HANDOUT 1: Social Darwinism and Colonial Praxis.
1904 - German near-complete
annihilation of Herero (80 thousands). <New York Times>, May 31, 1998:
“Gen. Lothar von Trotha, notorious for his butchery in German East Africa, was
dispatched with10,000 volunteers and a battle plan. Von Trotha pushed the Herero guerrillas
and their families north to Waterberg and then attacked from three sides,
leaving one exit: the Omaheke Desert. When the Herero fled into it, he poisoned
the water holes, erected guard posts along a 150-mile line and bayoneted
everyone who crawled out. He then issued the Vernichtungsbefehl, or
extermination order: "Within the German borders, every Herero, whether
armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot. I shall not accept any
more women or children. I shall drive them back to their people -- otherwise I
shall order shots to be fired at them."
The remaining Herero were rounded up and sent to labor
camps, where they starved or died of overwork, typhus and smallpox. By 1907 the
order had been denounced and von Trotha had been recalled -- but the rebellion
had been crushed. Before the war there were 80,000 Herero. In the 1911
census, 15,000 were found”.
Even without “extermination campaigns”, colonial
neglect of the life and well-being of the ”natives” could cost millions of
lives. F. ex., in India, there were 24 famines in the last half of the 19th
C., that cost around 20 millions of Indian lives. Interestingly, the food
grains were exported from India even during the famines while relief was
totally inadequate. Even in normal years, 70-80% of Indians were living on the
verge of hunger, and life expectancy was constantly falling, reaching 23 years
(!) in 1931 (M.Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts). Famines were also
rampant in the Dutch Indonesia – some of them in the mid-19th C.
cost around 250 thousands lives a year. In most colonies, “natives” were either
shrinking in numbers (aboriginal population of the Americas) or the population
growth was lower than in Europe and USA.
2 Ideology
of the Imperialism: Racism and Social Darwinism. 1898, Lord Salisbury
(1830-1903) – “the living race has the right to take the land from a dying
race”
1900-1904,
German geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904)’s Lebensraum theory.
Social Darwinist politician: Pres. Theodore Roosevelt
(1858-1919) : <The Winning of the West>: "it is impossible to accord
the savages the same rules of international morality which obtained between
stable and cultured communities". "conquest
and settlement by the whites of the Indian lands were necessary to the
greatness of the race and to the well-being of civilized mankind".
<Expansion and Peace> (1899):
"civilized man can keep peace only by subduing his barbarian neighbours;
for the barbarian will yield only to force".
Poet of
Imperialism and “survival of the fittest” – Rudyard Kipling:
“The White Man’s
Burden” (1899):
“Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the
best ye breed--
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your
captives' need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk
and wild--
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and
half child.
Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain,
To seek another's profit
And work another's gain.
Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hope to nought.
Take up the White Man's burden--
No iron rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go, make them with your living
And mark them with your dead.
Take up the White Man's burden,
And reap his old reward--
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those
ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!)
toward the light:--
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved
Egyptian night?"
Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness.
By all ye will or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent sullen peoples
Shall weigh your God and you.
Take up the White Man's burden!
Have done with childish days--
The lightly-proffered laurel,
The easy ungrudged praise:
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers.”
On this poem: H. Marshall, “Rudyard Kipling and Racial Instinct” (1899):
“His
vigorous imperialism tells the same story. The process of nature, which through
dim ages in the past has perfected the race of men by the contest for survival,
expresses itself in him with new power. Civilization must contend with
civilization that the more efficient, the more skillful, the more resourceful,
may inherit the earth. And even those of us who believe this to be a moment
when these deeply intrenched instincts should be restrained, -- that the time
has come when civilization will be the better advanced by such restraint, by
cooperation rather than contest, -- even they must grant, nevertheless, that
the instincts to which he appeals, which have given our forefathers their
preeminence, cannot be repressed without danger, must be guided rather than
thwarted, must be made instrumental in the movement toward perfection, rather
than crushed out and obliterated.
What
some tell us are his faults and errors express this same revolt against the
repression of those instinctive forces within us -- forces which have dignity
given them by the very fact that they speak of the experience of the ages -- by
the very fact that they have been impressed upon us by nature in her struggles
toward the higher life. Of these faults we can speak but lightly here. If at
times he deals with indelicacies, almost with brutalities, even then his themes
tell of nature's demand that the experience of eons of time shall not be lost
to sight in our efforts to establish artificial standards of life.” Thus,
imperialism was presented as a matter of “instinct”, “human nature”, a “natural
way to the higher forms of life”, beneficent and inescapable.
3.
Outlook of the development of Racism/Social Darwinism
17th C.
– formation of the concept of ”blackness”.
18th C. – first
detailed descriptions of ”black inferiority”: William Tyson, <Orang-Outang,
or The Anatomy of a Pigmye>, 1709: "Blacks – halfway from the animals
to humans”.
18th C.
Malthusianism – ideas on “superfluous population” and “inevitable struggle for
resources”.
1799 – first
”classic” racist treatise: Charles White, <An Account of the Regular
Graduations in Man>.
19th C., first
half - George Cuvier – idea of the ”extinction of unfit species”.
1850s –
beginnings of “scientific” racism - Robert Knox, <The Races of Man>:
"Race is everything: literature, science, art, in a word, civilization,
depend on it". "Dark races" : "the Saxon race will never
tolerate them - never amalgamate - never be at peace". Necessity of
“extermination of all the colored races”.
1859 - Darwin, <The Origin of Species>:
"the improved and modified descendants of a species will generally cause
the extinction of the parent species". The less intellectual races being
exterminated".
1863 – establishment
of the Anthropological Society in London. Introductory talk – “the extinction
of races”.
1864 - W.W.Reade, <Savage Africa>: proposal
to ”annihilate all blacks” and make Africa Europe’s ”park”.
1864 -
A.R.Wallace, systematization of the ”principle of natural selection”.
1866 - F.Farrar,
<Aptitude of the Races> - "half-civilized" Chinese versus
“irreclaimable savages”.
1868 - W.Greg,
raises the problem of ”overcivilization” inside Europe. Solution –
“revitalization” through imperialism: “Exterminate, govern, supercede, fight,
eat, or work the inferior tribes out of existence".
1871 - Ch.Darwin,
<The Descent of Man> - ”blacks” as ”half-primates”.
Francis Galton (1822-1911) – ”eugenics”: “This is precisely the aim of Eugenics. Its first object is to check the birth rate of the Unfit, instead of allowing them to come into being, though doomed in large numbers to perish prematurely. The second object is the improvement of the race by furthering the productivity of the Fit by early marriages and healthful rearing of their children. Natural Selection rests upon excessive production and wholesale destruction; Eugenics on bringing no more individuals into the world than can be properly cared for, and those only of the best stock”
Thomas Huxley, <Evolution and Ethics>
(1894): ” There is
another fallacy which appears to me to pervade the so-called "ethics of
evolution." It is the notion that because, on the whole, animals and
plants have advanced in perfection of organization by means of the struggle for
existence and the consequent "survival of the fittest"; therefore men
in society, men as ethical beings, must look to the same process to help them
towards perfection. I suspect that this fallacy has arisen out of the
unfortunate ambiguity of the phrase "survival of the fittest."
"Fittest" has a connotation of "best"; and about
"best" there hangs a moral flavor. In cosmic nature, however, what is
"fittest" depends upon the conditions. Long since, I ventured to
point out that if our hemisphere were to cool again, the survival of the
fittest might bring about, in the vegetable kingdom, a population of more and
more stunted and humbler and humbler organisms, until the "fittest"
that survived might be nothing but lichens, diatoms, and such microscopic
organisms as those which give red snow its color; while, if it became hotter,
the pleasant valleys of the Thames and Isis might be uninhabitable by any
animated beings save those that flourish in a tropical jungle. They, as the
fittest, the best adapted to the changed conditions, would survive.
Men in society are undoubtedly subject to the cosmic
process. As among other animals, multiplication goes on without cessation, and
involves severe competition for the means of support. The struggle for
existence tends to eliminate those less fitted to adapt themselves to the
circumstances of their existence. The strongest, the most self-assertive, tend
to tread down the weaker. But the influence of the cosmic process on the evolution
of society is the greater the more rudimentary its civilization. Social
progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the
substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the
end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in
respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are
ethically the best.
William Sumner, <The Challenge of
Facts> (1914): “Another development of the same philosophy is the doctrine
that men come into the world endowed with "natural rights," or as
joint inheritors of the "rights of man," which have been
"declared" times without number during the last century. The divine rights of man have
succeeded to the obsolete divine right of kings. If it is true, then, that a
man is born with rights, he comes into the world with claims on somebody
besides his parents. Against whom does he hold such rights? There can be no
rights against nature or against God. A man may curse his fate because he is
born of an inferior race, or with an hereditary disease, or blind, or, as some
members of the race seem to do, because they are born females; but they get no
answer to their imprecations. But, now, if men have rights by birth, these
rights must hold against their fellow-men and must mean that somebody else is
to spend his energy to sustain the existence of the persons so born. What then
becomes of the natural rights of the one whose energies are to be diverted from
his own interests? If it be said that we should all help each other, that means
simply that the race as a whole should advance and expand as much and as fast
as it can in its career on earth; and the experience on which we are now acting
has shown that we shall do this best under liberty and under the organization
which we are now developing, by leaving each to exert his energies for his own
success. The notion of natural rights is destitute of sense, but it is
captivating, and it is the more available on account of its vagueness. It lends
itself to the most vicious kind of social dogmatism, for if a man has natural
rights, then the reasoning is clear up to the finished socialistic doctrine
that a man has a natural right to whatever he needs, and that the measure of
his claims is the wishes which he wants fulfilled. If, then, he has need, who
is bound to satisfy it for him? Who holds the obligation corresponding to his
right? It must be the one who possesses what will satisfy that need, or else
the state which can take the possession from those who have earned and saved
it, and give it to him who needs it and who, by the hypothesis, has not earned
and saved it.”
Ideology of Imperialism – refutation
of the human right theory, ideas on inborn inequality, “cosmic laws of struggle
for existence”, and “necessity of the extinction of the inferior”.