A Modern Utopia, H. G. Wells [i like reading books .txt] 📗

supreme blessings of life, conceal from us the

very real nobility of their dream of England’s mission to the

world….

 

We of this generation have seen a flood of reaction against such

universalism. The great intellectual developments that centre upon

the work of Darwin have exacerbated the realisation that life is a

conflict between superior and inferior types, it has underlined the

idea that specific survival rates are of primary significance in the

world’s development, and a swarm of inferior intelligences has

applied to human problems elaborated and exaggerated versions of

these generalisations. These social and political followers of

Darwin have fallen into an obvious confusion between race and

nationality, and into the natural trap of patriotic conceit. The

dissent of the Indian and Colonial governing class to the first

crude applications of liberal propositions in India has found a

voice of unparalleled penetration in Mr. Kipling, whose want of

intellectual deliberation is only equalled by his poietic power. The

search for a basis for a new political synthesis in adaptable

sympathies based on linguistic affinities, was greatly influenced by

Max Muller’s unaccountable assumption that language indicated

kindred, and led straight to wildly speculative ethnology, to the

discovery that there was a Keltic race, a Teutonic race, an

Indo-European race, and so forth. A book that has had enormous

influence in this matter, because of its use in teaching, is J. R.

Green’s Short History of the English People, with its grotesque

insistence upon Anglo-Saxonism. And just now, the world is in a sort

of delirium about race and the racial struggle. The Briton

forgetting his Defoe, [Footnote: The True-born Englishman.] the Jew

forgetting the very word proselyte, the German forgetting his

anthropometric variations, and the Italian forgetting everything,

are obsessed by the singular purity of their blood, and the danger

of contamination the mere continuance of other races involves. True

to the law that all human aggregation involves the development of a

spirit of opposition to whatever is external to the aggregation,

extraordinary intensifications of racial definition are going on;

the vileness, the inhumanity, the incompatibility of alien races is

being steadily exaggerated. The natural tendency of every human

being towards a stupid conceit in himself and his kind, a stupid

depreciation of all unlikeness, is traded upon by this bastard

science. With the weakening of national references, and with the

pause before reconstruction in religious belief, these new arbitrary

and unsubstantial race prejudices become daily more formidable. They

are shaping policies and modifying laws, and they will certainly be

responsible for a large proportion of the wars, hardships, and

cruelties the immediate future holds in store for our earth.

 

No generalisations about race are too extravagant for the inflamed

credulity of the present time. No attempt is ever made to

distinguish differences in inherent quality—the true racial

differences—from artificial differences due to culture. No lesson

seems ever to be drawn from history of the fluctuating incidence of

the civilising process first upon this race and then upon that. The

politically ascendant peoples of the present phase are understood to

be the superior races, including such types as the Sussex farm

labourer, the Bowery tough, the London hooligan, and the Paris

apache; the races not at present prospering politically, such as the

Egyptians, the Greeks, the Spanish, the Moors, the Chinese, the

Hindoos, the Peruvians, and all uncivilised people are represented

as the inferior races, unfit to associate with the former on terms

of equality, unfit to intermarry with them on any terms, unfit for

any decisive voice in human affairs. In the popular imagination of

Western Europe, the Chinese are becoming bright gamboge in colour,

and unspeakably abominable in every respect; the people who are

black—the people who have fuzzy hair and flattish noses, and no

calves to speak of—are no longer held to be within the pale of

humanity. These superstitions work out along the obvious lines of

the popular logic. The depopulation of the Congo Free State by the

Belgians, the horrible massacres of Chinese by European soldiery

during the Pekin expedition, are condoned as a painful but necessary

part of the civilising process of the world. The world-wide

repudiation of slavery in the nineteenth century was done against a

vast sullen force of ignorant pride, which, reinvigorated by the

new delusions, swings back again to power.

 

“Science” is supposed to lend its sanction to race mania, but it is

only “science” as it is understood by very illiterate people that

does anything of the sort—“scientists’” science, in fact. What

science has to tell about “The Races of Man” will be found compactly

set forth by Doctor J. Deinker, in the book published under that

title. [Footnote: See also an excellent paper in the American

Journal of Sociology for March, 1904, The Psychology of Race

Prejudice, by W. I. Thomas.] From that book one may learn the

beginnings of race charity. Save for a few isolated pools of savage

humanity, there is probably no pure race in the whole world. The

great continental populations are all complex mixtures of numerous

and fluctuating types. Even the Jews present every kind of skull

that is supposed to be racially distinctive, a vast range of

complexion—from blackness in Goa, to extreme fairness in

Holland—and a vast mental and physical diversity. Were the Jews

to discontinue all intermarriage with “other races” henceforth

for ever, it would depend upon quite unknown laws of fecundity,

prepotency, and variability, what their final type would be, or,

indeed, whether any particular type would ever prevail over

diversity. And, without going beyond the natives of the British

Isles, one can discover an enormous range of types, tall and short,

straight-haired and curly, fair and dark, supremely intelligent and

unteachably stupid, straightforward, disingenuous, and what not. The

natural tendency is to forget all this range directly “race” comes

under discussion, to take either an average or some quite arbitrary

ideal as the type, and think only of that. The more difficult thing

to do, but the thing that must be done if we are to get just results

in this discussion, is to do one’s best to bear the range in

mind.

 

Let us admit that the average Chinaman is probably different in

complexion, and, indeed, in all his physical and psychical

proportions, from the average Englishman. Does that render their

association upon terms of equality in a World State impossible? What

the average Chinaman or Englishman may be, is of no importance

whatever to our plan of a World State. It is not averages that

exist, but individuals. The average Chinaman will never meet the

average Englishman anywhere; only individual Chinamen will meet

individual Englishmen. Now among Chinamen will be found a range of

variety as extensive as among Englishmen, and there is no single

trait presented by all Chinamen and no Englishman, or vice versa.

Even the oblique eye is not universal in China, and there are

probably many Chinamen who might have been “changed at birth,” taken

away and educated into quite passable Englishmen. Even after we have

separated out and allowed for the differences in carriage, physique,

moral prepossessions, and so forth, due to their entirely divergent

cultures, there remains, no doubt, a very great difference between

the average Chinaman and the average Englishman; but would that

amount to a wider difference than is to be found between extreme

types of Englishmen?

 

For my own part I do not think that it would. But it is evident that

any precise answer can be made only when anthropology has adopted

much more exact and exhaustive methods of inquiry, and a far more

precise analysis than its present resources permit.

 

Be it remembered how doubtful and tainted is the bulk of our

evidence in these matters. These are extraordinarily subtle

inquiries, from which few men succeed in disentangling the threads

of their personal associations—the curiously interwoven strands of

self-love and self-interest that affect their inquiries. One might

almost say that instinct fights against such investigations, as it

does undoubtedly against many necessary medical researches. But

while a long special training, a high tradition and the possibility

of reward and distinction, enable the medical student to face many

tasks that are at once undignified and physically repulsive, the

people from whom we get our anthropological information are rarely

men of more than average intelligence, and of no mental training at

all. And the problems are far more elusive. It surely needs at least

the gifts and training of a first-class novelist, combined with a

sedulous patience that probably cannot be hoped for in combination

with these, to gauge the all-round differences between man and man.

Even where there are no barriers of language and colour,

understanding may be nearly impossible. How few educated people seem

to understand the servant class in England, or the working men!

Except for Mr. Bart Kennedy’s A Man Adrift, I know of scarcely any

book that shows a really sympathetic and living understanding of the

navvy, the longshore sailor man, the rough chap of our own race.

Caricatures, luridly tragic or gaily comic, in which the

misconceptions of the author blend with the preconceptions of the

reader and achieve success, are, of course, common enough. And then

consider the sort of people who pronounce judgments on the moral and

intellectual capacity of the negro, the Malay, or the Chinaman. You

have missionaries, native schoolmasters, employers of coolies,

traders, simple downright men, who scarcely suspect the existence

of any sources of error in their verdicts, who are incapable of

understanding the difference between what is innate and what is

acquired, much less of distinguishing them in their interplay. Now

and then one seems to have a glimpse of something really living—in

Mary Kingsley’s buoyant work, for instance—and even that may be no

more than my illusion.

 

For my own part I am disposed to discount all adverse judgments and

all statements of insurmountable differences between race and race.

I talk upon racial qualities to all men who have had opportunities

of close observation, and I find that their insistence upon these

differences is usually in inverse proportion to their intelligence.

It may be the chance of my encounters, but that is my clear

impression. Common sailors will generalise in the profoundest way

about Irishmen, and Scotchmen, and Yankees, and Nova Scotians, and

“Dutchies,” until one might think one talked of different species of

animal, but the educated explorer flings clear of all these

delusions. To him men present themselves individualised, and if they

classify it is by some skin-deep accident of tint, some trick of the

tongue, or habit of gesture, or such-like superficiality. And after

all there exists to-day available one kind at least of unbiassed

anthropological evidence. There are photographs. Let the reader turn

over the pages of some such copiously illustrated work as The Living

Races of Mankind, [Footnote: The Living Races of Mankind, by H. N.

Hutchinson, J. W. Gregory, and R. Lydekker. (Hutchinson.)] and look

into the eyes of one alien face after another. Are they not very

like the people one knows? For the most part, one finds it hard to

believe that, with a common language and common social traditions,

one would not get on very well with these people. Here or there is

a brutish or evil face, but you can find as brutish and evil in

the Strand on any afternoon. There are differences no doubt, but

fundamental incompatibilities—no! And very many of them send out

a ray of special resemblance and remind one more strongly of this

friend or that, than they do of their own kind. One notes with

surprise that one’s good friend and neighbour X and an anonymous

naked Gold Coast negro belong to one type, as distinguished from

one’s dear friend Y and a beaming individual from Somaliland, who

as certainly belong to another.

 

In one matter the careless and prejudiced nature of accepted racial

generalisations is particularly marked.