Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

One of the early propagators of biological racism was Jules Virey, a French doctor who addressed the Parisian Académie de Médecine in 1841 on ‘the biological causes of civilisation’. Virey divided the world’s peoples into two. There were the whites, ‘who had achieved a more or less perfect stage of civilisation’, and the blacks (the Africans, Asians and American Indians), who were condemned to a ‘constantly imperfect civilisation’. Virey was deeply pessimistic that the ‘blacks’ would ever achieve ‘full civilisation’, pointing out that, like white people, domesticated animals, such as cows, have white flesh, whereas wild animals – deer, say – have dark flesh. This didn’t square with science even then (it had been known since the sixteenth century that, under the skin, all human flesh is the same colour) but for Virey this ‘basic’ difference accounted for all sorts of consequences. For example, he said that ‘just as the wild animal was prey to the human, so the black human was the natural prey of the white human’.⁵³ In other words, slavery – far from being cruel – was consistent with nature.⁵⁴

One new element in the equation was the development in the nineteenth century of racist thinking within Europe. A familiar name here is Arthur de Gobineau who, in On the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–1855: i.e., before Darwin and natural selection but after the Vestiges of Creation

), claimed that the German and French aristocracy (and remember that he was a self-appointed aristocrat) ‘retained the original characteristics of the Aryans’, the original race of mankind. Everyone else, in contrast, was some sort of mongrel.⁵⁵ This idea never caught on but more successful was the alleged difference between the hard-working, pious – even joyless – northern Protestants, and ‘the languid, potentially passive and potentially despotic Latins’ of the Catholic south. Not surprisingly perhaps, many northerners could be found (Sir Charles Dilke was one) who became convinced that the northern ‘races’, the Anglo-Saxons, Russians and Chinese, would lead the way in the future. The rest would form the ‘dying nations’ of the world.⁵⁶

This reasoning was taken to its limits by another Frenchman, Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936). Lapouge, who studied ancient skulls, believed that races were species in the process of formation, that racial differences were ‘innate and ineradicable’ and any idea that they could integrate was contrary to the laws of biology.⁵⁷

For Lapouge, Europe was populated by three racial groups, Homo Europaeus – tall, pale-skinned and long-skulled (dolichocephalous), Homo Alpinus – smaller and darker with brachycephalous (short) heads, and the Mediterranean type – long-headed again but darker and shorter even than Alpinus.⁵⁸

Lapouge regarded democracy as a disaster and believed that the brachycephalous types were taking over the world. He thought the proportion of dolichocephalous individuals was declining in Europe, due to emigration to the United States, and suggested that alcohol be provided free of charge in the hope that the worst types might kill off each other in their excesses. He wasn’t joking.⁵⁹

After publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species it did not take long for his ideas about biology to be extended to the operation of human societies. Darwinism first caught on in the United States of America. (Darwin was made an honorary member of the American Philosophical Society in 1869, ten years before his own university, Cambridge, conferred on him an honorary degree.⁶⁰) American social scientists William Graham Sumner and Thorsten Veblen of Yale, Lester Ward of Brown, John Dewey at the University of Chicago, William James, John Fiske and others at Harvard, debated politics, war and the layering of human communities into different classes against the background of a Darwinian ‘struggle for survival’ and the ‘survival of the fittest.’ Sumner believed that Darwin’s new way of looking at mankind had provided the ultimate explanation – and rationalisation – for the world as it was. It explained laissez-faire

economics, the free, unfettered competition popular among businessmen. Others believed that it explained the prevailing imperial structure of the world in which the ‘fit’ white races were placed ‘naturally’ above the ‘degenerate’ races of other colours.^{61 20}

Fiske and Veblen, whose Theory of the Leisure Class was published in 1899, flatly contradicted Sumner’s belief that the well-to-do could be equated with the biologically fittest. Veblen in fact turned such reasoning on its head, arguing that the type of characters ‘selected for dominance’ in the business world were little more than barbarians, a‘throw-back’ to a more primitive form of society.⁶²