The Undivided Past

by David Cannadine

  CAVEATS AND QUALIFICATIONS

  “To go for a walk with one’s eyes open,” opined Simone de Beauvoir, echoing William Thompson, “is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests and occupations are manifestly different.” So, indeed, humanity is; and so, indeed, these individuals are.125 Between them, the two sexes constitute the whole of humankind in a way that no two religions or nations or classes have ever done. But that fact has always hindered more than it has helped either sex’s potential for solidarity and for forging a shared identity, and for most of human history the identities of men and women as men and as women have scarcely been galvanizing or politically significant. While today there are probably more variants of maleness and more versions of femaleness in existence than ever before, and in their diversity and fluidity they constantly undermine, destabilize, and complicate such a single, simple divide. In the words of Donna Haraway, “there is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women” (any more than there is anything about being male that naturally binds men).126 Mobilizing all women on the basis of their shared gender has never been possible, while mobilizing even some women has hardly been easy, and mobilizing any men in this way has yet to happen. So it is scarcely surprising that there has never been for women as women a triumphantly revolutionary moment, their own version of 1917, when the forces of patriarchy and male dominance were suddenly shattered and irrevocably overthrown. Nor indeed is it clear how such a revolution would happen, or what form it would actually take.

  Over the long haul of history, and notwithstanding their many limitations, it has clearly been easier to mobilize people on the basis of their religious faith, national pride, or class identity than because of their gender, and even during the second half of the twentieth century only a tiny percentage of women were members of feminist organizations. To be sure, this makes the significant changes that have been achieved to the benefit of women all the more remarkable. As Germaine Greer concedes, “in the last thirty years, women have come a long, long way,” one indication of which, she claims, is that “feminist consciousness now leavens every relationship, every single social and professional encounter.”127 Every relationship? Every encounter? This is surely an exaggeration: there are many women (and even more men) in large parts of the world as yet untouched by feminism, and even where feminism has made an impact, its “leavening consciousness” is more the awareness of women’s individual or class-based concerns than their universal collective identity. Moreover, such limited mobilization may be only one of several reasons why the position of some women in some parts of the world has recently improved. Essential alterations to the law required the consent of predominantly male legislators and predominantly male judges. Changes in work patterns have been greatly facilitated by the decline of male-dominated heavy industry and the rise of the service sector and the knowledge economy, in which men and women work on a more equal footing. The contraceptive pill was another technological innovation enlarging women’s freedom, whether their consciousnesses had been raised or not. None of this is to deny that organizing, mobilizing, campaigning, and writing have played a significant part in improving women’s circumstances; but as with first-wave feminism and the extension of the franchise, the limited collective action of the second wave is certainly not the only, and may not turn out to have been the major, explanation.128

  Yet it is still repeatedly maintained that mobilizing women for feminist ends “has contributed more to the world’s store of human happiness than it has taken away; and has undone some of its most banal and many of its most insufferable oppressions without significantly increasing others.”129 No Western secular liberal would be likely to deny that; but this is not the only view. To the Catholic Church, that most conservative and patriarchal of institutions (as exemplified in the views of Pope Benedict), modern secularism, liberalism, and feminism are anathema, undermining biblical teaching and subverting the natural order of things, of which the submission of women to men, and their providentially ordained roles as virgin, wife, and mother, are among the most important.130 Moreover, mainstream Islam is no less conservative and patriarchal, while its more radical expressions, such as Wahhabism, forbid women to drive or appear in public with more than their hands and eyes exposed. From these very different perspectives, the limited but misguided mobilization of women in the West, and the export of their feminism to other parts of the world, has not increased the sum total of human happiness. Far from bringing them fulfillment and satisfaction, freedom and emancipation, so this argument goes, it has led too many women to deny their essential nature and to undertake mistaken journeys along the unrighteous paths of sin, selfishness, and self-indulgence.131

  There is one further and final qualification. Many feminists claim that although women have come a long way, there is still much more work to do, and that the task of safeguarding the bodies, educating the minds, and enhancing the opportunities of women is far from complete. In this they are surely correct. But others insist that the whole journey thus far has been misdirected, and that the wrong sort of feminism has triumphed, because making women more the equal of men has not brought them the full and fulfilled humanity that they crave, which can only be attained when patriarchy is finally overthrown.132 Although they are significantly different in their aims and objectives, both interpretations assume that women will continue to organize, to campaign, and to assert their collective identity. But it is far from clear that they will do so. The generation of active feminists who were the children of the 1960s are reluctantly moving on, and as they do so, they increasingly lament that those women coming after them, who enjoy greater opportunities in part thanks to their predecessors’ efforts, are uneager to carry on fighting, organizing, and mobilizing, either because they cannot see the point of it or because they cannot see the need for it. Having enjoyed no 1917-style triumph, feminism is unlikely to suffer a 1989-style defeat; but Robin Morgan’s latest claim that mobilized and collective sisterhood is the pre-eminent collective identity that will last “for ever” seems more than a touch overstated.133

  FIVE

  Race

  Segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!

  —Governor George Wallace, 1963

  We’re all God’s children. All God’s children are equal.

  —Governor George Wallace, 1973

  DURING THE LATE 1840S, a disgraced Scottish doctor named Robert Knox went on a lecture tour of the north of England, speaking on “the races of men,” and he subsequently published a book of that title.1 His career as a successful medical researcher and anatomical teacher was behind him, his reputation having been irretrievably damaged by his association with two grave robbers who had supplied him with the cadavers of men they had recently murdered.2 Rejected by the Scottish medical establishment, Knox turned to study human history from a medical and anatomical perspective, also drawing on his earlier experiences as an army surgeon at the Cape of Good Hope, where he had encountered dark-skinned people in significant numbers. The conclusions he reached about the past content, present nature, and future trajectories of human identities were as all-encompassing as those drawn at the same time by Marx and Engels, but they were so different as to be incommensurable with them. For according to Knox, the history of all hitherto existing societies had not been built around the struggling collectivities of class, but around the antagonistic groupings of race. “That race is in human affairs everything,” he began his book, in a grandiose opening rivaling The Communist Manifesto in its all-embracing claims, “is simply a fact, the most remarkable, the most comprehensive, which philosophy has announced.” “Race,” Knox reaffirmed, was “everything.”3

  Although he accepted that humanity had initially known some primeval unity at the dawn of creation, Knox insisted that the various races existing throughout history were separate species living in distant habitats, different from one another biologically
and behaviorally; they were also unequal in their attainments and destined to be in conflict as they always had been. In Europe, he believed there were four major races, which he ranked in descending order of sophistication: the Saxons, concentrated in Britain, northern Germany, and Scandinavia; the Celts, inhabiting France, Spain, parts of Italy, most of Ireland, and the western extremities of Great Britain; the Slavonian, found in much of middle Europe and the Balkans; and the Sarmatian or Russ, who lived farther east. To these Knox added other, lesser races, such as the Goths, the Latins, and the (especially disliked) Jews; lower still down the scale, separated from the others by a vast gulf, came the mongoloid and negroid races. The black was the inferior of the white, not only with respect to color but in everything else as well: “He is,” Knox insisted, “no more a white man than an ass is a horse or a zebra.” These races were also immutable in their separateness, for just as “nature produces no mules,” so there could be “no hybrids” in people. Thus understood, race and its natural hierarchy would, Knox believed, be the “overweening determinant” of collective identities.4

  Though Knox was little read in his day, his views on race consciousness, rankings, and conflict were more widely subscribed to than those of Marx and Engels concerning class. For obvious reasons, Benjamin Disraeli did not accept Knox’s disparaging opinion of Jews, but he did agree with his general outlook. In 1847, he made one character observe in his novel Tancred, “All is race; there is no other truth,” and two years later he elaborated the point in the House of Commons: “Race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance.”5 Even closer to Knox’s were the opinions of the Frenchman Comte Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, who constructed “a fully furnished intellectual edifice where race explained everything in the past, present and future” in his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, published between 1853 and 1855. Its dedication to King George V of Hanover proclaims that “the racial question overshadows all other problems of history, that it holds the key to them all,” and that “the inequality of the races” was part of the immutable order of things.6 At the same time, the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, who shared Knox’s veneration for the Anglo-Saxons, devoted a chapter in his English Traits (1856) to the subject, arguing that race determined history and trumped all other identities, because “in the deep traits of race … the fortunes of nations are written.”7

  Drawing upon this recently developing body of literature on race, Knox’s writings offered validation to the continuation of slaveholding societies in the Caribbean and the Americas, and for the next century and more, belief in the preeminence of racial categories and identities as a “total explanatory system” of human behavior would remain a powerful—and pernicious—force in apprehending the world and in governing large parts of it.8 Yet this morphological view of human identities, built around skin color and other external features, never went uncontested, even in its heyday. In part this was because there were always the competing collectivities of religion, nation, class, and gender to challenge and undermine the primacy of race. But it may also be said that race, appealing as it did to the most visceral sense of human difference, also inspired the most visceral refusal of its claims, for it was in answer to the divisive and value-laden hierarchies of race in particular that the universalist claims of a common humanity were first articulated and invoked in modern times. In one guise, these counterarguments were religious, drawing on the biblical teaching that God had made all human beings equal in his own image. But in another, they were scientific, as the findings of anthropologists and geneticists accumulated to reveal that apart from certain superficial differences, the so-called races were more nearly the same than they were different from each other.

  THE RISE OF RACE

  Unlike religious or class identities, which derived from and depend on a limited number of sacred texts, namely the Bible and the writings of Marx and Engels, racial identities have been underpinned (or undermined) by a more varied corpus of (often contradictory) writings. This helps explain why historians cannot agree when race became an important form of collective perception, identity, ranking, and antagonism.9 But it seems generally accepted that no such way of conceptualizing and contrasting human aggregations was widespread in the ancient world. To be sure, ancient Greece and the Roman Empire were societies built on slavery, but there were no clear-cut physical differences, such as skin color, distinguishing slaves from masters: servitude was a matter of individual personal history rather than collective racial identity.10 The Greeks may have believed they were better than all other peoples, but they made no attempt to rank non-Hellenes in a hierarchy of superior or inferior types. And while black Africans, usually referred to as Ethiopians, were well known in ancient times, they were not regarded as lesser beings by virtue of their skin color. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans thought that way about the many peoples living in the Mediterranean, in Asia Minor, and in North Africa, and later attempts to impute to Plato and Aristotle a nineteenth-century view of racial identities and rankings, anticipating the opinions of Robert Knox and his contemporaries, were ahistorical and anachronistic.11

  The Bible was also largely color-blind and “oblivious of the fact of racial difference”: Old Testament descriptions of encounters between different tribes and peoples were generally devoid of racial connotations, and a fundamental tenet of Christian teaching was the essential unity of humankind, for as was made plain in the Book of Genesis, everyone was descended from the two originally created parents, Adam and Eve. This doctrine of a common humanity was frequently and brutally set aside during religious wars and persecutions, but the injunction that “God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” remained deeply embedded.12 This was certainly the view of Saint Augustine:

  Whoever is anywhere born a man, that is, a rational, mortal animal, no matter what unusual appearance he presents in colour, movement, sound, nor how peculiar he is in some part, or quality of his nature, no Christian can doubt that he springs from that one protoplast … if they are human, they are descended from Adam.13

  Such anatomical differences as skin pigmentation were merely superficial, and since all human beings originated from the same stock, they were all equal in the sight of God. The fourth-century Christian author Lucius Lactantius put this well:

  All men are begotten alike, with a capacity and ability of reasoning and feeling, without preference of age, sex, or dignity.… God, who produces and gives breath to men, willed that all should be equal.… In his sight, no one is a slave, no one a master; for all have the same father, by an equal right we are all children.14

  Between the fall of Rome and the early Enlightenment, the color-blind legacy of pagan antiquity, combined with the Christian belief in a shared humanity embodied in the doctrine of monogenesis, stood as a powerful barrier to the rise of racial thinking, categories, hierarchies, and conflict. Indeed, races later to be reviled in the West were honored. One of the wise men who presented their gifts to the infant Christ was usually depicted as being dark-skinned; early Christians celebrated the conversion of Africans as evidence of the spiritual equality of all human beings; and during the late Middle Ages, a favorable image of blacks was expressed in the idea of “le bon Nègre.”15 Black was beautiful, and race-blind behavior expressed race-blind attitudes. To be sure, some black Africans were forcibly brought to Europe or shipped to America, but others traveled freely as ambassadors and pilgrims, or collaborated with Europeans in the slave trade itself. This was not the only way in which slavery remained race-blind: for more than a millennium, from the Vikings to the Ottomans, the trade in slaves was overwhelmingly in white people, from eastern Europe and Asia. As such, it was geography, not race, that determined who was a slave; this was equally true in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in America, where marriages between colonizers and indigenes were commonplace.16

  But there were also countervailing developments, and it was in medieval times t
hat racial stereotypes and displays of hostility first became conspicuous. In late antiquity, Africans were popularly deemed to be descended from Canaan via Ham, and since Canaan had dishonored his father, Noah, their descendants were cursed and condemned to be dark-skinned and servile, as the hewers of wood and the drawers of water. Notions of “purity of blood” (notably in the Iberian world as “limpieza de sangre”) became widespread on a continent thought to be under siege by Islam. Among those deemed to lack such purity and to be accomplices of the devil were the Jews. A thousand years of religious objection had hardened into a racial animus, as the Jews came to be seen as a people apart, who could be neither converted nor assimilated into a broader humanity; and such discriminatory thinking also seemed to furnish divine sanction for employing black Africans as slaves.17 The result was that there were many violent outbursts against Jews, ranging from attacks by Crusaders in the Holy Land from 1096 to their expulsion from Spain four hundred years later; and from the mid-fifteenth century, the Portuguese began to enslave black Africans, shipping some back to work in Europe, and transporting others across the Atlantic to labor in their American empire. Such were the beginnings of European racial attitudes and categories, which would persist into the twentieth century, establishing by reason of blood or skin the inferiority of all other peoples to white Christian Europeans.18

  Yet for every tendency toward a modern conception of race, there was an equal and opposite tendency to undercut it, which prevented race from emerging as a central organizing concept of Western intellectual life, a major component of political culture, or a significant means of structuring human identities and differences before the middle of the eighteenth century.19 By then, however, racial categories, rankings, and identities were becoming more sharp, fixed, and significant, and there were a number of explanations for this development. It was partly a manifestation of the neoclassical sensibility of the Enlightenment, deriving from ancient Greece and Rome, which demonstrated an exclusive preference for white-skinned people. It was partly a consequence of the increasing travel and encounters between Europeans and peoples in Africa and South Asia, whose existence (and appearance) the biblical story of monogenesis and the curse of Canaan did not necessarily explain. There was also the expanding Atlantic slave trade, in which by now many European nations were participating, and which established and institutionalized the connection between freedom, superiority, and whiteness on the one hand, and servitude, inferiority, and blackness on the other. By the second half of the eighteenth century, these racial taxonomies were also becoming more pronounced on America’s eastern seaboard and in the Caribbean, where the slave-owning societies and slave-labor economies placed whites over blacks in binary opposition.20