Author: Wilmot Robertson
Source: The Dispossessed Majority (1981), Chapter 3
The concept of race and the racial ideologies that flow from it permeated the great civilizations of antiquity. The Bible divided the races of mankind into the sons of Shem (Semites), Ham (non-Semitic Mediterraneans),[1] and Japhet (Northern peoples). Among the sons of Shem were the Jews, who were warned by Jehovah to preserve their racial identity, as they were "a special people unto himself, above all the people that are upon the face of the earth."[2]
The Aryans who invaded India were so concerned with race that they set up a complex caste system, by means of which the priestly Brahmans partially succeeded in preserving their original physical type for more than 2,500 years, although their once fair complexions, as a result of mutations and some miscegenation are now better adapted to the blasting Indian sun.[3] The tomb and temple paintings of the ancient Egyptians depicted a simpler and less sophisticated form of racism. The gods and pharaohs were larger than life, whereas Negroes and other outlanders were posed in cringing obeisance.[4]
As might be expected, the Greeks were the first to look for natural causes of racial differences and to philosophize about racial matters. Hippocrates' essay, On Airs, Waters and Places, gave climate and geography as possible reasons for variations in human physiology and temperament.[5] Plato thought it would be good to inculcate a feeling of racial purity in youths destined for the future leadership of the commonwealth. Such an idea, which he described as a "noble lie," would develop a greater measure of pride and responsibility in the young elite—qualities which presumably made for better statesmanship.[6] On the other hand, Aristotle helped institutionalize slavery with his theory of the "natural-born" slave.[7]
Full-blown "scientific" racial theories, however, did not take form for another 2,000 years. It was not until the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century that enough data had been collected to permit a few intrepid anthropologists and biologists to categorize mankind according to race. Along with the classifications came the value judgments. Since whites had now conquered or settled much of the earth and were remaking it in their image, an innately superior bloodline was proposed for the supermen, who were variously described as Aryans, Indo-Europeans, Anglo-Saxons, Nordics, Celts, Alpines, and Teutons.
The theory of Northern European racial supremacy was assisted and expanded by the discovery of a surprising linguistic relationship between the Aryan (in this instance meaning a specific division of the white or Caucasian race) invaders of India, Hittites, Kas-sites, Persians, Greeks, and Romans of the ancient world, and the French, British, Germans, Slavs, and other peoples of modern Europe. Although a common language does not necessarily presuppose a common race, the Indo-European languages,[8] as they came to be called, and the Indo-European speakers gave birth to a racial hypothesis in which a blond, light-complexioned people with rare creative gifts fertilizes new civilizations or refertilizes moribund ones.[9]
Among the chief advocates of this hypothesis, often designated as the Aryan theory, were: Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882), a French count and Germanophile who wrote one of the first coherent, though somewhat fanciful, racial interpretations of history;[10] Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), an Englishman who became a naturalized German citizen and whose grandiose Weltanschauung detected Teutonic genes in almost all the great men of the past, including Jesus; Madison Grant (1865-1937), American lawyer and naturalist who expounded on the decline of the great culture-bearing, culture-creating Nordic peoples and whose arguments were helpful in securing the passage of restrictive United States immigration laws in the early 1920s; Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950), American political philosopher, also active in the immigration issue, who warned that whites would soon be overwhelmed by the fecundity of the colored races.[11]
Although his Spanish ancestry and his Puritan associations in New England precluded any special affection for the Teuton, the philosopher George Santayana was one of the most vigorous subscribers to the idea of racial hierarchies, as the following paragraph demonstrates:
Some races are obviously superior to others. A more thorough adjustment to the conditions of existence has given them spirit, vitality, scope and a relative stability. ... It is therefore of the greatest importance not to obscure this superiority by intermarriage with inferior stock, and thus nullify the progress made by a painful evolution and a prolonged sifting of souls. Reason protests as much as instinct against any fusion, for instance, of white and black peoples.... The Jews, the Greeks, the Romans, the English were never so great as when they confronted other nations. . . but this greatness falls whenever contact leads to amalgamation.[12]
In the 1930s, probably for the first time in history, theories of racial superiority became state doctrine when the Nazi Party took command in Germany.[13] But after the inventory of Hitler's racial politics was taken at the close of World War II, all arguments for racial supremacy were placed beyond the pale of permissible thought.
Race being so deeply personal a subject, it comes as no surprise that advocates of racial superiority usually belong to, or think they belong to, the race they consider superior. It is equally no surprise that in America the opposition to theories of Nordic or Northern European superiority was led by anthropologists and social scientists who were in most cases members of minority groups. Perhaps in the belief that one good myth deserves another, Franz Boas (1858-1942), a scholar of Ger-man-Jewish origin and professor of anthropology at Columbia University, advanced the first comprehensively developed theory of racial equality. Boas hypothesized that nurture, not nature, was the chief determinant of important racial differences. He went so far as to assert that even such a persistent genetic trait as head shape (cephalic index)[14] could be altered by environmental changes in one or two generations.[15]
Ashley Montagu, a physical anthropologist of Anglo-Jewish origin, became the great vulgarizer of racial equalitarianism with a seemingly endless stream of best-selling books, television appearances and speeches before learned and unlearned societies.[16] Other leading members of the equalitarian school, not all of them anthropologists, were Otto Klineberg, Melville Herskovits, Alexander Goldenweiser, Isador Chein, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Gene Weltfish, Kenneth Clark, and two vociferous Anglo-Saxon females, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead.[17] Gene Weltfish achieved some notoriety by asserting the American army had resorted to germ warfare in the Korean War. Kenneth Clark, a black, took a leading part in convincing the Supreme Court to order school desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In his scholarly monographs, Dobzhansky, a graduate of the University of Kiev, tactfully acknowledged some differences in racial capabilities, but practically denied them in his writings for public consumption. Leslie White's evolutionist school of anthropology and W. H. Sheldon's attempts to associate temperament with body type (endomorph, mesomorph, ectomorph) received scant recognition because of their anti-Boas stance.
Overall racial equality received the official sanction of the United Nations upon the publication of the 1950 and 1962 UNESCO statements on race. Sounding more like declarations of faith than reasoned scientific arguments, the UNESCO papers generated the following axioms:
The scientific evidence indicates that the range of mental capabilities in all ethnic groups is much the same. ... As for personality and character, these may be considered raceless .... [G]iven similar degrees of cultural opportunity to realize their potentialities, the average achievement of the members of each ethnic group is about the same.
Although really intending to describe the behaviorist school of psychology, which went hand in glove with the equalitarian anthropologists by stressing human malleability, sociologist Horace Kallen aptly summed up the UNESCO statements in words which should be carved on Boas's and Montagu's tombstones: "At birth human infants, regardless of their heredity, are as equal as Fords."[18] Several decades earlier, J. B. Watson (1878-1958), the founder and explorer of behaviorism, had provided a psychological basis for equalitarianism by stating, 'There is no such thing as an inheritance of capacity, talent, temperament, mental constitution and characteristics."[19] His most famous disciple, B. F. Skinner, later conditioned rats so successfully that it was assumed he could perform equal wonders with humans. In fact, Skinner designed a Utopia around his reinforcement techniques in a book, Walden II, which served as a combination Bible and Constitution for a live commune which never worked out too well. It should be stated, however, that the inventor of the Skinner Box never denied the importance of genetic factors in human behavior.
By the early 1960s the idea of innate racial equality had become so firmly established in modern education and in the communications media that it was difficult to question it and still maintain one's academic or professional respectability. Nevertheless, a largely unpublicized but persistent reaction set in, stimulated by school desegregation and the violence that accompanied increasing black demands for a place in the American sun.
Carleton Putnam, American air transport pioneer and historian, declared that the Boas school of anthropology based its conclusions concerning racial equality on a misconceived self-interest Advocating a realistic acceptance of the sharp differential in black thought patterns and learning capacity, he argued that racial integration on all but the economic level would lead to a steady, relentless deterioration of American education, social life, culture, and national power, as well as to the deterioration of the Negro himself.[20] Boas and his followers, Putnam maintained, gave
the Negro the idea that he has a grudge against the White man and the White man the notion he should feel guilty about the Negro. The grudge incites the Negro to riots and crime, and the guilt leads the White man to a policy of perpetual permissiveness and appeasement.[21]
Elsewhere Putnam stated, "The core of the deceit has been in teaching that the greater part of the differences in status of individuals and groups among us is due to social injustice, whereas the scientific fact remains that, frequent as injustice is, these differences are primarily attributable to innate differences in capacity."[22]
Henry E. Garrett, chairman of the Department of Psychology, Columbia University, went further than Putnam by calling the equalitarian dogma "the scientific hoax of the century." Garrett accused social scientists of relying on moral denunciation when their real evidence regarding Negro mental abilities became feeble. He blamed church leaders for falsifying science to bolster their ethical arguments for racial equality.[23]
William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize in physics for coinventing the transistor, joined the controversy when he suggested that all contemporary programs for Negro betterment were based on false premises. 'The major deficit in Negro intellectual performance," Shockley asserted, "must be primarily of hereditary origin and thus irremediable by practical improvements in environment."[24] He also stressed that the high birthrate of the poorest and most disadvantaged blacks was a "dysgenic tragedy."
Other believers in disparities in racial intelligence included Sir Cyril Burt[25] and H. J. Eysenck in Britain, J. Philippe Rushton in Canada, Arthur Jensen and the British-born Raymond Cattell in the United States. Jensen created a sensation by refusing to attribute the 15-point shortfall in black I.Q. scores to environmental causes or to tests that were "culturally biased." With scant regard for consistency, Julian Huxley, the noted British biologist who helped prepare the UNESCO statements decrying race, went on record as staring that it was probably true, "Negroes have a slightly lower average intelligence than the whites or the yellows."
A few leading twentieth-century anthropologists and sociologists attempted to stand above or straddle the question of racial differences, among them A.L. Kroeber, Ales Hrdlicka,[26] and Pitirim Sorokin.[27] Hrdlicka warned of the danger of a mass inflow of black genes into the American population but refused to say why it was a danger. Sorokin admitted there was evidence of mental differences among races, but underplayed the function of heredity. Some of this reticence was doubtlessly due to fear, some to the natural reluctance of bona fide scientists to generalize on what they considered to be insufficient data. One of the great modern anthropologists, Professor Carleton Coon of Harvard, wrote, The subject of racial intelligence... has not progressed far enough to merit inclusion in a general work of racial history."[28]
Nevertheless, Coon provided powerful ammunition for the anti-equalitarian or hereditarian school with a startling and illuminating theory on the origin of races. For thousands of years it had been taken for granted that the races of man had descended or branched out from a single species. In direct and iconoclastic contradiction to this traditional doctrine, Coon stated that the five living races of mankind, which he named Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Australoid, Capoid and Congoid, had evolved separately into Homo sapiens following different timetables. If Coon was right about the parallel genesis of races, there now existed an evolutionary basis for racial differences, and the case against the equalitarians was strengthened. Even more damaging to the equalitarian viewpoint was Coon's assertion that the Negro race, which he assigned to the Congoid group, was the last of the major races to evolve. The blacks, according to Coon, had been in a sapiens state for a shorter time than the white and yellow races (40,000 versus 210,000 years).[29] This led inexorably to the conclusion that blacks were the least developed and least articulated of mankind's principal racial divisions.
The violent and vituperative reaction which greeted Coon's theories vividly demonstrated the metaphysical nature of the race question. Ashley Montagu, who before the publication of Coon's work had said that the multiracial origin of man was "inadmissible," declared that Coon's facts were fraudulent and compared the onetime president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists to "the racial anthropologists [of] a hundred years ago."[30] Marvin K. Opler, another anthropologist of the Boas persuasion, was equally vehement, stating, "it is easy to see why Coon's theory should make him the darling of segregationist committees and racists everywhere ... he cannot convincingly write human history, even racial history. He will have to acquire more knowledge, more compassion and more humility for that."[31]
Instead of invective, which is often self-defeating because it publicizes the target, the silent treatment was given to another great modern anthropologist, Sir Arthur Keith (1866-1955), who held the view that the greatest outburst of man's biological progress occurred in the hunting band, when a combination of geographical isolation and group cohesion produced the balanced gene pool necessary for the efficient functioning of the evolutionary process. Keith was afraid that the total racial integration demanded by the more dedicated equalitarians might have a dysgenic effect on man by swamping beneficial mutations before they had a chance to take hold. The Scottish anthropologist also pointed out that prejudice, discrimination, xenophobia, and certain other human achievements now considered sinful may actually serve an important evolutionary purpose. They may be nature's chief tools for race-building and creating favorable growth conditions for the variegated cultures and peoples that have made the mosaic of man so rich and colorful.[32]
If professional anthropologists can descend to the lowest levels of polemics, vindictiveness, and thought control, how, it may be asked, can the layman acquire enlightened ideas about race? One answer is to look at the historical evidence, which points inescapably to the fact that certain races or peoples have accomplished far more than others in the fields of technology, material comfort and popular government. If these accomplishments are due to genetic causes, the low-achieving races in Western lands will always be saddled, as they have been in the past, with the stigma of underperformance, even though they may be perfectly capable of overperformance in their ancestral societies, many of which are still extant.
Much of the bitterness of the present-day racial debate stems from some races being forced to compete or choosing to compete, in a world they never made. The all-important question of whether heredity or environment has the upper hand in the shaping of human destiny has degenerated into a quasi-theological dispute involving such crucial psychological ingredients as pride and facesaving. One side appeals to heredity to explain past successes; the other to environment, society, and "historical accidents" to excuse past failures.
If heredity was proved beyond a shadow of a doubt to be the central factor in human achievement, the proof would almost certainly be rejected in the present climate of modern thought. Anti-hereditarians have too much at stake, both physically and spiritually, to abandon their cause for any reason, least of all a negative scientific verdict on the validity of their ideas and programs. They are only too well aware that the acceptance or acknowledgement of important genetic diversities in man would seriously undermine the entire foundation of prevailing political and social dogma, the fountainhead of the miraculous changes wrought in the status of privileged and underprivileged minorities.
Nonetheless, time seems to be working unflaggingly for the hereditarian party. Although investigations into racial intelligence are still largely taboo, research teams keep approaching the subject tangentially with significant new discoveries relating to racial divergences in brain structure, resistance to disease, blood group distribution, glandular function, hormone activity, and gene recombination.
By the late 1960s the investigations of Nikolaas Tinbergen, a Hollander, and Konrad Lorenz, a German, into the heritability of aggressive and territorial instincts had been widely published, both under their own names and by popularizer Robert Ardrey, whose profuse digressions often reached high levels of political and social commentary. If man had been a hunter for millions of years, a farmer for 10,000, and a factory worker for 150, Ardrey wanted to know how his deeper instincts—his reptilian and mammalian brains—could be changed by a few years of inferior education. The author advised those who wished to improve man to understand, not ignore, his instinctual nature.
Another blow was struck against the environmentalist hegemony with the publication in 1974 of Race by John R. Baker, an internationally renowned Oxford biologist and a Fellow of the Royal Society.[33] Dr. Baker minced no words and ducked no issues in what one respected scientific journal called "perhaps the best documented book on human races ever published." In contrast to the Boasites, Baker found significant mental as well as physical differences among the races which he classified, analyzed, and evaluated with such professional skill that hardly anyone rose to challenge him. In the United States the book was generally ignored by the mass media, an exception being the Washington Post, which ran a splenetic review by Amitai Etzioni, a sociologist and former Israeli commando.
A year later Edward O. Wilson, a Harvard entomologist, opened up new vistas for genetic determinists when he practically invented the science of sociobiology. Genes, according to Wilson, not only govern individual behavior but social behavior as well. Death on the battlefield, for example, is a supreme act of altruism in which one sacrifices one's own genes so that the closely related genes of one's family or one's group will survive. Xenophobia is simply an inherited response to threats of contamination of the gene pool by outsiders.[34]
Wilson's ideas, together with the fascinating speculations of theoretical biologists R. L. Trivers, W. D. Hamilton, J. Maynard Smith, and Richard Dawkins stirred up a vortex of controversy. Two minority scientists, Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, reacted by insinuating that sociobiology was racist. Other scientists, such as George Wald, a highly politicized Nobel laureate, lashed out at Wilson and the determinist school of biology by calling for an end to amniocentesis, the screening of fetuses for genetic defects. Walter Bodmer and Liebe Cavalli-Sforza wanted to outlaw investigations into black and white I.Q. differences. Still others demanded a government ban on any research that might substantiate racial theories or lead to any form of genetic engineering. When Pope John Paul II joined the fray and lent his considerable support to these strictures,[35] a strange inquisitional alliance between the ultrareligious and the ultraleft seemed in the making.
That so many anti-Wilsonians were minority members of the Marxist persuasion was probably the effect rather than the cause of their apparently innate abhorrence of even a hint of biological determinism. Although Marx had once tried to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin, a strong believer in inherited racial differences, his followers have always nourished a secret fondness for Lamarck, who believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In his desperate attempt to force science to yield to ideology, Stalin elevated the charlatan Lysenko to the higher reaches of Soviet science, while allowing a brilliant geneticist like Nikolai Vavilov to perish in a gulag. Even if biology says no, most Marxists still want man to be 100 percent moldable. Moldable men can be made into good Marxists, whereas genes have no ears to hear the revolutionary blandishments of a Lenin. Indeed the attachment for Lamarck is so persistent that, though his theory has been totally discredited, it keeps cropping up, not only in the pamphlets of extraterritorial Marxists (Russia and the other former Soviet republics have now rehabilitated Mendelian genetics), but also in the books and sermons of Christian fundamentalists.
The war against Wilson in particular and against all scientific research into genetically induced behavior all too frequently descended from words to acts—often rather sordid acts. Wilson himself was physically threatened and doused with water during a conference. William Shockley had some of his college lectures disrupted by black and white radicals. H. J. Eysenck was assaulted during a lecture in London, and his eyeglasses smashed. Richard Herrnstein, who hardly mentioned race, was continuously harassed for proposing that a meritocracy might derive from high I.Q. matings. Edward Banfield, an urbanologist who had some unkind things to say about ghettos, had to sit silently on a podium, while being threatened by left-wing and minority students flaunting brass knuckles. The trials and tribulations of Arthur Jensen will be recounted in a later chapter. The only allegations of racial differences which do not provoke a bitter reaction from the intellectual establishment are those proposing the superiority of Jews.
As man's environment becomes increasingly man-made, its effect on creating and perpetuating racial differences is bound to shrink. Human surroundings are growing increasingly similar, particularly in highly civilized areas where a common technology, a common educational system, a common communications network, and common occupations prescribe a common way of life. According to equalitarian theory, the performance and achievement levels of different races will converge as their environments converge. Consequently, the supreme test of environmentalism may come in the not too distant future.
Meanwhile, as the issues raised by the hereditarians become more relevant each day, it is hard to believe that the scientific curiosity of the world's most scientifically curious societies can be prevented much longer from penetrating one of the most challenging and most exciting frontiers of knowledge. It should be kept in mind, however, that the metaphysics of racial equality, although so far having failed to provide any workable solutions to modern man's most difficult problems, still fires the hearts of tens of millions, who when it comes down to it can be forgiven for refusing to accept the harsh possibility that nature practices a form of racial Calvinism.
Because the faithful are certain not to relinquish their cherished equalitarian dreams without a fight, it is more likely there will be a Galileo of genetics before there is a Newton.