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

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies
ISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)
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)
‘Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the “Other”,’ Mohamed Hamoud Kassim Al-
Mahfedi and Venkatesh P
JPCS Vol 3, No 1, 2012
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