Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart' and Darwin's Influence

Read the entire book Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.
Answer five questions, preparing bullet points while reading and then expanding them into 1-2 paragraph responses.
Use direct quotes from the book to support your arguments.

Explore the balance between individual desires and community expectations within Igbo society.
Consider whether individual or community values are emphasized and how this compares to Western liberalism.
Think about how individual agency and communal responsibility interact.

Define pantheism as a worldview where the secular and spiritual are interconnected.
Explain how this contrasts with perspectives that sharply separate the material and spiritual realms.
Identify examples in the book demonstrating the fluid boundary between the living, the dead, the spiritual, and the secular.

Analyze the roles of the two missionaries in the book.
Determine which missionary embodies social Darwinist ideas and which embodies scientific racism.

Examine gender roles within Igbo society as social constructs.
Discuss the division of labor, expectations for males and females, and whether the society is patriarchal.
Acknowledge that patriarchy is a general idea of male control and consider potential exceptions within Igbo society.

Interpret the meaning behind the title Things Fall Apart.
Discuss what aspects of Igbo society, culture, or values are disintegrating.
Explain why these elements are falling apart and the implications of this collapse.

Liberalism is a political philosophy important to the development of republicanism, democracy, and capitalism.
It emphasizes the individual as paramount in the legitimacy of the state, based on a social contract.
Liberalism promotes equal opportunity, not equal division of things, aiming for a level playing field where individuals can advance through meritocracy.
It values a wide diversity of intellectual thought.

Liberalism is related to the idea that mankind is improving and getting better.
- Central to this belief in progress is that ideas, the best ideas can really help us move forward.
Form before content argues the deduction, the way we think about things in our mind helps push mankind forward.
Induction is empiricism, which is the idea that truth is not only the way we think about it, but truth is inductively established through empiricism.
Scientific method involves both deduction (hypothesis) and empiricism (testing).

Darwin challenged the liberal belief in the march of ideas by emphasizing material, biological factors in progress through evolution.
Darwin prioritized empiricism, advocating for observation and evidence before deductive reasoning.
Darwin began by saying, show me the empiricism first.
Darwin really shakes things up by saying progress is about biological material things connected to evolution.

Natural selection says progress is done through random mutation.

Darwin's concept of natural selection posits that successful interaction with the environment is due to genetic predispositions from random mutations.
Germinal ideas (core DNA) are inherited and determine one's predisposition to prosper or suffer.
Individuals do not adapt and pass on physiological adaptations acquired during their lifetime.
Darwin's theory challenges the idea that progress is solely based on the life of the mind.

The influence of Darwin was so profound that it became necessary to utilize Darwinian terminology within contemporary epistemological circles.

Pseudoscience: False science.
Theorists borrowed language from Lamarck, who incorrectly proposed that groups acquire characteristics and pass them on.

*Social Darwinism is a pseudo scientific social theory.

It applies "survival of the fittest" to human societies, framing international relations as a competition between racial types.
Race is an inconsequential genetic trait.

Scientific racism is a pseudo scientific that focuses on race.

A softer idea that acknowledges a hierarchy of races but suggests that uplift is possible through the civilizing mission of European imperialism.
It assumes white imperial Europe stands at the top of the hierarchy.
Scientific racism presupposes racial difference, but it is not necessarily permanent.

Imperial powers never provided a timetable for when colonized peoples would be considered "uplifted" or ready for self-governance, a problem that caused the empire to end.

The Congress of Berlin (1884-1885) exemplified scientific racism, dividing Africa into European colonies.
The document from the Congress of Berlin is deeply rooted in uplift and tutelage.

Before the Congress of Berlin, Europe had limited knowledge and influence in sub-Saharan Africa due to disease impediments such as malaria.
By 1880, after the Congress of Berlin, every part of Africa was divided into European colonies.
The main mission moved beyond the missionary mission of uplift and was ran through order and discipline.