On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (41 page)

Demonization and race. David Lean, the director, and Alec Guinness, the actor, received many charges of anti-Semitism after their grotesque portrayal of Fagin in the 1948 version of
Oliver Twist
(Independent Producers). Unflattering shots of Fagin were edited out of the film before it was released in the United States. Image courtesy of Photofest.

In the medieval era the monstrous races were conceptualized as cursed by God, but such theological thinking became less available to Westerners in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After Darwin, race became a predominantly scientific issue, but this only meant that some prejudices took on a new nomenclature. Anthropology in the early twentieth century was still assuming the old hierarchy of races, but now the bogus declension was supposed to be a product of evolution rather than theological fiat. Underneath the new anthropology was a deeper debate about the nature of the
self
.

The influential philosopher Descartes argued that the human self or soul was completely independent of the body. Like a diamond in a dung heap, the real me maintains its purity inside my transient material body. To the question Who am I really? the rationalist Cartesians answered, The soul or the mind, which has no gender, no class, no race. But the empiricists of the following generation, including John Locke and then David Hume, argued against this idea, claiming that there is no such inner diamond mind; in fact, there is nothing in the mind that is not first in the senses (
nihil in intellectu nisiprius in sensu
). Unlike the Cartesian
internalist
view,
externalist
empiricism held that if the body can be affected by its particular environment, then so can the mind.

Some think that the Cartesian internalist view, with its genderless and raceless pure self, represents a kind of theoretical bar to racism. This has a certain plausibility. Edward Said, for example, claims that the racist stereotypes of Orientalism rest on the presupposition of empiricist theories of self. He suggests that racism is fueled by the empiricist belief “that mind and body were interdependent realities, both determined originally by a given set of geographical, biological, and quasi-historical conditions.”
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Noam Chomsky points out the racist tendency toward social manipulation buried in empiricist theory. “The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.”
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According to empiricist theories of the self, the contents of consciousness, the inner life, is in large part conditioned by the external environment. In this tradition, the ideas of the soul or mind are simply internal copies of bodily sense impressions. A constant thread through such empiricism is Locke’s claim that confused minds result from erroneous conflations of impressions. Any interesting epistemology must account not only for our knowledge but for our more abundant ignorance. So, Locke claims, “whole societies of men” are worked into “universal perverseness” because unrelated experiences “of no alliance to one another, are, by education, custom, and the constant din of their party, so coupled in their minds, that they always appear there together” and become confused as one idea.
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This position would later support racial theorists such as the empirically oriented American Jeffersonians.

The early anthropology of the American Philosophical Society, whose inner circle included such thinkers as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush, centered around whether Indians, blacks, and whites were members of the
same species. The empirically oriented philosophers argued that the races had a common origin, but the current “depravity” of Indians and blacks was a result of poor environment: unhealthy external conditions resulted in internal retrograde souls. Rush, for example, stated, “The weakness of the intellects in certain savage and barbarous nations…is as much the effect of the want of physical influence upon their minds, as a disagreeable color and figure are of its action upon their bodies.”
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A post-Darwinian expression of this same external model of racial causality can be found in Edward Drinker Cope’s 1883 assertion that “every peculiarity of the body has probably some corresponding significance in the mental, and the cause of the former are the remoter causes of the latter.”
¹³

The metaphor of external causation did indeed allow theorists to indulge in justifications for prejudice. However, the explanation of racial variations via empirical environmentalism is not in itself inherently pernicious. Obviously it’s a dangerous blunder to argue from one’s environment to one’s skin color to one’s morally significant mental status, but the externalist metaphor has also been the driving force behind some arguments for the fundamental unity of humankind and the moral equality of all races. The advantage of thinking of the mind (and race) as environmentally produced is that it eliminates dangerous forms of essentialism. Normal or abnormal, mundane or monstrous—no group was essentially fixed or eternally different; they simply had different geographical biographies. Of course, this racial relativism was not applied fairly in many cases. Jefferson himself conveniently suggested that although Indians are certainly capable of the most refined capacities of our species, Negroes may not be so capable; thus a certain theoretical justification for American slavery could remain in place. Obviously, this was a perniciously inconsistent application of the theory. But if applied consistently the environmental theory can legitimate a moral egalitarianism in the face of racial variation.

If race is simply a response to particular external stimuli, then given enough time (and the geological revolution finally convinced us that there is enough time), an environmentally transposed black population and white population would eventually take on each other’s traits. For if we take Darwinian natural selection seriously, we must recognize that there is no trait that is so
essential
that it cannot become, in time,
accidental
, and even nonexistent. And there is no trait that is so accidental that it cannot become, in time, essential to a race or species. That is to say, the age-old concepts of essence and accident are exploded. Unfortunately, many such theories were still wed to the ancient idea of a hierarchical
scala naturae
and presupposed that one could “improve” the savage (raise him to the “higher” white or European level of the ladder) by altering his environment.

By contrast, a Cartesian model of the self, mixed with prejudice, becomes an odious framework for thinking racial differences to be eternal and forever fixed.
¹⁴
Indeed, such a framework was articulated in American polygeny theory, whereby internal selves were expressed through external racial characteristics. Naturalists in the nineteenth century divided roughly into two camps: the polygenists, who argued for several distinct origins of the races, and the monogenists, who argued for one origin for all humankind. Prior to Darwin, the inquiry centered around whether there was
one
Adam and Eve or
many
(multiple creations). After Darwin, the discourse shifted slightly to inquire into whether the species had one origin with several evolved racial variations, or whether each race constituted its own species, having only a very remote connection to others. Polygenists, both before and after Darwin, embraced the internalist or essentialist idea of fixed races. The African descendant, the Native American descendant, and the Caucasian descendant all represented fixed kinds of diverse entities, taking their diversity from some innately bestowed respective essence (usually granted by God). American polygenists, such as Dr. Samuel George Morton, were very popular prior to the Civil War because their internalist metaphor left no room for change in the contemporary racial hierarchy. An internal soul immune from environmental conditions was said to eternally define the slave, from ancient times to the present.

The polygenist idea of races as originally and essentially distinct was a harbinger of the Nazi ideology. The Nazis rejected monogenism because the idea that all races had a common origin lent itself to the democratic contention that Jews, blacks, and Aryans were essentially brothers and sisters, descendants of common parent stock. The polygenist doctrine of eternal divisions between races made it easy to think of the souls of other races (if they had them) as fundamentally other. Thus no amount of external environmental influence could alter the essence of the Jew or the Asian. George Mosse describes this Nazi opposition to the monogenist theory that all races evolved from one source: “As National Socialism and the Volkish movement claimed that the German race was perfection incarnate, that its greatness was immutable, the idea of racial evolution and progress had to be rejected.”
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Adolf Hitler himself invoked this theme of eternal racial identity and rejected the empiricist view of the self when he stated, “A man can change his language without any trouble—that is, he can use another language; but in his new language he will express the old ideas; his inner nature is not changed. This is best shown by the Jew who can speak a thousand languages and nevertheless remain a Jew. His traits of character have remained the same, whether two thousand years ago as a grain dealer in Ostia, speaking Roman, or
whether as a flour profiteer of today, jabbering German with a Jewish accent. It is always the same Jew.”
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Why do we transform other groups, whole races, into monsters? This is an important question. The kind of theoretical explanation that I’ve been sketching may be ascribing more
rational
decision-making behavior to racists than really occurs. All such arguments tend to take the form
because it is economically or socially advantageous to see other races as inferior, we elect to see them as inferior
. The argument implies some sort of conscious decision making, or at least a social calculation. But the treatment of other races as monstrous may be more
instinctual.
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Specifically, it may be the result of xenophobia, a neurotic exaggeration of an otherwise low-level but ever-present instinctual fear. Fear and anxiety are ubiquitous in humans; they are reported to be the most common emotions in our dream lives. Just as some psychiatric disorders may be intensified modulations of ordinary feelings like fear, so, too, whole societies may suffer from intensified fears, especially if their mass media stimulates such feelings. Treating strangers as monsters may be the neurotic cultural response of a paranoid society. Being afraid is a given part of the human condition, as is suspicion about people and creatures that are different. But if widespread fears are systematically trained upon another population, it won’t be long before that population really is a threat because their subsequent feelings of defensiveness and victimization are surefire paths to hostile countermeasures.

“Us-versus-them thinking comes remarkably easily to us,” says the primate biologist Frans de Waal.
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He finds the demonization of others to be strong in primate communities as well: “There is no question that chimpanzees are xenophobic.” Jane Goodall described some chimp aggression toward out-group members as so violent and degrading that it was clear that the chimps were treating their enemies as members of some other species. De Waal also describes such behavior: “One attacker might pin down the victim (sitting on his head, holding his legs) while others bit, hit, and pounded. They would twist off a limb, rip out a trachea, remove fingernails, literally drink blood pouring from wounds, and in general not let up until their victim stopped moving.” Chimps, like humans, can perceive their enemies as monsters and then respond with torture and other forms of excessive brutality. Perceived monsters bring out monstrous reactions.

A community of chimps in Gombe National Park in Tanzania demonstrates some interesting xenophobic behavior. In the beginning it was
a large group of chimps who socialized with each other and functioned like a unified clan. Over the years, however, the group split into northern and southern subgroups. Eventually the two groups began to fight with each other and define each other as hostile out-groups. “Shocked researchers watched as former friends now drank each other’s blood,” de Waal writes. Biologists extend the point to human hostilities, such as those of the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and the Muslims, Serbs, and Croats in Bosnia. De Waal speculates that when groups feel a sense of common purpose, they suppress their aggression toward other in-group members. But remove that common purpose, and look out. “Both humans and chimps are gentle, or at least restrained, toward members of their own group, yet both can be monsters to those on the outside.”

So strong is the xenophobia in chimps that researchers fail whenever they attempt to introduce new members into a clan. If they bring excaptive chimps, for example, to a wild clan, the new chimps are always met with violence, and the integration experiment usually has to be aborted. On the other hand, such tribalism appears to carry strong bonds of loyalty. When de Waal introduced two males to a group at the Yerkes Primate Center, he was surprised to observe two females approach and defend one of the newcomers, Jimoh. The other chimp was received with the usual violence, but not Jimoh. The two females groomed him and protected him from the other hostile chimps. Sometime later de Waal discovered that fourteen years earlier, Jimoh had been in another institution with the same two females, who recognized him and now protected him as one of their own.

Here at the beginning of our century we find much of the explicitly racial xenophobia being replaced by talk of a “clash of civilizations.” The political scientist Samuel P. Huntington prognosticated a future drama between post–cold war world powers in his influential and vaguely paranoid essay “The Clash of Civilizations,” where he argued that, after the cold war, international politics would move out of its Western phase (i.e., the battles between liberal democracy, fascism, and communism) and become the clash between Western and non-Western civilizations: “In the politics of civilizations, the peoples and governments of non-Western civilizations no longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western colonialism but join the West as movers and shapers of history.”
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Western nation-states, Huntington argued, must align with each other in order to be strong and resilient in the coming clash with the East.