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

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies
ISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)
expression by enduring centuries of military and mental struggle, after which they
degenerated and that man must strive with Nature or with man, if he is not to fall back and
degenerate. F. W. Headley's Darwinism and Modern Socialism (1909) was an anti-socialist
tract that used biological reasonings to show that the continuance of competition and Natural
Selection is essential to the well-being of a civilised community (Crook 63-97).
The doctrine of colonial discourses defined the goal of colonialism as enlightening and
civilizing non-Western peoples. Yet, this idea was abandoned and replaced by a more racist
doctrine that colonized peoples were intelligently inferior and were incapable of being
civilized. The dark races were going to be extinct in the struggle for existence, and imperial
exploitation needed no moral justification (Adas 318-42). Imperialist policies were regarded
as ‘‘biological necessities’’ (Hawkins 207 -09). The imperialist ideologies of the state
supported by the intellectual hegemony of Darwinism were the dominant academic and
intellectual Orientalist agenda during the colonial era. This is manifested in Muller’s 1892
speech which began with a lengthy acknowledgment of royal patrons and governments for
their protection and support of Orientalist scholarship (Muller 1–2), and ended with a frank
admission that the ultimate end of Oriental studies was to serve imperialism:
England has proved that she knows not only how to conquer, but how to rule. It is
simply dazzling to think of the few thousands of Englishmen ruling the millions of
human beings in India, in Africa, in America, and in Australasia. . . . Under the
personal patronage of H. R. H. the Prince of Wales, a School of Modern Oriental
Studies has at last been established at the Imperial Institute . . . [W]e want help, we
want much larger funds . . . [F]ar higher interests than the commercial supremacy of
England are at stake. (35–37)
Scientists such as Konrad Lorenz and Ernst Heinrich Haeckel built on the Darwinian concept
of ‘the survival of the fittest’, maintaining that the same inexorable law applied to humanity.
These theorists believed that there existed two types of nations – those still vibrant and
destined to survive, and those that were old, stagnant and condemned to decline. However,
the scientific-racist knowledge of the East created another epistemological dichotomy which
is a natural extension of the biologically determined one. The ‘‘soft version’’ of scientific
racism and Weber’s conception of East-West differences that he saw the inferiority of the
East was culturally rather than biologically determined is no less derogatory than a ‘‘hard
version’’ of scientific racism or the evolutionary theory of Herbert Spencer, who derived
most of his data and ideas directly from the biological sciences of his day. It is worth
mentioning here that Spencer’s biological imagination was inherited by many modernization
theorists, who saw modernization following the Western path as a universal, natural, and
evolutionary process, and that social-scientific Orientalist inquiries today are still haunted by
the essentialist conception of East-West differences and the unilinear, evolutionary
conception of social change. (Hung 273- 274)
The Darwinian Orientalist thought continued to foster the racist intellectual discourse in the
contemporary era. In his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998), David Lande’s
‘Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the “Other”,’ Mohamed Hamoud Kassim Al-
Mahfedi and Venkatesh P
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