The Undivided Past (28 page)

Over the long haul of history, and notwithstanding their many limitations, it has clearly been easier to mobilize people on the basis of their
religious faith,
national pride, or
class identity than because of their
gender, and even during the second half of the twentieth century only a tiny percentage of women were members of feminist organizations. To be sure, this makes the significant changes that have been achieved to the benefit of women all the more remarkable. As
Germaine Greer concedes, “in the last thirty years, women have come a long, long way,” one indication of which, she claims, is that “feminist consciousness now leavens every relationship, every single social and professional encounter.”
¹²⁷
Every relationship? Every encounter? This is surely an exaggeration: there are many women (and even more men) in large parts of the world as yet untouched by feminism, and even where feminism has made an impact, its “leavening consciousness” is more the awareness of women’s individual or class-based concerns than their universal collective identity. Moreover, such limited mobilization may be only one of several reasons why the position of some women in some parts of the world has recently improved. Essential alterations to the law required the consent of predominantly male legislators and predominantly male judges. Changes in work patterns have been greatly facilitated by the decline of male-dominated heavy industry and the rise of the service sector and the knowledge economy, in which men and women work on a more equal footing. The
contraceptive pill was another technological innovation enlarging women’s freedom, whether their consciousnesses had been raised or not. None of this is to deny that organizing, mobilizing, campaigning, and writing have played a significant part in improving women’s circumstances; but as with
first-wave feminism and the extension of the
franchise, the limited collective action of the
second wave is certainly not the only, and may not turn out to have been the major, explanation.
¹²⁸

Yet it is still repeatedly maintained that mobilizing women for feminist ends “has contributed more to the world’s store of human happiness than it has taken away; and has undone some of
its most banal and many of its most insufferable oppressions without significantly increasing others.”
¹²⁹
No Western
secular liberal would be likely to deny that; but this is not the only view. To the
Catholic Church, that most conservative and
patriarchal of institutions (as exemplified in the views of
Pope Benedict), modern secularism,
liberalism, and feminism are anathema, undermining
biblical teaching and subverting the natural order of things, of which the submission of women to men, and their providentially ordained roles as virgin, wife, and mother, are among the most important.
¹³⁰
Moreover, mainstream
Islam is no less conservative and patriarchal, while its more radical expressions, such as Wahhabism, forbid women to drive or appear in public with more than their hands and eyes exposed. From these very different perspectives, the limited but misguided mobilization of women in the West, and the export of their feminism to other parts of the world, has
not
increased the sum total of
human happiness. Far from bringing them fulfillment and satisfaction, freedom and emancipation, so this argument goes, it has led too many women to deny their essential nature and to undertake mistaken journeys along the unrighteous paths of sin, selfishness, and self-indulgence.
¹³¹

There is one further and final qualification. Many feminists claim that although women have come a long way, there is still much more work to do, and that the task of safeguarding the bodies, educating the minds, and enhancing the opportunities of women is far from complete. In this they are surely correct. But others insist that the whole journey thus far has been misdirected, and that the wrong sort of feminism has triumphed, because making women more the
equal of men has not brought them the full and fulfilled humanity that they crave, which can only be attained when patriarchy is finally overthrown.
¹³²
Although they are significantly different in their aims and objectives, both interpretations assume that women will continue to organize, to campaign, and to assert their collective identity. But it is far from clear that they will do so. The generation of active feminists who were the children of the 1960s are reluctantly moving on, and as they do so, they increasingly lament that those women coming after them, who enjoy greater opportunities in part thanks to their predecessors’ efforts, are uneager to carry on fighting, organizing,
and mobilizing, either because they cannot see the point of it or because they cannot see the need for it. Having enjoyed no 1917-style triumph, feminism is unlikely to suffer a 1989-style defeat; but
Robin Morgan’s latest claim that mobilized and collective sisterhood is the pre-eminent collective identity that will last “for ever” seems more than a touch overstated.
¹³³

D
URING THE LATE 1840S
, a disgraced Scottish doctor named
Robert Knox went on a lecture tour of the north of England, speaking on “the races of men,” and he subsequently published a book of that title.
¹
His career as a successful medical researcher and anatomical teacher was behind him, his reputation having been irretrievably damaged by his association with two grave robbers who had supplied him with the cadavers of men they had recently murdered.
²
Rejected by the Scottish medical establishment, Knox turned to study
human history from a medical and anatomical perspective, also drawing on his earlier experiences as an army surgeon at the Cape of Good Hope, where he had encountered dark-skinned people in significant numbers. The conclusions he reached about the past content, present nature, and future trajectories of human identities were as all-encompassing as those drawn at the same time by
Marx and
Engels, but they were so different as to be incommensurable with them. For according to Knox, the history of all hitherto existing societies had not been built around the struggling collectivities of
class, but around the antagonistic groupings of race. “That race is in human affairs everything,” he began his book, in a grandiose opening rivaling
The Communist Manifesto
in its all-embracing claims, “is simply a fact, the most remarkable, the most comprehensive, which philosophy has announced.” “Race,” Knox reaffirmed, was “everything.”
³

Although he accepted that humanity had initially known
some primeval unity at the dawn of creation, Knox insisted that the various
races existing throughout history were separate species living in distant habitats, different from one another biologically and behaviorally; they were also unequal in their attainments and destined to be in conflict as they always had been. In Europe, he believed there were four major races, which he ranked in descending order of sophistication: the Saxons, concentrated in Britain, northern Germany, and Scandinavia; the Celts, inhabiting
France,
Spain, parts of
Italy, most of
Ireland, and the western extremities of
Great Britain; the Slavonian, found in much of middle Europe and the Balkans; and the Sarmatian or Russ, who lived farther east. To these Knox added other, lesser races, such as the
Goths, the Latins, and the (especially disliked)
Jews; lower still down the scale, separated from the others by a vast gulf, came the mongoloid and negroid races. The
black was the inferior of the white, not only with respect to color but in everything else as well: “He is,” Knox insisted, “no more a white man than an ass is a horse or a zebra.” These races were also immutable in their separateness, for just as “nature produces no mules,” so there could be “no hybrids” in people. Thus understood, race and its natural hierarchy would, Knox believed, be the “overweening determinant” of collective identities.
⁴

Though Knox was little read in his day, his views on race consciousness, rankings, and conflict were more widely subscribed to than those of
Marx and
Engels concerning
class. For obvious reasons,
Benjamin Disraeli did not accept Knox’s disparaging opinion of Jews, but he did agree with his general outlook. In 1847, he made one character observe in his novel
Tancred
, “All is race; there is no other truth,” and two years later he elaborated the point in the House of Commons: “Race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance.”
⁵
Even closer to Knox’s were the opinions of the Frenchman Comte
Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, who constructed “a fully furnished intellectual edifice where race explained everything in the past, present and future” in his
Essay on the Inequality of Human Races
, published between 1853 and 1855. Its dedication to King George V of Hanover proclaims that “the racial question overshadows
all other problems of history, that it holds the key to them all,” and that “the inequality of the
races” was part of the immutable order of things.
⁶
At the same time, the American writer
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who shared Knox’s veneration for the
Anglo-Saxons, devoted a chapter in his
English Traits
(1856) to the subject, arguing that race determined
history and trumped all other identities, because “in the deep traits of race … the fortunes of nations are written.”
⁷

Drawing upon this recently developing body of literature on race, Knox’s writings offered validation to the continuation of
slaveholding societies in the
Caribbean and the Americas, and for the next century and more, belief in the preeminence of racial categories and identities as a “total explanatory system” of human behavior would remain a powerful—and pernicious—force in apprehending the world and in governing large parts of it.
⁸
Yet this morphological view of
human identities, built around skin color and other external features, never went uncontested, even in its heyday. In part this was because there were always the competing collectivities of religio
n, nation, class, and
gender to challenge and undermine the primacy of race. But it may also be said that race, appealing as it did to the most visceral sense of human difference, also inspired the most visceral refusal of its claims, for it was in answer to the divisive and value-laden hierarchies of race in particular that the universalist claims of a common humanity were first articulated and invoked in modern times. In one guise, these counterarguments were religious, drawing on the biblical teaching that
God had made all human beings equal in his own image. But in another, they were scientific, as the findings of anthropologists and geneticists accumulated to reveal that apart from certain superficial differences, the so-called races were more nearly the same than they were different from each other.

Unlike religious or class identities, which derived from and depend on a limited number of sacred texts, namely the
Bible and the writings of
Marx and
Engels, racial identities have been
underpinned (or undermined) by a more varied corpus of (often contradictory) writings. This helps explain why historians cannot agree when race became an important form of collective perception, identity, ranking, and antagonism.
⁹
But it seems generally accepted that no such way of conceptualizing and contrasting
human aggregations was widespread in the ancient world. To be sure, ancient
Greece and the
Roman Empire were societies built on
slavery, but there were no clear-cut physical differences, such as
skin color, distinguishing slaves from masters: servitude was a matter of individual personal history rather than collective racial identity.
¹⁰
The Greeks may have beli
eved they were better than all other peoples, but they made no attempt to rank non-Hellenes in a hierarchy of superior or inferior types. And while
black Africans, usually referred to as Ethiopians, were well known in ancient times, they were not regarded as lesser beings by virtue of their skin color. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans thought that way about the many peoples living in the Mediterranean, in Asia Minor, and in North Africa, and later attempts to impute to
Plato and
Aristotle a nineteenth-century view of racial identities and rankings, anticipating the opinions of
Robert Knox and his contemporaries, were ahistorical and anachronistic.
¹¹

The
Bible was also largely color-blind and “oblivious of the fact of racial difference”:
Old Testament descriptions of encounters between different tribes and peoples were generally devoid of racial connotations, and a fundamental tenet of
Christian teaching was the essential unity of humankind, for as was made plain in the
Book of Genesis, everyone was descended from the two originally created parents,
Adam and Eve. This doctrine of a common humanity was frequently and brutally set aside during
religious wars and persecutions, but the injunction that “
God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” remained deeply embedded.
¹²
This was certainly the view of
Saint Augustine:

Such anatomical differences as
skin pigmentation were merely superficial, and since all human beings originated from the same stock, they were all equal in the sight of God. The fourth-century Christian author
Lucius Lactantius put this well: