Tuesday 23 August 2005

A Modern Heresy

How would you credit the idea that breeds of dog are an illusion, a social construct, and an outdated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concept? You would think it ludicrous, wouldn’t you? How about human races? Ah, now there we have it! They’re an illusion, a social construct, and an outdated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concept, aren’t they?
.....Empirically, breeds in dogs and races in humans are similar. Yet in cherished belief, they are wholly different. Under no political compulsion to see breeds of dog as anything but what they are – as having biological reality –, we can see breeds of dog for what they are. But under political compulsion to see human races as anything but what they are – as having biological reality –, we can be compelled into thinking them a social myth.
.....At least this is how it is in the West. In Japan, for instance, the claim that human races are a myth would strike most as utterly against all evidence; and so it is, but then the population of Japan has not yet been reduced to the level of useful idiocy that the West now enjoys. In England, the mere mention of the possibility of the biological existence of race brings everyone out in a sweat. Good people just know that race is an outdated and unscientific concept, so outdated and unscientific, in fact, that any rational discussion or modern scientific evidence to the contrary is deemed heretical.
.....It is not only race that we are not allowed to see. In England nowadays, to come to one’s senses and see the world aright is treated as the grossest solecism. We must all commit ourselves to some sacred and binding falsehoods, lest we cause offence to the readily and expediently offendable; we must all repudiate the evidence of our senses and place our faith in the sayings of our intellectuals, lest we be denounced. For have you not heard? While our senses are irredeemably corrupt, and reason a useless organ, the political sayings of our opinion-shapers and masters are the hardest facts and the unchallengeable tenets of truth.
.....Every fallen age has its sacred falsehood to which it is a heresy not to commit, and this age is no different.

1 comment:

dearieme said...

That the Japs are wrong is proved by the huge number of them who have won the Gold Medal in the 100m sprint at the Olympics.