Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by kennyc

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

- William Faulkner

most definitely

[WT Sharpe]

From Wikipedia:

.....Josiah Wedgwood (12 July 1730 – 3 January 1795) was an English potter, credited with the industrialization of the manufacture of pottery. A prominent abolitionist, Wedgwood is remembered for his "Am I Not A Man And A Brother?" anti-slavery medallion.



On his Fox News show on Thursday, Aug. 19, 2010, Glen Beck said, "Two generations later his great grandson plants the seed that leads to progressivism, eugenics. You know who Wedgewood's grandson was? Charles Darwin, the father of modern-day racism."

I hate quoting the same person from the same source again so soon, but Mr. Beck, who seems to feel that the end of the practice of slavery started when religion began to question the government-sanctioned practice of commerce, deserves an answer; and so, once again, I give you Mr. Samuel Clemens.

.....The methods of the priest and the parson have been very curious, their history is very entertaining. In all the ages the Roman Church has owned slaves, bought and sold slaves, authorized and encouraged her children to trade in them. Long after some Christian peoples had freed their slaves the Church still held on to hers. If any could know, to absolute certainty, that all this was right, and according to God's will and desire, surely it was she, since she was God's specially appointed representative in the earth and sole authorized and infallible expounder of his Bible. There were the texts; there was no mistaking their meaning; she was right, she was doing in this thing what the Bible had mapped out for her to do. So unassailable was her position that in all the centuries she had no word to say against human slavery. Yet now at last, in our immediate day, we hear a Pope saying slave trading is wrong, and we see him sending an expedition to Africa to stop it. The texts remain: it is the practice that has changed. Why? Because the world has corrected the Bible. The Church never corrects it; and also never fails to drop in at the tail of the procession—and take the credit of the correction. As she will presently do in this instance.
..........— Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910), American writer. Europe and Elsewhere (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1923), pages 389-390[1].

[1] Publication Information: Book Title: Europe and Elsewhere. Contributors: Mark Twain - author, Roy J. Friedman Mark Twain Collection (Library of Congress). Publisher: Harper & Brothers Publishers. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1923. Page Numbers: 389-390. Information supplied by Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com, 20 Aug. 2010.

[FlorenceArt]

Very strange to consider Darwin as the father of racism.

Your quote reminds me of an anecdote he tells in The Voyage of the Beagle, about a group of slaves somewhere in South America, who escaped and lived in the forest for some time. They were eventually recaptured, except for an old woman who threw herself off a cliff to escape her pursuers. Darwin's comment to this (from memory) was something like "From a Roman matron, this would be considered admirable. From a slave, it's only seen as a sign of stubbornness."

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

Very strange to consider Darwin as the father of racism.

My thought as well when I read the quotation ....

[FlorenceArt]

This morning I listened to a podcast where several potentially interesting authors were mentioned, one of them was Cioran. I looked for quotes on wikiquote, and here are some I liked:

From A Short History of Decay (1949)

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

From The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job...

When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

Very strange to consider Darwin as the father of racism.

Originally Posted by GeoffC

My thought as well when I read the quotation ....

Consider the source.

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Consider the source.

Okay, but he's an unknown to me so I can assume by your comment that he's a controversial character ?

[Sparrow]

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

Very strange to consider Darwin as the father of racism.

From what little I know of him, Glen Beck is a sort of video shock-jock; paid for his ability to deliver a mindless rant on a topic of the day.
We have them in the UK too; and their opinions are hardly ever worth noting, regardless of where they happen to be on the political spectrum.

[WT Sharpe]

From The New York Times Sunday Book Review of Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, dated Jan. 29, 1009:

Adrian Desmond and James Moore published a highly regarded biography of Darwin in 1991. The argument of their new book, "Darwin’s Sacred Cause," is bluntly stated in its subtitle: "How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution." They set out to overturn the widespread view that Darwin was a "tough-minded scientist" who unflinchingly followed the trail of empirical research until it led to the stunning and unavoidable theory of evolution. This narrative, they claim, is precisely backward. "Darwin’s starting point," they write, "was the abolitionist belief in blood kinship, a 'common descent'" of all human beings.

You can read the entire review at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/bo.../Benfey-t.html.

Beck is a pinhead who caters shamelessly to the lowest common denominator.

[GeoffC]

Beck is a pinhead who caters shamelessly to the lowest common denominator.

Duly noted ....

[Poppa1956]

Clearly, racists (pro-slavery/anti-abolitionists) were extant long before Darwin's writings. Whether or not you're a fan of Chuckie and the Beagle, please at least get the obvious facts right.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by Poppa1956

Clearly, racists (pro-slavery/anti-abolitionists) were extant long before Darwin's writings. Whether or not you're a fan of Chuckie and the Beagle, please at least get the obvious facts right.

[Poppa1956]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

I meant that racism existed before Darwin's writings. Charles Darwin could not have been the father of racism because it existed before he did.
However, the quote says GB claims ‘Darwin is the father of modern-day racism.’ My bad, the phrase “modern-day” makes a huge difference in the quote.

Having Googled "darwin racism" (No, I did not bing it) I found several discussions, each of which proving, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Charles Darwin absolutely simultaneously was and was not racist. Not surprisingly, most of the sites that "prove" his racist are creationist leaning (to say the least).
I personally thought this article helped clear the air.

There is another incongruity in these claims: to suggest that Darwin's scientific ideas are the foundation of racism, immorality, Fascism and Communism, and neglect of the poor is to blithely ignore the fact that most of the social ills Darwin's ideas are supposedly responsible for have been around long before Darwin was born.

[FlorenceArt]

My understanding, from vaguely remembered school lessons, is that some conservatives tried to use Darwin as a theoretical justification for social hierarchies, and for not helping the poor and letting "natural selection" pick the best. And, in some cases, even went as far as proposing eugenic actions, such as rendering some people sterile (the poor or the handicapped) to prevent them from "polluting" the gene pool. Since these have since gained a bad reputation by being associated with the Nazis, it has given Darwin a bad name, for reasons that had nothing to do with him, or of course the validity of his theory.

Which bad reputation is now being re-used by ultra-conservatives to shed doubts on said theory. Ironic, isn't it?

[TimMason]

There is no necessary contradiction between anti-slavery and racism; one can be against the ownership of one human being by another while still believing that race is a useful concept and that it is possible to build a hierarchy of races. Darwin does seem to have believed this - there are several passages in The Descent of Man that clearly set out a difference between the several races :

"There is, however, no doubt that the various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other, - as in the texture of the hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body, the capacity f the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even the convolutions of the brain ... Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly it would appear, in their emotional but partly in their intellectual faculties ..."

A few pages further on, he sees the massive death rates that occurred on contact as being a natural, evolutionary, result of the encounter between superior and inferior groups.

Darwin's ideas certainly influenced the development of scientific racism. However, the doctrine had existed in some form since at least the 18th Century. Ordinary common or garden racism is, of course, far older.