Re: Gobineau, the "Bayreuth Circle" and Schemann

2       Gobineau's racial taxonomy 

I've noted that Gobineau's belief that race is the single factor that
determines human history, culture and civilisation, is the Gobinist
equivalent of Marx's belief that economics is the single factor that
determines human history, culture and civilisation. Marx was an
economic determinist; Gobineau was a racial determinist.

The parallels between Gobineau and Marx don't end there. Gobineau's
exhaustive racial taxonomy is the equivalent of Marx's exhaustive
analysis of capital. That is, Gobineau's analysis of the human
"races", with his infinitely detailed categories and subcategories, is
the central intellectual project of Gobinism, just as the analysis of
capitalist relations is the central intellectual project in Marx's
work. Both men also developed a theory of history, but we'll come to
that later.

As previously noted, Gobineau wasn't the father of scientific racism,
as he's so often called; he wasnt the father of anything.  What is
called Gobineau's racial theory was not devised by Gobineay: it was
mainstream anthropological science of his day. We now know it was bad
science, but the idea that there are distinct races with differing
capabilities and mental characteristics was the respectable mainstream
science of Gobineau's time and place.

In a sense it was no more culpable for Gobineau to have believed in
the inequality of human races than it was for Alexander Pope to have
believed in the phlogiston theory, or for Shelley to have believed
that when high clouds appeared to travel against the wind, it was
because they were driven by discharge of electrical energy (an idea
that crops up in his poem "The Cloud"). Gobineau, pope and Shelley
were intelligent, interested, well-read laypeople, who followed the
science of their day, and in each instance the mainstream science they
adopted happened to be wrong.

In Gobineau's case the science happened not only to be wrong, but
eventually to have tragic consequences. Still, in joining this general
condemnation of Gobineau I'm reminded that as a layperson I read The
Scientist, New Scientist and the occasional slightly more academic
piece, and I mostly (not always) trust what seems to be the scientific
consensus. It's generally a reasonable trust to have, but mainstream
science sometimes makes horrible mistakes. Gobineau's eternal ill fame
rests on the fact that early anthropological science made some of the
worst mistakes with some of the worst consequences: but he accepted
and repeated what the best authorities told him.

The racial theory that Gobineau drew on essentially came from no less
respected a scientist than Carl von Linné, or Carolus Linnaeus
(1707-1778), better remembered these days for his taxonomy of plants,
rather than for his taxonomy of human races, a thing we'd rasther
forget these days. Linnaeus built on the writings of still earlier
scientists and philosophers, who could in turn be identified, but
teasing out the real origins of "bad racial science" is probably
impossible. The evolution of these ideas as a stream in Western
thought can be traced back as far as the ancient Greeks.

Anyway, Linnaeus proposed a system in which humanity is divided into
four races. He assigned each race differing capabilities and
characteristics in a way that now makes slightly comic reading:
* White people, who were supposedly inventive and energetic, but
fortunately very moral and law-abiding;
* Red people, meaning American Indians, who were supposed to be
enduring but not adaptable, and whose horizons are limited by their
adherence to custom;
* Yellow people, meaning the various Asian peoples, who were supposed
to be almost as intelligent as white people, but not as energetic or
inventive; they are inflexible and prone to melancholy;
* Black people, who were supposed to be physically strong, but lazy
and thoughtless, a categorisation that happened to provide a sort of
justification for the slave trade.

Linnaeus was followed by another eminent scientist whose name is still
remembered and respected today, the anatomist, zoologist,
paleontologist and geologist Georges Cuvier (1769 - 1832). Cuvier
adopted most of Linnaeus' system, but simplified the Linnaean system
from four races to three. Cuvier did this by incorporating the "red"
peoples into the "yellow" category, because the American Indian
peoples had entered the Americas by crossing the Bering Strait from
Asia.

As with Linnaeus, Cuvier assigned different physical, intellectual and
moral characteristics to each race, these supposed characteristics
being largely based on a mixture of traveller's tales and European
wishful thinking. Both men's systems happened to flatter white people,
while suggesting that black people are suitable for slavery.

So Cuvier's theory specified just three basic races: 
* White (clever, industrious, inventive and good, and reasonably
strong);
* Yellow (quite clever, reasonably moral, but not inventive, energetic
or strong); and
* Black (neither clever, nor inventive, nor good; but energetic and
physically strong).

The layman Gobineau adopted the Cuvier system because it was generally
accepted anthropological science. There were other, competing systems
of racial taxonomy available in the 1840s and 1850s, but there is
nothing surprising, let alone original, about Gobineau adopting
Cuvier's system. Gobineau was not even the first populariser of racial
ideas to do so. Robert Knox, Karl Carus, Gustav Klemm and a number of
others wrote popular books on race before Gobineau, each of which
adopted a form of Cuvier's general system. Cuvier was the most
respected name in the field, by some margin.

It's worth observing that fortunately for Cuvier's reputation his
texts on race appear never, not once, to have been translated into
English. I have no desire to diminish Cuvier's reputation, as he was
simply a man of his time. Linnaeus too.  But the fact that we hold
Linnaeus' and Cuvier's names in high esteem while we condemn
Gobineau's rests more on luck than justice*.

The bulk of Gobineau's _Essai sur l'inegalité des races humaines_ is
taken up with two things:
* Gobineau's taxonomy of races; and 
* A racially determinist theory of history.  

These two topics are hard to separate chapter by chapter, as Gobineau
is not a remarkably systematic thinker or writer. But together they
make up the great bulk of the _Essai_: books II to VI of Gobineau's
six books: that is, the last quarter of volume I, plus all of volumes
II, III and IV of Gobineau's four volumes.

First, Gobineau describes his three races, white, yellow and black, in
the same general terms as Cuvier (see above). Then he divides each
race in categories, and each category in subcategories, and each
subcategory into … and so on.

Thus Gobineau divided the "white" race into various divisions, the
best-known of these being the Aryans; the Assyrians were another. He
divided the Assyrians into the Jews, the Phoenicians, the Lydians and
the Carthaginians, while he divided the Aryans into the Hindu, the
Iranian, the Hellenic, the Celtic, the Slavonic and the Germanic
peoples. The Yellow and Black races are similarly divided and
subdivided.

Gobineau then subdivided each of the subcategories into further
sub-subcategories, and ... so on.

This exercise is how Gobineau's book got to be so long, and, as Wagner
found, so very tedious. But long and tedious as it was, and is, this
was the meat, the core, of Gobineau's racial theory.

So what was Wagner's reaction to all of Gobineau's hard work? 


In a word, derision. In another, boredom. 

Wagner accepted the division of humanity into three racial groups,
white, yellow and black, but that is no evidence of influence from
Gobineau. As noted, that was a commonplace among educated people of
the time, including people with exploitative agenda such as advocates
of slavery, but also people who opposed racial exploitation, such as
Darwin, Lincoln and Wagner.

I have found nothing in Wagner's essays, letters and remarks recorded
by Cosima, to suggest that he was ever interested in Gobineau's vast
racial taxonomy, or that he accepted it, or that he was influenced by
it.

The overwhelming majority of Wagner's comments on Gobineau's _Essai_
are negative. Wagner expressed positive views of just three things in
the book.

First, Wagner said Gobineau's view of France was convincing. I haven't
identified which passage in Gobineau that Wagner referred to: given
Wagner's general view of the French, the temptation is to assume it
was something uncomplimentary.

Second, Wagner liked Gobineau's chapter on civilisation, in the first
volume.

Third, and much later, Wagner liked the "beginning of Ch. 3 of Volume
4" [Monday 9 May, 1882], said Cosima. And a couple of days later, she
said, he read those pages "which he so loves" aloud to the Count
himself [Thursday 12 May 1882].

It's not quite clear which chapter Wagner meant, unfortunately. This
is because the breaks between the books of Gobineau's _Essai_ do not
correspond to the breaks between the volumes. Thus Volume III ends
with Chapter I of Book VI. Volume four therefore begins with Chapter
II of Volume VI.

So did Cosima mean that Wagner liked the chapter of Volume IV that was
titled Chapter 3 ["The Capacity of the Native German Races"]? Or did
she mean that he liked the third chapter in that volume, which is
actually called Chapter 4 ["Germanic Rome; the Romano-Celtic and
romano-Germanic armies; the German emperors"]?

I don't know. Worse, some vile animal has borrowed the Sydney Uni
library's copy of the _Essai_, so at the moment I can't look up these
two chapters and make a guess as to what it might have been, at the
beginning of either chapter, that Wagner liked. My guess is that in
Chapter III Gobineau would have opened with flattering remarks about
the early Germans as described by Tacitus and other contemporary
authorities (not the same people as the Germans of Wagner's day), and
in the case of Chapter IV Gobineau would have opened with a review of
the Grandeur that was Rome.

Regardless, these three or four isolated positive reactions are more
than outweighed by Wagner's negative comments, during the painful
process of reading Gobineau's work. Wagner's comments show him being
bored by the book, finding it far too long, finding it ludicrous,
finding it annoying, finding it unintentionally funny, finding that it
was less significant than he had originally thought, and so on.  Later
Wagner dismissed it, along with all of Gobineau's thought, as
impressively broad, and even acute, but lacking in profundity. Thus
there is no shortage of evidence on Wagner's reaction to Gobineau's
racial work, and it's overwhelmingly in one direction.

I've quoted most of Wagner's remarks on Gobineau's racial
classifications earlier in this thread so I won't repeat the citations
here.  There were things in Gobineau's book that Wagner respected, and
I will come to those and give them full weight, but the main body of
Gobineau's theory, his racial taxonomy, is not one of the things that
Wagner respected. Gobineau's analysis of race inspired Wagner with
alternate boredom and derision.
      
Gobineau's theory of history is my next topic, then perhaps the idea
of racial masters, and then degeneration through miscegenation. The
latter of which sounds like my idea of a good time. But this post is
long enough now, except for a very boring footnote on Cuvier's works
on race.

Cheers!


Laon

* Cuvier's work on race mainly appeared in his _ Leçons d'anatomie
comparativée_ (1800), and _Histoire des Sciences Naturelles, depuis
leur origine jusqu'à nos jours, chez tous les peoples connu, professée
au College de France_. I can't find an earlier publication date than
1840 for the second work, but it was probably first published before
Cuvier's death in 1832.

There was also the _Histoire naturelle des l'homme, par M. le Compte
de Lacépède, précédée par son éloge historique, par le baron G
Cuvier_, by La Cépède, M. le comte de (Bernard Germain Etienne de La
Ville sur Illon). I can't find an earlier edition than 1839, but La
Cépède's dates are 1756-1825, so we'll assume first publication before
1825. I said it was boring.