You are on page 1of 23

Godless Savages and Superstitious Dogs: Charles Darwin, Imperial Ethnography, and the Problem of Human Uniqueness

Matthew Day

What, if anything, is a uniquely human trait? Although the search for the sine qua non of human identity predates nineteenth-century controversies over mans place in nature, this question acquired new signicance as evolutionary theories of biological descent promised to close the ontological gap between human and non-human animals. When the issue is raised within an evolutionary framework, however, the traditional bid to construct a hedge around human exceptionalism inevitably confronts one of two problems. The rst is that just about every allegedly distinctive characteristicincluding classic human attributes like opposable thumbs, tool making, cooperative hunting, altruism, and languagehas been observed, to one degree or another, in our non-human kin. Slightly rephrased, the trouble with convincing portraits of human uniqueness is that on any given point the distance between us and them is astonishingly small. The second problem is that if one shrinks the range of potentially unique human traits to those which seem safely exceptionalsuch as marriage dowries, novels, and the income taxyou do so at the risk of pushing any number of human communities out of the family tree. That is, one consequence of playing it safe with human distinctiveness is that you end up turning some of us into them. If we take the lessons of modern evolutionary theory seriously, it seems as though any claim regarding human uniqueness must either ignore the signicance of inter-species continuity or discount the lesCopyright by Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 69, Number 1 (January 2008)

49

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS JANUARY 2008

sons of intra-species variation. In the following essay I want to explore how Charles Darwin negotiated the tensions between continuity and variation as he turned his evolutionary gaze towards something that is, by all accounts, a uniquely human affairreligion. As early as the mid-seventeenth century, religion had been identied as a, if not the, uniquely human trait. Seeing there are no signes, nor fruit of Religion, but in Man onely, Thomas Hobbes stated in Leviathan (1651), there is no cause to doubt, but that the seed of Religion, is also onely in Man.1 The virtuoso John Evelyn made the point even more rmly in his History of Religion (ca. 1657): Religion, as being the highest reason, is that alone which makes mankind differ from brute animals; because it renders him like his great Creator, rectifying the depravity of his nature, which, if uncultivated by religion, becomes erce and sensual.2 The attempt to draw the line of human demarcation around religion was appealing for a very long time, as witnessed by Hensleigh Wedgwoods willingness to invoke this standard to Darwin himself in the early nineteenth century.3 Yet, I believe this assertion was doubly untenable for Darwin. On the one hand, the claim was theoretically unacceptable because it established an absolute gap between two points in evolutionary history that could not, in principle, be bridged by gradual descent with modication. On the other hand, by furnishing a rationale for treating some people as less than fully human, the assertion was morally objectionable because it provided implicit support to both the institution of slavery and polygenetic accounts of human origins. My proposal is that Darwin was able simultaneously to naturalize human religiosity, preserve his moral intuitions, and solve the puzzle of seemingly non-religious human communities by constructing a portrait of protoreligious animals. In Section One, I will set the historical context for Darwins work on religion. Here the goal is to examine how European imperial ethnography contested the post-Reformation claim that all human beings share a universal natural religion by forging the representation of a godless savage. In Sections Two and Three, I will provide a comprehensive overview of Darwins anthropological reections about religion beginning with his formative experiences among the indigenous tribes of Tierra del Fuego and
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Penguin Classics, 1985), 168. John Evelyn, The History of Religion: A Rational Account of the True Religion (London: Henry Colburn, 1850), 260. 3 Charles Darwin, Notebook C, in Charles Darwins Notebooks, 18361844, transcribed and ed. Paul H. Barrett, Peter J. Gautrey, Sandra Herbert, David Kohn, and Sydney Smith (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), 316 (C 244).
1 2

50

Day Darwin, Ethnography, and Human Uniqueness

nishing with the 1872 publication of the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Here my aim is two-fold. First, I want to situate Darwins work on religion within what I will be calling the imperial discourse of the godless savage. Second, I want to explore how Darwin resolved the riddle of non-religious humans by locating rudimentary elements of the religious life in non-human animals. Finally, in the conclusion, I will suggest that by understanding Darwins evolutionary work on religion we arrive at a better understanding of how his naturalist theorizing was informed by his normative commitments.

I. THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY: NATURAL, UNIVERSAL, AND ABSENT The emerging historical consensus is that the distinctly modern notion of religion as a set of practices and beliefs invested with propositional content about the divine is rooted in the early modern European experience of religious difference. As Talal Asad observes, it was on the heels of the fragmentation of the unity and authority of the Roman Church and the consequent wars of religion, which tore European principalities apart, that the earliest systematic attempts at producing a universal denition of religion were made.4 The seventeenth-century invention of religion established the intellectual horizons necessary for anthropological and philosophical inquiries into the nature, origin and purpose of the human predilection for trafcking with the supernatural. However, rather than an expression of esoteric scholasticism, these early modern discussions about religion were responding to the socio-political conditions that had produced the category in the rst place. Triggered by the bloody internecine struggles that followed the Reformation, as well as the discoveries associated with the colonial conquest of Africa, Asia and the Americas, the seemingly arcane interest in understanding why humans engage in religious behavior was
4 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 40. The classic historical review of the religion idea is Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991). For more recent treatments see Peter Harrison, Religion and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Richard King, Orientalism and Religion (London: Routledge, 1999); Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Jonathan Z. Smith, Religion, Religions, Religious, in Relating Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004), 17996; and Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005).

51

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS JANUARY 2008

premised on a tender hope: if the source of human religiosity could be identied, perhaps the political signicance of religious differences could be peacefully and permanently neutralized. Thus, in addition to the theological quest for the uniquely true religion, Western intellectuals also began looking for a core set of religious beliefs, emotions, codes and practices that all people shareda universal natural religion of humanity.5 The vision of a universally shared religion was an extraordinary conceptual innovation. In one stroke it could generate a politically normative portrait of theological homogeneity out of the messy reality of empirical religious diversity. As one might expect, the specic cognitive and behavioral content of humanitys natural religion was watered down as the theological differences within the single religion of European Christianity were exchanged for differences between religions. This process of theological thinning is vividly on display in Edward Herbert, Lord of Cherburys De Religion Gentilium (1633). Drawing on a limited range of cultural data, Herbert managed to reduce the evident diversity of the worlds religions down to ve rather pallid common notions. According to Lord Herbert, all religions have always and will always afrm that: (1) there is a supreme God; (2) this God ought to be worshipped; (3) together, virtue and piety constitute the essence of proper worship; (4) moral vice ought to be repented; and (5) divine rewards and punishments are doled out by God in this life and the next. To the casual observer, this sort of anthropological generalization fails to reveal anything particularly novel about religious thoughtand in some sense that was the point of the exercise. Herberts intellectual strategy was to defuse both the theological and socio-political implications of religious plurality by draining such central concepts as true piety or moral vice of any historically or regionally specic content. The durability of the universal religion trope can be measured by the fact that Immanuel Kant condently insisted at the end of the eighteenth century: There may certainly be different historical confessions . . . and there may be just as many different religious books (the Zend-Avesta, the Vedas, the Koran, etc.) . . . [but] there can only be one religion which is valid for all men and at all times. Thus the different confessions can scarcely be more than the vehicles of religion.6 From this vantage point, the truly religious consciousness was the view from nowhere in particular.
5 Wilfred Cantwell Smith argues that the phrase natural religion rst appears in 1666 or 1667. See ibid., The Meaning and End of Religion, 231 (fn. 111). 6 Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 125.

52

Day Darwin, Ethnography, and Human Uniqueness

Yet, the anthropological universality of this natural religion was never secured. Throughout the sixteenth century, Christian missionaries and imperial explorers had sent home word thatto their surprise and horror the natives lacked any form of piety. Thus, the French explorer Jean de Lery (15341613) was pained to learn of the Brazilian Tupinambas consti tutional godlessness: Not only are they utterly ignorant of the sole and true God; what is more, in contrast to the custom of all the ancient pagans, who had many gods . . . they neither confess nor worship any gods, either of heaven or earth.7 After the seventeenth century, the problem was no longer the natives lack of piety but instead the savages absence of religion. As William Smith incredulously observed in his Voyage to Guinea (1744), despite the presence of both Christians and Muslims the vast majority of the native population consisted of Pagans, who trouble themfelves about no Religion at all.8 By the late 1800s, the European discourse on the godless savage had become a full-edged ethnographic tradition.9 One sign of this transformation is that when John Lubbock sat down to compose The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man (1870), there were enough eyewitness reports on the absence of religion amongst the lowest savages that he dedicated an entire chapter to simply rehearsing the considerable evidence.10 Even if the existence of native tribes without religion was shocking, for Lubbocks British audience it was no longer very surprising. Contemporary post-colonial writers and critics now contend that the discovery of the godless savage has the unmistakable whiff of hegemonic ambition. That is to say, many scholars insist that the anthropological discourse about godless savages participated in the European management and domination of non-European cultures. Christopher Miller nicely captures the avor of this hermeneutical suspicion when he claims that for Europeans writing about the religious landscape of Black Africa, the real contours of African religion have little importance to the functioning of this discourse, which proceeds through the centuries to project onto Africa a mon7 Jean de Lery, History of A Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America, trans. Janet Whatley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 134. 8 William Smith, A New Voyage to Guinea (London: Frank Cass & Co., [1744] 1967), 26. 9 See George Stocking, Jr., Victorian Cultural Ideology and the Image of Savagery (17801870), in Victorian Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 187237. 10 John Lubbock, On The Absence of Religion Amongst the Lowest Savages, in The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man (London: Longmans, Green and Co., [1870] 1912), 183.

53

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS JANUARY 2008

strous impossibility whose only existence is on paper. What is essential here is less African religion than European desire.11 When we consider the colonial discovery of religions absence in this light, the ethnographic puzzle looks less like a genuine anthropological discovery and more like a shrewdly Machiavellian line of political attack. By denying that a given indigenous population had a religion, the European agents of colonial expansion could simultaneously deny their full humanity as well: if religion was the sine qua non of human identity then any creature that lacked religion was, by denition, not human. David Chidester argues that the immediate consequence of this anthropological denial was that if godless savages were somehow less human than the folks back home, the indigenous people who lacked religion also lacked any recognizable human right or entitlement to the land in which they lived.12 Thus, the rst step in establishing imperial control over a new territory was often rendering the local gods and spirits invisible. Once that business was nished, the justication for conquest was never very far behind. There is no question that the post-colonial lens helpfully draws our attention to the ways in which missionaries, settlers and explorers were agents of imperial power. It now seems beyond dispute that these dislocated Europeans were often articulating an imaginative geography of the world premised on fear and longing.13 Moreover, the recognition that European representations of non-European cultures were based on the brute strength of political, economic and military hegemony should make us all wary of the cognitive contents of their ethnographic descriptions. If we are not careful, however, this perspective can also obscure the intellectual and moral ambiguity that characterizes the contingent historical relationships engendered by the colonial enterprise. As a case in point, David Livingstone has argued that Edward Saids inuential portrait of the nineteenth-century polymath William Robertson Smithwhom Said characterizes as the mouthpiece for a framework designed to preserve the Orient and Islam under the control of the White Manmisleads by its rigid one-dimensionality.14 The essential problem with this brand of historical analysis, Livingstone writes, is that it fails to notice how the colonizers encounters with the colonized could transform travelers perceptions of their own cultural
Christopher L. Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1985), 47. 12 David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 14. 13 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 71. 14 Said, Orientalism, 238.
11

54

Day Darwin, Ethnography, and Human Uniqueness

identity at the most profound level.15 Once we acknowledge the transformational potential of colonial experience, we are forced to reconsider whether the meaning of religions absence was as monolithic as Miller and Chidester suggest. That is, rather than merely providing an imperial rationale for political domination, it seems likely that the puzzling ethnographic discovery also could invite theorists to revisit the anthropological requirements of being human.

II. A MATTER OF DEGREES: DARWIN ON THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION, 1832 40 When it came to autobiographical reection, Charles Darwins wellcultivated modesty sometimes approached willful misrepresentation. This penchant for deliberate and sometimes dissembling cultural self-fashioning could be particularly conspicuous when religion was the subject of conversation.16 In his own estimation there was, as he put it, a fearfully difcult moral problem about the speaking out on religion.17 As a consequence, the challenge of decoding Darwins sometimes confusing and frequently evasive reections on the theological implications of his theory of evolutionary change has been a scholarly preoccupation for more than a century.18 In fact, David Kohn has concluded thatif we take seriously Darwins vigilant habits of self-editing and the often contradictory philosophical impulses that are discernable in his writingit might be the case that we cannot trust anything he wrote on metaphysical subjects for publication.19 On this account, we must simply grit our teeth and learn to embrace the ambiguity. Given that Darwin believed it was a moral, rather than a merely diploDavid Livingstone, Oriental Travel, Arabian Kinship, and Ritual Sacrice: William Robertson Smith and the Fundamental Institutions, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22 (2004): 639. 16 On literary self-fashioning see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 17 As quoted in John Hedley Brooke, The Relations Between Darwins Science and His Religion, in Darwinism and Divinity: Essays on Evolution and Religious Belief, ed. John Durant (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 40. 18 See, e.g., James Moore, Darwin of Down: The Evolutionist as Squarson-Naturalist, in The Darwinian Heritage, ed. David Kohn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 43581. 19 David Kohn, Darwins Ambiguity: The Secularization of Biological Meaning, British Journal for the History of Science 22 (1989): 227.
15

55

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS JANUARY 2008

matic, challenge to conceal his private metaphysical musings, one could argue that Kohns lesson of hermeneutical suspicion must be observed whenever Darwin talks about religion. If this is so, the best we can do is carefully comb through the bulk of Darwins writings and call attention to the places where he was at odds with himself. However, if we are prepared to distinguish between Darwins theological reections on religion with his naturalist, anthropological reections about religion, I think something a bit more denitive can be said. That is, if we bracket the questions about Darwins religious biography and view him instead as a nineteenth-century intellectual wholike Max Muller, Edward Burnett Tylor, or Emile Durk heimwas interested in a broadly naturalistic account of religions origins, I believe we discover a surprisingly stable public and private theoretical stance. Like Jean de Lery and William Smith before him, this story begins with Darwins colonial discovery of religions absence among the savages. Although we cannot tie the long-term signicance of the Beagle years to any single experience, few were as memorable as his rst contact with the indigenous tribes of Tierra del Fuego. When he rst saw them, he confessed in a letter to John Henslow, they seemed the troubled spirits of another world.20 Thus, the Fuegians represented more than the unknownthey were, in fact, aliens. It was without exception, he wrote in his diary on December 18, 1832, the most / curious & interesting spectacle I ever beheld. I would not have believed how entire the difference between savage & civilized man is. It is greater than between a wild & domesticated animal, in as much as in man there is a greater power of improvement.21 Darwin seems to have been fond of this analogy for expressing the perceived cultural distance between himself and the Fuegians, because several months later he repeated it in a letter to his sister Caroline: an untamed savage is I really think one of the most extraordinary spectacles in the world.the difference between a domesticated & wild animal is far more strikingly marked in man.in the naked barbarian, with his body coated with paint, whose very gestures, whether they may be peacible [sic] or hostile are unintelligible, with difculty we see a fellow-creature.22 For a man who atly rejected polygenic accounts of human origins on both humanitarian and Biblical grounds, however, this mutual unintelligibility was a
Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Volume One (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 307. 21 Charles Darwin, Diary of the Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle, in The Works of Charles Darwin, Volume One, ed. Paul Barrett and R.B. Freeman (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 109. 22 Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Volume One, 3023.
20

56

Day Darwin, Ethnography, and Human Uniqueness

problem. How was it possible that our common humanity could rise so high, or sink so low? From Darwins perspective, the signs of an unintelligible cultural gap were everywherebody paint; naked men and women; head feathers; no apparent form of government; men with long hair; and even reports of cannibalism. The native Fuegians seemed to lack everything that made a community a recognizably human one. With that said, it was still a bit unnerving for Darwin to discover that they apparently had no identiable religious life. As he recounted in the Voyage of the Beagle: Captain Fitz Roy could never ascertain that the Fuegians have any distinct belief in a future life. They sometimes bury their dead in caves, and sometimes in the mountain forests; we do not know what ceremonies they perform. . . . We have no reason to believe that they perform any sort of religious worship; though perhaps the muttering of the old man before his putrid blubber to his famished party may be of this nature. . . . The nearest approach to a religious feeling which I heard of, was shown by York Minster, who, when Mr. Bryce shot some very young ducklings as specimens, declared in the most solemn manner, Oh, Mr. Bynoe, much rain, snow, blow much. This was evidently a retributive punishment for wasting human food.23 When we situate this passage within the European discourse of the godless savage, Darwins impressions clearly conform to the generic conventions and rhetorical strategies of the imperial travel narrative.24 Despite the uproar that his theoretical imagination would eventually generate, Darwin turns out to be a rather unexceptional gure in this matter. Perhaps this should be less surprising than it seems at rst blush. After all, his sensibilities had been well-prepared for this encounter by his youthful devotion to one of the highpoints of the genre: Alexander von Humboldts Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctal Regions of the New Continent, 17991804 (1814).25 Indeed, the routine nature of Darwins observations,
Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (New York: F. Collier & Son, 1909), 230. See, e.g., Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 25 For Humboldts impact on Darwin see Phillip R. Sloan, The Making of a Philosophical Naturalist, in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, ed. Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Raddick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1739; and ibid, The Sense of Sublimity: Darwin on Nature and Divinity, in Science in Theistic Contexts, ed. John Hedley Brooke, Margaret J. Osler and Jitse M. van der Meer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 25169.
23 24

57

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS JANUARY 2008

and their implicit foundation in military might, is conrmed when he casually notes: An European labours under great disadvantages when treating with savages like these, who have not the least idea of the power of rearms. . . . Nor is it easy to teach them our superiority except by striking a fatal blow.26 In the midst of this vast disparity of powera disparity that the imperial explorer improbably experiences as a disadvantagesome features of the local cultural landscape were not seen because the observer was limited by the invested interests of the colonial gaze. As Jonathan Z. Smith has remarked, the history of comparative religion teaches us that a foreign local tradition only counts as a religion when it has achieved sufcient power and numbers to enter our history, either to form it, interact with it, or to thwart it. All other religions are invisible.27 If Darwins discovery of the godless Indians of South America marked the beginning and end of his naturalistic reections about religion, he would hardly merit further scrutiny. Indeed, if this measured the extent of his interest in religion even a simplistic post-colonial account of the relationship between imperial power and imperial knowledge would give us all of the interpretive tools needed to make sense of his impressions; Darwin would be just another agent of the framework designed by White Men to preserve European hegemony. However, the story is far more complicated and ambiguous than this perspective allows. Looking back on his life, Darwin concluded that his time aboard the Beagle was the single most important event in shaping his mind, and I tend to agree.28 In this case, I believe that Darwins enduring interest in a naturalistic account of religion can be explained in part by his desire to sever the traditional association between the moral status of being human and the anthropological status of having a religion. Soon after opening his private transmutation notebooks in the late 1830s, Darwin began trying to make sense of human intra-species religious variation and returned to his time amongst the people of Tierra del Fuego. The challenge was to account for human populations like the Fuegians who lacked what had been identied as the uniquely human trait without ignoring their humanity or giving comfort to the dubious polygenic cause. The question Darwin faced was this: how could a single, monogenic species like
Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, 235. Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 295. 28 See Charles Darwin The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, in The Works of Charles Darwin, Volume 29, ed. Ernst Krause and Nora Barlow (New York: New York University Press, 1989), 113.
26 27

58

Day Darwin, Ethnography, and Human Uniqueness

Homo sapiens come in both religious and non-religious varieties? Although Darwin was convinced that once one has demonstrated that mens & brutes bodies one type: almost superuous to consider minds, he was not willing to shirk a serious theoretical hurdle: I have felt some difculty in conceiving how inhabitant of Tierra del Fuego is to be converted into civilized man.29 If religion was taken as an essential mark of human civilization, the challenge wasnt just explaining why the English had religion one also had to explain why human beings like the Fuegians had none. Painted in broad strokes, Darwins solution to this dilemma was to narrow the gap between humans and non-humans by locating the rudiments of religion in animal cognition. That is to say, Darwin solved the problem of intra-species variation by appealing to inter-species continuity. On his reckoning, the difference intellect of Man & animals not so great as between living thing without thought (plant) & living thing with thoughts (animal).30 The gradualist thread of evolutionary continuity that Darwin used to narrow the gulf between human and animal psychology in general was thus used to blur the lines between godly and godless minds.31 To Darwins way of looking at the world, there was nothing prima facie fanciful about the idea that the elementary forms of the religious life might be found in animals. In Notebook M, for instance, he observed that Lyell in his Principles talks of it as wonderful that Elephants understand contracts, only to add that theres nothing particularly special about this because W. [William] Foxs dog that shut the door evidently did, for it did with far more alacrity than] when something good was shown him, than when merely ordered to do it.32 If complex forms of social cognition were mastered by elephants and dogs, why not forms of religious devotion as well? The rst step in Darwins strategy was to reconcile the anthropological portrait that the concept of natural religion provided with his own rsthand experiences with the natives of Tierra del Fuego. As he made the point in Notebook M, it seems impossible to deny that the innate idea of God . . . does not exist in different degrees in races.whether in Ancient Greeks, with their mystical but sublime views, or the wretched fears & strange superstitions of an Australian savage or one of Tierra del Fuego.33 Although
Darwin, Notebook E, in Charles Darwins Notebooks, 409 (E 47). Darwin, Notebook B, in Charles Darwins Notebooks, 224 (B 214). 31 On Darwins evolutionary psychological gradualism see Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 12756. 32 Darwin, Notebook M, in Charles Darwins Notebooks, 551 (M 128). 33 Darwin, Notebook M, in Charles Darwins Notebooks, 553 (M 136).
29 30

59

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS JANUARY 2008

we may have reasons for doubting the truth of the claim, the existence of godless savages was an unobjectionable ethnographic fact in Darwins day; it was where any anthropological conversation about religion began. The next move was to suggest that rather than thinking of religion as a switch that is either thrown on or off, we should instead visualize a gradient of religiosity. Hensleigh [Wedgwood] says the love of the deity & thought of him or eternity , only difference between the mind of man & animals, Darwin reected in Notebook C, yet how faint in a Fuegian or Australian! why not gradation.34 Darwins methodological commitment to gradualism serves two ends here. On the one hand, by positing intraspecic degrees of religious impulses within Homo sapiens Darwin could preserve the monogenic portrait of human origins. On the other hand, by postulating inter-specic degrees of religious impulses between human and non-human animals, Darwin could tame the evolutionary riddle of religions conspicuous absence within some human communities. Rather than treating religious devotion as the result of a single impulse or instinct, however, Darwin viewed it as the by-product of three separate psychological faculties acting in concert. This approach was similar to one that he had discerned in Dugald Stewarts decomposition of the sublime into a complicated series of associations.35 The rst cognitive requirement was a basic concept of causality. During the notebook years, Darwin appears to have believed that nearly every organism possessed a minimal concept of causality simply because it is crucial for survival. For example, in Notebook N Darwin treats the idea of cause and effect as a necessary notion that is connected with our the willing of the simplest animals, as hydra toward light.36 In the case of religious cognition, Darwin speculated that perhaps our expectations about what should happen next in a purely causal sense interact with our moral intuitions about what should happen next in an ethical sense. May not the idea of God arise from our confused idea of ought, he asked: joined with necessary notion of causation, in reference to this ought, as well as the works of the whole world?37 Perhaps religion was just a category mistake. The second key psychological component was a capacity for reason, which Darwin treated as a natural and gradual elaboration of any organisms primitive ability to choose between two or more options. He writes:
Darwin, Notebook C, in Charles Darwins Notebooks, 316 (C 244). Darwin, Old and Useless Notes, in Charles Darwins Notebooks, 605 (OUN 19). 36 Darwin, Notebook N, in Charles Darwins Notebooks, 567 (N 1213). 37 Darwin, Notebook M, in Charles Darwins Notebooks, 558 (M 151).
34 35

60

Day Darwin, Ethnography, and Human Uniqueness

As soon as memory is improved. direct effect of improving organization, comparison of sensations would rst take place, whether to pursue immediate inclination or some future pleasure.hence judgment, which is part of reason.38 When both a notion of causality and a capacity for reason are combined in a single mind, he thought, a concept of God could be the inevitable result: Notion of deity effect of reason acting on ( not social instinct]) but a causation.39 The third and nal element needed for religion was a certain measure of innate or acquired curiosity about the world. In an entry worth quoting at length, we read: Man getting sight slowly, but when in grown years, thinking he instinctively knows distances., is good instance of obtaining that a faculty in the form of a true instinct, which is a real instinct in the chicken, just bursting from the egg.Animals have necessary notions. which of them? and curiosity strongly shewn in the numerous artices to take birds & beasts .very necessary to explain the origin of idea of deity.Animals do not know they have these necessary notions any more than a Savage.40 If we take necessary notions in this passage to include the concept of causality, Darwins hunch seems to be that all it takes to generate a religious impulse is an animal mind equipped with the concept of a cause and an inquisitive streak. The advantages of this naturalizing strategy were threefold. First, Darwin could explain our knowledge of the supernatural without appealing to a supernatural cause. That is, if one approached the question from this direction, the origins of religion were no more mysterious than the emergence of new species. Second, by positing a suite of psychological faculties that animals and humans share in common, Darwin could address what appeared to be a uniquely human capacity without inserting a cognitive evolutionary gap between animals and humans. Third, by comparing the religious impulse to the gradual transformation of our brute capacity for seeing into a nely-honed skill for judging distances, Darwin could naturally explain both the religious and non-religious types of Homo sapiens. Since the inchoate capacity for religion could either be cultivated
Darwin, Notebook N, in Charles Darwins Notebooks, 568 (N 18). Darwin, Notebook N, in Charles Darwins Notebooks, 564 (N 4). 40 Darwin, Notebook N, in Charles Darwins Notebooks, 566 (N 11).
38 39

61

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS JANUARY 2008

or ignored, the differences lay in culture and experience rather than predetermined biology. A genuine solution appeared to be in sight.

III. SENTIMENT, SUBMISSION, AND SUPERSTITION: DARWIN ON THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION, 186972 As Darwin began to close in on the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection, his interest in evolutionary anthropology was temporarily put on hold. Infamously, human beings make only a brief cameo in the Origin of Species. Darwin was determined that nothing should stand in the way of his argument for transmutation, John R. Durant advises, and this determination led him to exclude from the Origin virtually any reference to the highest and most interesting problem of all.41 However, as the initial furor over the Origin passed, Darwin found himself under increasing public and private pressure to return to the problem of human evolution. All eyes were turning to Darwin, Adrian Desmond and James Moore observe: Everybody had spoken on the rise and fall of man but him. He was expected to clear the mud with a denitive pronouncement.42 In 1869, Darwin returned to his notebooks and began work on The Descent of Man. The Descents evolutionary account of religion begins with the familiar imperial discovery of its absence among the natives. Summarizing the idee xe of the European discourse about the godless savage, Darwin wrote: there is ample evidence, derived not from hasty travelers, but from men who have long resided with savages, that numerous races have existed and still exist, who have no idea of one or more gods.43 However, this recognition did not mean the end of the line. By allowing the anthropological category of religion to include beliefs about ghosts and spirits, the naturalists project could continue. If the belief in spirits is no less religious than the belief in gods, he judged, the case is wholly different; for this belief seems almost universal with the less civilized races.44 With his target in plain view, Darwin pressed on. Returning to the basic theoretical intuition he had formulated in the 1830s, he suggested that religious cognition and behavior
41 John R. Durant, The Ascent of Nature in Darwins Descent, in The Darwinian Heritage, 284. 42 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of A Tormented Evolutionist (New York: Norton, 1991), 572. 43 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 1: 65. 44 Darwin, Descent, 1: 65.

62

Day Darwin, Ethnography, and Human Uniqueness

are the by-products of several evolved psychological faculties interacting with each other. So, much as a combustion engine generates heat as a predictable side-effect of its design, the belief in spiritual agents is a foreseeable consequence of a mind blindly assembled by the processes of natural, sexual and group selection. As soon as the important faculties of the imagination, wonder, and curiosity, together with some power of reasoning, had become partially developed, Darwin supposed, man would naturally have craved to understand what was passing around him, and have vaguely speculated on his own existence.45 By 1871, this intellectualist portrait of religions natural origin was quickly becoming the common consensus in Victorian anthropology.46 Darwins version deviated from the standard account in one key way, though. According to theorists like Edward Burnet Tylor, John Lubbock and Herbert Spencer, the religious concept of spirits began as a primitive attempt to explain our dream life. Simply put, the concept of a soul or spirit was a crude but effective way to account for our ability to visit distant lands and see dead or merely absent people while we sleep. When a dead father or brother appears to a man in sleep, Lubbock conjectured, he does not doubt the reality of the occurrence [sic], and hence concludes that their spirits still live.47 Once the idea of a human spiritual double was on the scene, it was gradually elaborated into a general doctrine about souls and the nature of an unseen, spiritual reality. Yet, to Darwins ear, there was something amiss about this explanation. First, the dream theory presumed a tremendous amount of cognitive machinery. Thus, although he conceded its intuitive appeal, Darwin pointed out that until the faculties of imagination, curiosity, reason, &c., had been fairly developed in man, his dreams would not have led him to believe in spirits, any more than in the case of a dog.48 Second, by anchoring religion in the second-order attempt to explain our psychological experiences, the dream theory required a signicant amount of self-reexive consciousness. This meant that the intellectualists were re-inscribing an impassable evolutionary gap between animal minds and human minds when it came to religion. Whether Tylor and Lubbock realized it or not, religion was being used once again to articulate a portrait of human exceptionalism. I cannot but
Darwin, Descent, 1: 65. See, e.g., George Stocking, Animism, Totemism and Christianity, in After Tylor (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 4783. 47 John Lubbock, The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man, 275. 48 Darwin, Descent, 1: 66.
45 46

63

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS JANUARY 2008

suspect, he admitted, that there is a still earlier and ruder stage, when anything which manifests power or movement is thought to be endowed with some form of life.49 Given his commitment to the evolutionary continuity between animal and human psychology, Darwin insisted that the real anthropological test was demonstrating how religion could have gradually emerged from our pre-human ancestry. Darwins response to this challenge was to offer his readers what we now think of as a just-so story. His narrative begins with the rudimentary expression of proto-religious impulses in animals, progresses to the middling depths of savage godlessness and superstition, and concludes with the regal heights of Victorian monotheism. In many ways, the varieties of indigenous superstition were the most important for Darwins program as they provided a kind of narrative fulcrum for his evolutionary account. The tendency in savages to imagine that natural objects and agencies are animated by spiritual or living essences, is perhaps illustrated by a little fact which I once noticed, Darwin wrote: my dog, a full-grown and very sensible animal was lying on the lawn during a hot and still day; but at a little distance a slight breeze occasionally moved an open parasol, which would have been wholly disregarded by the dog, had anyone stood near it. As it was, every time that the parasol slightly moved, the dog growled ercely and barked. He must, I think, have reasoned to himself in a rapid and unconscious manner, that movement without any apparent cause indicated the presence of some strange living agent, and no stranger had a right to be on his territory.50 By establishing clear lines of continuity between dogs and superstitious savages, this domestic vignette allows Darwin to narrow the cultural and biological space that separates religious and non-religious humans. Both the pre-scientic savage and the non-human animal are navigating the world with the same instinctive but untutored notion of causality. It is nearly impossible to ignore the imperial suggestion in Descent that indigenous peoples are only slightly more discerning creatures than dogs. Clearly, Darwins comparative strategy is structured by the political fact that when it came to savages the British were their masters. In some sense, the European explorers tradition of being mistaken for godsa
49 50

Darwin, Descent, 1: 66 (fn. 53). Darwin, Descent, 1: 67.

64

Day Darwin, Ethnography, and Human Uniqueness

trope that Gananath Obeyesekere views as a structure of the long run in European culture and consciousnesscan be viewed as the discursive apotheosis of political reality.51 Considered in this light, the relationships between savages and the British empire, gods and their followers, and dogs and their masters all share one straightforward trait: they were all established on the asymmetry of power. However, if we stop here we miss something important. It was only by reducing the cognitive distance that separates humans and animals that Darwin could account for the existence of godless savages without viewing them as less than fully human; refusing to make the Fuegians another species meant closing the ontological gap between humans and non-humans by making dogs a little superstitious. The tactical signicance of the savage/ dog comparison, then, is clear: the savages of the colonized world presented a kind of intermediate form of natural religiosity, a stage betwixt and between the crude, incipient worship of a dog for his master and the cultivated, self-reective devotion of a Victorian Christian to her God. This link is made explicit when Darwin suggests that the people of Tierra del Feugo appear to be in this respect in an intermediate condition.52 Just in case we miss the point, the Descents evolutionary discussion of religion closes by returning to the problem of mental evolution and quasi-religious dogs: The feeling of religious devotion is a highly complex one, consisting of love, complete submission to an exalted and mysterious superior, a strong sense of dependence, fear, reverence, gratitude, hope for the future and perhaps other elements. No being could experience so complex an emotion until advanced in his intellectual and moral faculties to at least a moderately high level. Nevertheless, we see some distant approach to this state of mind, in the deep love of a dog for his master, associated with complete submission, fear, and perhaps other feelings.53 It had taken nearly forty years, but Darwin had discovered a way to naturalize religion. The existence of godless savages made a bit more evolutionary sense in a world with proto-religious animals. Since religions cognitive
51 Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 123. 52 Darwin, Descent, 1: 67. 53 Darwin Descent, 1: 68.

65

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS JANUARY 2008

scaffolding included a suite of psychological faculties that animals and humans share, there was no insuperable divide between a godly and godless mind. The belief in God has often been advanced as not only the greatest, but the most complete of all the distinctions between man and the lower animals, he commented near the end of Descent: It is however impossible, as we have seen, to maintain that this belief is innate or instinctive in man.54 As a consequence, the status of being human could no longer depend on being religious. Darwin had saved the Fuegians from their own godlessness. The irony, of course, is that Darwins strategy for naturalizing religion ultimately depended on the same discursive structures associated with imperial conquest and domination that had created the anthropological problem of godless savages in the rst place. Yet, Darwin was not nished with religions natural origins. The subject makes a brief but intriguing appearance in the nal installment of his evolutionary trilogyThe Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Part of what makes religions appearance in the Expression so interesting is that we nd him expanding what could be viewed as the narrowly cognitive approach that he had rst mapped out in the Notebooks. His interest in accounting for what might be called religion in the roundthat is, religion in all of its maddening anthropological and historical complexitycan already be detected in the Descent.55 There Darwins interest in religion led him to analyze both the intellectual and the unmistakably affective components of the religious life. Thus, in addition to the essential cognitive categories of causality, reason and curiosity that he had identied in the notebooks of the 1830s, by the 1870s Darwin had concluded that emotions were no less necessary for uncovering the naturalness of religion. More specically, Darwin settled on a politically-charged suite of sentiments that included love, submission and fear that any naturalistic account of religion must address. In the Expression, the same affective ensemble becomes the primary focus of his evolutionary attention. Religious devotion, we read, is, in some degree, related to affection, through mainly consisting of reverence, often combined with fear.56 In keeping with his concentration on the behavioral expression of emotion, however, Darwin refused to examine these sentiments in the abstract. InDarwin, Descent, 2: 394. See Matthew Day, Rethinking Naturalness: The Modes of Religiosity and Religion in the Round, in Modes of Religion, ed. Harvey Whitehouse and Robert McCauley (Walnut Creek, CA: Altma Mira, 2005), 85106. 56 Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 216.
54 55

66

Day Darwin, Ethnography, and Human Uniqueness

stead, he turned to examine something that his audience would have considered to be the prototypical behavioral expression of a committed religious life: the act of prayer. A humble kneeling posture, Darwin noted, with the hands upturned and palms joined appears to us, from long habit, a gesture so appropriate to devotion that it might be thought to be innate. Yet, given his methodological commitment to naturalizing religion by decomposing it into a complicated series of associations, Darwin had to reject this prospect and search instead for the historical genealogy of prayers physiology. Without warning, Darwin amends the strategy he adopted in the Descent and takes up a political historical perspective to naturalize an orthodox element of the religious life. Yet, this modied line of attack does not represent a fundamental change of mind. Recall that in the notebooks of the 1830s, Darwin had appealed to differences in culture and experience to account for both religious and non-religious types of Homo sapiens. The theoretical result of this approach in the Expression is that the seemingly innate and natural habitus of prayer is, for lack of a better term, debiologized and transformed into the politically and sociologically relative outcome of contingent human history. Noting that in non-European cultures the hands are not joined in prayer, he submits that the Christian European practices of prayer are historically rooted in an attitude of slavish subjection to an invading military force.57 On this point he approvingly quotes his cousin Hensleigh Wedgewood from the Origin of Language (1866): When the suppliant kneels and holds up his hands with the palms joined, he represents a captive who proves the completeness of his submission by offering up his hands to be bound by the victor.58 The familiar pose of prayer thus reenacts the decisive moment in every program of militaristic dominationthe point at which resistance is abandoned and subjugation is acknowledged. This routine experience of submitting to overwhelming but this-worldly might was enough to convince him that the joining of hands, under the inuence of devotional feelings, was not an innate behavioral trait.59 A basic Christian expression of the religious sentimental suite was, in Darwins hands, nothing more supernatural or mysterious than the affective residue of military defeat. For the knowing naturalists eye, even prayer could reveal its utterly mundane origins.
Darwin, Expression, 217. Darwin, Expression, 217 59 Darwin, Expression, 218.
57 58

67

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS JANUARY 2008

IV. CONCLUSION I have argued that Darwins speculations about the natural origins of religion are characterized by a complex association of evolutionary theorizing, imperial power and moral judgments that rigid models of post-colonial theory fail to capture. More to the point, I have suggested that for Darwin the appeal of locating elementary forms of the religious life in non-human animals can be partly explained by his transformative experiences amongst the Indians of Tierra del Fuego and his desire to sever the connection between being human and having a religion. However, the point of this exercise is not to suggest that Darwin was especially original or even inuential when it comes to the nineteenth-century interest in naturalizing religion. In many ways his work is quite conventional, especially when situated within the European discourse of the godless savage. The value of examining how his theorizing about religion was conditioned by a matrix of social, political and biographical factors is that it allows us to see how Darwins evolutionary project was structured in quite fundamental ways by his life aboard the Beagle and his normative commitments. For example, this approach to Darwins work on religion reveals a similar pattern in his reections on what he once called the odious deadly subject of slavery.60 Robert Richards has noted that Darwins moral sensitivities and theoretical impulses were challenged in countless ways during his time in South America; and nothing was quite as taxing as the Brazilian slave trade.61 Darwin admitted in his diary on March 12, 1832, that he had heard such horrifying eyewitness accounts about slavery that if I had read them in England, I should have placed them to the credulous zeal of well meaning people.62 David Livingstone discerns ambiguity and transformation in William Robertson Smiths Arabian travels. Similarly, I believe that the spatial displacement that prompted Darwin to manufacture an imaginative geography of South America also forced him to reconsider the landscape of his own moral conscience. If his expectations about what he would discover were disguised cultural self-portraits built on fear and desire, Darwin apparently did not like what he discovered about himself away from home. One of the most poignant examples of how Darwins identity was put to
Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, I: 310. Robert J. Richards, Darwin on Mind, Morals and Emotions, in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, 92115. 62 Charles Darwin, Diary of the H.M.S. Beagle, in The Works of Charles Darwin, Volume One, ed. Paul H. Barrett and R.B. Freeman (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 41 [42/3].
60 61

68

Day Darwin, Ethnography, and Human Uniqueness

the test in South America appears in the April 14, 1832 entry from Journal of Researches: I was crossing a ferry with a negro, who was uncommonly stupid. In endeavoring to make him understand, I talked loud, and made signs, in doing which I passed my hand near his face. He, I suppose, thought I was in a passion, and was going to strike him; for instantly, with a frightened look and half-shut eyes, he dropped his hands. I shall never forget my feelings of disgust, and shame, at seeing a great and powerful man afraid even to ward off a blow, directed, as he thought, at his face. This man had been trained to a degradation lower than the slavery of the most helpless animal.63 This passage captures the essential ambiguity of Darwins colonial experience. At the same time that the imperial vantage point permits him to compare human slavery to the domestication of animalsa perspective that depends in crucial ways on an asymmetry of powerit also provides a conceptual vocabulary for indicting the institution of chattel slavery itself. Alongside the snide judgment regarding the nameless Black mans intelligence, we also nd Darwin confronting his own incredulity regarding the inhumanity of slavery and feeling unforgettable shame. In his private notebooks, this ambiguity becomes the stuff of naturalist theorizing. We read in Notebook C: Animals have voice, so has man. Not saltus, but hiatus animals expression of countenance share of sickness,death, unequal life,stimulated by same passionsbrought into the world the same way they may convey much thus, Man has expression. animals signals. (rabbit stamping ground) Man signals.animals understand the language, the know the crys of pain, as well as we.It is our arrogance , to raise on the same shelfto (look at common ancestor, scarcely[)] conceivable in savages) Has not the white Man, who has debased his Nature & violates every best instinctive feeling by making slave of his fellow black, often wished to consider him as other animal.64
Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches, Part One, in The Works of Charles Darwin, Volume Two, ed. Paul H. Barrett and R.B. Freeman (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 23 [27/8]. 64 Darwin, Notebook C, Charles Darwins Notebooks, 286 [C154].
63

69

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS JANUARY 2008

At rst blush, there does not seem to be anything novel about this passage. The claim that instead of an ontological divide or saltus separating humans from non-humans there is only a cascade of differences, a mere hiatus, tentatively distinguishing us from them is classic Darwinian gradualism. What is striking about this passage upon closer inspection, however, is the way in which Darwin invests his methodological commitment to evolutionary gradualism with unambiguously moral content. The naturalist perspective that draws a parallel between human and non-human forms of communication allows him to establish simultaneously a conceptual link between his disapproval of slavery and the traditional desire to preserve human uniqueness. Man in his arrogance, he irritably judged, thinks himself a great work. worthy the interposition of a deity, more humble & I believe true to consider him created from animals.65 For Darwin, the narcissistic project that begins with inserting a gulf between us and them ultimately ends with the immoral and self-debasing practice of treating other human beings like animals. It should come as little surprise then, that in Descent we nd Darwin addressing the great Sin of slavery in the same paragraph that he confronts the horrible cruelty to animals.66 From his point of view, both practices were expressions of the same nefarious decision to separate ourselves from Nature. For more than a century now, anti-evolutionists have worried about the waves of immorality that would follow if Darwins view of human origins took root. As William Jennings Bryan put it in 1921, the primary concern for many anti-Darwinians has been to protect humanity from the demoralization involved in accepting a brute ancestry.67 Yet, when we examine the nature of Darwins evolutionary project through the lens of his theorizing about religion, we discover a very different outcome. His attempt to spoil the fantasy of human uniqueness was not an accidental feature of his scientic work. Nor was it a reckless stab at naturalizing with a hammer. Rather, Darwins biological theorizing was itself conditioned by his moral response to our all-too-human condition. Florida State University.

Darwin, Notebook C, Charles Darwins Notebooks, 300 [C196197]. Darwin, Descent, 1: 94. 67 William Jennings Bryan, The Origin of Man, in In His Image. (New York, Fleming H. Revell: 1922), 104.
65 66

70

You might also like