I Have Landed (56 page)

The solution to big puzzles often hinges upon tiny curiosities, easy to miss or to pass over. I suggest that the key to understanding Blumenbach's classification, the foundation of so much that continues to influence and disturb us today, lies in a peculiar criterion that he invoked to name the European race Caucasian—the supposed maximal beauty of people from this region. Why, first of all, should anyone attach such importance to an evidently subjective assessment; and why, secondly, should an aesthetic criterion become the basis for a scientific judgment about place of origin? To answer these questions, we must turn to Blumenbach's original formulation of 1775, and then move to the changes he introduced in 1795, when Caucasians received their name.

Blumenbach's final taxonomy of 1795 divided all humans into five groups defined by both geography and appearance—in his order, the “Caucasian variety” for light-skinned people of Europe and adjacent areas; the “Mongolian variety” for inhabitants of eastern Asia, including China and Japan; the “Ethiopian variety” for dark-skinned people of Africa; the “American variety” for native populations of the New World; and the “Malay variety” for Polynesians and Melanesians of Pacific islands, and for the aborigines of Australia. But Blumenbach's original classification of 1775 recognized only the first four of these five, and united members of the “Malay variety” with the other people of Asia, later named “Mongolian” by Blumenbach.

We now encounter the paradox of Blumenbach's reputation as the inventor of modern racial classification. The original four-race system, as I shall illustrate in a moment, did not arise from Blumenbach's observations or theorizing, but only represents, as Blumenbach readily admits, the classification adopted and promoted by his guru Carolus Linnaeus in the founding document of taxonomy, the
Systema Naturae
of 1758. Therefore, the later addition of a “Malay variety” for some Pacific peoples originally included in a broader Asian group represents Blumenbach's only original contribution to racial classification. This change seems so minor. Why, then, do we credit Blumenbach, rather than Linnaeus, as the founder of racial classification? (One might prefer to say “discredit,” as the enterprise does not, for good reason, enjoy high repute these days.) I wish to argue that Blumenbach's apparently small change actually records a theoretical shift that could not have been broader, or more portentous, in scope. This change has been missed or misconstrued in most commentaries because later scientists have not grasped the vital historical and philosophical principle that theories should be construed as models subject to visual representation, usually in clearly definable geometric terms.

By moving from the Linnaean four-race system to his own five-race scheme, Blumenbach radically changed the geometry of human order from a geographically based model without explicit ranking to a double hierarchy of worth, oddly based upon perceived beauty, and fanning out in two directions from a Caucasian ideal. The addition of a Malay category, as we shall see, provided the focus for this geometric reformulation—and Blumenbach's “minor” change between 1775 and 1795 therefore becomes the key to a conceptual transformation rather than a simple refinement of factual information within an old scheme.

Blumenbach idolized his teacher Linnaeus. On the first page of the 1795 edition of his racial classification, Blumenbach hailed “the immortal Linnaeus, a man quite created for investigating the characteristics of the works of nature,
and arranging them in systematic order.” Blumenbach also acknowledged Linnaeus as the source of his original fourfold classification: “I have followed Linnaeus in the number, but have defined my varieties by other boundaries” (1775 edition). Later, in adding his “Malay variety,” Blumenbach identified his change as a departure from his old guru Linnaeus: “It became very clear that the Linnaean division of mankind could no longer be adhered to; for which reason I, in this little work, ceased like others to follow that illustrious man.”

Linnaeus divided his species
Homo sapiens
into four varieties, defined primarily by geography and secondarily by appearance and supposed behavior (Linnaeus also included two other false or fanciful varieties within
Homo sapiens
—
ferus
for “wild boys” occasionally discovered in the woods and possibly raised by animals [most turned out to be retarded or mentally ill youngsters abandoned by their parents]; and
monstrosus
for travelers' tales of hairy people with tails, and other assorted fables.)

Linnaeus then presented the four major varieties arranged by geography and, interestingly,
not
in the ranked order favored by most Europeans in the racist tradition. He discussed, in sequence,
Americanus, Europeus, Asiaticus
, and
Afer
(or African). In so doing, Linnaeus presented nothing at all original, but merely mapped humans onto the four geographic regions of conventional cartography.

In the first line of his descriptions, Linnaeus characterized each group by three words for color, temperament, and posture in that order. Again, none of these three categories implies any ranking by worth. Moreover, Linnaeus again bowed to classical taxonomic theories rather than his own observations in making these decisions. For example, his separations by temperament (or “humor”) record the ancient medical theory that a person's mood arises from a balance of four fluids
(humor
, in Latin, means “moisture”)—blood, phlegm, choler (or yellow bile), and melancholy (or black bile). One of the four substances may dominate, and a person therefore becomes sanguine (the cheerful realm of blood), phlegmatic (sluggish), choleric (prone to anger), or melancholic (sad). Four geographic regions, four humors, four races.

For the American variety, Linnaeus wrote
“rufus, cholericus, rectus”
(red, choleric, upright); for the European,
“albus, sanguineus, torosus”
(white, sanguine, muscular); for the Asian,
“luridus, melancholicus, rigidus”
(pale yellow, melancholy, stiff); and for the African,
“niger, phlegmaticus, laxus”
(black, phlegmatic, relaxed).

I don't mean to deny that Linnaeus held conventional beliefs about the superiority of his own European variety over all others. He surely maintained the almost universal racism of his time—and being sanguine and muscular as a
European surely sounds better than being melancholy and stiff as an Asian. Moreover, Linnaeus included a more overtly racist label in his last line of description for each variety. Here he tries to epitomize supposed behavior in a single word following the statement
regitur
(ruled)—for the American,
consuetudine
(by habit); for the European,
ritibus
(by custom); for the Asian,
opinionibus
(by belief); and for the African,
arbitrio
(by caprice). Surely, regulation by established and considered custom beats the unthinking rule of habit or belief, and caprice can only represent the least desirable among the four criteria, thus leading to the implied and conventional racist ranking of Europeans first, Asians and Americans in the middle, and Africans at the bottom.

Nonetheless, and despite these implications, the overt geometry of Linnaeus's model is neither linear nor hierarchical. When we epitomize his scheme as an essential picture in our mind, we see a map of the world divided into four regions, with the people in each region characterized by a list of different traits. In short, Linnaeus uses cartography as a primary principle for human ordering; if he had wished to advocate linear ranking as the essential picture of human variety, he would surely have listed Europeans first and Africans last, but he started with Native Americans instead.

The shift from a geographic to a hierarchical ordering of human diversity marks a fateful transition in the history of Western science—for what, short of railroads and nuclear bombs, has generated more practical impact, in this case almost entirely negative, upon our collective lives and nationalities? Ironically, J. F. Blumenbach became the primary author of this shift—for his five-race scheme became canonical, as he changed the geometry of human order from Linnaean cartography to linear ranking by putative worth.

I say ironic because Blumenbach surely deserves plaudits as the least racist, most egalitarian, and most genial of all Enlightenment writers on the subject of human diversity. How peculiar that the man most committed to human unity, and to inconsequential moral and intellectual differences among groups, should have changed the mental geometry of human order to a scheme that has promoted conventional racism ever since. Yet, on second thought, this situation should not be deemed so peculiar or unusual—for most scientists have always been unaware of the mental machinery, and particularly of the visual or geometric implications, behind their particular theorizing (and underlying all human thought in general).

An old tradition in science proclaims that changes in theory must be driven by observation. Since most scientists believe this simplistic formula, they assume that their own shifts in interpretation only record their better understanding of novel facts. Scientists therefore tend to be unaware of their own
mental impositions upon the world's messy and ambiguous factuality. Such mental manipulations arise from a variety of sources, including psychological predisposition and social context. Blumenbach lived in an age when ideas of progress, and of the cultural superiority of European life, dominated the political and social world of his contemporaries. Implicit and loosely formulated (or even unconscious) notions of racial ranking fit well with such a worldview. In changing the geometry of human order to a system of ranking by worth, I doubt that Blumenbach operated consciously in the overt service of racism. I think that he only, and largely passively, recorded the pervasive social view of his time. But ideas have consequences, whatever the motives or intentions of their promoters.

Blumenbach certainly thought that his switch from the Linnaean four-race system to his own five-race scheme—the basis for his fateful geometric shift, as we shall see, from cartography to hierarchy—arose only from his improved understanding of nature's factuality. He so stated in the second (1781) edition of his treatise, when he announced his change: “Formerly in the first edition of this work, I divided all mankind into four varieties; but after I had more actively investigated the different nations of Eastern Asia and America, and, so to speak, looked at them more closely, I was compelled to give up that division, and to place in its stead the following five varieties, as more consonant to nature.” And, in the preface to the third edition of 1795, Blumenbach states that he gave up the Linnaean scheme in order to arrange “the varieties of man according to the truth of nature.” When scientists adopt the myth that theories arise solely from observation, and do not scrutinize the personal and social influences emerging from their own psyches, they not only misunderstand the causes of their changed opinions, but may also fail to comprehend the deep and pervasive mental shift encoded by their own new theory.

Blumenbach strongly upheld the unity of the human species against an alternative view, then growing in popularity (and surely more conducive to conventional forms of racism), that each major race had been separately created. He ended the third edition of his treatise by writing: “No doubt can any longer remain but that we are with great probability right in referring all varieties of man . . . to one and the same species.”

As his major argument for unity, Blumenbach notes that all supposed racial characters grade continuously from one people to another, and cannot define any separate and bounded group.

He particularly refutes the common claim that black Africans, as lowest on the conventional racist ladder, bear unique features of their inferiority: “There is no single character so peculiar and so universal among the Ethiopians, but what it may be observed on the one hand everywhere in other varieties of men.”

Blumenbach believed that
Homo sapiens
had been created in a single region and had then spread out over the globe. Our racial diversity, he then argued, arose as a result of our movement to other climates and topographies, and our consequent adoption of different habits and modes of life in these various regions. Following the terminology of his time, Blumenbach referred to these changes as “degenerations”—not intending, by this word, the modern sense of deterioration, but the literal meaning of departure from an initial form of humanity at the creation
(de
means “from,” and
genus
refers to our original stock).

Most of these degenerations, Blumenbach argues, arise directly from differences in climate—ranging from such broad patterns as the correlation of dark skin with tropical environments, to more particular (and fanciful) attributions, including a speculation that the narrow eye slits of some Australian people may have arisen as a response to “constant clouds of gnats . . . contracting the natural face of the inhabitants.” Other changes then originate as a consequence of varying modes of life adopted in these different regions. For example, nations that compress the heads of babies by swaddling boards or papoose carriers end up with relatively long skulls. Blumenbach holds that “almost all the diversity of the form of the head in different nations is to be attributed to the mode of life and to art.”

Blumenbach does not deny that such changes, promoted over many generations, may eventually become hereditary (by a process generally called “Lamarckism,” or “inheritance of acquired characters” today, but serving as the folk wisdom of the late eighteenth century, and not as a peculiarity of Lamarck's biology, as Blumenbach's support illustrates). “With the progress of time,” Blumenbach writes, “art may degenerate into a second nature.”