Nehru's Word: How White supremacists appropriated Darwin’s theory

The NCERT textbook controversy refuses to die down, with two of the country’s best-known political scientists, Suhas Palshikar and Yogendra Yadav, having written to the NCERT to remove their names as editors from books ‘mauled beyond recognition’. The second part of Jawaharlal Nehru’s 1933 essay on Darwin and the triumph of science, speaking of how Darwin was appropriated by white supremacists, seems apt here now.

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In the middle of the [19th] century… the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin…produced a vast impression and helped in changing the social outlook more than any other scientific work. Darwin showed, by a mass of actual examples, that species did change from one to another, and that this was the normal method of development…

A few years later Darwin published another book, The Descent of Man, in which he applied his theory to man. This idea of evolution and of natural selection is accepted by most people now, though not exactly in the way Darwin and his followers put it forward….

All this seems obvious enough to us now. But it was not so obvious 70 years ago. Most people in Europe still believed at the time in the Biblical account of the creation of the world just 4004 years before Christ, and of each plant and animal being created separately, and finally man.

They believed in the Flood and in Noah’s Ark with its pairs of animals, so that no species might become extinct. All this did not fit in with the Darwinian theory.

Darwin and the geologists talked of millions of years as the age of the earth, and not a paltry 6,000 years. So, there was a tremendous tussle in the minds of men and women, and many good people did not know what to do. Their old faith told them to believe in one thing, and their reason said another.

So, there was a great argument and great conflict in England and elsewhere in Europe between science and religion. There could be no doubt of the result. The new world of industry and mechanical transport depended on science, and science thus could not be discarded.

Science won all along the line, and ‘natural selection’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ became part of the ordinary jargon of the people, who used the phrases without fully understanding what they meant.

Darwin had suggested in his Descent of Man that there might have been a common ancestor of man and certain apes. This could not be proved by examples showing various stages in the process of development. From this there grew the popular joke about the ‘missing link’.

And, curiously enough, the ruling classes twisted Darwin’s theory to suit their own convenience, and were firmly convinced that it supplied yet another proof of their superiority. They were the fittest to survive in the battle of life, and so by ‘natural selection’ they had come out on top and were the ruling class.

This became the justification for one class dominating over another, or one race ruling over another. It became the final argument of imperialism and the supremacy of the white race. And many people in the West thought that the more domineering, ruthless and strong they were, the higher up in the scale of human values they were likely to be.

It is not a pleasant philosophy, but it explains to some extent the conduct of Western imperialist powers in Asia and Africa.

Darwin’s theories have been criticised subsequently by other scientists, but his general ideas still hold. One of the results of a general acceptance of his theories was to make people believe in the idea of progress, which meant that man and society, and the world as a whole, were marching towards perfection and becoming better and better.

This idea of progress was not the result of Darwin’s theory alone. The whole trend of scientific discovery and the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution and afterwards had prepared people’s minds for it. Darwin’s theory confirmed it, and people began to imagine themselves as marching proudly from victory to victory to the goal of human perfection, whatever that might be.

It is interesting to note that this idea of progress was quite a new one. There seems to have been no such idea in the past in Europe or Asia, or in any of the old civilisations. In Europe, right up to the Industrial Revolution, people looked upon the past as the ideal period. The old Greek and Roman classical period was supposed to be finer and more advanced and cultured than subsequent periods. There was progressive deterioration or worsening of the race, so people thought, or at any rate there was no marked change.

In India there is much the same idea of deterioration, of a golden age that is past. Indian mythology measures time in enormous periods, like the geological periods, but always it begins with the great age, Satya Yuga, and comes down to the present age of evil, the Kal Yuga.

So, we see that the idea of human progress is quite a modern notion. Our knowledge of past history, such as it is, makes us believe in this idea. But then, our knowledge is still very limited, and it may be that with fuller knowledge our outlook might change. Even today there is not quite the same enthusiasm about ‘progress’ as there was in the second half of the 19th century. If progress leads us to destroy each other on a vast scale, as was done in the World War, there is something wrong with such progress.

Another thing worth remembering is that Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ does not necessarily mean the survival of the best. All these are speculations for the learned. What we have to note is that the old and widespread idea of a static or unchanging, or even deteriorating, society was pushed aside by modern science in the 19th century, and in its place came the idea of a dynamic and changing society. Also there came the idea of progress. And indeed, society did change out of all recognition during this period.

As I have been telling you of Darwin’s theory of the origin of species, it might interest you to know what a Chinese philosopher wrote on the subject 2,500 years ago.

Tson Tse was his name, and he wrote in the 6th century before Christ, about the time of the Buddha: ‘All organisations are originated from a single species. This single species had undergone many gradual and continuous changes, and then gave rise to all organisms of different forms. Such organisms were not differentiated immediately, but, on the contrary, they acquired their differences through gradual change, generation after generation.’

This is near enough to Darwin’s theory, and it is amazing that the old Chinese biologist should have arrived at a conclusion which it took the world two and a half millennia to rediscover.

(Selected and edited by Mridula Mukherjee, former professor of history at JNU and former director of Nehru Memorial Museum & Library)