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The Human Race
By: Lee Drummond, Center for Peripheral Studies
Race . . . Old Norse-Icelandic . . . rush (of water) . . . Originally a northern
word, coming into general use about the middle of the 16th century . . . II5.
onward movement of a thing, as the heavenly bodies, a vehicle, etc.; running
or rush of water. Also, a sudden deviation from a line.
__ Oxford English Dictionary
The Science of Difference
Anthropology is the science of human difference, although at present it is a
rather shamefaced, ambivalent science. No other field of inquiry has expanded and
systematized our understanding of human diversity to the extent that anthropology
has accomplished. Yet, like a timid host, we find ourselves stammering apologies
for what we do best: “I really didn’t mean to suggest that people are all that
different . . . certainly, despite cultural variation, people share a fundamental nature,
etc., etc.” For decades we have been caught up in a dilemma: our heartfelt urge to
celebrate a human diversity we have done so much to establish is brought up short
by our duty to avoid supplying material for racists and demagogues to feed upon.
An anthropological discussion of the concept of race puts us on the horns of
this intellectual and moral dilemma. We react in a typically ambivalent manner by
proclaiming an underlying uniformity of human nature while emphasizing the
cultural diversity of human groups. Either way, we manage to cling to a politically
correct egalitarianism.
Drawing by Chris Suddick, for Anthropology Newsletter
Though these responses may salve our consciences, they are morally
irrelevant and intellectually mistaken. They are morally irrelevant because a few
anthropologists mouthing the twin platitudes of psychic unity and multiculturalism
will do nothing to stanch the bloodletting in the many racial, ethnic, religious, and
national conflicts going on in the world today. People will continue to slaughter one
another for any reason they may care to invoke, or, as daily life in our cities
demonstrates, for no reason at all. Glossing over the phenomenon of human
difference is intellectually mistaken because it is an unassailable fact that people
everywhere insist on making fundamental distinctions between their group and those
“others” who are utterly unlike themselves. We may not be racists, but our
ethnographic subjects are. A plausible theory of culture cannot ignore their
assertions: it is axiomatic to every cultural system that the world is divided into an
“us” and a “them.” As anthropologists, we must proceed to construct a science of
difference; to do less would be a betrayal to our intellectual forebears, to our own
sustaining sense of an “us-ness.”
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Zoo Horizons
The main theme or generative principle of this essay is what I have come to
think of as a “zoo horizon,” or, more accurately, a terrifically complex set or
manifold of zoo horizons. This idea hit me like a freight train almost twenty years
ago — one of those little epiphanies in an anthropologist’s life — and I have been
turning it over in my mind ever since.
It was 1978, and I was attending a seminar in Montréal led by Glynn Isaac,
the brilliant prehistorian whose untimely death was a tragic loss for the whole
discipline of anthropology. At the time paleoanthropology was in turmoil over the
australopithecines and Homo habilis. Each new discovery or dating technique
pushed back the age of those beings to impossibly remote times: two million years
in the case of Homo habilis; three and even four million years for the
australopithecines. For some paleoanthropologists the very early hominids began to
seem more ape-men than man-apes, primitive ancestors who lacked the rudimentary
physical and cultural traits associated with humans. Isaac was the foremost
spokesperson for the contrary view that australopithecines possessed distinctive
hominid attributes that set the stage for Homo sapiens. In particular, the use of a
base camp implied that those beings had developed a social organization in which
some members foraged or hunted far afield and returned “home” to share their food
with those who had remained behind. It was, Isaac maintained, a threshold of sorts:
sustained, long-distance division of labor is predicated on a concept of group, of a
fundamental “us-ness,” that separated australopithecines from the animal world
around them.
In the discussion that followed his presentation, the small audience bore in
on this ape-man / man-ape controversy. I found Isaac’s arguments persuasive, and
was thus brought up short when, toward the end of the session, he made the offhand
remark that if a surviving band of australopithecines were discovered today in some
remote African savanna or woodland, we’d have to keep them in a zoo. Human-like
as they were, they were still far too different from us ever to survive in an
unprotected, unsupervised environment. We couldn’t take them round to the faculty
club for a spot of sherry and a tranche of Stilton. Like some of our acquaintances,
we couldn’t take them anywhere. We’d have to keep them in a zoo.
In an intellectual atmosphere still poisoned by the witch hunts for
sociobiologists, I found the frankness of Isaac’s remark — its intellectual honesty —
both profound and troubling. Troubling, because he was prepared to draw a line
between human and non-human; liberal-minded academics (including myself)
instinctively avoided that dangerous ground. Profound, because I realized, even as I
recoiled from the idea, that Isaac was right. Evolution creates unbridgeable
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differences; the very concept of “species” depends on that fact. Populations that
once intermingled and interbred drift apart until, over the generations, distinct
species take the place of those earlier, permeable groups. The image or metaphor
for this process that struck me at the time and stays with me to this day (but now
with a set of new connotations), is a horizon: the whole complicated business of
hominid mixing, mating, and moving goes on until “we” look around us and discern
a boundary, a limit to our inclusive vision, a horizon that cuts “us” off from other
beings whose ancestors were once on “our” side of the horizon. And since “we” are
now enlightened, culture-bearing beings, it is far better to act on those perceived
differences by building zoos than by following the example of English settlers in
early nineteenth-century Tasmania, who exterminated the indigenous islanders like
so much vermin.
The notion of zoo horizon is useful because it enables us to frame interesting
questions about our biological and cultural lineage(s) — questions that may even
lead to empirical answers. Is the horizon of modern Homo sapiens relatively flat,
like Kansas, or vertiginous, like the jumbled foothills of a mountain range? Does
the horizon change rapidly or slowly over time? And finally, the question that most
exercises cultural anthropologists with their acute moral sensibilities: Does the
horizon of our species look pretty much the same from group to group, individual to
individual, or is there a significant amount of internal variation within the species?
Finding answers to these questions is absolutely critical, both to
anthropological theory and to our general understanding of ourselves as members of
a human race. Broadly speaking, two very different sorts of answers are possible.
On one hand, we may regard our species as a large, biologically homogeneous
population that has evolved gradually and that happens to possess an interesting
veneer of cultural differences. A man is a man, for all a’ that. On the other hand,
we may conclude that our species, despite sharing genetic basics, is extremely
heterogeneous, and that it comes by that heterogeneity honestly as the product of
abrupt, erratic evolutionary processes. In the former case, zoo horizons would be all
plains and gentle contours, with one species or group gradually shading into another.
In the latter, zoo horizons would tower and plummet precipitously, carving the
landscape into haphazard, isolated little crevices. If you and I are standing a mile or
so apart in central Kansas, the horizons we see are very similar; the topology is
continuous. However, if we are standing the same distance apart near my home,
where the southern arm of the San Andreas fault has crumpled the landscape like a
sheet of aluminum foil, we are likely separated by a series of intervening ridges,
foothills, and valleys, and see completely different horizons. The topology is
discontinuous, in the extreme.
On the basis of evidence accumulating in the fields of evolutionary biology,
hominid paleontology, neurophysiology, and even cultural anthropology, I suggest
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that the horizon of humanity is a jumbled, tortuously complex vista (we’re not in
Kansas anymore, Toto), that its contours have changed rapidly throughout the
course of hominid evolution, and that today it looks very different depending on
where and how it is viewed. For example, recent studies of mitochondrial DNA in
contemporary human populations and of Neandertal DNA indicate that we are an
upstart (and doubtlessly highly unstable) species. We don’t much resemble our
hominid predecessors, even very recent ones such as the Neandertals. Thus the
details of our prehistory very likely contradict the slow-and-steady-wins-the-race
message of classical Darwinism. Failing that simplistic interpretation, we must
conclude that any useful model of internal variation in the human species would
contain a great many dimensions of differentiation (what mathematicians
intriguingly call “degrees of freedom”). A particular domain of identity (“Us”)
unfolds within an exceedingly complex multidimensional field or manifold of
experiential possibilities (what may conveniently be called a semiospace).
Multidimensional Broccoli
How might we visualize these extraordinarily complex zoo horizons? And
how might we begin to get a feel for how those horizons change or evolve in
semiospace? A way of thinking about these issues, of modeling something already
too complicated to grasp intuitively, is through the device of multidimensional
broccoli (an idea suggested to me by Roger Penrose’s discussion, in The Emperor’s
New Mind, of the closely related notion of “phase space” that describes the evolution
of physical systems). Try the following exercise: Take a head of broccoli, one with
its long stalk still attached, and begin slicing it perpendicularly to the stalk,
beginning at the base of the stalk. This procedure gives you, not the elegant
transverse sections Martha Stewart would recommend, but a series of cross sections.
As your slices proceed up the stalk and into the head, where clusters of flowerlets
lead off in all directions, the cross sections become more and more irregular, until
you find yourself slicing through a number of small, individual stalks rather than the
convoluted main stalk.
Figure 1. Cross-Sections of Multidimensional Broccoli Sprouting in (Semio)space.
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Which of these diverse cross sections best represents the present extent of
internal variation within the human race? Are we a fairly homogeneous lot, with
individual differences that fall within a neatly circumscribed domain (as Figure 1a
would indicate)? Or does our species have its outriders, branches that fold back on
themselves and provide nooks and crannies for individual variation about to become
species-level differentiation (as Figures 1c and 1d depict)? May it even be that the
fashionable rhetoric of multiculturalism has hit on an essential truth about humanity:
that internal cultural variation has already produced sodalities that are, in effect,
different species (as Figure 1e suggests)?
Here I can offer only two comments on these important questions. First, we
need to recognize that the human race must fit somewhere along the continuum I
have described, must occupy some domain of that complex space composed of the
innumerable biological and cultural variables of our species. Although incredibly
complicated, this issue is an empirical one. My best guess is that we are well toward
the flowerlet end of the stalk, while certain other species (cockroaches, perhaps?)
have enjoyed a far more leisurely journey across the grand tableau of evolution and
thus cluster near the relatively homogeneous base of the stalk. But this is a
researchable issue — a rare item in contemporary anthropological discussion.
Second, we must bear in mind that the broccoli-like sets of variation I have sketched
here are in fact multidimensional, and with a vengeance. Like Wonderland, things
get curiouser and curiouser as we trace our labyrinthine past: we may start out from
a fairly well-defined region only to find that a multitude of branchings or histories
have led to a seemingly uniform present. There are an awfully lot of rabbit holes or
(to use the term in vogue with cosmologists) worm holes in semiospace.
Recognizing the convoluted nature of semiospace — seeing the
multidimensional broccoli for what it is — should enable us, once and for all, to
renounce the vicious stupidity of racism without compromising our fledgling science
of difference. The racist errs, not by insisting on the importance of variation in our
species, but by limiting himself to an absurdly few indices or dimensions of
variation; people are far more different than he imagines. To focus on a few indices,
such as skin color, religious affiliation, or country of origin, is to pretend that an
impossibly complex multidimensional entity — humanity — can be reduced to two
or three dimensions.
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It Was Fun While It Lasted . . . We Really Got Blasted!
If our nature(s) are far more complex than the racist supposes, they are also
far more dynamic. Our thoughts and feelings on the subject of race are so
ambivalent in part because we have inherited a set of utterly contradictory
etymologies of the word. The conventional meaning of “race” posits a fixity or
rootedness of human groups: we are what we are from time immemorial.
Diametrically opposed to this static definition of “race” is the meaning that comes to
us from Old Norse-Icelandic, cited at the beginning of this piece. In that linguistic
tradition, “race” evokes turbulence and change, as in the chaotic flow of a rushing
stream. Intriguingly, this ancient usage corresponds nicely with the nature of
dynamical systems as explored by contemporary chaos-complexity theory — in
which a turbulent liquid serves as a type case. I would suggest that our species —
the human race — is just such a dynamical system. The disposition of individuals
and groups (whether human beings or water molecules) at one time tells us very
little about their past or future arrangements.
With a burgeoning population and blindingly fast technological change, our
science of difference is now being put to the acid test. The contours of zoo horizons
stretching into our remote past (Isaac’s hominids) may well be gentle slopes in
comparison with the precipitous terrain that lies ahead, where computer science and
transgenic experimentation will fashion sapient beings that are not conceivably
human. Nature allowed the australopithecines two or three million years; will the
present human race have even a tenth of that time span? A hundredth? What would
the not-so-human beings of 22,002 AD think and do if they came across a surviving
band of Homo sapiens? They’d have to keep us in a zoo.
(See below)
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Drawing by Chris Suddick, for Anthropology Newsletter
(not used by AN editor – too frivolous)
_________________________________________________
Lee Drummond is director of the Center for Peripheral Studies, P O Box
477, Palm Springs CA 92263. This essay has evolved from ideas developed in
Drummond’s 1996 book, American Dreamtime: A Cultural Analysis of Popular
Movies, and Their Implications for a Science of Humanity (Lanham MD: Rowman
& Littlefield), and in a long essay manuscript, “Something Else: Notes on the
Human, Sort-of-Human, and Not-So-Human Things to Come.” (Now more-or-less
completed and included on the Center’s website as Culture, Mind, and Physical
Reality: An Anthropological Essay). These and other works may be found at:
www.peripheralstudies.org
Frequent visits to the bonobo enclosure at the San Diego Zoo have contributed much
to the notion of “zoo horizon” presented here and in an on-going research paper, “A
Cultural Analysis of Mythic Performance and Ritual Site in American Life (the San
Diego Zoo and San Diego’s Sea World).” Discussions with a paleoanthropologist
friend, Michael Bisson, have sharpened his woefully soft-focused thinking on the
subject of human evolution.
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