2nd Half of Part 5: The Age of Racism

Hello again my friends,

I am growing to love the way Marc Aronson leads up to his arguments. It’s always the same sort of thing; he begins every chapter exactly the way a non-fiction book would be written. Then, towards the end of the read, he clarifies the connection and I feel a sudden jolt of enlightenment. For the sake of using simple terms, it’s a surprise when the clarification comes.

Now.... I suppose an example would be helpful. Since I’m reflecting on chapters 13, 14, and 15 in this blog post, I’ll pull examples from them.

Chapter 13: Survival of the Fittest
          As a portion of you might have guessed by the title, this chapter began with a rundown on who Charles Darwin was, and what he dedicated his time to doing. Aronson tells of how his ideas were highly controverial, mentioning that Darwin delayed revealing his discoveries for 20 years because he was afriad of the reactions people would have (pg. 175).
          Next, Aronson explains the impacts Darwin’s ideas had when he did reveal them. He particularly goes into depth on how people such as Francis Galton (Darwin’s cousin) took Darwin’s ideas and used them for strange implications. Galton took Dalton’s ideas and applied them to people, rather that what Dalton had intended: application to the natural world (pg. 177).
          Now that the concept of traits being passed from parents to children was scientifically established, Dalton wanted to beleive society could improve if the people with worse traits were kept from having children and conequentally die off.

My jolt of enlightenment happened was when on page 84, Aronson connects Galton’s idea of genetically inferior people with the prejudice against jews. Now I understood why Aronson brought up “survival of the fittest” at all. Ot was becuase, ultimately Dalton’s work increases the severity of racism in the world by providing a supposedly scientific background, rather than just the opinions of racist people.



I’m going to leave it at just the one example from chapter 13 so as to avoid boring you all. Plus, I feel like I went overboard explaining that one. Just be aware that the pattern of arguent formation exists in every chapter somehow.

The one other thing I’d like to share today is how I feel this can connect to what I said in my previous post about people feeling the need to be superior. I think that in Galton’s case, it is really the same idea: he wants to be superior. The scale is just larger, because he is trying to make his race superior, not just himself.

Later in the section, I read about Adolf Hitler’s actions. This was essentially the same concept. Overall, I can clearly see that Aronson intended that the big takeaway of Part 5 is that any development in history that eatablished a difference between groups caused those groups to separate even further, in some instances going to extreme levels.

If I could request anything of you as you read my blog, I would ask that you choose never to hate people. It just seems to me that that is the reason wars and other large social conflicts erupt: because on the basic level, too many individuals decide to have hatred for one another.

Okay that’s a wrap!

-Simon S. Page