The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred Read Online Free PDF

preoccupation of modern times. An answer that suggests itself – also, as it happens, from the literature on evolutionary biology – is that racism, in the sense of a strongly articulated sense of racial differentiation, is one of those ‘memes’ characterized by Richard Dawkins as behaving in the realm of ideas the way genes behave in the natural world. The
idea
of biologically distinct races, ironically, has been able to reproduce itself and retain its integrity far more successfully than the races it claims to identify.
    In the ancient and medieval worlds, no identity was wholly indelible. It was possible to become a Roman citizen, even if one had been born a Gaul. It was possible to become a Christian, even – at first especially – if one had been born a Jew. At the same time, blood feuds could run for years, even centuries, between ethnically indistinguishable but irreconcilably hostile clans. The notion of immutable racial identity came late to human history. The Spanish expulsion of the Jews in 1492 was very unusual in defining Jewishness according to blood rather than belief. Even in the eighteenth-century Portuguese Empire, it was possible for a mulatto to acquire the legal rights and privileges of a white through the payment of a standard fee to the crown. As is well known, the first ostensibly scientific attempt to subdivide the human species into biologically distinct races was by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (Carl von Linné). In his
Systema Naturae
(1758), he identified four races:
Homo sapiens americanus, Homo sapiens asiaticus, Homo sapiens afer
and
Homo sapiens europaeus
.Linnaeus, like all his many imitators, ranked the various races according to their appearance, temperament and intelligence, putting European man at the top of the evolutionary tree, followed (in Lin-naeus’s case) by American man (‘ill-tempered… obstinate, contented, free’), Asian man (‘severe, haughty, desirous’) and – invariably at the bottom – African man (‘crafty, slow, foolish’). Whereas European man was ‘ruled by customs’, Linnaeus argued, African man was ruled by ‘caprice’. Already by the time of the American Revolution, this way of thinking was astonishingly widespread; the only real debate was whether racial differences reflected gradual divergence from a common origin or, as polygenists insisted, the lack of such a common origin. By the end of the nineteenth century, racial theorists had devised more elaborate methods of categorization, most commonly based on skull size and shape, but the basic ranking never changed. In his
Hereditary Genius
(1869), the English polymath Francis Galton devised a sixteen-point scale of racial intelligence, which put ancient Athenians at the top and the Australian aborigines at the bottom.
    This was a profound transformation in the way people thought. Previously, men had tended to believe that it was power, privilege and property that were inheritable, as well, no doubt, as the social obligations that went with them. The royal dynasties who still ruled so much of the world in 1900 were the embodiments of this principle. Even the republics that occasionally arose in the modern period – in the Netherlands, North America and France – tended to retain the hereditary principle with respect to wealth, if not to office and status. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries new political doctrines arose. One theory asserted that power should not be a hereditary attribute, and that leaders should be selected by popular acclamation. Another called for the demolition of the edifice of inherited privilege; all men should instead be equal before the law. A third argued that property should not be monopolized by an elite of wealthy families, but should be redistributed according to individual needs. Yet even as democrats, liberals and socialists advanced these arguments, racists asserted that the hereditary principle should nevertheless apply in every other field of