Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the âOtherâ - JPCS

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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 2
Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies ISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic) 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 JPCS Vol 3, No 1, 2012 3
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Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the âOtherâ - JPCS