The Epiphany of the Other 2
Earth’s Twilight — Chapter 03.2
The racist paradigm
In spite of its discriminating attitude, the intelligence of the westerner assumes, when applied to the historical frame, a pre-rational paradigm as the one of the alleged superiority of the white race. The racist bias originates well before the conscious theoretical position we call racism, it is a deeply ingrained prejudice that perverts the intellectual process both in the moment of analysis and in that of synthesis.
Back in the century when the theoretical basis of modernity was conceived, the racist paradigm was partaken even by the main exponents of the empirical enlightenment. To explain the inferiority of certain races, such as the black, Voltaire and Hume would appeal to the heretical thesis developed in the previous century for which only the white race descended from Adam and Eve, while Chinese, indios and blacks descended from pre-adamitic couples: a thesis later reclaimed by the scientific polygenism. There has never been any civilized nation, argued Hume, that wasn’t white skinned. And in vain you could search in the other races for an artist or a scientist. Such an obvious difference couldn’t be explained if “Nature hadn’t sanctioned an original distinction between those races”. For Voltaire, if the negroes are slaves of the other men and the indios never tried to revolt “even if they were a thousand against one” it’s because nature gave “to each species of humans, as to the plants, a principle that makes them different from the others”. So read his Essay on the customs and spirit of the nations written in 1756. Even a thinker that seemed to personify reason in its absolute purity, Immanuel Kant, while refusing to attribute the diversity of the races to a biological basis, couldn’t avoid falling in the racist bias. Assuming the civilization of enlightenment to represent the adulthood of mankind, he saw the journey of humanity distributed along different stages, to which the races are the living testimony: in the negroes survives the infancy of the species, in the indios the puberty.
It was the duty of the Europeans to promote the development of the other races by exporting civilization.
Only J.J. Rousseau distanced himself from such a pervasive ethnocentrism, questioning the picture of the ‘savage’ as inferior human and expressing, in his Essay on the Origin of Inequality, the suspect that under the “arrogant pretension of studying humankind, everybody is really only studying the people of his own country”.
Yet the Eurocentric paradigm would rule undisputed during the Enlightenment age. The Declarations of 1776 and 1789 on the Human Rights, where equality always occupies a central position, don’t really change the deal: Colonial Europe, with its maritime Companies, is ready to export its reason and import in exchange the world’s treasures. Colonialism, that appears today as a grand adventure of extortions and massacres, was generally perceived with a clear conscience by the West, legitimized by his theorists such as Hegel, for whom the entire human story culminated in Bourgeois Europe: Asia is the thesis, Africa the antithesis, Europe the synthesis. His rough reconstruction of the Weltgeschichte gets enriched with colorful ethnic details during his Lessons on the philosophy of history (1831), where he states that
“Africa… is the childish country, shrouded in the black color of the night, beyond the day where history is conscious of itself” ,
“the negro represents the natural man in his total barbarity and wildness: to understand him we must leave behind all our European intuitions”.
“Us Europeans have acquired so far little knowledge of the African inland; on the other hand, sometimes we found populations so savage and inhuman, to exclude all kind of relationships with them”. That being the case, how to treat those negroes? The answer will come, a century later, by the mouth of great disciple of Hegel, Benedetto Croce, that after distinguishing “between humans that belong to history and natural humans (Naturvoelker), humans capable of elaboration and humans incapable of such”, explains:
“towards the latter class of beings, zoologically human but not historically, we must exercise, as towards animals, domination and taming, when possible, and otherwise we must let them live at the margins of society, without explicit cruelty against them but allowing their descent to become extinct, as happened to those American races that would retreat and die out at the sight of civilization, for them unbearable”.
In the picture of this philosophy of history where Reason has a white skin, the discoveries that gave birth to the theory of evolution would justify with scientific arguments the Racist Ideology, both the moderate one of the so-called social Darwinism, and the perverse one that, from Arthur Gobineau to Adolf Hitler, believed the pure-blood Arian race was set to dominate the world.
Today the West has finally got rid of this kind of racism, after enormous tragedies such as the Holocaust, but he still isn’t free from the lurking racism that hides in his ethnocentric paradigm, subconsciously preventing his awareness of the unity of humankind as an indivisible subject of rights. The Gulf War was another tragic manifestation of the inability of the West to go beyond a formal interpretation of the international law, useful as reference when it has to legitimize its own hegemonic strategies, and easy to ignore when contrary to its interests.
The future of humanity requires an international democracy based on the tangible recognition of the other, aware of the number of expectations developed in the long centuries of submission, and of the plurality of perceptive and communicative modes intrinsic to the different cultures.
The end of modernity implies the end of that long cultural monologue that made it impossible for the westerner to respect the other humans as equals to itself, and establish with them a relationship of authentic reciprocity.
Races: from myth to science
The first step towards the realization of this goal is the demolition of the myth that contributed to shape modern man: the myth of races. This demolition, in fact, is the direct consequence of the anthropological discoveries emerged right within the western scientific field of research. Those findings allowed us to set the history of the species on a diachronical plane where the diversification in sub-species, once improperly called races, is reduced to a relatively recent event, caused mainly by the process of adaptation to different environments, each inspiring a distinct phenotypical solution to the common genetic heritage inscribed in every human chromosome.
The races, therefore, far from marking different stages of a single evolutionary line, document the extraordinary versatility of a species able to come up with different answers to the different challenges, without compromising the unity of the genetic heritage that characterizes the human race.
On the chronological vector of hominid evolution that led to homo sapiens, the so-called races are variations that emerged in the last segment that covers one percent of its length. For the 99% of its time-span, the human evolutionary process was entirely common. In the white, the black, the amerind sleeps, so to say, the same memory that could finally awake, if the mutual encounter is not tainted by aggressive behaviors. The morphological divergence started when homo sapiens, around the end of the last glaciation, 150,000–50,000 years ago, scattered around the globe. But by then, the human mental capacity was already formed in its constitutive traits, among which we can list also the spontaneous aggressive defense of the tribal genetic equilibrium.
Hence the conflicting dynamics between ethnic groups, in which is rooted the sentiment of repulsion towards the different, that would traditionally validate the modern ideological phenomenon of racism.
Each individual builds its identity within the ethnic group it belongs to, and expresses it with the repulsion of the stranger whom, because of its difference, appears as a menace. It is of secondary importance if as sign of unrelatedness is considered the color of the skin, the incomprehensible language (barbaric, for the Greeks, was who couldn’t speak), the different motherland or religion:
the hidden drive leading to the repulsion of the other is the fear of losing one’s own identity, the psychological cornerstone to self-assurance.
The current crossbreeding between ‘races’ could see reemerging the ancestral xenophobia that should have lost by now any structural justification. Those archaic impulses haven’t been completely dissolved by modernity, that limited itself to a rationalization without defusing their aggressive charge.
The epiphany of the Other holds as a premise the critical dissolution of that western subjectivity that to date has visited every corner of the world without finding anything else from itself. It’s easy to understand the dismay felt by the European conquistadores when they first got in touch with the indigenous people overseas. Where they fully human? Did they have a soul? Could they be baptized? As we have seen, even open-minded intellectuals such as Hume and Voltaire, more than a couple centuries later, in full enlightenment age, resorted to polygenistic theories to deny to the natives a full membership to the human race.
Only recently, the ethnological research gave us the proofs that the populations encountered by the Spanish weren’t but a branch of our species that had crossed the Bering strait from Asia around 30,000 years back, during a glaciation phase that had made transitable the passage from Siberia to Alaska. What happened, in substance, in 1492? A sub-species, that protagonist of an amazing development after the Neolithic revolution, met another sub-species, that had remained broadly bound to a hunter-gatherer’s lifestyle, ignorant of the warlike technologies that made us so dreadful. A man met another man and didn’t recognize him,
humanity met itself and didn’t recognize the image it saw in the mirror,
inaugurating a tragic alienation that only today, in the new planetary age,
has the chance of being definitively healed.
