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

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies
ISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)
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-
Mahfedi and Venkatesh P
JPCS Vol 3, No 1, 2012
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