34. Questions of Endowment and Their Validity
Are the human races alike or dissimilar in mentality and character? Are some lower than others, or are they all on a plane as regards potentiality? The answers to these questions are of theoretical import, and naturally also bear on the solution of the practical race problems with which many nations are confronted.
As long as an inquiry remains sufficiently abstract or remote, the desirability of such inquiry is likely to go unquestioned. As soon, however, as investigation touches conduct—for instance, our actual relations with other races—a sentiment has a way of rising, to the effect that perhaps after all the problem does not so much call for knowledge as for action. Thus, in regard to the negro problem in the United States, it is likely to be said that the immediate issue is what may be the best attitude toward “Jim Crow” cars and other forms of segregation. Are these desirable or undesirable, fair or unfair? Here are specific problems which an actual condition presses to have answered. Under the circumstances, it will be said, is not an inquiry into the innate capacity of the negro rather remote, especially when every one can see by a thousand examples that the negro is obviously inferior to the Caucasian? He is poorer, more shiftless, less successful. He has made no inventions, produced no geniuses. He clearly feels himself inferior and comports himself accordingly. Why then raise the issue of capacity at all, unless from a desire to befog it, to subvert the conclusions of common sense and every-day experience by special pleading which substitutes adroitness for sincerity? When a prisoner has been found guilty it is the judge’s business to determine the length of sentence, to decide how far justice should be tempered with mercy. Were he to reopen the case from the beginning, he would be showing partiality. Is not the situation of the scientist proposing to inquire into the accepted verdict that the negro is inferior to the Caucasian, analogous to that of a judge who insists on setting aside the verdict of twelve unprejudiced jurymen in order to retry the defendant himself? In some such form as this, objections may rise in the minds of some.
The answer to such criticism is first of all that racial inferiority and superiority are by no means self-evident truths. Secondly, the belief in race inequalities is founded in emotion and action and then justified by reasoning. That is, the belief is rationalized, not primarily inferred by pure reason. It may be true, but it is not proved true.
As to what is self-evident, there is nothing so misleading as direct observation. We see the sun move and the earth stand still. It is “self-evident” that the sun revolves around the earth. Yet after thousands of years the civilized portion of mankind finally came to believe that it was the earth that spun. Science had no perverse interest, no insidious motive, in advocating the Copernican instead of the Ptolemaic system; in fact, was driven to its new belief gradually and reluctantly. It was pre-scientific humanity, with its direct, homespun, every-day observation, which had really prejudged the matter, and which, because it had always assumed that the earth was flat and stationary, and because every idiot could see that it was so, long combated the idea that it could be otherwise.
As to opinions founded in emotion and subsequently rationalized, instead of being evolved by pure reason from evidence, it may suffice to quote from a famous book on herd instinct, as to the relation of mass opinion and science:
“When, therefore, we find ourselves entertaining an opinion about the basis of which there is a quality of feeling which tells us that to inquire into it would be absurd, obviously unnecessary, unprofitable, undesirable, bad form, or wicked, we may know that that opinion is a non-rational one, and probably, therefore, founded upon inadequate evidence.
“Opinions, on the other hand, which are acquired as the result of experience alone do not possess this quality of primary certitude. They are true in the sense of being verifiable, but they are unaccompanied by that profound feeling of truth which belief possesses, and, therefore, we have no sense of reluctance in admitting inquiry into them. That heavy bodies tend to fall to the earth and that fire burns fingers are truths verifiable and verified every day, but we do not hold them with impassioned certitude, and we do not resent or resist inquiry into their basis; whereas in such a question as that of the survival of death by human personality we hold the favorable or the adverse view with a quality of feeling entirely different, and of such a kind that inquiry into the matter is looked upon as disreputable by orthodox science and as wicked by orthodox religion. In relation to this subject, it may be remarked, we often see it very interestingly shown that the holders of two diametrically opposed opinions, one of which is certainly right, may both show by their attitude that the belief is held instinctively and non-rationally, as, for example, when an atheist and a Christian unite in repudiating inquiry into the existence of the soul.”
Take the attitude of the average Californian or Australian about the Mongolian; of the Texan about the Mexican; of the Southerner about the Negro; of the Westerner about the local tribes of Indians; of the Englishman about the Hindu—is not their feeling exactly described by the statement that inquiry into the possibility of racial equality would be “unnecessary,” “absurd,” or evilly motivated; and that their belief in race superiority rests on an “a priori synthesis of the most perfect sort,” and possesses “the quality of primary certitude”?
In short, the apparently theoretical beliefs held as to race capacity by people who are actually confronted by a race conflict or problem are by no means the outcome of impartial examination and verification, but are the result of the decisions taken and emotions experienced in the course of acts performed toward the other race. The beliefs rest ultimately on impulse and feeling; their reasoned support is a subsequent bolstering up. Of course, the fact that a belief springs from emotion does not render that belief untrue, but does leave it scientifically unproved, and calling for investigation.
These conclusions may vindicate inquiry into the relative capacity of races from the charge of being finespun, insidious, impractical, or immoral.