My alien eye, and I wish I could pluck it out, leads me far astray, into back corners of the Internet. Here is one journey, that started out as a defense of the late Stephen Jay Gould and led into the dark recesses of the human heart.
It started with this post in an article on Gould's mistakes in The Mismeasure of Man.
Gould's style of thinking has consistently fallen in with the late 20th century California trend to revisionism in all fields....of the sort seen from anthropologists who have decided that Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal intermingled to become one and the same; from historians who have concluded all white European males to be the source of all evil in civilisation, denying that all societies on this planet (save a few Pacific islanders) engaged in warfare, torture, and slavery. Multi-cultural political correctness has formed the over-arching ethos of my generation, inspiring scientific conclusions that range from biased to embarrassingly silly.
Is it just me, or is this little post ladled with all sorts of conservative subtext?
My counterattack. This stupid alien eye of mine makes me very confrontational.
Lots of evil, everywhere, all the time, but in the 19th and 20th centuries, white European males did cause much of the mayhem, mostly through the European colonial empires, wars of conquest, World Wars I and II, some of it motivated, justified by stupid pseudoscience to show they, and they alone, stood at the top of the "great chain of being." Also, don't forget slavery in the Americas, both in the USA and South America, mostly white guys behind that.
That said, the most lethal war of the 19th century was the Taiping Rebellion in China. It ranks number two on the scale of "Most People Killed Ever," about 20 - 30 million people smoked. It was mostly Chinese-on-Chinese action. It comes in right after the 60 - 100 million killed in WW2.
I still read Gould, he's a good writer. He made assumptions about Morton's science based on Morton's misuse and misinterpretation of data, a human failing. omg, I'm shocked to discover Gould was a human being.
The Neanderthal genome project has demonstrated that Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans did get funky and busy. They've even found traces of Neanderthal DNA in non-Africans.
I should add a personal note here. I'm mostly of Irish and German ancestry. It doesn't bother me a lick that I have Neanderthal DNA inside me. That some guys sharing a similar skin coloration with me once went on a world-wide rampage doesn't bother me a lick. I didn't do any of those things. No one I know did. None of my ancestors did. It's nice to know what once happened and the causes that led Europeans and European-derived cultures astray, but no guilt accrues to living individuals because of it. Now we know, we know the paths not to follow. Real history is not for kids. It's shocking, startling, and full of lessons on what not to do.
Then more conservative subtext, one of their favorites, "everyone does it."
I think you do non-Europeans a huge disservice by assuming that they are not capable of the the same selfish violence as Europeans. An honest look at history will show that the difference between European and non-European cultures is one of quantity, not quality. Europeans had the same militant greed as everyone around them. The only real difference is that they were better at it than their neighbors.
You think the alien eye is discouraged at that? It's coming back at you, hard!
The human propensity for violence is universal. Anyone who knows about Pol Pot knows that. But the rise of the vast European colonial empires, their subjugation of millions of people, the incredible body counts, the slavery, the mayhem - they have specific causes. If you dodge that by claiming that "everyone does it" you'll never learn anything from history.
Here are just two of them, and only mentioned, cuz this is a freaking comment section and not a place to write a book.
Scientific Racism. Bigotry is a universal impulse among humans, but the kind of deeply configured racialism present in European and European-derived cultures in the 19th and early 20th centuries both promoted and justified the exploitation of non-whites in the antebellum South, India, China, and Africa. It led to the atrocities of World War 2. It was the intellectual foundation for the European empires.
The Industrial Revolution. This gave Europeans the power to dominate the world. It did not give them the motivation for doing so.
So you had ideas current in the culture and the ability to act on them. When both are combined, then comes the big whammy.
Opposition to these ideas was also present, from British intellectuals and working men who pushed back at the idea of empire, to Quakers who smuggled slaves out of the South, to Bonhoeffer. Mark Twain was an ardent anti-imperialist.
I've given you enough to work on. Go read Twain's works in opposition to American Imperialism. Read the scientific racists and their critics. Read a history of the the Industrial Revolution. Read Hitler. Read Bonhoeffer. Go read, enrich yourself. Don't take a word I say as the truth, find out for yourself. Read the original works in translation. Read not just one narrative history but several, from different historians. Take the journey.
And what did my alien eye get for the exhortation to self-education?
And for all those reasons, real history is for kids....
An inanity. Once you've been to a gunfight with a conservative, it's the same pattern all over again. First a denunciation, then tit-for-tat, then inanity. They also expect no shove-back. Oh, and a few of them may be paid shills. My point in all this, always push back. Like I did in response to this inanity.
Real history is contained in the films of bulldozers pushing thousands
of rotting bodies into pits. Little kids ready for that? Show that to
little kids, be prepared for weeks of nightmares. Go read "The Theory
and Practice of Hell" and tell me that's suitable for little kids.
Those are just a few of the consequences of malformed ideas about race.
You can prepare them a little for the evil truths of this world, but the
real exposure to it must come later, in high school. Even then,
they'll have nightmares.
Don't worry, I won't come back at you here. That would be impolite. You're a guest. You don't take linguistic baseball bats to guests.