In among the Darwin worship of 2009 few people had the courage to stand up and say that the great man’s theory had cast a large and dark shadow over humanity since its publication in 1859. To have done so would have been to risk being accused of party-pooping or, worse, creationism.
Denis Sewell is neither a party-pooper nor a creationist. He recognises Darwin’s scientific brilliance and has no problem with evolution as a scientific theory. He is, however, alert to the way in which Darwinism has been used to justify the some truly grotesque social policy.
From the moment it was published, The Origin of Species and the ideas therein were used to justify more or less every political ideology imaginable. As George Bernard Shaw once remarked, Darwin “had the luck to please everybody who had an axe to grind.” From Marxist socialism to extreme libertarianism, evolution proved it right.
Most influential was the way in which the theory was used to divide and categorise humans, either into rigid strata or different classes altogether. “These lower [i.e. black] races are psychologically nearer to apes and dogs than to civilised Europeans,” wrote Darwin’s friend Ernest Haeckel; “we must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives.”
It is common to dissociate such views from Darwin himself but, as Sewell points out, this is a little disingenuous. Darwin loathed slavery and was a humanitarian to the core, but that did not stop him from explaining, in The Descent of Man, how “civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.” Personally he baulked at this idea and would have been sick (he was often sick) at the thought that within two generations of his death, people would be deliberately exterminating those races they deemed sub-human. But that cannot excuse him entirely.
His problem, and that of many who followed him, was that he saw biology as destiny. What is natural, i.e. what science discovers is the case, is understood to be what is right. In Haeckel’s words, therefore “politics [becomes] applied biology.” If science shows that nature is about competition (the emphasis on co-operation was a long-time coming) and progress was only made when stronger species out-bred weaker ones, and some races were superior to others, the conclusion was obvious, and there was no point in struggling against it. This was just the way things were. Thus Herbert Spencer, another of Darwin’s disciples, could argue with impeccable evolutionary logic that any formalised system poor-relief would only make things worse.
Sewell’s analysis of the political uses to which evolution has been put is superb. Although limiting himself to British, American and German politics, he covers a great deal of ground. Along the way we encounter Ota Benga, the 23 year old Congolese pygmy put on public display in a New York monkey house, against the wishes of the Colored Baptists Ministers’ Conference; Marie Stopes, the family planning campaigner, who forced her son to break off his engagement for fear that his fiancé’s short-sightedness might be passed on to the children; and Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the Finnish student who killed nine people including himself after posting an on-line message about how “death and killing is not a tragedy…it happens in nature all the time”. We read about what really happened at the Scopes Monkey Trial, how panics about race purity were not confined to Germany, and who has donated to the Nobel Sperm Bank (yes, it is what you think it is).
Sewell writes well and pugnaciously, at one point suggesting we should treat Richard Dawkins with the same contempt we do Anjem Choudary of Islam4UK fame. Occasionally, his enthusiasm gets the better of him, such as when he claims that “we can be fairly confident that whatever is the consensus among scientists today will have been superseded in a generation.” I don’t see any scientists overturning the heliocentric theory in a hurry.
That aside, it is hard to disagree with his conclusions. “Politically, a society that holds human life to be sacred and one that thinks we’re ‘not that special’ are a world apart.” Because it is a fundamental tenet of evolutionary thinking (at least in its narrow, scientistic guise) that humans are not special, it has followed that “in nearly all its applications in the social and political field, evolutionary science had proved dysfunctional and disruptive.”
Sewell ends by dwelling on the astonishing progress made in gene-decoding and manipulation over the last twenty years, which has opened up vast new opportunities for those who want to ‘improve’ human beings and the societies in which they live. We have not heard the end of this story.
The Political Gene by Denis Sewell is published by Picador (2009)
This review first appeared in Third Way Magazine.
