Read on Twitter
New today is an awesome book, “A Most Interesting Problem: What Darwin’s Descent of Man Got Right and Wrong about Human Evolution,” edited by @desilva_jerry and pub’d by @PrincetonUPress. In it I write about civilization & white nationalism. (Thread! 1/x) https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691191140/a-most-interesting-problem
Descent is the lesser-known Darwin work, coming out in 1871, and following Origin of Species (1859). Darwin needed to wait for the dust to settle on his evolutionary ideas before he could tackle humans specifically. (2/x)
When Darwin published, anthropology had only just sprung into existence. This means Darwin’s and other scientists’ understanding of the diversity of humans through time – particularly their intelligence, morality, and invention of civilization – was also at its beginning. (3/x)
Every essay in this new @princetonUpress volume tackles the question of "what has changed in 150 years?", chapter by chapter, with a different author for each. (4/x)
My contribution to this is an update of Ch 5 of Descent - which dealt with the evolution of intellect and morality in “primeval and civilised times” - I've called my essay: “A century of civilization, intelligence, and white nationalism.” (5/x)
As he did with the theory of physical evolution by natural selection, Darwin begins his discussion of the cultural evolution of human civilization by reading the work of Alfred Russel Wallace. (6/x)
Wallace’s 1864 essay in Anthropological Review suggests that humans evolved intellectual and moral faculties that could be subject to selection, and that this selection created the most ideal humans in temperate climates. (7/x)
Civilizations could rise and fall based on effects of “unequal mental and physical struggle” according to Wallace, and therefore those qualities in Europeans are superior. (8/x)
Wallace’s ideas weren’t exactly well received by the Anthropological Society of London, but he gave his paper to Darwin, who prominently cites it in Descent. (9/x)
Darwin starts his Chapter 5 by suggesting that natural selection providing an increase in human intelligence is the key to raising oneself out of “brutishness.” (10/x)
[Here's a link to a free copy of Descent if you want to follow along...] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2300/2300-h/2300-h.htm#link2HCH0005
[Here's a link to a free copy of Descent if you want to follow along...] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2300/2300-h/2300-h.htm#link2HCH0005
Darwin was thinking about a biological foundation for human culture but also saw that culture was constrained and brought about by both the natural and built environments. (11/x)
Culture, the arts, civilization – these are one and the same to Darwin – and he thinks that only cultures that live in certain (temperate) climates can achieve “civilization”. (12/x)
But if cultural advancement leads to civilization, as Darwin suggests, that would present a demographic problem: contemporary “civilized” societies protect even their “weakest” members. (13/x)
Vaccinations, mental hospitals, alms for the poor are all cultural developments in Darwin’s time that allow “the weak members of civilized societies [to] propagate their kind.” (14/x)
But Darwin wasn’t an anti-vaxxer OR a eugenicist (unlike his famous cousin Francis Galton)! Rather, Darwin attributes our penchant for taking care of the “weak” to inherent sympathy for our fellow humans. (15/x)
And for cultural checks on the decline of cultures, Darwin pointed to practices such as executions and imprisonment of “unsavory characters”. (16/x)
But Darwin warned that, if there were no cultural checks, “the nation will retrograde, as has occurred too often in the history of the world. We must remember that progress is no invariable rule.” (17/x)
Darwin admits he doesn’t really understand why one culture rises and falls, though, and writes that: "The subjects to be discussed in this chapter are of the highest interest, but are treated by me in a most imperfect and fragmentary manner." (18/x)
So Darwin suggests that the ancient Greeks “retrograded from a want of coherence between the many small states, from the small size of their whole country, from the practice of slavery, or from extreme sensuality.” (19/x)
Western Europe, on the other hand, learned from the ancient Greeks and “now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors and stand at the summit of civilization” per Darwin. (20/x)
For Darwin, the evolution of human culture is both part and parcel of human progress and, in his view, a transition from savagery to barbarism to civilization. (Cue Lewis Henry Morgan...) (21/x)
“Man has risen,” Darwin ends Chapter 5 of Descent, “though by slow and interrupted steps, from a lowly condition to the highest standard as yet attained by him in knowledge, morals, and religion.” (22/x)
That was 1871. What do we know NOW – 150 years later – that Darwin didn’t?
Well… here’s where we get into the coopting of 'intelligence' and 'civilization' into recent white nationalist propaganda… (23/x)
Well… here’s where we get into the coopting of 'intelligence' and 'civilization' into recent white nationalist propaganda… (23/x)
Most of Chapter 5 of Descent will give any social scientist pause. The patriarchal language, the conflation of religion with morality, the uncritical naturalizing of the Western European and colonialist way of life... it's easy to poke holes in Darwin’s explanations. (24/x)
But let’s start with brain size, complexity and intelligence. Since humans have a larger brain size compared to our primate cousins, Darwin unfortunately extends this observation to jibe with folks like Broca and Blumenbach: (25/x)
Darwin: “There exists in man some close relation between the size of the brain & the development of the intellectual faculties, supported by the comparison of the skulls of savage & civilised races, of ancient & modern people, & by analogy of the whole vertebrate series.” (26/x)
Broca and Blumenbach were key figures in skull measuring, which ultimately formed the basis for scientific racism in early biological anthropology, when physical traits were used to justify cultural and structural violence, including slavery, patriarchy, and colonialism. (27/x)
3 big issues w/ Darwin’s use of intelligence to explain culture & civilization = assumptions that: 1) brain size is proxy for intelligence, 2) intelligence can be quantified, 3) quantifications of intelligence reflect heritable, immutable traits. (28/x)
Darwin has clear assumptions about intelligence among different groups and conflates intelligence with socioeconomic superiority, health, and well-being in the form of longevity, civilization, and progress. (29/x)
Some 21st century scientists continue to espouse these ideas; like Nobel Laureate James Watson: "all our social policies are based on the fact that their [Africans’] intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really." (30/x) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/science/watson-dna-genetics-race.html
The data these “racial” ideas of intelligence have been based on over the last 150 years, though, are meaningless and cannot be interpreted without social and economic context. (31/x)
It’s the context—socioeconomic hardships, discriminatory health-care system, lack of access to education, criminal justice system—that social scientists have shown to be impossible to separate from any measure of human intelligence. (32/x)
Inequality is a cultural construct, not a natural, biologically deterministic pattern. (33/x)
The idea of major differences in intelligence by race and/or social class, although thoroughly debunked, has unfortunately reemerged in the United States, England, and elsewhere in the past few years owing to white nationalist movements. (34/x)
The important warnings Stephen J Gould gave us in 1996 about “political retrenchment and destruction of social generosity” are unfortunately once again relevant amid the resurgent popularity of biological determinism and white nationalism. (35/x)
Gould: biological determinism is correlated with "episodes of political retrenchment, particularly w/ reduced government spending on social programs, or at times of fear among ruling elites, when disadvantaged groups sow serious social unrest or threaten to usurp power." (36/x)
Just as scientific racism surrounding intelligence belies its proponents’ assumptions and prejudices about other groups, the contemporary discussion of 'civilization' and 'progress' has similar themes. (37/x)
Take U.S. congressman Steve King, a man whose fifteen-year history of racist polemics, specifically surrounding civilization and birth rates, has warranted its own time line at the New York Times. (38/x) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/15/us/politics/steve-king-offensive-quotes.html
In early 2019, King told a reporter, “white nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?”
“Civilization” is indeed not a universally offensive term; but it has always been a loaded and exclusionary one. (39/x)
“Civilization” is indeed not a universally offensive term; but it has always been a loaded and exclusionary one. (39/x)
That language came about during the Enlightenment, in the eighteenth century, when “civilization” as a term was borrowed from the French as a sort of politically correct replacement for the English word “civility,” the opposite of “savagery.” (40/x)
By the 19th century, “civilization” meant the idea of human cultural development or linear progress and was something to attain but also something to force on peoples who were not considered to be civilized, to teach them to participate in the Western, colonialist economy. (41/x)
We get definitions like this one from American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1862: (42/x)
“A certain degree of progress from the rudest state in which man is found,—a dweller in caves, or on trees, like an ape, a cannibal, an eater of pounded snails, worms, and offal,—a certain degree of progress from this extreme is called Civilization.” - Emerson (43/x)
By the early 20th century, social thinkers had jettisoned the idea of progress, but still wanted to identify reasons for culture change. For example, in 1913, the notable sociologists Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss wrote “Note on the Notion of Civilization.” (44/x)
Admitting that nations are complex and difficult to study, as shown by archaeologists who attempted to make sense of past material culture, Durkheim and Mauss write that civilizations are “systems of facts that have their own unity and form of existence.” (45/x)
The notion of civilization became decoupled from the idea of progress by early 20th-century sociologists, and both terms became ideas worthy of academic research. (46/x)
It wasn’t just sociologists. Evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, writing in 1955, notes that extending the idea of evolution to culture is problematic because of... (47/x)
... "the erroneous idea that biological evolution could be represented by a single straight line of inevitable progress, and the Comtian conversion of this into an evolutionary strait-jacket for culture." (48/x)
By the mid-twentieth century, the idea of cultural evolution had become popular again, and the natural environment was cited as a limiting factor in the formation of human societies. (49/x)
Huxley, for example, writes that “the environment does not determine the culture, but does condition and may limit it—for instance, through the extremes of climate, or the prevalence of debilitating disease.” (50/x)
This is not far removed from Darwin’s ideas in Descent, in which he writes, “The Esquimaux, pressed by hard necessity, have succeeded in many ingenious inventions, but their climate has been too severe for continued progress.” (51/x)
This environmentally deterministic perspective on the rise and fall of civilizations has been eagerly embraced well into the 21st century by such writers as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari. But it's problematic! (52/x)
Researchers whose study focuses on cultural change over time—archaeologists—have a different understanding, and their work on the rise and fall of complex societies complicates the picture considerably. (53/x)
Research over the last several decades has shown that identifying one “prime mover” is impossible; rather, past activity is diverse, and circumstances are unique to a specific culture or society. (54/x)
Archaeologists caution that Diamond, Harari, and others over-essentialize the processes that lead to the rise and fall of past and present societies in order to write a tidy—but inaccurate—story of the past. (55/x)
Archaeologists today discuss the rise/fall of human societies by defining terms. “Complex societies” are formed by several different aspects of culture—cities, agriculture, inequality, surplus, specialization, politics, and economics—that are integrated and work together. (56/x)
I'm particularly partial to the definition Robert Chapman gives in his Archaeologies of Complexity:
"If we turn to the long-term record of archaeology, there is, I think, no doubt that the human societies which inhabit this planet have become more complex ... (57/x)
"If we turn to the long-term record of archaeology, there is, I think, no doubt that the human societies which inhabit this planet have become more complex ... (57/x)
... (in the sense of interconnectedness) and more unequal, both within individual societies and at the level of global relations. This is a gross trend, superimposed on shorter-term records of evolution and devolution, of “rise” and “fall” of more complex societies ... (58/x)
... such as the earliest states, of change at different rates and scales, or to put it more grandly, of history. There have been many different forms of society, as there are today, and complexity should not be conceived as the ultimate goal of social evolution.” (59/x)
If archaeologists’ assumptions about the “rise of civilization” have yet to be fully examined, it is fair to say that those ideas regarding “collapse” have not either. (60/x)
Collapse or fall of a complex society is well known to archaeologists who have studied the Roman, Ottoman, Inca, and Mali Empires, the Maya civilization, the Han dynasty, and many others. (61/x)
Collapse may come when there are drastic changes to parts of the cultural system that cannot be easily overcome. (62/x)
For example, encroaching war can obviously cause collapse, but population pressure, a pandemic disease, or climate change that affects the society’s food supply can as well. (63/x)
Perhaps a society faced with these pressures is able to create new institutions to deal with them—if it is unable to, however, the entire system can be brought down. (64/x)
Given the Western cultural assumption that there is constant forward progress, and given the lack of collective memory of societal transformation, many people today tend to believe that their society is the norm and that it is not going anywhere. (65/x)
This view correlates with “civilization” and “progress”—and these ideas are being used by North American and European politicians to pit “us” (white upholders of the Western, Judeo-Christian tradition) against “them” (nonwhites, immigrants, non-Christians, and others). (66/x)
Former congressman Steve King may be a notorious and unrepentant racist, but his spoken and unspoken views on “civilization” and “progress” are widely held by 21st century white Americans, just as these same ideas were widely held by Europeans in Darwin’s time. (67/x)
