “Other” and to replace it with history written by the West. The argument of this paper is
based on a historical sense of recasting and questioning the dominant forms of culture, in a
sense that the struggle for history is a political endeavor and this would explain why
postcolonial writers and critics seriously recognized the central relation between history,
narrative and politics in their works. I have strongly observed that one of the legacies of
Orientalism, and indeed one of its epistemological foundations, is historicism which means
that the history of humanity either culminated in or was observed from the vantage point of
Europe, or the West alone. Historicism is actually an essential component of a modern mode
of thinking. We cannot conceive of modernity without historicism. The denial of other modes
of knowledge is part and parcel of the Orientalist mindset. The multiplicity of the past is
erased. Hence, it needs no further proof to say that Modernism, Historicism, Orientalism,
Imperialism, Colonialism, and other Western “isms” all work on a Manichean logic and
Darwinian concept of separation.
Biography
Both Mohamed Hamoud Kassim Al-Mahfedi and Venkatesh P work in the Department of
English, University of Mysore in India. They specialize in postcolonial literature and theory.
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