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.
For although there seems to be so great a difference between widely separate nations, that you might easily take the inhabitants of the Cape of Good Hope, the Greenlanders, and the Circassians for so many different species of man, yet when the matter is thoroughly considered, you see that all do so run into one another, and that one variety of mankind does so sensibly pass into the other, that you cannot mark out the limits between them.
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.”
But Blumenbach strongly held that most racial variation, as superficial impositions of climate and mode of life, could be easily altered or reversed by moving to a new region or by adopting new styles of behavior. White Europeans living for generations in the tropics may become dark-skinned, while Africans transported as slaves to high latitudes may eventually become white: “Color, whatever be its cause, be it bile, or the influence of the sun, the air, or the climate, is, at all events, an adventitious and easily changeable thing, and can never constitute a diversity of species.”
Blumenbach’s new geometry of racial ranking in two lines of degeneration from a Caucasian center (middle skull), with one line (to the left) moving from American to Mongolian, and the other (to the right) from Malay to African. From Blumenbach’s treatise of 1795.
Backed by these views on the superficiality of racial variation, Blumenbach stoutly defended the mental and moral unity of all peoples. He held particularly strong opinions on the equal status of black Africans and white Europeans—perhaps because Africans had been most stigmatized by conventional racist beliefs.
Blumenbach established a special library in his house devoted exclusively to writings by black authors. We may regard him today as patronizing in praising “the good disposition and faculties of these our black brethren,” but paternalism surely trumps contempt. He campaigned for the abolition of slavery when such views did not enjoy widespread assent, and he asserted the moral superiority of slaves to their captors, speaking of a “natural tenderness of heart, which has never been benumbed or extirpated on board the transport vessels or on the West India sugar plantations by the brutality of their white executioners.”
Blumenbach affirmed “the perfectibility of the mental faculties and the talents of the Negro,” and he listed the fine works of his library, offering special praise for the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, a Boston slave whose writings have only recently been rediscovered and reprinted in America: “I possess English, Dutch, and Latin poems by several [black authors], amongst which however above all, those of Phillis Wheatley of Boston, who is justly famous for them, deserves mention here.” Finally, Blumenbach noted that many Caucasian nations could not boast so fine a set of authors and scholars as black Africa has produced under the most depressing circumstances of prejudice and slavery: “It would not be difficult to mention entire well-known provinces of Europe, from out of which you would not easily expect to obtain off-hand such good authors, poets, philosophers, and correspondents of the Paris Academy.”
Nonetheless, when Blumenbach presented his implied mental picture of human diversity—his transposition from Linnaean geography to hierarchical ranking—he chose to identify a central group as closest to the created ideal, and then to characterize other groups by relative degrees of departure from this archetypal standard. He therefore devised a system (see the accompanying illustration from his treatise) that placed a single race at the pinnacle of closest approach to the original creation, and then envisioned two symmetrical lines of departure from this ideal toward greater and greater degeneration.
We may now return to the riddle of the name Caucasian, and to the significance of Blumenbach’s addition of a fifth race, the Malay variety. Blumenbach chose to regard his own European variety as closest to the created ideal, and he then searched within the diversity of Europeans for a smaller group of greatest perfection—the highest of the highest, so to speak. As we have seen, he identified the people around Mount Caucasus as the closest embodiments of an original ideal, and he then named the entire European race for their finest representatives.
But Blumenbach now faced a dilemma. He had already affirmed the mental and moral equality of all peoples. He therefore could not use these conventional standards of racist ranking to establish degrees of relative departure from the Caucasian ideal. Instead, and however subjective (and even risible) we may view the criterion today, Blumenbach chose physical beauty as his guide to ranking. He simply affirmed Europeans as most beautiful, with people of the Caucasus on the highest pinnacle of comeliness (hence his linking, in the quotation presented at the beginning of this essay, of maximal beauty with place of human origin—for Blumenbach viewed all subsequent variation as departure from a created ideal, and the most beautiful people must therefore live closest to our primal home).
Blumenbach’s descriptions make continual reference to his personal sense of relative beauty, presented as an objective and quantifiable property, not subject to doubt or disagreement. He describes a Georgian female skull (from closest to Mount Caucasus) in his collection as “really the most beautiful form of skull which . . . always of itself attracts every eye, however little observant.” He then defends his European standard on aesthetic grounds:
In the first place, that stock displays . . . the most beautiful form of the skull, from which, as from a mean and primeval type, the others diverge by most easy gradations. . . . Besides, it is white in color, which we may fairly assume to h
ave been the primitive color of mankind, since . . . it is very easy for that to degenerate into brown, but very much more difficult for dark to become white.
Blumenbach then presented all human variety on two lines of successive departure from this Caucasian ideal, ending in the two most degenerate (least attractive, not morally unworthy or mentally obtuse) forms of humanity—Asians on one side, and Africans on the other. But Blumenbach also wanted to designate intermediary forms between ideal and most degenerate—especially since he advocated an even gradation as his primary argument for human unity. In his original four-race system, he could identify Native Americans as intermediary between Europeans and Asians, but who would serve as the transitional form between Europeans and Africans?
The four-race system included no appropriate group, and could therefore not be transformed into the new geometry of a pinnacle with two symmetrical limbs leading to maximal departure from ideal form. But invention of a fifth racial category for forms intermediate between Europeans and Africans would complete the new geometry—and Blumenbach therefore added the Malay race, not as a minor factual refinement, but as the enabler of a thorough geometric transformation in theories (mental pictures) about human diversity. As an intermediary between Europeans and Africans, the Malay variety provided crucial symmetry for Blumenbach’s hierarchical taxonomy. This Malay addition therefore completed the geometric transformation from an unranked geographic model to the conventional hierarchy of implied worth that has fostered so much social grief ever since. Blumenbach epitomized his system in this geometric manner, and explicitly defended the necessary role of his Malay addition:
I have allotted the first place to the Caucasian . . . which makes me esteem it the primeval one. This diverges in both directions into two, most remote and very different from each other; on the one side, namely, into the Ethiopian, and on the other into the Mongolian. The remaining two occupy the intermediate positions between that primeval one and these two extreme varieties; that is, the American between the Caucasian and Mongolian; the Malay between the same Caucasian and Ethiopian.
Scholars often suppose that academic ideas must remain, at worst, harmless and, at best, mildly amusing or even instructive. But ideas do not reside in the ivory tower of our usual metaphor about academic irrelevancy. In his famous vision of strength and weakness, Pascal epitomized humans as thinking reeds—and ideas do motivate human history. Would Hitler have flourished without racism, America without liberty? Blumenbach lived as a cloistered professor all his life, but his ideas reverberate through our wars, our conquests, our sufferings, and our hopes. I therefore end by returning to the coincidence of 1776, as Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence while Blumenbach published the first edition of his treatise in Latin. Consider the words of Lord Acton on the power of ideas to propel history, as illustrated by potential passage from Latin to action:
It was from America that . . . ideas long locked in the breast of solitary thinkers, and hidden among Latin folios—burst forth like a conqueror upon the world they were destined to transform, under the title of the Rights of Man.
27
The Great Physiologist of Heidelberg
IF YOU SUSPEND BOTH REASON AND KNOWLEDGE, AND then gaze upon the ruins of the medieval castle on the hill, lit so softly at night and visible from all points in the city below; if you then recall the lively drinking songs from Sigmund Romberg’s Student Prince, and conjure up an image of dashing young men purposely scarring their faces in frivolous duels—then the usual image of Heidelberg as a primary symbol of European romanticism and carefree charm might pass muster. But when you trace the tales of internecine destruction that created these sets, then the visions become fiction, and a gritty historical reality emerges from gentle mythology.
Heidelberg boasts an ancient pedigree, for the town’s name first appears in a document written in 1196, while the university, founded in 1386, ranks as Germany’s oldest. But only one or two medieval buildings still stand (while the castle lies in ruins), because the city suffered an architectural equivalent of genocide—“devoured [unto] the foundations thereof” (Lamentations 4:11)—in several disastrous religious and political wars of the seventeenth century. The Thirty Years War (1618–48) had wrought enough destruction, but when the Protestant elector (ruler) of the Rhineland Palatinate (with Heidelberg as capital) married his daughter to the brother of France’s Catholic king Louis XIV, he only courted further trouble—for the elector’s son died without heir in 1685, and Louis then laid claim to the territory. French armies destroyed Heidelberg in 1689, and the few remnants then succumbed to fire in 1693.
If our all-too-human tendencies toward xenophobia and anathematization of differences can place such closely allied and ethnically similar people on warpaths of total destruction, what hope can we maintain for toleration or decency toward people of more different appearance and cultural background? A sad chapter in the history of science must chronicle the support provided by supposedly “factual” arguments for the designation of different people as inferior beings. Science, to be fair, did not invent the concept of an inherent gradation in worth, with the promulgator’s own group on top and his immediate enemies and more distant prospects for conquest on the bottom. But the doctrine of racism—the claim for intrinsically biological and therefore ineradicable differences in intellectual or moral status among peoples—has built a powerful buttress for our ancient inclinations toward xenophobia.
During the heyday of European colonialism in the nineteenth century, scarcely any Western scientist denied such gradations of worth—either as ordained by divine or natural law in versions favored before Darwin’s discoveries, or as developed by the workings of evolution in explanations that triumphed in the closing decades of Victoria’s reign. Black Africans received especially short shrift in these racist classifications.
Such opinions flowed with particular ease from basically conservative scientists, like the great French anatomist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), who also favored strict divisions among social classes back home. Cuvier wrote in 1817:
The Negro race is confined to the area south of the Atlas Mountains. With its small cranium, its flattened nose, its protruding jaw, and its large lips, this race clearly resembles the monkeys. The people belonging to it have always remained barbarians.
But even scientists of more egalitarian bent at home, including such passionate abolitionists as Charles Darwin, did not challenge the general consensus. In his most striking statement (from The Descent of Man, 1871), Darwin argues that a gap between two closely related living species does not disprove evolution because the intermediary stages, linking both forms to a common ancestor, died out long ago. The large gap that now separates the highest ape and the lowest man, Darwin asserts, will grow even wider as extinctions continue:
The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes . . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
The few “egalitarians” of those times—defined in this context as scientists who denied inherent differences in intellect or morality among races—limited their views to abstract potentials, and did not challenge conventional opinions about gradation in actual achievements. Alfred Russel Wallace, for example, strongly supported inherent equality (or at least minimal difference), but he did not doubt that English society had reached a pinnacle of realization, while African savages remained mired in barbarity: “Savage languages,” he wrote, “contain no words for abstract conceptions . . . The singing of savages is a more or less monotonous howling.”
Even J. F. Blumenbach (1752–1840), the great Enlightenment thinker (see essay 26) who devised the classification of races that became standard in nineteenth-century science, stoutly def
ended intellectual equality, while never doubting gradational differences in inherent beauty, with his own Caucasian race on a pinnacle obvious to all. Blumenbach devised the term Caucasian (still employed today) for the white races of Europe because he regarded the people living near Mount Caucasus as the best among the comeliest—“really the most beautiful form of skull,” he writes, “which always of itself attracts every eye, however little observant.”
I have, during the quarter-century of this series of essays, written about most of these few egalitarians, if only because iconoclasm always attracts me, while moral rectitude (at least by the preferences of most people today) always inspires admiration. But I have never treated the single most remarkable document in this small tradition, probably because its largely unknown author never extended his anthropological research beyond this lone foray into a subject (the status of races) and a language (English) otherwise absent from his extensive and highly valued work.
Perhaps Friedrich Tiedemann (1781–1861) had learned a sad lesson about the fruits of xenophobia from the history of his own adopted city, for “the great physiologist of Heidelberg”—an accolade for Tiedemann from the pen of England’s leading anatomist, Richard Owen—served as professor of anatomy, physiology, and zoology at the University (from 1816 until his retirement in 1849), where the ruined castle, perched on a hill above his lecture hall, stood as a mute testimony to human folly and venality.
Following a common pattern among the intellectual elite of his generation (his father served as a professor of Greek and classical literature), Tiedemann wandered among many European universities to study with the greatest teachers of his time. Thus he learned philosophy from Schelling at Würzburg; anatomy from Franz Joseph Gall (the founder of phrenology) in Marburg; zoology from Cuvier in Paris; and anthropology from Blumenbach in Göttingen. Although he did not publish any work on human races until 1836, near the end of his active career in science, he must have internalized the core of this debate during these youthful Wanderjahren.
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