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

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