Essays discussion

Reading two books progressing from page one, and by chance, landing on the same topic:

“The hypothesis that somewhere, sometime, an Indo-European race has existed has always been anchored in linguistic observation.” During the nineteenth and even more in the twentieth century, “racial anthropologists also began to discuss the Indo-Europeans” hypothesis ; philology seeped into the fi eld (Arvidsson 2006 , p. 41). A transformation that “cannot be stressed enough” took place: “the shift from the Aryan or Indo-European ‘ race ’ of people as a linguistic family to a physical- genetic species.” By the end of the nineteenth century, “ culturist philology was unable to prevent the word ‘race’ from being usurped by naturalist forces, and human beings came to be seen more and more as part of the necessary realm of nature, rather than the contingent realm of culture” (ibid., p. 61). The full depravity of Aryan racial anthropology was evident in Nazi Germany.

From: The Crisis of German Philology: Aryan Philology and the Elimination of the Old Testament

Many who are fully prepared to acknowledge that there are no significant natural differences between races nonetheless argue that there are certain respects in which it is worth retaining the concept of race: for instance, in talking about issues like social inequality or access to health care. There is, they argue, a certain pragmatic utility in retaining it, even if they acknowledge that racial categories result from social and historical legacies, rather than being dictated by nature. In this respect “race” has turned out to be a very different sort of social construction than, say, “witch” or “lunatic.” While generally there is a presumption that to catch out some entity or category as socially constructed is at the same time to condemn it, many thinkers are prepared to simultaneously acknowledge both the nonnaturalness of race as well as a certain pragmatic utility in retaining it.
Since the mid-twentieth century, no mainstream scientist has considered race a biologically significant category; no scientist believes any longer that “Negroid,” “Caucasoid,” and so on represent real natural kinds or categories.* For several decades it has been well established that there is as much genetic variation between two members of any supposed race as between two members of supposedly distinct races. This is not to say that there are no real differences, some of which are externally observable, between different human populations. It is only to say, as Lawrence Hirschfeld wrote in his 1996 book, Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds, that “races as socially defined do not (even loosely) capture interesting clusters of these differences.”Yet the category of race continues to be deployed in a vast number of contexts, and certainly not just by racists, but by ardent antiracists as well, and by everyone in between. The history of race, then, is not like the history of, say, witches: a group that is shown not to exist and that accordingly proceeds to go away. Why is this?

From: The Enlightenment’s “Race” Problem, and Ours —Justin E. H. Smith

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Weird how accidental “ideas” congeal and persist, even two world wars and nuclear bombs can’t get rid of them.

given that we now know that the identity groups in modern multicultural states are plainly constituted on ethno-linguistic and cultural grounds, rather than on biological-essential grounds, it remains unclear why we should not allow a concept such as “culture” or “ethnie” to do the semantic work for us that until now we have allowed the historically tainted and misleading concept of “race” to do. We have alternative ways of speaking of human diversity available to us, some of which are on vivid display in Amo’s early life and work, and which focus on rather more interesting features of different human groups than their superficial phenotypic traits.

Same shit, different era:

Nineteenth-century “scholars established the disciplines of Semitic and Indo- European” studies, inventing “the mythical fi gures of the Hebrew and the Aryan.” The invention of this “providential pair” revealed “to the people of the Christianized West the secret of their identity” and “bestowed upon them the patent of nobility that justifi ed their spiritual, religious, and political domination of the world” (Vernant, “Foreword,” in Olender 2008 , p. x). “[T]he Indo-European hypothesis ,” in contrast to the traditional biblical hypothesis, “took the ultimate form,” and “the Aryan-Semitic categories” greatly infl uenced “the human sciences throughout the nineteenth century” (Olender 2008 , pp. 2–3). The concept Aryan is particularly problematic since it refers to language, not race. In Sanskrit , it means noble or pure .
The discovery of Indo-Europeans “caused a furor that extended well beyond the discipline of comparative philology.” All the human sciences from history to mythology “and soon to include ‘racial science,’ were affected by the discovery of the tongue [ Sanskrit ] that was known not only as Indo-European but also as Aryan.”

I wonder if Joyce’s Ulysses was an attempt to destroy the Hebrew/ Aryan artificial distinction (JewGreek is GreekJew.) But even if that were the case (i.e. the point is to tear it down), he’s still building a monument upon a mistaken dinstinction.

From Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future

“there are several points in the distant past at which scholars have been tempted to define East and West in terms of biology, rejecting the argument I made in the introduction that folks (in large groups) are all much the same and instead seeing the people in one part of the world as genetically superior to everyone else. There are also points when it would be all too easy to conclude that one region has, since time immemorial, been culturally superior to all others”

Unfortunately, this is neither distant nor past. Today we have Sam Harris, Steven Pinker...

“if the time machine I invoked earlier could transport you to Shanidar as well as to Zhoukoudian, you would see real behavioral differences between Eastern Peking Man and Western Neanderthals. You would also be hard-pressed to avoid concluding that the West was more developed than the East. This may already have been true 1.6 million years ago, when the Movius Line took shape, but it was definitely true a hundred thousand years ago. Again the specter of a racist long-term lock-in theory rears its head: Does the West rule today because modern Europeans are the heirs of genetically superior Neanderthal stock, while Asians descend from the more primitive Homo erectus?”

(Hint: The answer is: no.)

Again, shocking how such detours in thoughts and categories persist.

To be fair, despite having just read multiple books in the last few months that touch on this issue, I cannot seem to do away with the intuition of “race” as a legit, self-evident, meaningful category.