THREE CENTURIES' PERSPECTIVES 4 I 9
such potent and evil nonsense then passed for certain knowledge.
If I choose to impose individual blame for all past social ills,
there will be no one left to like in some of the most fascinating
periods of our history. For example, and speaking personally, if I
place every Victorian anti-Semite beyond the pale of my attention,
my compass of available music and literature will be pitifully small.
Though I hold no shred of sympathy for active persecutors, I can-
not excoriate individuals who acquiesced passively in a standard
societal judgment. Rail instead against the judgment, and try to
understand what motivates men of decent will.
The personal argument is more difficult and requires substantial
biographical knowledge. Attitudes are one thing, actions another—
and by their fruits ye shall know them. What did Darwin do with his
racial attitudes, and how do his actions stack up against the mores of
his contemporaries? By this proper criterion, Darwin merits our ad-
miration.
Darwin was a meliorist in the paternalistic tradition, not a be-
liever in biologically fixed and ineradicable inequality. Either atti-
tude can lead to ugly statements about despised peoples, but
practical consequences are so different. The meliorist may wish to
eliminate cultural practices, and may be vicious and uncompromis-
ing in his lack of sympathy for differences, but he does view "sav-
ages" (Darwin's word) as "primitive" by social circumstance and
biologically capable of "improvement" (read "Westernization"). But
the determinist regards "primitive" culture as a reflection of unal-
terable biological inferiority, and what social policy must then follow
in an era of colonial expansion: elimination, slavery, permanent
domination?
Even for his most despised Fuegians, Darwin understood the
small intrinsic difference between them in their nakedness and him
in his regalia. He attributed their limits to a harsh surrounding
climate and hoped, in his usual paternalistic way, for their eventual
improvement. He wrote in his Beagle diary for February 24, 1834 :
Their country is a broken mass of wild rocks, lofty hills and useless forests,
and these are viewed through mists and endless storms.... How little can
the higher powers of the mind come into play: what is there for imagination
to paint, for reason to compare, for judgment to decide upon? To knock a
limpet from the rock does not even require cunning, that lowest power of
the mind.... Although essentially the same creature, how little must the