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

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies
ISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)
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).
‘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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