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ABSTRACT
While studies have examined Charles Darwin's wide social and political impact, they have not adequately centred the combined influence of colonial systems of human differentiation and religion within them. To address this, I draw from Sylvia Wynter's critique concerning how religious and colonial discourses contribute to the shifting development of Man within the Western tradition. Specifically, I explore how Darwin focused his evolutionary gaze towards one of the unique foundations of what it meant to be human in his time: religion. Tracing the entangled religious and colonial filiations of Darwin's thought, I show that he established an evolutionary link between human and non-human animals by proposing both Indigenous peoples and dogs held superstitious beliefs. To illustrate this, I show that Darwin transposed Victorian anthropological conceptions of religion - as a quantifiable object of knowledge corresponding to the intellect and associated with phrenology, dream theory and the apparitional soul - into a bio-religious conception of evolution. Furthermore, I argue that Darwin's bio-evolutionism assumes Christianity is most closely associated with abstract reason. Finally, analyzing the role of race in Darwin's thought, I suggest that theology is not what was before modern scientific bio-evolutionary conceptions of race, but at its very core.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 For Wynter, modernity is understood as a global system organized by colonialism and capitalism. See Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument’, The New Centennial Review, 3(3), Fall 2003, pp 257–337.
2 Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being’; Denise Ferreira da Silva, ‘Before Man: Sylvia Wynter’s Rewriting of the Modern Episteme’, in Kathrine McKittrick (ed), Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, Durham: Duke University Press, 2015, pp 93–95.
3 For McKittrick (2015), Wynter does not offer a sequential unfolding narrative of modernity that begins with colonial subjugation and moves towards freedom. Also, according to Sonya Posmentier, ‘rupture’ here corresponds to breaking with what Homi Bhabha (2004) names the ‘continuous progressivist myth of Man’ (340). See Sonya Posmentier, Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017; Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, New York, NY: Routledge, 2004 (1994).
4 McKittrick ‘Yours in the Intellectual Struggle: Sylvia Wynter and the Realization of the Living’, in K McKittrick (ed), Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, p 16.
5 Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being’, pp 266–267.
6 Da Silva, ‘Before Man’, 94.
7 In his Descent of Man, Darwin states: ‘The sole object of this work is to consider, firstly, whether man, like every other species, is descended from some pre-existing form; secondly, the manner of his development; and thirdly, the value of the differences between the so-called races of man’. See Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 (1871) pp 3–4.
8 Matthew Day, ‘Godless Savages and Superstitious Dogs: Charles Darwin, Imperial Ethnography, and the Problem of Human Uniqueness’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 69(1), 2008, p 59.
9 Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being’, p 319.
10 According to Wynter, this biological genre of the human is indexed by homo economicus – a figure that practices accumulation in the name of economic freedom, see Wynter ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being’.
11 Walter Mignolo, ‘Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human?’ in K McKittrick (ed), Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, p 106.
12 I often use religion and theology interchangeably, while recognizing they are distinct. In fact, this paper tracks how the category of religion itself is as a modern invention of anthropology. See also Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
13 David Scott, ‘The Re-Enactment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter’, Small Axe, 8, 2000, p 180.
14 Concerning my use of ‘theology’ vis-à-vis Darwin, I am not so much interested in his personal reflections upon the existence and nature of God. Instead, I agree with Matthew Day’s cogent analysis concerning Darwin’s characterizations of the origins of religion as it relates to the shifting conception of the human.
15 While outside the scope of the paper, there is a tension in Wynter in that she deploys the conceptual language of ‘rupture’ and ‘reinvention’ concerning the epistemic shifts that shape the development of Man in the Western tradition. Ultimately, I believe that Wynter reproduces the ‘religious decline thesis’ mentioned later in the paper.
16 Day, ‘Godless Savages’, p 59.
17 Day, ‘Godless Savages’, p 60.
18 Terence Keel, Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018, p 13, 20–21.
19 David Scott, ‘The Tragic Sensibility of Talal Asad’, in D Scott and C Hirschkind (eds), Powers of the Secular Modern, p 140.
20 I have put this category in quotations to account for its colonial lineage – hereafter, I will not use them.
21 Banu Subramaniam, Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014, p 12.
22 Drawing from the work of Ernst Mayr, Subramaniam argues that Darwin breaks from typologies; however, it should be noted that this point is debated. For instance, Peter Bowler (2013) suggests that Mayr’s characterization is overstated, because traditional naturalists were not totally wedded to a conception of fixed essences whether Platonic idealism or the like (65–66). See Ernst Mayr, ‘The Recent Historiography of Genetics’, Journal of the History of Biology, 6(1), 1973, pp 125–154; Peter Bowler, Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without Darwin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
23 Subramaniam, Ghost Stories for Darwin, p 12, 48.
24 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, (1st ed), London: John Murray, 1859, p 490.
25 Subramaniam, Ghost Stories for Darwin, p 49; Bowler, Darwin Deleted, p 54.
26 Bowler, Darwin Deleted, p 70. See also Richard Lewontin, ‘Adaptation’, Scientific American, 239, 1978, pp 212–230; David Depew and Bruce Weber, Darwinism Evolving—Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.
27 Jonathan Howard, Darwin: A Very Short Introduction, London: Oxford Paperbacks, 2003, p 67.
28 Bowler, Darwin Deleted, p 57, 64.
29 Bowler, Darwin Deleted, p 64.
30 Bowler, Darwin Deleted, p 64.
31 Howard, Darwin: A Very Short Introduction, p 18.
32 Subramaniam, Ghost Stories for Darwin, p 51.
33 Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A history of Theories of Culture, Updated Edition, New York, England: Altamira Press, 2001 (1968), pp 114–115.
34 Subramaniam, Ghost Stories for Darwin, p 50.
35 Carl Bajema, ‘Charles Darwin as a Cause of Adaptive Evolution 1837-1859’, The American Biology Teacher, 47(4), April, 1985, pp 228.
36 Subramaniam, Ghost Stories for Darwin, p 50.
37 Curtis Johnson, Darwin's Dice: The Idea of Chance in the Thought of Charles Darwin, London: Oxford University Press, 2015, p xv.
38 Subramaniam, Ghost Stories for Darwin, p 50; John Maynard Keynes. 1926. The End of Laissez-faire, http://www.panarchy.org/keynes/laissezfaire.1926.html.
39 Bowler, Darwin Deleted, p 68.
40 Bowler, Darwin Deleted, pp 69–70.
41 Howard, Darwin: A Very Short Introduction, p 2. See also, Nihad Farooq, Undisciplined: Science, Ethnography, and Personhood in the Americas, 1830-1940, New York: New York University Press, 2016; M J S Hodge, ‘Capitalist Contexts for Darwinian Theory: Land, Finance, Industry and Empire’, Journal of the History of Biology, 42(3), Fall, 2009, pp 399–416.
42 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783-1939, Oxford University Press, 2009, p 3.
43 Michael Reidy and Helen Rozwadowski, ‘The Spaces in Between: Science, Ocean, Empire’, Isis, 105, 2014, p 350.
44 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth, p 4.
45 Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882. Nora Barlow (ed), London and Glasgow: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1958, p 80.
46 Darwin, Charles, The Autobiography, p 80.
47 Charles Darwin, ‘Diary of the Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle’, in Paul Barrett and R B Freeman (eds), The Works of Charles Darwin, Volume One, New York: New York University Press, 1987, p 109; Day, ‘Godless Savages’, p 56.
48 Darwin, The Descent of Man, p 186.
49 Day, ‘Godless Savages’, pp 58–59.
50 Darwin, The Descent of Man, p 34.
51 Darwin, The Descent of Man, p 39.
52 Charles Darwin, ‘Notebook B’, 224 (B214) in Charles Darwin's Notebooks, http://darwinonline.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/vanWyhenotebooks.html; Day ‘Godless Savages’, p 59.
53 Charles Darwin, ‘Notebook C’, 316 (C 244) in Charles Darwin's Notebooks, http://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/vanWyhe_notebooks.html; Day, ‘Godless Savages’, p 60.
54 Darwin, The Descent of Man, 65. Emphasis mine.
55 Charles Darwin, ‘Notebook M,’ 553 (M 136) in Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, http://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/vanWyhe_notebooks.html; Day, ‘Godless Savages’, p 59.
56 Darwin, The Descent of Man, pp 68–69.
57 Darwin, Origins, p 420 in McGrane Beyond Anthropology, p 80.
58 Bowler, Darwin Deleted, p 71.
59 Ryan Gregory, ‘The Argument from Design: A Guided Tour of William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802)’, Evolution: Education and Outreach, 2, 2009, 603.
60 Bowler, Darwin Deleted, p 73.
61 David Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, p 39.
62 Keel, Divine Variations, p 15.
63 Keel, Divine Variations, p 13.
64 Bowler, Darwin Deleted, p 42. This is not to say that all liberal Christians embraced Darwin’s thought. Bowler (2013) argues, many of them turned to non-Darwinian theories including Lamarckism, which could be reconciled with the notion that God established a purposeful evolutionary process.
65 Keel, Divine Variations, p 28.
66 Keel, Divine Variations, p 6.
67 Robbie Shilliam, ‘Race and Revolution at Bwa Kayiman’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 45(3), 2017, p 276.
68 David Chidester, ‘Darwin’s Dogs: Animals, Animism, and the Problem of Religion’, Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 92(1/2), 2009, p 53.
69 Chidester, ‘Darwin’s Dogs’, p 54.
70 Cornelius Donovan, ‘On the Brain in the Study of Ethnology’, Journal of the Ethnological Society of London, 2, Ethnological Society (London), 1870, p 369.
71 Cornelius Donovan, A Handbook of Phrenology, London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1870, p 93–94, in Chidester, ‘Darwin’s Dogs’, p 54.
72 Chidester, ‘Darwin’s Dogs’, p 55.
73 Chidester, ‘Darwin’s Dogs’, p 54.
74 Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A history of Theories of Culture, Updated Edition, New York, England: Altamira Press, 2001 (1968), p 202.
75 Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory, p 202.
76 Edward B Tylor, ‘The Philosophy of Religion among the Lower Races of Mankind’, The Journal of the Ethnological Society of London, 2(4), 1869–1870, p 371.
77 Tylor, ‘The Philosophy of Religion’, p 371.
78 Darwin, The Descent of Man, p 66 in Chidester, ‘Darwin’s Dogs,’ p 62.
79 John Lubbock, The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man, London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1912 (1870), p 275, in Day ‘Godless Savages’, p 63.
80 Darwin, The Descent of Man, 33.
81 Vanita Seth, Europe’s Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500-1900, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010, p 170.
82 Chidester, ‘Darwin’s Dogs’, p 62.
83 Chidester, ‘Darwin’s Dogs’, p 57.
84 Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory, p 204.
85 Darwin, The Descent of Man, 66 in Day ‘Godless Savages’, p 63.
86 Darwin, The Descent of Man, 66 in Day ‘Godless Savages’, p 63.
87 Chidester, ‘Darwin’s Dogs’, p 62.
88 Lubbock, The Origin of Civilisation, p 287 in Chidester, ‘Darwin’s Dogs’, p 59.
89 Darwin, The Descent of Man, p 65.
90 Darwin, The Descent of Man, p 65.
91 Darwin, The Descent of Man, p 66.
92 Darwin, The Descent of Man, p 48.
93 Darwin, The Descent of Man, p 58.
94 Darwin, The Descent of Man, p 64.
95 Darwin, The Descent of Man, p, 67.
96 Darwin, The Descent of Man, p 67.
97 Darwin, The Descent of Man, p 69.
98 Darwin, The Descent of Man, p 67.
99 Darwin, The Descent of Man, p 69.
100 McGrane, Beyond Anthropology, p 65.
101 Darwin, The Descent of Man, p 68.
102 Darwin, The Descent of Man, p 69.
103 Robert FitzRoy, Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle. Proceedings of the Second Expedition, 1831-36, Under the Command of Captain Robert FitzRoy, R.N., London: Henry Colburn, 1839, p 3; James Moore and Adrian Desmond, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race Slavery and the Search for Human Origins, Penguin Press, 2010, p 67.
104 FitzRoy, Narrative, p 3.
105 Moore and Desmond, ‘Darwin’s Sacred Cause’, p 67; Alexis Harley, ‘This Reversed Order of Things: Re-Orientation Aboard ‘HMS Beagle’’, Biography, 29(3), Summer 2006, p 468.
106 Darwin, The Descent of Man, p 33.
107 Moore and Desmond, p 89.
108 Charles Darwin, ‘Notebook E’, 409 (E 47), in Charles Darwin's Notebooks, http://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/vanWyhe_notebooks.html in Day, ‘Godless Savages’, p 63.
109 While some suggest that ‘Social Darwinism’ is a corruption or sociologization of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, I would argue that his thought was always necessarily entwined with violent colonial forms of human difference.
110 Subramaniam, Ghost Stories for Darwin, p 12–13.
111 Subramaniam, Ghost Stories for Darwin, p 13; see also Alan Garland, ‘Science Misapplied: The Eugenics Age Revisited’, Technology Review, 99(6), pp 22–31.
112 Contrasting this reading, Bowler (2013) argues that even without Darwinism, race thinking and other ideologies of individual and national difference would have drawn justification from non-Darwinian ideas of evolution.
113 Subramaniam, Ghost Stories for Darwin, p 50.
114 Darwin, Descent of Man, p 136 in Subramaniam, Ghost Stories for Darwin, p 50.
115 Charles Darwin, ‘Letter to Kingsley, Charles’, Letter 3439, 6 February, 1862 http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-3439.
116 Charles Darwin, ‘Letter to Graham, William’, Letter 13230, 3 July, 1881 http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-13230.
117 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, p xxvi.
118 Seth, Europe’s Indians, p 4.
119 Seth, Europe’s Indians, p 16.
120 Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘Religion, Conquest, and Race in the Monder/Colonial World’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 82(3), September, 2014, p 642.
121 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, p 8.
122 Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept’, Cultural Studies, 21(2-3), 2007, p 244.
123 Donald S Moore, Jake Kosek and Anand Pandian. Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003, p 5.
124 Seth, Europe’s Indians, p 206.
125 Keel, Divine Variations, p 14.
126 Keel, Divine Variations, p 16.
127 Keel, Divine Variations, pp 31–32.
128 For further reflections on this position, see Bowler (2013). For him, ‘the blanket assumption that all these injustices and horrors were inspired by Darwinism alone simply cannot be sustained’, p 45.
129 Johnson, Darwin’s Dice, pp xii–xv; George Levine, ‘Reflections on Darwin and Darwinizing’, Victorian Studies, Special Issue: Darwin and the Evolution of Victorian Studies, 51(2), Winter, 2009, p 215.
130 Levine, ‘Reflections on Darwin and Darwinizing’, p 225.
131 Scott, ‘The Tragic Sensibility of Talal Asad’, p 139.
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Zahir Kolia
Dr. Zahir Kolia's research broadly examines how coloniality and settler colonial formations are shaped by the secular using Postcolonial and Decolonial Theory, Indigenous Studies, Critical Race Theory, Post-Secular Studies and Decolonial approaches to World/Political Ecology. Also, he examines how the historical emergence of race is entwined with shifting theological forms of power.