The Undivided Past (35 page)

As with the solidarities of class, so with the identities of race, the twentieth century ended very differently from how it began. The destruction of
Nazi Germany, the fall of the European colonial empires, the de-racing of
civil rights in the United States, and the end of
apartheid in
South Africa were as much a repudiation of the view that “race is everything” as the collapse of the
Communist regimes was a rejection of the proposition that the
history of all hitherto existing societies had been primarily one of class identity and class struggle. The passing of those regimes based on racial identities and hierarchies lent credibility to
Barack Obama’s assertion in 2004 that “there’s not a black America and
white America and Latino America and Asian America. There’s the United States of America.”
¹³⁹
In so saying, Obama was also acknowledging a significant development in the American academy since the 1980s, namely the proposition that race was of “declining significance.” One explanation, associated with the work of
William Julius Wilson, to which Obama was indebted, was that the continued growth and consolidation of a black
bourgeoisie meant race had become less important than class in explaining
blacks’ life chances; another was the increased number of interracial marriages; and the result was a plethora of books asserting that race as a form of collective identity mattered less in American society than before.
¹⁴⁰
Here was a new “
postracial” America, of which Obama was, appropriately, the first “postracial” president.

Yet the notion of race lingers as a form of identity and ranking that stubbornly refuses to die. Since the 1960s, there have been sporadic efforts to rehabilitate the nineteenth-century notion that races can be identified and ordered.
¹⁴¹
African leaders such as
Robert Mugabe continue to play the “race card,” denouncing white Western
colonialism and
neoimperialism. Some Americans lament that the color line persists, and that the country has by no means gotten beyond race; Obama’s position is more equivocal than his eloquent exhortations to get beyond a black-and-white view of the United States suggests; and
Randall Kennedy is surely correct to argue that everything about Obama’s alleged “postracial presidency” is “widely, insistently, almost unavoidably interpreted
through the prism of race.”
¹⁴²
One indication of the persistence of race as a
category of human identity, but also of the serious doubts concerning its validity, can be found in the U.S. Census, which requires respondents to declare their racial identity from a list of options that in recent decades has changed frequently, inexplicably, and arbitrarily. In the 1930 census, Mexicans were deemed to belong to a separate race, but not in subsequent ones. In the same census and again in 1940,
“Hindu” appeared as a separate race category, but then it too disappeared. In 1970,
Indian Americans and
Pakistani Americans were declared to be “white,” but in 1980 they were reclassified as “Asian.” In 2000, respondents were asked to describe themselves as belonging to one or more of fifteen “racial” identities, and if they refused to do so, their racial identity would be imputed and assigned by the Census Bureau.
¹⁴³

Thus, however mutably, does race persist; but as these taxonomical fluctuations suggest, it
has
significantly declined in plausibility as the most all-embracing category of human identity—not just in the United States but around the world. For the sustained undermining of racial solidarities and rankings by anthropologists has been corroborated (as
Jacques Barzun presciently anticipated) by
geneticists, building on the discovery by
James Watson and
Francis Crick of the structure of DNA. According to the findings of the
Human Genome Project, people of all backgrounds, locations, and “races” share more than 99.9 percent of their DNA, and in the case of the remaining 0.1 percent, there is more variation
within
stereotypical racial groups than
between
them. This means that 99.9 percent of the genes of a “black” person are the same as those of a “white” person, and that the genes of any “black” person may be more similar to the genes of a “white” person than to another “black” person. Thus understood, race is a biologically meaningless concept and category, literally no more than
skin deep. It is also neither innate nor permanent, for skin color can change dramatically from one generation to another as the result of mixed-race marriages.
¹⁴⁴

Thus has
scientific research undermined those who urged that humanity had many, polygenic origins, which explained why there were so many different (and unequal) races, and thus has it supported earlier biblical arguments built around the belief
in a monogenic creation, which stressed the essential unity and equality of humankind.
¹⁴⁵
Nor is this the only way in which, as President
Bill Clinton puts it, “modern science” has corroborated “ancient faiths,” for many paleoanthropologists insist that
Homo sapiens
evolved once, in Africa, between 120,000 and 150,000 years ago. Thereafter, the new species migrated “out of Africa” (as this theory is known), and eventually spread across the whole of the habitable globe. If this is right (the argument is persuasive, but not conclusive), then it follows, as
Stephen Jay Gould has written, that “all modern humans,” regardless of their skin color, “form an entity united by physical bonds of descent from a recent African root,” which reinforces the view that the idea of common humanity and the reality of human unity “is no idle political slogan or tenet of mushy romanticism.”
¹⁴⁶
Like the competing identities allegedly constructed around religion, nation, class, and gender, the claims of race to be the most important way of understanding who we are do not survive serious scrutiny. What, then, of the claims made by President Clinton’s successor, who insisted that the abiding division of peoples into different and antagonistic civilizations was the most all-encompassing and the most important collective identity of all?

I
N
1749, almost exactly one hundred years before Robert Knox went on his lecture tour in the north of England touting the overwhelming significance of racial identities, the British philosopher
David Hartley published his
Observations on Man
, in which he contrasted “barbarity and ignorance” on the one side with “instruction and civilization” on the other.
¹
So far as is known, this is the first time these two identities, which would soon be regarded as the ultimate form of collective aggregation and human antagonism, had been thus juxtaposed and contrasted. Almost a quarter of a century later, on March 23, 1772,
James Boswell made an entry in his diary. That morning, he had found his friend
Samuel Johnson working on a revised edition of his celebrated dictionary, and they had discussed a new word by then in circulation that the
“great lexicographer” had been considering for possible inclusion, but which he had on reflection decided to reject. “He would,” Boswell regretfully noted, “not admit
civilization
, but only
civility
”; yet with “great deference” to Johnson, Boswell “thought
civilization
, from to
civilize
, better in the sense [that it was] opposed to
barbarity
, than
civility.
”
²
Samuel Johnson may have rejected the word “civilization,” but it soon received a kind of formal recognition, in the pages of
Ash’s Dictionary
, in 1775. By then, “civilization” was being freely used in polite and educated circles in England and Scotland, both as a description of the highest state to which society might aspire and as a collective identity opposed to the more venerable solidarity of
barbarism.

From the very outset, “civilization” as a noun, a concept, and an identity was a word that had behind it what the cultural critic
Raymond Williams termed “the general spirit of the
Enlightenment.” It had come into common currency in
France at an even earlier date, and its subsequent adoption seems to have been a clear example of British cultural borrowing, so it was scarcely surprising that the patriotically insular Dr. Johnson was not exactly enamored of it.
³
But even without his enthusiasm for it, “civilization” soon became established as part of the everyday vocabulary on both sides of the Channel, and in France as in Britain, it was often deployed to indicate the highest stage of collective human identity, development, and achievement, not only in politics but also in culture and society. Yet in the German-speaking lands of Europe, where the word
“Zivilisation” also came into use at this time, it did not signify such an exalted state of existence or group identity: it was a “second-rank term,” referring to external appearances and superficialities, which were subordinate to the more weighty German concept of
“Kultur.” So while the British and the French might see
themselves
as the embodiment of a cosmopolitan European civilization, German speakers knew better, and while the British and the French (and later the Italians) came to contrast the accomplishments and identities of their civilization with barbarism, the Germans related to both of these concepts and identities rather differently and more circumspectly.
⁴

This Enlightenment antithesis, between the embattled collectivities of civilization and barbarism, was historically asymmetrical,
for while “
civilization” was a relatively recent concept, the term “barbarism,” to which it was now contrasted, had been common currency on the continent for more than two millennia.
⁵
It had originally been used by the ancient Greeks to describe those aliens who spoke some other language: indeed, “barbarian” was an onomatopoeic rendering of what sounded to the Greek ear as their inane babbling (“bar bar”), and “barbarian” was taken up in due course by the
Romans to
identify those savage unfortunates who resided outside their empire and did not speak Latin. Thereafter, the word was employed as a commonplace derision by western
Christians who regarded themselves as cultivated, superior, and refined, in contrast to those aliens beyond their ken whom they loathed as crude, violent, heathen, inferior, and ill-educated; and it was in this sense that “barbarian” was widely used in medieval and early modern Europe, when it was variously applied to the Slavs, Magyars, Vikings, Saracens, Arabs, Tartars, and Turks.
⁶
It was later adopted by the ruling elites of Renaissance
Italy, who saw themselves as the heirs of imperial
Rome, to denounce the “northern barbarians” invading from
France and
Germany during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. (The sack of Rome by the German soldiers of the emperor
Charles V in 1527 was likened to the alleged fall of the city to the
Goths in 476 CE, and the last chapter of
Machiavelli’s
The Prince
was famously entitled “Exhortation to Liberate Italy from the Barbarians.”)
⁷

Before the eighteenth century, then, and insofar as there was an antonym to what was already by then the venerable collective category of “barbarian,” it was not another generalized solidarity, but a sequence of place- and time-specific societies and cultures, whether it be ancient
Greece, imperial Rome, Christian Europe, or Renaissance Italy. As such, “barbarian” was an identity, and generally an inferiority, ascribed to successive alien groups by those regarding themselves as “superior.” The latter felt no need to define themselves collectively, only to describe and disparage those whom they regarded as a hostile, threatening, and predatory “other,” and in so doing they projected onto successive cohorts of “barbarians” a shared identity and a common consciousness that was not necessarily felt or accepted. They also furnished historical accounts of barbarian development, and
delivered moral judgments on barbarian behavior, which were at best oversimplified and at worst deeply misleading. “Each man,”
Montaigne rightly observed, “calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.”
⁸
During the second half of the eighteenth century, however, these asymmetrical polarities and identities were transformed by the more balanced and all-encompassing antithesis between “barbarism” and “civilization,” and this new formulation received its most celebrated, influential, and enduring (but also misunderstood and misapplied) elaboration from
Edward Gibbon, to whom we now return.

As befitted a work of Enlightenment rationality indebted to contemporary Scottish thinkers, Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
was constructed around contrasts, antitheses, and dichotomies, of which two were particularly significant. The first was between “pagans” and
“Christians,” but the second was that between the civilized Romans and the barbarian hordes beyond their borders, who would eventually overwhelm and vanquish the empire. “In the second century of the Christian era,” Gibbon famously began his opening chapter, “the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.”
⁹
As he saw it, Rome had conferred upon a large portion of humanity a unique blend of civic virtue and personal freedom, the blessings of order, justice, prosperity, and individual rights, and an unrivaled cultural heritage of poetry, oratory, history, philosophy, and art; and the word that he used to describe that achievement in its entirety was the very one that Dr.
Johnson had recently rejected, namely “civilization.” For Gibbon, bar-barism was the negation of civilization, and he equated it with savagery. The
Goths, for instance, were pastoral nomads, they had no notion of fixed, landed property, nor of the laws required to regulate it, and they were “unacquainted with the use of letters,” which meant that, far from being a “civilized people,” they were merely a “herd of savages, incapable of knowledge or reflection,” and they were naturally inclined to war. (Perhaps not surprisingly,
Gibbon did not learn German, because he thought it was too “barbarous” a language.)
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