Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln and race

Darwin indelibly signaled his milieu by including the Irish among the lower races. In the Descent of Man he quoted with approval a colleague who said that “the careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits; the fugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot … passes his best years in struggle and celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind”. An offended Irish reader asked Darwin to withdraw this statement, but he refused.

What are we to make of this? How can the man who showed the world the similarity between man and apes have believed in a categorical difference between Scots and Irish? Did he not recognise the class differences in his own society, obvious to all? He did. The Irish case is misleading because the lower classes are like them: “the reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members.”

This process of degradation is actually promoted by welfare practices such as vaccination, hospitals and asylums, and tolerance of individual reproductive choice. If the process is allowed to continue, extinction looms. The process can be arrested, Darwin surmised, by eugenic measures proposed by his cousin, Francis Galton. These he endorsed, but expressed his misgiving that they probably wouldn’t succeed. Alfred Russel Wallace tells us that in a conversation with Darwin towards the end of his life, he gloomily forecast that modern civilisation was coming to an end because “natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive … our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes”.

Darwin’s belief in racial hierarchy was the prevailing view of his time, integral to the concept and practice of world dominance by imperial powers.

The dissolution of empire in India, the Middle East, and Africa after World War II was the beginning of a new concept of humanity enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

The celebrations of Lincoln’s bicentennial do sometimes take notice of the fact he was not an early version of Martin Luther King, Jr.

But the Darwin celebrations? Despite the hundreds of papers being presented, only one makes race thematic. Ponder the paradox. The scientific establishment hails Darwin for his culture-transforming insight into true human origins. Yet this exalted knowledge didn’t free him from the then prevailing belief in the superiority of the Caucasian race. Refusal to acknowledge this fact says something about the vulnerability of High Science to human frailty.

Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s recently published Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution provides a detailed account of Darwin’s beliefs and activities in opposition to slavery. For a balanced account of Lincoln’s views and actions, see Stacy Pratt McDermott’s Lincoln and Race.