I think what I find really interesting in Descent of Man is the way Darwin approaches his continued project of de-centering the human through the use of humor. Though in the context of eugenics and racial sciences much of this book might not seem funny at all, I found there to be quite a bit of humor in the way Darwin draws together the behaviors, structures, and mental faculties of animals with those of humans. A lot of the instances he mentions seem to conjure up human ‘embarrassments’ or moments that could induce shame due to their display of a human in a compromised position. Since a nameless human, or sometimes a human tendency or habit is made the butt of the joke, it tends to provide the chance for a reader’s blush but also recognition of him or herself (probably him, descent of man…) in the humorous situation. Obviously, one of the key examples of this is Darwin’s description of drunken baboons, who experience a morning-after hangover so bad that they wear “a most pitiable expression” and when offered more hair of the dog vehemently refuse to drink it (4). At first it seems that the point is to laugh at the animal-playing-human, “haha, they’re so much like us, how cute!” but as usual, Darwin quickly makes man the butt of his joke: “An American monkey…after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus was wiser than many men. These trifling facts prove how similar the nerves of taste must be in monkeys and man, and how similarly their whole nervous system is affected” (4). Darwin seems to talk about these apes in a conventional anthro-centric way, only to end up elevating the status of the animal for having superior judgment to man on the subject of drinking, and in so doing humble the human, and then finally to bring human and ape to the same level. This strategy of humbling the reader (even the title seems to do this: “descent” of course as descending from some lineage, but also being lowered, or even, falling) began in Origin of the Species, but I think it really works on a much more intimate level here, calling into question the faculty that humans pride so much and that they believe sets them above the animal kingdom: reason and sound judgment.
My personal favorite of these examples, however, is the instance Darwin relates about long canine teeth in humans, and how they reveal a descent from an apelike progenitor. Here Darwin reveals another human blind spot, or embarrassment that we’d rather not like to be reminded of: vanity, especially as it might take the place of belief in something that humbles us. “”He who rejects with scorn the belief that the shape of his own canines, and their occasional great development in other men, are due to our early forefathers having been provided with these formidable weapons, will probably reveal, by sneering, the line of his descent” (31). Darwin’s trick is to say that by disagreeing, despite one’s best efforts to scoff at such an argument, his theory is inevitably proven. There’s no possible way out of his theory as demonstrated by the joke: to deny it only proves its validity, and causes you to display evidence of it, “snarling muscles,” despite your will, and even perhaps your right to believe what you want.
I find it significant that instead of trying to appease the reader by elevating him in some way or speaking his language and structures of feeling like he often did in Origin, Darwin finds it more effective to continue to weaken or attack the reader’s embarrassing weak points, only to convince him of what he already knows about himself in light of new information about his progenitor. That humans are vain, over-confident in their faculty of reason, and often prone to the pleasures and vices of liquor we already know and wish we didn’t about ourselves. Darwin just redirects those trouble spots as being linked not to ‘sinful nature’ or the inherent folly of man but to our descent from an animal progenitor, thus removing the moral burden and replacing it with an arguably neutral ‘natural’ one.
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