May The Spirit of Wilberforce Arise Amongst Us Once More

The Hard Truth--Charles Darwin

What Your Biology Teacher Didn’t Tell You 

Phil Moore ©
The Gospel Coalition (US)

Charles Darwin is a great British hero. That’s hardly surprising, since he was one of the most influential thinkers of the past 200 years. I happened to live opposite Darwin’s former lodgings when I was a student at Cambridge University, so I looked out each morning on a blue plaque hailing him as one of the greatest Britons who ever lived. I’m not saying he didn’t deserve that commemorative plaque, but I should point out that he wasn’t a British hero but a British villain. You don’t need to be a Bible-thumping evangelical to question whether Darwin’s thinking deserves to be given a bit more thought.

Whatever your views on origins and evolution, we can hopefully all agree that, at present, we give far too much honor to the British thinker who justified genocide.

Devaluation of Humans

Darwin didn’t hide his view that his evolutionary thinking applied to human races as well as to animal species. The full title of his seminal 1859 book was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. He followed up more explicitly in The Descent of Man, where he spelled out his racial theory:

The Western nations of Europe . . . now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors [that they] stand at the summit of civilization. . . . The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races through the world.

Thankfully, most British people today are embarrassed by the racist rhetoric that undergirded the late-Victorian British Empire. What’s astonishing is how little they understand that Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution provided the doctrine behind its white supremacism.

Utilitarianism Versus Faithful Christians

The Sweet Sugar Trade a Bitter Poison

We are familiar with England in the eighteenth and nineteenth leading the charge against the slave trade.  William Wilberforce and the Clapham sect have been rightly celebrated for their lifelong labours in putting slavery to death.  

What we tend to overlook in these days, however, was how easily England got into the trade in the first place.  Benthamite utilitarianism was/is a godless philosophy.  It allowed calculation of principles and ethics on an abacus made up of human beings.  "The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number" was a convenient, soulless doctrine where the good of one's own always outweighed the good of "other" human beings.  It remains so to this day.

It was relatively easy, then, for England to accept the development of a slave trade--the evils of which reverberate to this day.  If utilitarianism provided the general moral justification, how did it all start?  What need drove it?   What led English ships to capture and enslave Africans and transport them elsewhere around the world into enforced labour?  Even as we write these words, the incredible  evil of such policies and practices strike us afresh.  We repeat, whilst nothing could justify it, what perceived need drove it?

Robert Tombs reminds us of how slavery came about on an industrial scale.