Birth of a word

Memorial service for Walther Rathenau (Wikicommons - German Federal Archives). His assassination introduced a new word into French and, shortly after, into English.

 

 

A reader has written me about my last post:

It is extremely unlikely that "racism" is an attempt at translating something like Völkismus. Between Hitler's preference for Rasse (race) over Völk and the fact that the Nazis drew on authors like Chamberlain (whose antisemitism would also tend towards privileging Rasse over Völk) and Gobineau (who wrote in French), there is no support to be found for a derivation that would make "racism" appear to be related to the less virulent of the two strains of German nationalism (the romantic-idealistic one which relished being able to point at linguistic differentiation - like Völk vs. populus/people/peuple - and speculating about vague semantic correlates thereof).

 

The simple fact of the matter is that "racism" is not any kind of translation but just a combination of a widely used term with a lexologically highly productive suffix. Critical use of "racism" basically starts in the 1920s with Théophile Simar. And Hirschfeld, whose book Racism secured wider currency for the term, clearly wanted to espouse an anthropological concept just as much as Boas et. al. did, although he didn't offer any detailed discussion beyond his roundabout rejection of traditional ideas. BTW, Hirschfeld lectured in the U.S. in 1931. While he wrote his German manuscript in 1933/1934, he may well have employed the term "racism" years earlier.

The best authority on this subject is probably Pierre-André Taguieff, who seems to have read everything about racism, racialism, or colorism. He found that continuous use of the word “racism” began in the 1920s, initially in French and shortly after in English. There is little doubt about the historical context:

In a book published late in 1922, Relations between Germany and France, the Germanist historian Henri Lichtenberger introduced the adjective racist in order to characterize the "extremist," "activist," and "fanatical" elements in the circles of the German national and nationalist right as they had just recently been manifested by the assassination in Berlin, on June 24, 1922, of Walther Rathenau:

The right indignantly condemned Rathenau's murder and denied any connection with the murderers. A campaign was even planned to expel from the Nationalist party the agitators of the extreme right known as "Germanists" or "racists," a group (deutschvölkische) whose foremost leaders are Wulle, Henning and von Graefe, and whose secret inspirer is supposed to be Ludendorff.

[...] The context of the term's appearance is significant: the description of the behavior of the "German nationals" and more precisely the "activist," "extreme right" fraction. The adjective racist is clearly presented as a French equivalent of the German word völkische, and always placed in quotation marks. [...] The term, having only just appeared, is already charged with criminalizing connotations.

In 1925, in his reference book L'Allemagne contemporaine, Edmond Vermeil expressly reintroduced the adjective racist to translate the "untranslatable" German term völkische and suggested the identification, which became trivial in the 1930s of (German) racism with nationalist anti-Semitism or with the anti-Jewish tendencies of the nationalist movement in Germany in the 1920s:

 

It is in this way that the National German Party has little by little split into two camps. The "racist" (völkische) extreme right has separated from the party. Racism claims to reinforce nationalism, to struggle on the inside against all that is not German and on the outside for all those who bear the name German. [...] (Taguieff, 2001, pp. 88-89)

 

The term “racist” thus began as an awkward translation of the German völkische to describe ultranationalist parties. Initially, the noun "racism" did not exist, just as there was no corresponding noun in German. It first appeared in 1925, and in 1927 the French historian Marie de Roux used it to contrast his country’s nationalism, based on universal human rights, with radical German nationalism, which recognized no existence for human rights beyond that of the Volk that created them. "Racism [...] is the most acute form of this subjective nationalism," he wrote. The racist rejects universal principles. He does not seek to give the best of his culture to "the treasure of world culture." Instead, the racist says: "The particular way of thinking in my country, the way of feeling that belongs to it, is the absolute truth, the universal truth, and I will not rest or pause before I have ordered the world by law, that of my birth place" (Taguieff, 2001, p. 91-94).

This was the original meaning of "racism," and it may seem far removed from the current meaning. Or maybe not. No matter how we use the word, the Nazi connotation is always there, sometimes lingering in the background, sometimes in plain view.

Conclusion

The noun "racism" was derived in French from an awkward translation of the German adjective völkische. Unlike the original source word, however, it has always had negative and even criminal connotations. It encapsulated everything that was going wrong with German nationalism in a single word and, as such, aggravated a worsening political climate that ultimately led to the Second World War.

When that war ended, the word "racism" wasn't decommissioned. It found a new use in a postwar context of decolonization, civil rights, and Cold War rivalry. Gradually, it took on a life of its own, convincing many people—even today—that the struggle against the Nazis never ended. They're still out there!

 

It would be funny if the consequences weren't so tragic. Our obsession with long-dead Nazis is blinding us to current realities. In Europe, there have been many cases of Jews being assaulted and murdered because they are Jews. These crimes are greeted with indignation about how Europe is returning to its bad ways, and yet in almost every case the assailant turns out to be of immigrant origin, usually North African or sub-Saharan African. At that point, nothing more is said. One can almost hear the mental confusion.

Reference

 

Frost, P. (2013). More thoughts. The evolution of a word, Evo and Proud, May 18

http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2013/05/more-thoughts-evolution-of-word.html

 

Taguieff, P-A. (2001). The Force of Prejudice: On Racism and its Doubles, University of Minnesota Press.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=AcOG6Y9XG40C&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

From Nazi Germany to Middletown: ratcheting up the war on racism

Licensed under public domain via Wikimedia Commons

 

Ruth Benedict (1887-1948), much more than Franz Boas, would define the aims of Boasian anthropology for postwar America.

 

When Franz Boas died in 1942, the leadership of his school of anthropology passed to Ruth Benedict and not to Margaret Mead. This was partly because Benedict was the older of the two and partly because her book Patterns of Culture (1934) had already assumed a key role in defining Boasian anthropology.

The word "define" may surprise some readers. Wasn't Boas a Boasian? Not really. For most of his life he believed that human populations differ innately in their mental makeup. He was a liberal on race issues only in the sense that he considered these differences to be statistical and, hence, no excuse for systematic discrimination. Every population has capable individuals who should be given a chance to rise to the limits of their potential.

He changed his mind very late in life when external events convinced him of the need to fight "racism," at that time a synonym for extreme nationalism in general and Nazism in particular. In 1938, he removed earlier racialist statements from his second edition of The Mind of Primitive Man, and the next year Ruth Benedict wrote Race: Science and Politics to show that racism was more than a Nazi aberration, being in fact an ingrained feature of American life. Both of them saw the coming European conflict as part of a larger war.

 

This is one reason why the war on racism did not end in 1945. Other reasons included a fear that extreme nationalism would lead to a second Hitler and a Third World War. How and why was never clear, but the fear was real. The two power blocs were also competing for the hearts and minds of emerging nations in Asia and Africa, and in this competition the West felt handicapped. How could it win while defining itself as white and Christian? The West thus redefined itself in universal terms and became just as committed as the Eastern bloc to converting the world to its way of life. Finally, the rhetoric of postwar reconstruction reached into all areas of life, even in countries like the U.S. that had emerged unscathed from the conflict. This cultural reconstruction was a logical outcome of the Second World War, which had discredited not just Nazism but also nationalism in general, thereby leaving only right-wing globalism or left-wing globalism. Ironically, this cultural change was weaker in the communist world, where people would remain more conservative in their forms of sociality.

Ruth Benedict backed this change. She felt that America should stop favoring a specific cultural tradition and instead use its educational system to promote diversity. To bring this about, she had to reassure people that a journey through such uncharted waters would not founder on the shoals of unchanging human nature. This fear had been addressed in Patterns of Culture (1934). Inspired by Pavlov’s research on conditioned reflexes, she argued that people are conditioned by their culture to think, feel, and behave in a particular way. This pattern assumes over time such a rigid form that even a student of anthropology will assume it to be innate:

 

He does not reckon with the fact of other social arrangements where all the factors, it may be, are differently arranged. He does not reckon, that is, with cultural conditioning. He sees the trait he is studying as having known and inevitable manifestations, and he projects these as absolute because they are all the materials he has to think with. He identifies local attitudes of the 1930’s with Human Nature […] (Benedict, 1989, p. 9)

 

She argued that such behavioral traits cannot be innate, since they assume different patterns in different human populations and in different time periods of a single population. Our potential for social change is thus greater than what we imagine, being limited only by the range of behavior that exists across all societies. Because we underestimate this potential, we resist social change on the grounds that it would violate a nonexistent human nature:

 

The resistance is in large measure a result of our misunderstanding of cultural conventions, and especially an exaltation of those that happen to belong to our nation and decade. A very little acquaintance with other conventions, and a knowledge of how various these may be, would do much to promote a rational social order. (Benedict, 1989, p. 10)

 

In contradistinction to Boas, who believed that human populations differ innately in various mental and behavioral traits, she argued that cultural evolution had long ago replaced genetic evolution:

 

Man is not committed in detail by his biological constitution to any particular variety of behaviour. The great diversity of social solutions that man has worked out in different cultures in regard to mating, for example, or trade, are all equally possible on the basis of his original endowment. Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex. (Benedict, 1989, p. 14)

 

In short, humans have turned the tables on evolution. Instead of being changed by their environment via natural selection, they redesign it with the tools provided by their culture. To a large degree, humans create their own environment:

 

The human animal does not, like the bear, grow himself a polar coat in order to adapt himself, after many generations, to the Arctic. He learns to sew himself a coat and put up a snow house. From all we can learn of the history of intelligence in pre-human as well as human societies, this plasticity has been the soil in which human progress began and in which it has maintained itself. [...] The human cultural heritage, for better or for worse, is not biologically transmitted. (Benedict, 1989, p. 14)

 

Since human nature is everywhere the same, whatever works in any other culture ought to work in America’s, and this greater diversity should pose no serious problem. This argument would eventually be topped off by American can-doism: if other cultures can cope with some diversity, we can do even better!

 

Much more deviation is allowed to the individual in some cultures than in others, and those in which much is allowed cannot be shown to suffer from their peculiarity. It is probable that social orders of the future will carry this tolerance and encouragement of individual difference much further than any cultures of which we have experience. (Benedict, 1989, p. 273)

 

Such social change would be resisted by Middletown—originally a pseudonym for Muncie, Indiana in two sociological studies, and later a synonym for whitebread small-town America.

 

The American tendency at the present time leans so far to the opposite extreme that it is not easy for us to picture the changes that such an attitude would bring about. Middletown is a typical example of our usual urban fear of seeming in however slight an act different from our neighbours. Eccentricity is more feared than parasitism. Every sacrifice of time and tranquillity is made in order that no one in the family may have any taint of nonconformity attached to him. Children in school make their great tragedies out of not wearing a certain kind of stockings, not joining a certain dancing-class, not driving a certain car. The fear of being different is the dominating motivation recorded in Middletown. (Benedict, 1989, p. 273)

Conclusion

 

Ruth Benedict wrote well, so well that any flaws are easily missed. Much of her reasoning revolved around the concept of cultural conditioning. Just as a dog will salivate on hearing the tinkling of a bell, if associated with food, so people will come to respond unthinkingly and in the same way to a situation that occurs over and over again. Such behavior may seem innate, yet it isn't. This part of her reasoning is true, but it is also true that natural selection tends to hardwire any recurring behavioral response. Mental plasticity has a downside, particularly the risks of responding incorrectly to a situation when one is still learning. It's better to get things right the first time. In sum, conditioned reflexes and innate reflexes both have their place, and one doesn't preclude the other ... for either dogs or humans.

Benedict seems on firmer ground in saying that humans are uniquely able to change the world around themselves. Instead of having to adapt biologically to our environment, we can invent ways to make it adapt to us. It's this manmade environment—our culture—that does the evolving, not our genes. This view used to be widely accepted in anthropology and has been proven false only recently. We now know that cultural evolution actually caused genetic evolution to accelerate. At least 7% of the human genome has changed over the last 40,000 years, and most of that change seems to be squeezed into the last 10,000, when the pace of genetic change was more than a hundred-fold higher (Hawks et al., 2007). By that time, humans were no longer adapting to new physical environments; they were adapting to new cultural environments. Far from slowing down genetic evolution, culture has speeded it up by greatly diversifying the range of circumstances we must adapt to.

Benedict was right in foreseeing a time when tolerance would become a virtue. Yet, strangely enough, Middletown America is no more tolerant today than it was in her time. Americans are simply obeying a new set of rules, whose first commandment is now "Thou shalt not be intolerant."  People are still fearful of being different from their neighbours. It's just that the fears have another basis. People are still insulted for being different. It's just that the insults have changed. "Filthy pervert" has given way to "Dirty homophobe." Mistrust of the stranger has been replaced by mistrust of those who are not inclusive. Pierre-André Taguieff has described this new conformity in France:

 

[...] over the last thirty years of the 20th century, the word "racism" became an insult in everyday language ("racist!" "dirty racist!"), an insult derived from the racist insult par excellence ("dirty nigger!", "dirty Jew!"), and given a symbolic illegitimating power as strong as the political insult "fascist!" or "dirty fascist!". To say an individual is "racist" is to stigmatize him, to assign him to a heinous category, and to abuse him verbally [...] The "racist" individual is thus expelled from the realm of common humanity and excluded from the circle of humans who are deemed respectable by virtue of their intrinsic worth. Through a symbolic act that antiracist sociologists denounce as a way of "racializing" the Other, the "racist" is in turn and in return categorized as an "unworthy" being, indeed as an "unworthy" being par excellence. For, as people say, what can be worse than racism? (Taguieff, 2013, p. 1528)

 

It's hard to believe that the sin of racism did not yet exist in Ruth Benedict's day. The word itself was just starting to enter common use. At most, there was a growing movement for people to be more tolerant, and even that movement was very limited in its aims. "Tolerance" had a much less radical meaning.

Interestingly, Benedict did touch on the reason for Middletown's intolerance. In her book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), she explained that human cultures enforce social rules by means of shame or guilt. You feel ashamed if your wrongdoing is seen by another person. In contrast, you feel guilty even if nobody else has seen it, or even if you merely think about doing wrong. Although all humans have some capacity for both shame and guilt, the relative importance of one or the other varies considerably among individuals and among human populations. "Shame cultures" greatly outnumber "guilt cultures," which are essentially limited to societies of Northwest European origin, like Middletown.

But how does a guilt culture survive? If a few individuals feel no guilt as long as no one is looking, they will have an edge over those who do. Over time, they will proliferate at the expense of the guilt-prone, and the guilt culture will become a shame culture. It seems that this outcome does not happen because the guilt-prone are always looking for signs of deviancy in other individuals, however trifling it may seem. We have here the "broken windows" theory of law enforcement:  if a person tends to break any rule, however minor, he or she will likely break a major one, since the psychological barrier against wrongdoing is similar in both cases. The guilt-prone will judge such people to be morally worthless and will ultimately expel them from the community. Intolerance is the price we pay for the efficiency of a guilt culture.

Today, this mechanism has been turned upon itself. The new social rule—intolerance of intolerance—will, over the not so long term, dissolve the mental makeup that makes a guilt culture possible. Benedict did not foresee this outcome in her own time. Middletown was too set in its ways, too monolithic, too well entrenched. At most, one could hope for a little more leeway for the socially deviant. A few bohemians here, a few oddballs there ... 

 

Ruth Benedict saw Middletown as a difficult case, particularly its extreme guilt culture, and she drew on the language of education and psychotherapy to frame this difficulty in terms of long-term treatment:

 

 […] there can be no reasonable doubt that one of the most effective ways in which to deal with the staggering burden of psychopathic tragedies in America at the present time is by means of an educational program which fosters tolerance in society and a kind of self-respect and independence that is foreign to Middletown and our urban traditions. (Benedict, 1989, pp. 273-274)

They [the Puritans] were the voice of God. Yet to a modern observer it is they, not the confused and tormented women they put to death as witches, who were the psychoneurotics of Puritan New England. A sense of guilt as extreme as they portrayed and demanded both in their own conversion experiences and in those of their converts is found in a slightly saner civilization only in institutions for mental diseases. (Benedict, 1989, p. 276)

 

By the time of her death in 1948, Boasian anthropology had become fully mobilized for the war on racism. This mobilization had begun in response to the rise of Nazi Germany but was soon extended to a much larger enemy that included America itself, as seen in the increasingly radical meanings of “racism” and “tolerance.” Only a determined, long-term effort would bring this enemy to heel.

 

References

Benedict, R. (1989 [1934]). Patterns of Culture, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Benedict, R. (2005 [1946]). The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Patterns of Japanese Culture, First Mariner Books.

Hawks, J., E.T. Wang, G.M. Cochran, H.C. Harpending, & R.K. Moyzis. (2007). Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), 104, 20753-20758.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2410101/ 

 

Taguieff, P-A. (2013). Dictionnaire historique et critique du racisme, Paris: PUF.

The Franz Boas you never knew

 

The anthropologist Franz Boas is remembered for moving the social sciences away from genetic determinism and toward environmental determinism. In reality, he felt that genes do contribute substantially to mental and behavioral differences ... and not just between individuals.

 

 

Most of us identify with certain great teachers of the past: Christ, Marx, Freud … Though long dead, they still influence us and we like to think that their teachings have come down to us intact. We know what they believed … or so we like to think. This raises a problem when we find discrepancies. Jesus was so humble that he resented being called good, since only God is truly good. But then ...

Often, however, the discrepancies remain unknown. They develop too gradually for the average person to notice and are most obvious to those who least want to point them out, i.e., the successors of the great teacher. Of course, the great teacher is no longer around to set things straight.

This has happened to many belief-systems. In my last post, I discussed how the real Sigmund Freud differed significantly from the one we know. The same is true for Franz Boas (1858-1942), whose school of anthropology is as much a product of his immediate disciples—Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict—as of Boas himself.

Today, Boas is remembered as the man who moved the social sciences away from genetic determinism and toward environmental determinism. His Wikipedia entry states:

Boas was one of the most prominent opponents of the then popular ideologies of scientific racism, the idea that race is a biological concept and that human behavior is best understood through the typology of biological characteristics. [...] Boas also worked to demonstrate that differences in human behavior are not primarily determined by innate biological dispositions, but are largely the result of cultural differences acquired through social learning.

In reality, he felt that genes do contribute substantially to mental and behavioral differences ... and not just between individuals. This is apparent in a speech he gave in 1894 under the title "Human Faculty as Determined by Race."

It does not seem probable that the minds of races which show variations in their anatomical structure should act in exactly the same manner. Differences of structure must be accompanied by differences of function, physiological as well as psychological; and, as we found clear evidence of difference in structure between the races, so we must anticipate that differences in mental characteristics will be found.  [...] As all structural differences are quantitative, we must expect to find mental differences to be of the same description, and as we found the variations in structure to overlap, so that many forms are common to individuals of all races, so we may expect that many individuals will not differ in regard to their faculty, while a statistical inquiry embracing the whole races would reveal certain differences. Furthermore, as certain anatomical traits are found to be hereditary in certain families and hence in tribes and perhaps even in peoples, in the same manner mental traits characterize certain families and may prevail among tribes. It seems, however, an impossible undertaking to separate in a satisfactory manner the social and the hereditary features. Galton's attempt to establish the laws of hereditary genius points out a way of treatment for these questions which will prove useful in so far as it opens a method of determining the influence of heredity upon mental qualities (Boas, 1974, p. 239)

We have shown that the anatomical evidence is such, that we may expect to find the races not equally gifted. While we have no right to consider one more ape-like than the other, the differences are such that some have probably greater mental vigor than others. The variations are, however, such that we may expect many individuals of all races to be equally gifted, while the number of men and women of higher ability will differ. (Boas, 1974, p. 242) 

 When discussing brain size, Boaz merely pointed to the overlap among racial groups:

We find that 50 per cent of all whites have a capacity of the skull greater than 1550 cc., while 27 per cent of the negroes and 32 per cent of the Melanesians have capacities above this value. We might, therefore, anticipate a lack of men of high genius, but should not anticipate any great lack of faculty among the great mass of negroes living among whites and enjoying the advantages of the leadership of the best men of that race. (Boas, 1974, pp. 233-234)

He did add that "mental ability certainly does not depend upon the size of the brain alone." He then argued, quoting an authority, that the encephalon and the cortex develop to a greater degree in whites, especially after puberty:

When we compare the capacity for education between the lower and higher races, we find that the great point of divergence is at adolescence and the inference is fairly good that we shall not find in the brains of the lower races the post-pubertal growth in the cortex to which I have just alluded. (Boas, 1974, p. 234)

Boas would return to this topic, such as in this 1908 speech on "Race Problems in America":

I do not believe that the negro is, in his physical and mental make-up, the same as the European. The anatomical differences are so great that corresponding mental differences are plausible. There may exist differences in character and in the direction of specific aptitudes. There is, however, no proof whatever that these differences signify any appreciable degree of inferiority of the negro, notwithstanding the slightly inferior size, and perhaps lesser complexity of structure, of his brain; for these racial differences are much less than the range of variation found in either race considered by itself. (Boas, 1974, pp. 328-329)

All of these remarks must be judged in context. Boaz was trying to stake out a reasonable middle ground in opposition to the view that human races differ not only in degree but also in kind. There is also little doubt about his opposition to racial discrimination, which he felt was holding back many capable African Americans.

But he did not feel that equality of opportunity would lead to equality of results. This was the middle ground he defended, and it is far removed from today's middle ground. The two don't even overlap. What happened between then and now?

Something critical seems to have happened in the late 1930s. When Boas prepared the second edition of The Mind of Primitive Man (1938), he removed his earlier racialist statements. The reason was likely geopolitical. As a Jewish American seeing the rise of Nazi Germany, he may have felt that the fight against anti-Semitism would require a united front against all forms of “racism”—a word just starting to enter common use and initially a synonym for Nazism.

Boas died in 1942 and the leadership of his school of anthropology fell to Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. With the end of the war, both of them wished to pursue and even escalate the fight against racism. Escalation was favored by several aspects of the postwar era: lingering fears of a revival of anti-Semitism, competition between the two power blocs for the hearts and minds of the Third World, and an almost utopian desire to rebuild society—be it through socialism, social democracy, or new liberalism … In all this, we are no longer in the realm of science, let alone anthropology.

 

Boas had sought to strike a new balance between nature and nurture in the study of Man. The war intervened, however, and Boasian anthropology was conscripted to fight not only the Axis but also racism in any form. Today, three-quarters of a century later, we’re still fighting that war.

 

References

Boas, F. (1974). A Franz Boas Reader. The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911, G.W. Stocking Jr. (ed.), Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

 

Wikipedia (2014). Franz Boas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Boas

Still missing the point

Occurrences of ‘Blumenbach’ in published writings. After a peak in the early 19th century, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach faded into the background. He had little influence on the thinking of later anthropologists. (source) 

 

Stephen Jay Gould believed that the Western world view had been perverted by the racial theorizing of anthropologists in the 18th and 19th centuries, one of them being the American anthropologist Samuel George Morton (1799-1851). Another was his German contemporary Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840):

In the eighteenth century a disastrous shift occurred in the way Westerners perceived races. The man responsible was Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, one of the least racist thinkers of his day.

[…] Blumenbach chose to regard his own European variety as closest to the created ideal and then searched for the subset of Europeans with greatest perfection--the highest of the high, so to speak. As we have seen, he identified the people around Mount Caucasus as the closest embodiments of the original ideal and proceeded to name the entire European race for its finest representatives.

[…] however subjective (and even risible) we view the criterion today, Blumenbach chose physical beauty as his guide to ranking. He simply affirmed that Europeans were most beautiful, with Caucasians as the most comely of all.

[…] Where would Hitler have been without racism, Jefferson without liberty? Blumenbach lived as a cloistered professor all his life, but his ideas have reverberated in ways that he never could have anticipated, through our wars, our social upheavals, our sufferings, and our hopes. (Gould, 1994)

As Gould himself noted, Blumenbach denied that human populations differ in mental capacity. In this, he was less racist than many other people of his day. But he did posit differences in sexual beauty, thus ultimately leading humanity to … Hitler.

Is this true? Yes, Blumenbach considered Europeans the most attractive of all humans, as we may see in his work De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa:

Caucasian variety. Colour white, cheeks rosy, hair brown or chestnut-coloured [...] In general, that kind of appearance which, according to our opinion of symmetry, we consider most handsome and becoming. (Blumenbach, 1795, p. 265)

Meiners refers all nations to two stocks: (1) handsome, (2) ugly; the first white, the latter dark. He includes in the handsome stock the Celts, Sarmatians, and oriental nations. The ugly stock embraces all the rest of mankind. (Blumenbach, 1795, p. 268)

Caucasian variety. I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighbourhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; and because all physiological reasons converge to this, that in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones of mankind. For in the first place, that stock displays, as we have seen, the most beautiful form of the skull, from which, as from a mean and primeval type, the others diverge by most easy gradations on both sides to the two ultimate extremes (that is on the one side, the Ethiopian, on the other, the Mongolian) […] (Blumenbach, 1795, p. 269)

These passages, however, covered less than a page out of a tome that ran to 276 pages. Nor did they recount anything new in the academic or popular literature. Blumenbach simply stated what most people of his time believed, as is implied by the above quotes. One likeminded person was the French naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832):

The white race, with its oval face, long hair, protruding nose, to which the civilized peoples of Europe belong, and which appears to us to be the most beautiful of all races, is also much superior to the others by strength of genius, courage and activity. (Cuvier, 1798, p. 71)

Another was the American President Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826):

And is this difference [of color] of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them […] (Jefferson, 1785, p. 265)

Blumenbach did not create a perception that Europeans were more beautiful than other humans. That perception already existed.

Influences on later anthropologists?

But was Blumenbach instrumental in transmitting this perception to later anthropologists? Did he play a pivotal role in creating the racialized mind-set of later times? That, too, is doubtful. There is a chasm between him and his successors. Unlike the latter, he saw human diversity through the lens of the Bible, in particular the story of the Flood. Since Noah’s Ark came to rest on Mount Ararat, he reasoned that the inhabitants of that region must closely resemble the humans that God chose to repeople the Earth. From this epicenter of physical perfection, Noah’s descendants spread to other lands and gradually became less perfect in appearance.

This view is quite unlike later ones, which were framed in secular and evolutionary terms. For Blumenbach, change was degenerative, moving from the perfect to the less perfect. Later anthropologists, while accepting the possibility of degenerative change, saw a general trend towards advancement and increasing complexity.

Like others of his time, Blumenbach also believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. If people of any origin share the same climate, diet, and means of existence, they will converge to the same physical type—not through natural selection, but through the direct action of the environment. In this, he was poles apart from later writers, particularly those influenced by Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel.

The chasm between him and later writers can be seen in the occurrence of the term ‘Blumenbach’ in books over the years. After a peak in the early 19th century, references to his name fell into steep decline, long before the publication of Darwin’s Descent of Man in 1871 (Hawks, 2013). That book had only four such references, all of them minor.

Finally, European writers do not assign this German naturalist a key role in the development of racial thinking. In a recent French dictionary on the history of racism, there are entries for such individuals as Bolk, Buffon, Darwin, Gobineau, Haeckel, Nietzsche, and Linnaeus, but none at all for Blumenbach (Taguieff, 2013).

Famous but no real legacy

Blumenbach, though widely respected in his time, made few intellectual contributions that would be both lasting and original, other than his coining of the term ‘Caucasian’ for white folks. What about the notion that the Caucasus is the epicenter of human beauty? It was already in circulation, as seen in this passage by the French traveler Jean Chardin (1643-1713):

[…] the Persian blood is now highly refined by frequent intermixtures with the Georgians and the Circassians, two nations which surpass all the world in personal beauty. There is hardly a man of rank in Persia who is not born of a Georgian or Circassian mother; and even the king himself is commonly sprung, on the female side, from one or other of these countries. As it is long since this mixture commenced, the Persian women have become very handsome and beautiful, though they do not rival the ladies of Georgia (Lawrence, 1848, p. 310)

The Caucasus was the last area where one could freely buy fair-skinned women for marriage or concubinage, typically for clients in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Previously, the zone of recruitment had been larger, extending into what is now Ukraine and southern Russia. Further back in time, it had covered almost all of Europe. But this earlier page of European history was largely forgotten by Blumenbach’s time.

Blumenbach really had only one original idea. He saw a causal link between the biblical account of the Flood and the beauty of European women, particularly those from the Caucasus. But that single flash of insight would leave no lasting impression on future generations.

More shenanigans …

None of this was pointed out in 1994, when Stephen Jay Gould published his essay on Blumenbach. Or perhaps it was. If a man shouts in a forest and no one listens, did he ever really say anything?

Two years later, Gould incorporated this essay into a new edition of The Mismeasure of Man. Once again, he couldn’t resist the urge to “fudge”:

In 1996, when Gould updated The Mismeasure of Man, he added an article about Blumenbach. It included a drawing of skulls which Gould claimed to be an illustration from one of Blumenbach’s books. In this graphic, a Caucasian skull is situated higher than those of other races. When a paper by University of Tubingen historian Thomas Junker demonstrated that the original drawing placed all the skulls at the same level, Gould blamed the mistake on his editor saying, “I don’t think that I even knew about the figure when I wrote the article, for I worked from a photocopy of Blumenbach’s text alone.” Gould dismissed this error as “inconsequential” and faulted Junker for misstating “the central thesis of my article—a misinterpretation that cannot, I think, be attributed to any lack of clarity on my part.” (Michael, 2013)

One might wonder why Gould missed this error when he got the galley proofs for the new edition. Furthermore, since his errors point in the same direction, one might wonder whether there had been a systematic tendency to distort the facts, either consciously or unconsciously. Wasn’t this the same argument he had made when condemning Samuel George Morton?

References

Blumenbach, J.F. (1795). De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa, trans. On the Natural Variety of Mankind, 1865, London.

Cuvier, G. (1798). Tableau elementaire de l'histoire naturelle des animaux, Paris.

Gould, S.J. (1994). The Geometer of Race, Discover Magazine, (November 1994), online edition http://discovermagazine.com/1994/nov/thegeometerofrac441#.UOGEqXcdOZQ

Jefferson, T. (1785). Notes on the State of Virginia,

http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=JefVirg.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=14&division=div1

Hawks, J. (2013). Blumenbach, Haeckel, Dobzhansky, January 2, John Hawks Weblog,

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/history/biology/blumenbach-haeckel-dobzhansky-2013.html

Lawrence, W. (1848). Lectures on Comparative Anatomy, Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man, London: Henry G. Bohn.

Michael, J.S. (2013). Stephen Jay Gould and Samuel George Morton: A Personal Commentary, Part 4, June. 14, Michael1988.com

http://michael1988.com/?p=203

Taguieff, P.-A. (ed.) (2013). Dictionnaire historique et critique du racisme, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

More thoughts. The evolution of a word

 

Are you assaulting me because I’m White?

How do you react to this poster? Is it antiracist or racist? Why?

The word “racist” is so common today that you may have trouble imagining a time when neither the word nor the concept existed. Yet such a time did exist, and not so long ago.

The first appearances of this word seem to date to the 1920s, in both English and French. At that time “racist” was a translation of the German völkisch and, as such, referred to the “blood and soil” nationalism so prevalent in Germany and in other countries that looked to Germany as a model (Taguieff, 2013, p. 1528). It remained a rather esoteric term during the interwar years, being narrow not only in its range of meaning but also in the political spectrum of those who used it—essentially the left, if not the far left.(1)

All of this changed with the Second World War. At first, the word “racist” was used mainly in postwar Europe—as part of the effort to root out ex-Nazis and their collaborators. Bit by bit, however, it became more widely used elsewhere, particularly in the contexts of race relations in the United States and colonialism in Africa and Asia. It also began to appear in the emerging context of Afro-Asian immigration to Western Europe. “Racists” were no longer Nazis. They could in fact be people who had valiantly fought against Nazi Germany.

Yet there were certain unspoken limits. By and large, this word was not directed against non-Europeans. Even today, it just doesn’t sound right when applied to a man with brown or black skin, no matter how intolerant he might be. A racist should at least look like a Nazi.

Besides becoming broader in meaning, this term also became less descriptive and more pejorative. It took on a highly emotional intent, even more so than words like “bastard!” or “liar!” Pierre-André Taguieff describes this transformation:

[…] over the last thirty years of the 20^th century, the word “racism” became an insult in everyday language (“racist!” “dirty racist!”), an insult derived from the racist insult par excellence (“dirty nigger!”, “dirty Jew!”), and given a symbolic illegitimating power as strong as the political insult “fascist!” or “dirty fascist!”. To say an individual is “racist” is to stigmatize him, to assign him to a heinous category, and to abuse him verbally […] The “racist” individual is thus expelled from the realm of common humanity and excluded from the circle of humans who are deemed respectable by virtue of their intrinsic worth. Through a symbolic act that antiracist sociologists denounce as a way of “racializing” the Other, the “racist” is in turn and in return categorized as an “unworthy” being, indeed as an “unworthy” being par excellence. For, as people say, what can be worse than racism? (Taguieff, 2013, p. 1528)

What can be worse than racism? The question would have been incomprehensible a hundred years ago—and not just because the word didn’t exist yet. The underlying concept didn’t exist. People did not consider it sinful to prefer the company of their kith and kin. Nor did they consider it unfair to judge non-kith and non-kin by a higher standard. Such individuals existed outside one’s moral community and could not be trusted to the same degree as someone within it. So where’s the unfairness? And where’s the sin?

Note

 

1. The first author to use the term raciste seems to have been Leo Trotsky in his work Histoire de la revolution russe (1930), in which he applied it to traditionalist Russian slavophiles. During the late 1930s, and with the rise of Nazism, it became much more negative than the German term it had originally translated, so much so that a German anti-Nazi, Magnus Hirschfeld, introduced it into German for his work Rassismus. His book then appeared in English translation under the title Racism (1938). This was the first appearance of the term “racism” in the title of a book, and it was really at that point in time that it entered the language of academics and political activists (Taguieff, 2013, p. 844; Wikipedia, 2013).

References

 

Taguieff, P-A. (2013). Dictionnaire historique et critique du racisme, Paris: PUF.

 

Wikipedia (2013). Racisme - Étymologie

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racisme#cite_note-10

 

 

Thoughts on the Paris spring

Antifa badge (Norway). Antiracism is now part of a legally enforced system of values and norms. Its followers are surreptitiously becoming the underlings of authority, even to the point of becoming a secret police that does the regrettable but necessary “dirty work.” (source)

 

Something is happening in France. Will this “Paris spring” end up like the Prague Spring of 1968? Or more like the Velvet Revolution of 1989? One thing is sure. There is a greater willingness to speak out on various taboo subjects, one of which is race and racism.

This may be seen in a soon-to-be-published book, Dictionnaire historique et critique du racisme, which shifts the spotlight of critical analysis from racism to antiracism. Its editor, Pierre-André Taguieff, chooses his words carefully. As he points out, “antiracism” is not just a word but also a norm, and one cannot objectively describe a norm without offending those who feel bound by it. To be objective is to blur the distinction between Good and Evil.

Pierre-André resolves this dilemma by arguing that antiracism has violated its own stated norms. It has abandoned its original values of doubt, debate, criticism, and free enquiry. It has moved out of the academy and into the police department. It has become the antithesis of what it once was.

He describes this reversal, and why it came about:

[Since WWII] Western antiracism has taken the form of an ongoing anti-Nazism, or of a neo-anti-Nazism in search of "neo-Nazis" who are believed to carry the racist ideology. Hence the temptation to "Nazify" all phenomena perceived as being racist, beginning with nationalist movements of whatever sort. Shaped by anti-Nazi activism, the antiracism of the 1950s to 1970s was governed by the conviction that racist views [thèses racistes] were errors due to ignorance or to the power of prejudices, errors that scientists could and must rectify after denouncing them. When not a villain, a racist could be only an ignorant person, a man who was misleading himself or who had been misled. The good news of antiracist activists could be summed up in one sentence: racism was not in any way “scientific.” Antiracism was defined ideally as a fight that the Enlightened were waging against the darkness of ignorance or false ideas—the historical incarnation par excellence being the racism of the Nazis and the racism of colonial regimes (during the era of decolonization). This antiracism, incarnated by the authorized discourse of biologists (and geneticists in particular), has thus long dominated antiracist practices since the first UNESCO declarations in the early 1950s. “Scientific” antiracism embraced an ideal that flowed from rationalist humanism: through instruction and education, we shall create a world where, with the disappearance of errors, prejudices, and illusions, racism will survive only as an archaism, a relic of the past, a past we have fortunately transcended.

This faith that racism will inevitably wither away seems to have evaporated. Antiracist activism has gone from historical optimism to anthropological pessimism. If the racist is no longer an ignorant person but rather a villain, and if he is defined by his impulses or negative passions (hate, aggressive intolerance, etc.), then the evil is in him, and his case seems hopeless. The antiracist’s task is no longer to lead the "racist" towards goodness, but rather to isolate him as a carrier of evil. The "racist" must be singled out and stigmatized. The task is now only to make him powerless by imposing legal penalties, at the risk of reestablishing ideological censorship and limiting freedom of expression.

[…] With racism being illegal and illicit, and with antiracism now part of a legally enforced system of values and norms, antiracists have also ceased to stand for criticism and questioning. Through a related process, antiracist organizations are no longer functioning as an opposition to authority. They are surreptitiously becoming the underlings [auxiliaires] of authority.

[…] As the fight against racism becomes increasingly State-owned and professionalized, many antiracists have lost their status as freethinkers who oppose authority, and antiracism has taken on the face of repressive policing. Is there not a risk that the hyper-legalism of contemporary antiracism is leading it into hyper-conformism? Are antiracists forsaking the Sorbonne for the police department? Are they drifting away from the fight for justice and truth, preferring instead the dreary hunt for delinquents who say or write the wrong things? (Taguieff, 2013)

Like Pierre-André, I was once involved in the antiracist movement. Like him, I deplore the totalitarian turn it has taken. I am less sanguine, however, about the prospects for returning it to its original values. Once antiracism had secured a monopoly over intellectual discourse, it no longer needed to engage in intellectual debate, and its priority naturally became one of maintaining this monopoly. Why should antiracism now jeopardize its privileged status by engaging in self-criticism and allowing debate, or even doubt? To be true to its original values? But those values were situational, a compromise between long-term goals and the realities of the moment. Circumstances change, and it’s not at all unusual for an ideology to go from a libertarian stage to a totalitarian one.

Yes, the reverse can also happen … sometimes. In such cases, however, the real reason is not a desire to return to original values. It’s a growing conviction, particularly among the intelligentsia, that something has gone terribly wrong and that a change in direction is imperative. Typically, the only way to legitimize the new direction is to make it seem consistent with original values. 

This was the case with the short-lived Prague Spring:

Those who drafted the Action Programme were careful not to criticize the actions of the post-war Communist regime, only to point out policies that they felt had outlived their usefulness. For instance, the immediate post-war situation had required "centralist and directive-administrative methods" to fight against the "remnants of the bourgeoisie." Since the "antagonistic classes" were said to have been defeated with the achievement of socialism, these methods were no longer necessary (Wikipedia, 2013)

That strategy worked well enough inside Czechoslovakia. Outside, not so well. The Prague Spring was brutally crushed by the other members of the Warsaw Pact. For the next twenty years, that country’s leaders, like those elsewhere in Eastern Europe, maintained the status quo by making consumer goods more available (at the cost of a growing mountain of debt) and by controlling intellectual dissent more effectively.

Which scenario will play out in France? An abortive Prague Spring or a more promising Velvet Revolution? Much will depend on what goes on in the minds of our antiracist friends. When I ask them about the need for debate and self-criticism, I typically get a blank look. Debate? What is there to debate? Criticism? What is there to criticize? Most of them prefer to think in terms of stricter control and surveillance. If France, or any European country, does abandon globalism, or simply moves away from it, they will be clamoring for intervention by an outside power. Just like in Prague, 1968.

References

Mahler, T. (2013). Taguieff : le racism a son encyclopédie, May 9, Le Point, pp. 2-4

Taguieff, P-A. (2013). Dictionnaire historique et critique du racisme, Paris: PUF.

Taguieff, P-A. (2013). Réflexions sur la « lutte contre le racisme. », May 7, Le Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/pierreandre-taguieff/lutte-contre-le-racisme_b_2915909.html?utm_hp_ref=france

Wikipedia (2013). Prague Spring

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Spring