6.9 The Means of Accomplishing part 9

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829)

The Norwegian Code of the Realm (1274) shows the impact of Christian doctrine on women’s authority and autonomy. The code set standards protecting commoners from the power of the wealthy. It reflected principles protecting women similar to those in northern Germanic and Scandinavian systems. But it left the control of marriage and divorce to the Church. The pressure to morally diminish women leached into Norwegian culture and the other countries influenced by the Code of the Realm.

There was a comparative stability, but not equality, of men’s and women’s rights in Western Europe and Britain from the time of the Magna Carta (1215) until the Age of Enlightenment (1650). Even with Enlightenment, Locke’s partial recognition of women’s autonomy for example, the concern of proper society remained constraining women.

Western society’s restriction of women’s rights has been multilayered. British social classes were rigid. The concern about women’s behavior that survives in the historical record focused primarily on elite women, secondarily middle class women. The world of lower class women is largely lost. A second layer, the differences between urban and rural communities, lessened in Britain with its set land border and the gradual enclosure of it. The vast western expansion in America buffered the country for a century from the damage Britain’s closed economic system imposed on paid labor. A third layer was the industrial revolution (1760). For nearly a century Britain lead the industrial world. When American industrialization expanded, its impact was less dramatic. Half the U.S. population was rural/agricultural until the Great Depression. Extra sons on a farm were economic assets. Sons in the city became economically neutral or a debits.

The Enlightenment fractured the Great Chain of Being, the old justification for the order of the world. The death of Divine Right forced early conservatives, including Burke and de Maistre, to create new justification defending social inequality. Understanding the new justification requires changing the question that needs answering. The old question had been “what exists?” or “how did it come to be?” The conservative answer was God. The insightful question is, “Whose interests does this new ‘thing’ serve?” So what new “Thing”?

The Justification of Subjugation

To remain in power after the loss of the Great Chain of Being the wealthy had to find new justifications for hierarchy and human inequality. Despite fragmenting, Christianity remained a defender of social hierarchy, but it no longer controlled governments as directly. Political governments needed new beliefs to justify the subjugation of conquered populations and women. By what fact of nature do white men rightfully rule the world?

The (re)discovery of the New World and colonization around the world created a moral-political crisis. Britain was exceptionally good at conquering then looting countries around the world. For example when Britain arrived, India was the richest country in the world. After it became a British colony, Britain managed to transfer ninety percent of India’s wealth to the home island by practices as blatant as forcing Indian farmers to send their raw cotton to English mills, then forcing Indian women to buy Britain’s mill cotton to make their saris.

Again, the important question is not “What happened,” but “How did Europe and Britain justify colonialism and the subjugation of whole populations?” Given the theft, call it massive displacement of wealth, the custodians of political morality seem compelled to justify their actions to prove their actions to be moral and necessary. The basic principle in justifying the subjugation of distant lands, people of color, and women was to define them as “other.”

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) developed the idea of “noble savage” in his essay Of Cannibals (1580). Paraphrased, indigenous peoples could be honorable despite being inferior. Locke rejected the idea that any race or gender was inherently superior to others, every human beginning with the same blank slate of knowledge (tabula rasa). Locke’s idea of “improving landlord,” however, provided an excuse for seizing any land and resources that weren’t being improved (exploited) by European standards (1690). In Ancient Society (1877) Lewis Henry Morgan claimed that societies developed in a set progression: “savagery,” “barbarism,” and “civilization.” Those limited minds and societies provided justification for governing lands and peoples for their own protection. Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden,” (1899) moralized seizing lands, resources and subjugating non-white populations until they achieved British-European standards.

European, British, and American social philosophers’ provided a “scientific theory” proving the genetic superiority of whites males. With a few modifications “scientific racism” stretched to subjugate women as protection of the weaker sex. Higher quality research rejected scientific racism, but of the ideas developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it was the most useful for justifying traditional inequality.

Contrary to popular convention evolution was an accepted theory. There were several theories of evolution because evolution made sense to farmers who carefully bread the livestock.¹ Further, these evolution theories were not created to solve the moral problem of subjugation. They were academic exercises in explaining the world. The ones that survived were not the best. They ones supported by governments and universities, were the ones that were most useful politically. They justified the social hierarchy.

In 1809 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) published Philosophie Zoologique, the foundation work in evolutionary theory. It was groundbreaking but also fundamentally wrong. The is a normal part of scientific advancement. The problem is that theory has been so useful politically those errors still guide government and educational policies. Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Graham Crackers were created because of Lamarck’s theory. It provided the modern, scientific justification for racism. It provided the scientific justification for removing upperclass and middle class women from public involvement lest they devolve.

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While I had not intended this diversion, a deeper review of Baptiste’s and Herbert Spencer’s works seems necessary. Although not mentioned by him Philosophie Zoologique is a foundation of Spencer’s work including Social Statics (1851), which Rand Paul, but not sociologists, considers the best book on social-political philosophy. Spencer’s justification of the Gilded Age is the society conservatives and the originalist Supreme Court Justices intend to restore.

1 Darwin’s theory of evolution was rejected for three principle reasons. One, rather than God guiding evolution like farmers pairing livestock, Darwin identified natural selection. Two, Darwin saw all races having a single ancestry, not the product of the, then four, then five race creations. Three,