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Winter
1997
The Landscape of Destiny
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7
Probably
the commonest explanation of how some people came to dominate other
people involves implicitly or explicitly assuming biological differences
among peoples. In the centuries after A.D. 1500, as European explorers
became aware of the wide differences among the world's peoples in
technology and political organization, they assumed that those differences
arose from differences in innate ability. With the rise of Darwinian
theory, explanations were recast in terms of natural selection and
of evolutionary descent. Technologically primitive people were considered
evolutionary vestiges of human descent from apelike ancestors. The
displacement of such peoples by colonists from industrialized societies
exemplified the survival of the fittest. With the later rise of
genetics, the explanations were recast once again, in genetic terms.
Europeans became considered genetically more intelligent than Africans,
and especially more so than Aboriginal Australians.
Today,
segments of Western society publicly repudiate racism. Yet many
(perhaps most!) Westerners continue to accept racist explanations
privately or subconsciously. In Japan and many other countries,
such explanations are still advanced publicly and without apology.
Even educated white Americans, Europeans and Australians, when the
subject of Australian Aborigines comes up, assume that there is
something primitive about the Aborigines themselves. They certainly
look different from whites. Many of the living descendants of those
Aborigines who survived the era of European colonization are now
finding it difficult to succeed economically in white Australian
society.
A seemingly
compelling argument goes as follows: White immigrants to Australia
built a literate, industrialized, politically centralized, democratic
state based on metal tools and on food production, all within a
century of colonizing a continent where the Aborigines had been
living as tribal hunter-gatherers without metal for at least 40,000
years. Here were two successive experiments in human development,
in which the environment was identical and the sole variable was
the people occupying that environment. What further proof could
be wanted to establish that the differences between Aboriginal Australian
and European societies arose from differences between the peoples
themselves?
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