Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Not dissimilar arguments were heard across the Atlantic in the southern states of the USA. Darwinism prescribed a common origin for all races and therefore could have been used as an argument against slavery, as it was by Chester Loring Brace.⁷³ But others argued the opposite. Joseph le Conte (1823–1901), like Lapouge or Ratzel, was an educated man, not a red neck but a trained geologist. When his book The Race Problem in the South appeared in 1892, he was the highly-esteemed president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His argument was brutally Darwinian.

⁷⁴ He said that when two races came into contact one was bound to dominate the other.

The most immediate political impact of social Darwinism was the Eugenics movement, which became established with the new century. All of the above writers played a role in this, but the most direct progenitor, the real father, was Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1822–1911). In an article published in 1904 (in the American Journal of Sociology), he argued that the essence of eugenics was that ‘inferiority’ and ‘superiority’ could be objectively described and measured.⁷⁵

Racism, or at the very least uncompromising ethnocentrism, shaped everything. Richard King, an authority on ancient Indian philosophy, says it was Orientalists who, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘effectively created’ the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism.⁷⁶

What he means is that though complex systems of belief had evolved in the East over many centuries, the peoples who lived there did not have the concept of religion ‘as a monolithic entity which involved a set of coherent beliefs, doctrines and liturgical practices’. He says that the very idea of religion, as an organised belief system, using sacred texts, and with a dedicated clerisy, was a European notion, stemming from the Christians of the third century after they had redefined the Latin word religio. To begin with, that had meant a ‘re-reading’ of the traditional practices of their ancestors, but the early Christians – then under threat from the Romans – had redefined the word so that for them it meant ‘a banding together, in which a “bond of piety” would unite all true believers’.⁷⁷ It was in this way, says King, that religion came to mean a system that emphasised ‘theistic belief, exclusivity and a fundamental dualism between the human world and the transcendental world of the divine . . . By the time of the Enlightenment, it was taken for granted that all cultures were understandable in this way.’⁷⁸

In fact, says King, the term ‘Hindoo’ was originally Persian, a version of the Sanskrit sindhu, meaning the Indus river. In other words, the Persians employed the word to single out the tribes inhabiting that region – it did not then have a religious meaning.⁷⁹ When the British arrived in India, he says, they first described the local inhabitants ‘as either heathens, the children of the devil, Gentoos (from the Portuguese gentio = gentile) or Banians (after the merchant population of Northern India)’. But the early colonialists could just not conceive of a people without a religion as they understood the term, and it was they who attached to this complex system of beliefs the phrase ‘the religion of the Gentoos’.⁸⁰

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, ‘Gentoo’ was changed to ‘Hindoo’ and then, in 1816, according to King, Rammohan Roy, an Indian intellectual, employed the word ‘Hinduism’ for the first time.⁸¹

And it was much the same with Buddhism. ‘It was by no means certain,’ says King, ‘that the Tibetans, Sinhalese and the Chinese conceived of themselves as Buddhists before they were so labelled by Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.’⁸² In this case, the crucial figure was Eugène Burnouf, whose Introduction à l’histoire de Bouddhisme indien effectively created the religion as we recognise it today. Published in 1844, Burnouf’s book was based on 147 Sanskrit manuscripts brought back from Nepal in 1824 by Brian Hodgson (see here).

In both cases, and this is crucial, says King, the current manifestations of these religions were seen as ‘degenerate’ versions of a classic original, and in great need of reform. This ‘mystification’ achieved three purposes. One, in viewing the East as ‘degenerate and backward,’ imperialism was justified. Two, insofar as the East was ancient, the West was by comparison ‘modern’ and progressive. Three, the ancient religions of the East satisfied Europe’s nostalgia for origins, very prevalent at the time. Friedrich Schlegel had voiced what many thought when he wrote ‘Everything, yes, everything without exception has its origins in India.’⁸³