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A Modern Utopia Chapter 10 - Race in Utopia, Sections 1-2 · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Chapter ten of A Modern Utopia. This is a LibriVox recording.
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  Speaker 1: All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
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  Speaker 1: information or to volunteer, please visit liberyvox dot org. Recording
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  Speaker 1: by Felicity Campbell. A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells,
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  Speaker 1: Chapter the tenth race in Utopia section one above the
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  Speaker 1: sphere of the elemental cravings and necessities, The soul of
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  Speaker 1: man is in a perpetual vacillation between two conflicting impulses,
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  Speaker 1: the desire to assert his individual differences, the desire for distinction,
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  Speaker 1: and his terror of isolation. He wants to stand out,
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  Speaker 1: but not too far out, And on the contrary, he
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  Speaker 1: wants to merge himself with a group with some larger body,
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  Speaker 1: but not altogether. Through all the things of life run
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  Speaker 1: this tortuous compromise. Men follow the fashions, but resent ready
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  Speaker 1: made uniforms on every plane of their being. The disposition
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  Speaker 1: to form aggregations and to imagine aggregations is part of
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  Speaker 1: the incurable nature of man. It is one of the
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  Speaker 1: great natural forces the statesman must utilize and against which
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  Speaker 1: he must construct effectual defenses. The study of the aggregations
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  Speaker 1: and of the ideals of aggregations about which men's sympathies
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  Speaker 1: will twine and upon which they will base a large
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  Speaker 1: proportion of their conduct into personal policy. Is that legitimate
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  Speaker 1: definition of sociology. Now, the sort of aggregation to which
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  Speaker 1: men and women will refer themselves is determined partly by
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  Speaker 1: the strength and idiosyncrasy of the individual imagination, and partly
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  Speaker 1: by the reek of ideas that chances to be in
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  Speaker 1: the air at the time. Men and women may vary greatly,
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  Speaker 1: both in their innate and their acquired disposition towards this
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  Speaker 1: sort of larger body, or that to which their social
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  Speaker 1: reference can be made. The social reference of a man
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  Speaker 1: is probably to some rather vaguely conceived tribe, as the
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  Speaker 1: natural social reference of a dog is to a pack.
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  Speaker 1: But just as the social reference of a dog may
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  Speaker 1: be educated until the reference to a pack is completely
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  Speaker 1: replaced by a reference to an owner, so on his
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  Speaker 1: higher plane of edgicability, the social reference of the civilized
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  Speaker 1: man undergoes the most remarkable transformations. But the power and
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  Speaker 1: scope of his imagination and the need he has of
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  Speaker 1: response sets limits to this process. A highly intellectualized, mature
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  Speaker 1: mind may refer for its data very consistent to ideas
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  Speaker 1: of a higher being, so remote and indefinable as God,
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  Speaker 1: so comprehensive as humanity, so far reaching is the purpose
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  Speaker 1: in things I write may, but I doubt if this
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  Speaker 1: exaltation of reference is ever permanently sustained. Kant, in his
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  Speaker 1: positive polity, exposes his soul with great freedom, and the
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  Speaker 1: curious may trace how while he professes and quite honestly
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  Speaker 1: intends to refer himself always to his greater being, humanity,
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  Speaker 1: he narrows constantly to his projected Western republic of civilized men,
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  Speaker 1: and quite frequently to the minute indefinite body of positivist subscribers.
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  Speaker 1: And the history of the Christian Church, with its development
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  Speaker 1: of orders and cults, sects and descents, the history of
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  Speaker 1: fashionable society with its cliques and sets, and every political
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  Speaker 1: history with its cabals, and in a cabinet's witness to
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  Speaker 1: the struggle that goes on in the minds of men
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  Speaker 1: to adjust themselves to a body larger indeed than themselves,
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  Speaker 1: but which still does not strain and escape their imaginative grasp.
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  Speaker 1: The statesmen, both for himself and others, must recognize this
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  Speaker 1: inadequacy of grasp, and the necessity for real and imaginary
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  Speaker 1: aggregations to sustain men in their practical service of the
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  Speaker 1: order of the world. He must be a sociologist. He
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  Speaker 1: must study the whole science of aggregations in relation to
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  Speaker 1: that world state to which his reason and his materist
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  Speaker 1: thought direct him. He must lend himself to the development
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  Speaker 1: of aggregatory ideas that favor the civilizing process. And he
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  Speaker 1: must do his best to promote the disas integration of
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  Speaker 1: aggregations and the effacement of aggregatory ideas that keep men
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  Speaker 1: narrow and unreasonably prejudiced one against another. He will, of
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  Speaker 1: course know that few men are even rudely consistent in
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  Speaker 1: such matters, that the same man, in different moods and
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  Speaker 1: on different occasions, is capable of referring himself in perfect
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  Speaker 1: good faith not only too different, but to contradictory larger beings,
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  Speaker 1: And that the more important thing about an aggregatory idea
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  Speaker 1: from the state maker's point of view is not so
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  Speaker 1: much what it explicitly involves as what it implicitly repudiates.
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  Speaker 1: The natural man does not feel he is aggregating at
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  Speaker 1: all unless he aggregates against something. He refers himself to
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  Speaker 1: the tribe. He is loyal to the tribe, and quite
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  Speaker 1: inseparably he fears or dislikes those outside the tribe. The tribe.
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  Speaker 1: Tribe is always at least defensively hostile, and usually actively
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  Speaker 1: hostile to humanity. Beyond the aggregation. The anti idea, it
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  Speaker 1: would seem, is inseparable from the aggregatory idea. It is
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  Speaker 1: the necessity of the human mind. When we think of
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  Speaker 1: the class a as desirable, we think of not a as undesirable.
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  Speaker 1: The two things are as inevitably connected as the tendons
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  Speaker 1: of our hands, so that when we flatten down our
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  Speaker 1: little fingers on our palms, the fourth digit, whether we
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  Speaker 1: want it or not, comes down half way. All real
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  Speaker 1: working gods, one may remark, all gods that are worshiped
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  Speaker 1: emotionally are tribal gods, and every attempt to universalize the
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  Speaker 1: idea of god trails dualism and the devil after it.
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  Speaker 1: As a moral necessity, when we inquire, as well as
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  Speaker 1: the unformed condition of terrestrial sociology permits into the aggregatory
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  Speaker 1: ideas that seem to satisfy men, we find a remarkable complex,
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  Speaker 1: a disorderly complex, in the minds of nearly all our
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  Speaker 1: civilized contemporaries. For example, all sorts of aggregatory ideas come
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  Speaker 1: and go across the chameleon surfaces of my botanist's mind.
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  Speaker 1: He has a strong feeling for systematic botanists as against
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  Speaker 1: plant physiologists, whom he regards as lude and evil scoundrels
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  Speaker 1: in this relation, but he has a strong feeling for
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  Speaker 1: all botanists, and indeed all biologists, as against physicists and
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  Speaker 1: those who profess the exact sciences, all of whom he
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  Speaker 1: regards as dull, mechanical, ugly minded scoundrels in this relation.
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  Speaker 1: But he has a strong feeling for all who profess
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  Speaker 1: what is called science as against psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and
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  Speaker 1: literary men, whom he regards as wild, foolish, immoral scoundrels
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  Speaker 1: in this relation. But he has a strong feeling for
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  Speaker 1: all educated men as against the working man, whom he
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  Speaker 1: regards as a cheating, lying, loafing, drunken, thievish, dirty scoundrel
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  Speaker 1: in this relation. But so soon as the working man
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  Speaker 1: is comprehended together with those others as Englishmen, which includes
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  Speaker 1: in this case, I may remark the Scottish and Welsh,
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  Speaker 1: he holds them superior to all other sorts of European
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  Speaker 1: whom he regards, etc. Now one perceives in all these
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  Speaker 1: aggregatory ideas and re arrangements of the sympathies one of
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  Speaker 1: the chief vices of human thought, due to its obsession
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  Speaker 1: by classificatory suggestions footnote see Chapter the first, section five
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  Speaker 1: and the appendix. The necessity for marking our classes has
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  Speaker 1: brought with it a bias for false and excessive contrast.
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  Speaker 1: And we never invent a term, but we are at
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  Speaker 1: once cramming it with implications beyond its legitimate content. There
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  Speaker 1: is no feat of irrelevance that people will not perform
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  Speaker 1: quite easily in this way. There is no class, however accidental,
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  Speaker 1: to which they will not at once ascribe deeply distinctive qualities.
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  Speaker 1: The seventh Sons of seventh Sons have remarkable powers of insight.
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  Speaker 1: People with a certain sort of air commit crimes of violence.
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  Speaker 1: People with red hair have souls of fire. All democratic
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  Speaker 1: socialists are trustworthy persons. All people born in Ireland have
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  Speaker 1: vivid imaginations, and all Englishmen are clods. All Hindus are
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  Speaker 1: co liars, All curly haired people are good natured, All
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  Speaker 1: hunchbacks are energetic and wicked, and all french Men eat frogs.
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  Speaker 1: Such stupid generalizations have been believed with the utmost readiness
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  Speaker 1: and acted upon by great numbers of sane, respectable people.
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  Speaker 1: And when the class is one's own class, when it
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  Speaker 1: expresses one of the aggregations to which one refers one's
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  Speaker 1: own activities, then the disposition to divide all qualities between
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  Speaker 1: this class and its converse, and to cram one's own
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  Speaker 1: class with every desirable distinction, becomes overwhelming. It is part
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  Speaker 1: of the training of the philosopher to regard all such
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  Speaker 1: generalizations with suspicion. It is part of the training of
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  Speaker 1: the utopist and statesmen, and all good statesmen are utopists,
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  Speaker 1: to mingle something very like animosity with that suspicion. For
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  Speaker 1: crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of all
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  Speaker 1: organized human life. Section two disregarding classes, cliques, sets, castes,
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  Speaker 1: and the like minor aggregations. Concerned for the most part
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  Speaker 1: with details and minor aspects of life, one finds among
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  Speaker 1: the civilized peoples of the world certain broad types of
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  Speaker 1: aggregatory idea. There are firstly the national ideas, ideas, which
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  Speaker 1: in their perfection require a uniformity of physical and mental type,
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  Speaker 1: a common idiom, a common religion, a distinctive style of costume,
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  Speaker 1: decoration and thought, and a compact organization acting with complete
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  Speaker 1: external unity, like the Gothic cathedral. The national idea is
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  Speaker 1: never found complete with all its parts, but one has
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  Speaker 1: in Russia, with her insistence on political and religious orthodoxy,
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  Speaker 1: something approaching it pretty closely, and again in the Inland
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  Speaker 1: and typical provinces of China, where even a strange pattern
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  Speaker 1: of hat arouses hostility. We had it in vigorous struggle
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  Speaker 1: to exist in England under the earlier Georges. In the
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  Speaker 1: minds of those who supported the established Church, the idea
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  Speaker 1: of the fundamental nature of nationality is so ingrained in thought,
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  Speaker 1: with all the usual exaggeration of implication, that no one
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  Speaker 1: laughs at talk about Swedish painting or American literature. And
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  Speaker 1: I will confess and point out that my own detachment
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  Speaker 1: from these delusions is so imperfect and discontinuous that in
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  Speaker 1: another passage I have committed myself to a short assertion
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  Speaker 1: of the exceptionally noble of the English imagination. Footnote Chapter
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  Speaker 1: the seventh section six. I am constantly gratified by flattering
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  Speaker 1: untruths about English superiority, which I should reject indignantly were
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  Speaker 1: the application bluntly personal, and I am ever ready to
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  Speaker 1: believe the scenery of England, the poetry of England, even
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  Speaker 1: the decoration and music of England in some mystic and
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  Speaker 1: impregnable way. The best this habit of intensifying all class definitions,
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  Speaker 1: and particularly those in which one has a personal interest,
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  Speaker 1: is in the very constitution of man's mind. It is
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  Speaker 1: part of the defect of that instrument. We may watch
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  Speaker 1: against it and prevent it doing any great injustices or
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  Speaker 1: leading us into follies, but to eradicate it is an
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  Speaker 1: altogether different matter. There it is to be reckoned with,
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  Speaker 1: like the coccyx, the pineal eye, and the vermiform appendix,
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  Speaker 1: and a too consistent attack on it may lead simply
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  Speaker 1: to its inversion, to a vindictively pro foreigner attitude that
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  Speaker 1: is equally unwise. The second sort of aggregatory ideas, running
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  Speaker 1: very often across the boundaries of national ideas and in
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  Speaker 1: conflict with them, are religious ideas. In Western Europe, true
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  Speaker 1: national ideas only emerged to their present hectic vigor after
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  Speaker 1: the shock of the Reformation had liberated men from the
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  Speaker 1: great tradition of a Latin speaking Christendom, a tradition the
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  Speaker 1: Roman Catholic Church has sustained as its modification of the
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  Speaker 1: old Latin speaking imperialism. In the rule of the Pontifex Maximus,
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  Speaker 1: there was, and their remains to this day, a profound
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  Speaker 1: disregard of local dialect and race. In the Roman Catholic tradition,
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  Speaker 1: which has made that Church a persistently disintegrating influence in
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  Speaker 1: national life. Equally spacious and equally regardless of tongues and
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  Speaker 1: peoples is the great Arabic speaking religion of Mahomet. Both
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  Speaker 1: Christendom and Islam are, indeed, on their secular sides, imperfect
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  Speaker 1: realizations of a utopian world state. But the secular side
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  Speaker 1: was the weaker side of these cults. They produced no
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  Speaker 1: sufficiently great statesmen to realize their spiritual forces. And it
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  Speaker 1: is not in Rome under Pontifical rule, nor in Munster
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  Speaker 1: under the Anabaptists, but rather in Thomas a Kempis and
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  Speaker 1: Saint Augustine's City of God that we must seek for
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  Speaker 1: the utopias of Christianity. In the last hundred years, a
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  Speaker 1: novel development of material forces, and especially of means of communication,
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  Speaker 1: has done very much to break up the eye isolations
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  Speaker 1: in which nationality perfected its prejudices, and so to render
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  Speaker 1: possible the extension and consolidation of such a worldwide culture
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  Speaker 1: as medieval Christendom and Islam foreshadowed. The first onset of
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  Speaker 1: these expansive developments has been marked in the world of
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  Speaker 1: mind by an expansion of political ideals. Comte's Western Republic
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  Speaker 1: eighteen forty eight was the first utopia that involved the
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  Speaker 1: synthesis of numerous states by the development of imperialisms in
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  Speaker 1: the place of national policies, and by the search for
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  Speaker 1: a basis for wider political unions in racial traditions and
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  Speaker 1: linguistic affinities. Anglo Saxonism, Pan Germanism and the like are
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  Speaker 1: such synthetic ideas. Until the eighties, the general tendency the
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  Speaker 1: progressive thought was at one with the older Christian tradition,
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  Speaker 1: which ignored race, and the aim of the expansive illiberalism movement,
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  Speaker 1: so far as it had a clear aim, was to
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  Speaker 1: europeanize the world, to extend the franchise to Negroes, put
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  Speaker 1: Polynesians into trousers and train the teeming myriads of India
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  Speaker 1: to appreciate the exquisite lilt of the lady of the lake.
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  Speaker 1: There is always some absurdity mixed with human greatness, and
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  Speaker 1: we must not let the fact that the Middle Victorians
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  Speaker 1: counted Scott, the suffrage and pantaloons among the supreme blessings
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  Speaker 1: of life conceal from us the very real nobility of
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  Speaker 1: their dream of England's mission to the world. We of
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  Speaker 1: this generation have seen a flood of reaction against such universalism.
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  Speaker 1: The great intellectual developments that center upon the work of
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  Speaker 1: Darwin have exacerbated the realization that life is a conflict
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  Speaker 1: between superior and inferior types. It has underlined the idea
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  Speaker 1: that specific survival rates are of primary significance in the
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  Speaker 1: world's development, and a swarm of inferior intelligences has applied
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  Speaker 1: to human problems elaborated and exaggerated versions of these generalizations.
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  Speaker 1: These social and political followers of Darwin have fallen into
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  Speaker 1: an obvious confusion between race and nationality and into the
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  Speaker 1: natural trap of patriotic conceit. The descent of the Indian
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  Speaker 1: and colonial governing class to the first crude applications of
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  Speaker 1: liberal propositions in India has found a voice of unparalleled
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  Speaker 1: penetration in mister Kipling, whose want of intellectual deliberation is
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  Speaker 1: only equaled by his poetic power. The search for a
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  Speaker 1: basis for a new political synthesis in adaptable sympathies based
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  Speaker 1: on linguistic affinities was greatly influenced by Max Muller's unaccountable
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  Speaker 1: assumption that language indicated kindred and led straight to wildly
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  Speaker 1: speculative ethnology, to the discovery that there was a Celtic race,
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  Speaker 1: a Teutonic race, an Indo European race, and so forth.
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  Speaker 1: A book that has had enormous influence in this matter
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  Speaker 1: because of its use in teaching is J. R. Green's
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  Speaker 1: Short History of the English People, with its grotesque insistence
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  Speaker 1: upon Anglo Saxonism, and just now the world is in
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  Speaker 1: a sort of delirium about race and the racial struggle.
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  Speaker 1: The Briton forgetting his defoe footnote, the true born Englishman,
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  Speaker 1: the Jew forgetting the very word proselyte, the German forgetting
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  Speaker 1: his anthropomey trick variations, and the Italian forgetting everything are
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  Speaker 1: obsessed by the singular purity of their blood and the
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  Speaker 1: danger of contamination. The mere continuance of other races involves,
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  Speaker 1: true to the law that all human aggregation involves the
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  Speaker 1: development of a spirit of opposition to whatever is external
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  Speaker 1: to the aggregation. Extraordinary intensifications of racial definition are going on.
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  Speaker 1: The vileness the inhumanity, the incompatibility of alien races is
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  Speaker 1: being steadily exaggerated. The natural tendency of every human being
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  Speaker 1: towards a stupid conceit in himself and his kind, a
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  Speaker 1: stupid depreciation of all unlikeness is traded upon by this
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  Speaker 1: bastard science. With the weakening of national references, and with
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  Speaker 1: the pause before reconstruction and religious belief, these new arbitrary
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  Speaker 1: and unsubstantial race prejudices become daily more formidable. They are
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  Speaker 1: shaping policies and modifying laws, and they will certainly be
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  Speaker 1: responsible for a large proportion of the wars, hardships, and
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  Speaker 1: cruelties the immediate future holds in store for our earth.
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  Speaker 1: No generalizations about race are too extravagant for the inflamed
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  Speaker 1: credulity of the present time. No attempt is ever made
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  Speaker 1: to distinguish differences in inherent quality, the true racial differences
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  Speaker 1: from artificial differences due to culture. No lesson seems ever
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  Speaker 1: to be drawn from history of the fluctuating incidents of
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  Speaker 1: the civilizing process. First upon this race, and then upon that.
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  Speaker 1: The politically ascendant peoples of the present phase are understood
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  Speaker 1: to be the superior races, including such types as the
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  Speaker 1: Sussex farm laborer, the Bowery tough, the London Hurligan, and
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  Speaker 1: the Paris Apache. The race is not at present prospering politically,
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  Speaker 1: such as the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Spanish, the miss
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  Speaker 1: the Chinese, the Hindus, the Peruvians, and all uncivilized people
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  Speaker 1: are represented as the inferior races, unfit to associate with
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  Speaker 1: the former on terms of equality, unfit to intermarry with
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  Speaker 1: them on any terms, unfit for any decisive voice in
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  Speaker 1: human affairs. In the popular imagination of Western Europe, the
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  Speaker 1: Chinese are becoming bright gamboge in colour and unspeakably abominable
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  Speaker 1: in every respect. The people who are black, the people
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  Speaker 1: who have fuzzy hair and flattish noses and no carbs
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  Speaker 1: to speak of, are no longer held to be within
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  Speaker 1: the pale of humanity. These superstitions work out along the
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  Speaker 1: obvious lines of the popular logic. The depopulation of the
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  Speaker 1: Congo Free State by the Belgians, the horrible massacres of
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  Speaker 1: Chinese by Europeans and soldiery during the Peakin Expedition are
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  Speaker 1: condoned as a painful but necessary part of the civilizing
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  Speaker 1: process of the world. The world wide repudiation of slavery
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  Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century was done against a vast sullen
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  Speaker 1: force of ignorant pride, which, reinvigorated by the new delusions,
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  Speaker 1: swings back again to power. Science is supposed to lend
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  Speaker 1: its sanction to race mania. But it is only science,
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  Speaker 1: as it is understood by very illiterate people, that does
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  Speaker 1: anything of the sort scientists science. In fact, what science
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  Speaker 1: has to tell about the races of man will be
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  Speaker 1: found compactly set forth by doctor J. Deinker in the
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  Speaker 1: book published under that title footnote. See also an excellent
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  Speaker 1: paper in the American Journal of Sociology for March nineteen
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  Speaker 1: hundred and four, The Psychology of Race Prejudice by W. I. Thomas.
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  Speaker 1: From that book one may learn the beginnings of race charity.
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  Speaker 1: Save for a few isolated pools of savage humanity, there
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  Speaker 1: is probably no pure race in the whole world. The
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  Speaker 1: great continental populations are all complex mixtures of numerous and
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  Speaker 1: fluctuating types. Even the Jews present every kind of skull
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  Speaker 1: that is supposed to be racially distinctive, a vast range
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  Speaker 1: of complexion, from blackness and Goer to extreme fairness in Holland,
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  Speaker 1: and a vast mental and physical diversity. Where the Jews
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  Speaker 1: to discontinue all intermarriage with other races henceforth forever, it
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  Speaker 1: would depend upon quite unknown laws of fecundity, prepotency and
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  Speaker 1: variability what their final type would be, or indeed whether
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  Speaker 1: any particular type would ever prevail over diversity. And without
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: going beyond the natives of the Britain Isles, one can
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  Speaker 1: discover an enormous range of types, tall and short, straight
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  Speaker 1: haired and curly, fair and dark, supremely intelligent and unteachably stupid, straightforward, disingenuous,
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  Speaker 1: and whatnot. The natural tendency is to forget all this
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: range directly. Race comes under discussion. To take either an
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: average or some quite arbitrary ideal as the type and
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: think only of that. The more difficult thing to do,
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: but the thing that must be done if we are
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: to get just results. In this discussion is to do
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: one's best to bear the range in mind. Let us
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: admit that the average Chinaman is probably different in complexion,
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: and indeed in all his physical and psychical proportions, from
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: the average Englishman. Does that render their association upon terms
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: of equality in a world's state impossible? What the average
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: Chinaman or Englishmen maybe is of no importance whatever to
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: our plan of a world state. It is not averages
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: that exist, but individuals. The average Chinamen will never meet
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: the average Englishmen anywhere, only individual Chinamen will meet individual Englishmen. Now,
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: among Chinamen will be found a range of variety as
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: extensive as among Englishmen. And there is no single tray
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: presented by all Chinamen and no Englishman, or vice versa.
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: Even the oblique eye is not universal in China, and
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: there are probably many Chinamen who might have been changed
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: at birth, taken away and educated into quite possible Englishmen.
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: Even after we have separated out and allowed for the
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: differences in carriage, physique, moral prepossessions, and so forth, due
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: to their entirely divergent cultures, there remains, no doubt a
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: very great difference between the average Chinamen and the average Englishmen.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: But would that amount to a wider difference than is
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: to be found between extreme types of Englishmen. For my
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: own part, I do not think that it would. But
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: it is evident that any precise answer can be made
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: only when anthropology has adopted much more exact and exhaustive
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: methods of inquiry, and to far more precise analysis than
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: its present resources permit. Be it remembered how doubtful and
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: tainted is the bulk of our evidence in these matters.
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: These are extraordinarily subtle inquiries from which few men succeed
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: in disentangling the threads of their personal associations, the curiously
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: interwoven strands of self love and self interest that affect
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: their inquiries. One might almost say that instinct fights against
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: such investigations, as it does under against many necessary medical researchers.
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: But while along special training are high tradition and the
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: possibility of reward and distinction enable the medical students to
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: face many tasks that are at once undignified and physically repulsive,
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: the people from whom we get our anthropological information are
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: rarely men of more than average intelligence and of no
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: mental training at all, and the problems are far more elusive.
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: It surely needs at least the gifts and training of
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: a first class novelist, combined with a sedulous patients that
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: probably cannot be hoped for in combination with these, to
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: gauge the all round differences between man and man, even
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: where there are no barriers of language and color, understanding
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: may be nearly impossible. How few educated people seem to
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: understand the servant class in England or the working men.
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: Except for mister Bart Kennedy's A Man Adrift, I know
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: of scarcely any book that shows a really sympathetic in
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: living understanding of the navvy, the longshore sailorman, the rough
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: chap of our own race. Caricatures luridly tragical, gaily comic
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: in which the misconceptions of the author blend with the
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: preconceptions of the reader and achieve success, are of course
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: common enough. And then consider the sort of people who
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: pronounce judgments on the moral and intellectual capacity of the Negro,
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: the Malay or the Chinamen. You have missionaries, native schoolmasters,
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: employers of callis, traders, simple downright men who scarcely suspect
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: the existence of any sources of error in their verdicts,
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: who are incapable of understanding the difference between what is
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: innate and what is acquired, much less of distinguishing them
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: in their interplay. Now and then one seems to have
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: a glimpse of something really living in Mary Kingsley's buoyant work,
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: for instance, And even that may be no more than
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: my illusion. For my own part, I am disposed to
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: discount all adverse judgments and all statements insurmountable differences between
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: race and race. I talk upon racial qualities to all
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: men who have had opportunities of close observation, and I
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: find that their insistence upon these differences is usually in
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: inverse proportion to their intelligence. It may be the chance
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: of my encounters, but that is my clear impression. Common
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: sailors will generalize in the profoundest way about Irishmen and Scotchmen,
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: and Yankees and Nova Scotians and Duchies, until one might
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: think one talked of different species of animal. But the
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: educated explorer flings clear of all these delusions. To him,
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: men present themselves individualized, and if they classify, it is
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: by some skin deep accident of tint, some trigger the tongue,
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: or habit of gesture, or such like. Superficiality and after all,
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: there exist today available one kind, at least of unbiased
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: anthrobiological evidence. There are photographs. Let the reader turn over
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: the pages of some such copiously illustrated work as The
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: Living Races of Mankind footnote The Living Races of Mankind
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: by H. N. Hutchinson, J. W. Gregory and R. Liddiger Hutchinson.
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: And look into the eyes of one alien face after another?
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: Are they not very like the people one knows? For
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: the most part, one finds it hard to believe that,
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: with a common language, in common social traditions, one would
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: not get on very well with these people. Here or
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: there there is a brutish or evil face, but you
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: can find as brutish and evil in the strand on
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: any afternoon. There are differences, no doubt, but fundamental incompatibilities. No,
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: and very many of them send out a ray of
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: special resemblance, and remind one more strongly of this friend
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: or that than they do of their own kind. One
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: notes with surprise that one's good friend and neighbour X
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: and an anonymous naked gold Coast negro belong to one type,
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: as distinguished from one's dear friend of Y, and a
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: beaming individual from Somaliland, who as certainly belong to another
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: in one manner. The careless and prejudiced nature of accepted
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: racial generalizations is particularly marked. A great and increasing number
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: of people are persuaded that half breeds are peculiarly evil creatures,
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: as hunchbacks and bastards were supposed to be in the
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: Middle Ages. The full legend of the wickedness of the
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: half breed is best to be learned from a drunken
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: mean white from Virginia or the Cape. The half breed
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: one hears combines all the vices of either parent. He
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: is wretchedly poor in health and spirit, but vindictive, powerful,
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: and dangerous to an extreme degree. His morals the mean
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: white as high and exacting standards are indescribable, even of
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: whispers in a saloon, and so on and so on.
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: There is really not an atom of evidence an unprejudiced
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: mind would except to sustain any belief of this sort.
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: There is nothing to show that the children of racial
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: admixture are as a class inherently either better always in
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: any respect than either parent. There is an equally baseless
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: theory that they are better, a theory displayed to a
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: fine degree of foolishness in the article on Shakespeare in
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: the Encyclopedia Britannica. Both theories belong to the vast edifice
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: of sham science that smothers the realities of modern knowledge.
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: It may be that most half breeds are fadeds in life,
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: but that proves nothing. They are, in an enormous number
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: of cases, illegitimate and outcast from the normal education of
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: either race. They are brought up in homes that are
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: the battlegrounds of conflicting cultures. They labor under a heavy
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: premium of disadvantage. There is, of course a passing suggestion
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: of Darwin's to account for atavism that might go to
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: support the theory of the vileness of half breeds if
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: it had ever been proved, But then it never has
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: been proved. There is no proof in the matter at all.
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: End of Chapter the tenth, Sections one and two. Recording
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: by Philip Citycamble, Book one for me dot com, Wangenui,
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: New Zealand.