Imagined Destinies

Russell McGregor

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780522847628
• eBook ISBN: 9780522865639
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

1

The Creation and Annihilation of Primitive Man

If the tendency of the Enlightenment was to make humanity subject to natural laws, the trend of early nineteenth-century racial science was to render those natural laws biological. Since its inception, the scientific study of race had embedded man in the processes of nature. Monogenists like Blumenbach and Pritchard relied heavily on the natural sciences of biology and anatomy in their endeavours to prove the unitary origins of mankind. Over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, racial science drifted more toward a polygenist perspective, and with this came an increasing proclivity to regard social and cultural differences as causally related to biological differences.

Nancy Stepan has described the shift in British racial science between 1800 and 1860 as involving

a change from an emphasis on the fundamental physical and moral homogeneity of man, despite superficial differences, to an emphasis on the essential heterogeneity of mankind, despite superficial similarities. It was a shift from a sense of man as primarily a social being, governed by social laws and standing apart from nature, to a sense of man as primarily a biological being, embedded in nature and governed by biological laws. It was a move away from an eighteenth century optimism about man, and faith in the adaptability of man’s universal ‘nature’, towards a nineteenth century biological pessimism, and a belief in the unchangeability of racial ‘natures’. . .

In short, a shift had occurred in which culture and the social behaviour of man became epiphenomena of biology.1

Naturalism, and the assumed link between biological and cultural attributes, were to be bequeathed to the generations of anthropologists who followed Darwin.

A thoroughgoing polygenism, positing the separate creation of fixed races or species of mankind, may not have been so readily compatible with the Darwinian hypothesis. But polygenism was far more than merely speculation about the ultimate origins of human diversity; as George Stocking has pointed out:

From a broader point of view . . . polygenism and monogenism can be regarded as specific expressions of enduring alternative attitudes toward the variety of mankind. Confronted by antipodal man, one could marvel at his fundamental likeness to oneself, or one could gasp at his immediately striking differences. One could regard these differences as of degree or of kind, as products of changing environment or immutable heredity, as dynamic or static, as relative or absolute, as inconsequential or hierarchical.2

He added that, considered ‘in these terms, polygenist thinking did not die with Darwin’s Origin of Species’. It was not merely that post-Darwinian anthropologists inherited the notion that humanity could be subdivided into a number of races; more than that, they persisted in the view that racial differences were fundamental and fixed, that racial types were stable over time. Evolutionary anthropologists continued to reify races, regarding them not merely as convenient classificatory tools but as actually existing entities of the natural world.3

Contemporary racial thought was one intellectual current on which evolutionary anthropology drew. The idea of progress was another. In the first half of the nineteenth century, conjectural histories in the style of the Scottish Enlightenment had passed out of fashion. The Enlightenment concern with reconstructing the course of human progress on the grand scale was displaced by a more utilitarian desire to ensure the continuation of social and economic development. But this entailed no diminution of faith in the reality of progress.

That faith grew stronger in Britain with each passing decade, to be epitomised by the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851.4 When, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the fashion for conjectural reconstructions of the human past was revived under the guise of evolutionary theory, Britain was a very different place to what it had been a century before. In the heyday of its imperial might and in a period of rapid industrialisation, the reality of progress could be taken for granted. As Stocking remarked,

for several decades after 1851, civilization in Britain was not so much a problem as an assumption. Insofar as it was problematic, the primary question was no longer how to accomplish it or defend it, but rather to explain its development, and why it was that not all men had shared equally in the process.5

In answering the latter question, the concept of race was combined with the idea of progress. The Enlightenment tradition of societal development and the post-Enlightenment science of race were harnessed together in evolutionary anthropology, to explain both the course of human progress and the source of human differences. This chapter examines the evolutionary synthesis of race with progress, first in Britain, then in the Australian context; it also explores the ways in which evolutionary ideas lent added weight to the expectation of Aboriginal extinction.

The Progress of Science

The central thrust of The Origin of Species was to explain, without recourse to the hand of God, how the observed diversity of life on the planet could have come about. For this purpose, the idea of progressive development had only a minor part to play; but a part none the less, at least as a rhetorical strategy to convince the reader. Biological evolution was an optimistic creed, according to Darwin: ‘Hence, we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection’.

In the Origin scant mention was made of the evolution of humanity. The most significant passage appeared in the concluding paragraphs where Darwin explicitly linked his hypothesis to the theories of the pre-eminent mid-nineteenth-century philosopher of progress, Herbert Spencer, and predicted that in the future ‘[m]uch light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’.6 When Darwin published at length on human evolution, with The Descent of Man in 1871, he again made reference to the theories of ‘Our great philosopher, Herbert Spencer’.7 But by this time evolutionary theory had gained widespread acceptance, and Darwin had to hand a great many works within an evolutionary framework upon which to draw, notably those by John Lubbock, Alfred Russell Wallace, T. H. Huxley, and E. B. Tylor. Far from these works being merely derivative of Darwin’s theory, it was to them that Darwin turned to buttress his own account of human evolution.

Although Darwin placed the idea of evolution on a firm scientific footing, his theory of natural selection did not win universal acceptance as the primary factor in the evolutionary process.8 But whatever factor was put forward as the engine of evolution, one thing was essential to the process—time. In a sense, time replaced God as the creator of organic diversity. In the mid-nineteenth century, and quite independently of the rise of Darwinism, the temporal limits for the existence of the Earth and its inhabitants were being pushed further and further back, making a biblically-based chronology increasingly untenable. The establishment of the antiquity of man was of great importance to the emergence of anthropology as a science, for it provided a new dimension to human existence. 9 Contemporary anthropologists were well aware of the significance of extending the frontiers of time. Arguing the plausibility of the theory that man and ape shared a common ancestry, T. H. Huxley pointed out that ‘if any form of the doctrine of progressive development is correct, we must extend by long epochs the most liberal estimate that has yet been made of the antiquity of Man’.10

However, it was one thing to assert that Darwinian theory posited the enormous antiquity of man; it was quite another to have solid evidence of that antiquity. By the 1860s the temporal scale had expanded enormously, but there were no archaeological or geological finds that directly supported a theory of the gradual development of man from an ape-like ancestor.11 The limited available human fossil material, such as the crania from Engis and Neanderthal, did not reveal the sorts of anatomical changes that could be expected according to Darwinian theory. Faced with a paucity of empirical evidence, the mid-nineteenth-century champions of evolution adopted two basic expedients. One was to assert that the fossil evidence was there; it had merely not yet been unearthed.12 The other was to fill in the fossil gap with the established racial hierarchy. Thus was the Great Chain of Being reinstated into science.

T. H. Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature conjured up a secularised version of the Great Chain, in which the similarities between ape and man indicated not the plenitude of God’s creation but common biological descent. Huxley discussed ‘the relations of man to the lower animals’, carefully pointing out the numerous anatomical, physiological and psychological similarities that became all the more striking as he moved up the hierarchy of the animal kingdom to the apes. He concluded that ‘the structural differences which separate Man from the Gorilla and the Chimpanzee are not so great as those which separate the Gorilla from the lower apes’. None the less, there was still a gap ‘between man and even the highest apes’, and it would be ‘no less wrong than absurd to deny the existence of this chasm; but it is at least equally wrong and absurd to exaggerate its magnitude’. Huxley could refer to no creature, alive or extinct, which could fill the chasm between man and ape. He could only remark that the absence of evidence of transitional forms was common in biology. The Engis and Neanderthal crania, he observed, did not ‘take us appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form, by the modification of which [man] has, probably, become what he is’. In the course of his discussion of the fossils, Huxley pointed out certain similarities between Neanderthal and Australian Aboriginal skulls. His remarks were cautious, by no means indicating the identity of the two; still less that the Aboriginal could be regarded as a missing link. Yet the clear implication of his comparison was that the Aboriginals did embody peculiarly primitive anatomical features.13

In an aptly titled paper, ‘The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man deduced from the Theory of "Natural Selection" ‘, Alfred Russell Wallace addressed the problem of human raciation from an evolutionary perspective. Utilising ‘Mr Darwin’s celebrated theory of "Natural Selection"‘, he endeavoured to demonstrate how ‘the two opposing views’ of monogenism and polygenism could be ‘combined so as to eliminate the error and retain the truth in each’. Wallace argued that since some early form of proto-man had developed the distinctively human attribute of intellect, natural selection had ceased to operate on his physical characteristics, working only on his ‘social, moral and intellectual faculties’. This led on the one hand to the remarkable adaptability of the human species, and on the other to the permanent establishment of distinct physical varieties. According to Wallace’s argument, physical differences of race were, in themselves, relatively superficial and inconsequential. Yet they were the external markers of deeper and more significant differences of intellectual, moral and social qualities.

By transposing the doctrine of survival of the fittest from the corporeal to the intellectual realm, Wallace was able to explain the persistence of physical variations within the human species. At the same time he was led to suppose that in the struggle for survival, some races had acquired a higher morality, a greater intellect and a superior sociability. These non-material attributes were permanently fixed to the physical embodiments of the race, the connection being provided by the brain, ‘the organ of mind’. By grounding mentality and morality on the same universal natural law as that which accounted for racial differentiation, Wallace rendered the difference between savage and civilised as one not merely of attainment but also of capacity. Those who had not progressed, could not progress. Thus they must succumb in the human struggle for survival.14

Darwin was favourably impressed by Wallace’s paper.15 And although its initial audience, the members of the Anthropological Society, were not so commendatory, Wallace had conceded a number of significant polygenist principles. In particular, his hypothesis maintained the notion of fixity of racial type; ever since a long-ago point of human raciation the physical types had persisted, largely unmodified over time. His argument also continued the tradition of linking physical attributes with mental, moral and cultural characteristics; all clustered together as innate qualities of a race. Wallace’s paper was a fine demonstration of the power of the theory of evolution, explaining not only biological diversification but also progress in the realm of intellect and morality. Moreover, as George Stocking has remarked, Wallace ‘shifted the focus of interest in the debate over anthropogenesis from the physical to the mental and social evolution of man’.16 Stocking added that other influences, most notably a resurgence of Christian degenerationist explanations of savagery, also contributed to this shift. According to the degenerationists, natural selection could not account for the emergence of the distinctively human attributes of language, religion, law and morality, and therefore as an explanation of the origins of man the theory was invalid. Among those who attempted to rebut these objections, John Lubbock was particularly vociferous.

The title of Lubbock’s first major publication, Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages, is revealing of his own and his contemporaries’ scientific assumptions. So too is the structure of the book. Lubbock began with the Bronze Age, then went backward in time through the Swiss lake-dwellers and Danish mound-builders to the ‘cave men’. Following this was a chapter entitled ‘On the Antiquity of Man’, in which he admitted that the available archaeological and geological evidence did not go anywhere near far enough back in time to provide confirmation of evolutionary theory. To fill this enormous temporal gap, Lubbock devoted the following three chapters, totalling 120 pages, to the ‘Modern Savages’. Their way of life, he declared, would ‘throw light on the ancient remains found in Europe, and on the condition of the early races which inhabited our continent’. What these surviving primitive people displayed was a starkly ignoble savagery, in which brutal practices, depraved rituals and irrational fears jostled together on the pages of Lubbock’s book; it was a state in which man was driven by the uncertainties of his livelihood ‘to the dreadful alternatives of cannibalism or death’.17 Yet this was no exercise in gratuitous denigration. The evolutionary argument demanded that some people be demoted to a level that made plausible the hypothesis of the animal origins of humanity.

Lubbock’s second major publication, The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man, was a more ambitious attempt to reconstruct the social progress of early man. It consisted almost entirely of descriptions of ‘the social and mental condition of savages, their art, their systems of marriage and relationship, their religions, language, moral character, and laws’. But Lubbock had no difficulty in reasoning from these to the ways of primeval humanity, for ‘the condition and habits of existing savages resemble in man...

Table of contents

• IMAGINED DESTINIES
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Conversions
• PROLOGUE The Eclipse of Antipodean Enlightenment
• 1 The Creation and Annihilation of Primitive Man
• 2 Protection and Preservation
• 3 Anthropology Renovated, Optimism Revived and Problems Renewed
• 4 Civilisation by Blood
• 5 Progress for All
• 6 New Solutions, Old Assumptions
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index