metaburbia

For the past year or so the Twittering @cdarwin has been travelling up and down the coast of South America (in @cdarwin’s world it’s currently February 1834). To compile the tweets in advance I use mostly  ‘The Beagle Diary‘, the subsequent book by Darwin, ‘The Voyage of the Beagle‘ and Darwin’s letters brought together in the excellent Darwin Correpondence Project.

One of the charges made against the real Darwin by Creationists and assorted anti-Darwinists is that he was a racist and an originator of the late 19thC – early 20thC Eugenics movement. Knowing Darwin fairly well now, I believe that to be rather unfair. Whatever you think about eugenics and the Social Darwinism of Spencer and others, Darwin can’t really be held to be responsible for faddish movements claiming to draw inspiration from the bare facts of evolution by Natural Selection.  As for Darwin himself, he was from a famously anti-slavery Whig background and his Beagle Diary is peppered with remarks on the conditions and situations of non-Europeans that display a great deal of compassion, concern and understanding.

Then I saw this tweet from ‘@aTexasAttitude‘

RT @cdarwin: The Indians are half civilized. They talk a good deal of Spanish & some English. Their appearance is though rather wild ~BIGOT~

This was in response to a further adventure by Darwin, Fitzroy and The Beagle to the cold, rainy, wind-whipped southern island of South America, Tierra del Fuego.

Obviously, a reasonable person wouldn’t dream of judging people who lived 150 years ago by the contemporary standards of a confused Western  liberal minority – possibly, in this case, a minority of precisely one.  Darwin displayed many of the customary prejudices and assumptions of the educated English gentry of the 1830s. But he also wrote and acted in a way that set him apart from, for instance,  the Captain of The Beagle, the High Tory, Fitzroy.

Darwin’s journey around the globe on The Beagle underlined for him the inhumanity of the slavery he witnessed at first hand:

…every individuall who has the glory of having exerted himself on the subject of slavery, may rely on it his labours are exerted against miseries perhaps even greater than he imagines.

how weak are the arguments of those who maintain that slavery is a tolerable evil!

and he wrote with admiration of many of the non-Europeans and indigenous peoples he came across. On the other hand, he described the European middle classes of Uruguay with disdain:

The character of the higher & more educated classes who reside in the towns, is stained by many other crimes. — partaking in a lesser degree in the good parts of the Gaucho character; he is a profligate sensualist who laughs at all religion; he is open to the grossest corruption; his want of principle is entire. — An opportunity occurring not to cheat his friend would be an act of weakness; to tell the truth where a lie might be more serviceable, would be the simplicity of a child. — The term honor is not understood; neither it, nor any generous feeling, the remains of chivalry, have survived the long passage of the Atlantic.

The remark to which ‘@aTexasAttitude‘ so objected was made about the the indigenous inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, Darwin described their miserable condition and desperate existence. Here he writes about their near-starvation diet and resort to cannibalism:

…at night, five or six human beings, naked and scarcely protected from the wind and rain of this tempestuous climate, sleep on the wet ground coiled up like animals… if a seal is killed, or the floating carcass of a putrid whale is discovered, it is a feast; and such miserable food is assisted by a few tasteless berries and fungi…when pressed in winter by hunger, they kill and devour their old women before they kill their dogs: the boy, being asked by Mr. Low why they did this, answered, “Doggies catch otters, old women no.” This boy described the manner in which they are killed by being held over smoke and thus choked; he imitated their screams as a joke, and described the parts of their bodies which are considered best to eat. Horrid as such a death by the hands of their friends and relatives must be, the fears of the old women, when hunger begins to press, are more painful to think of; we are told that they then often run away into the mountains, but that they are pursued by the men and brought back to the slaughter-house at their own firesides!

And today, despite the benefits of a more sophisticated understanding of indigenous cultures and a wariness of cultural absolutism, who honestly could not sympathise with Darwin’s description of them as ‘half civilized’?

Deciding how to slice and dice the world  – how to categorise things, how to classify – can often be more of an art than a science. As Dawkins points out there is, in at least one sense, a  single correct method of classifying living things: the One True Tree of Life he calls it. Even so, you might wish to distinguish animals according to their edibility or their propensity to eat you.

My favourite taxonomy  comes from Borges (or, as Larkin is supposed to have said, ‘Who is Borges’). The unfortunate tendency of some Western academics to leap on this list in the belief that the fictional encyclopaedia described by Borges was real, or at least based on real Eastern sources, has been taken by some as an example of the degeneracy of the Western academy, much like the Sokal Hoax.

Here it is. The classification of animals according to the The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge:

• those that belong to the emperor;
• embalmed ones;
• those that are trained;
• suckling pigs;
• mermaids;
• fabulous ones;
• stray dogs;
• those that are included in this classification;
• those that tremble as if they were mad;
• innumerable ones;
• those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush;
• etcetera;
• those that have just broken the flower vase;
• those that at a distance resemble flies