The Mismeasure of Man: Democracy in America

As a young boy, around 8 I think, my family was stationed at West Point, New York. One of many places I lived as an Army brat. My favorite place to hangout and play was at the old stone fort overlooking the Hudson River:  Fort Putnam.  One’s childhood imagination filled the space with soldiers, and prisoners in the dungeons, as we played on the ramparts and nearby woods.

One day, wandering through the fort’s grounds, there was a young man digging a shallow pit, about four feet by four feet and several inches deep.  A small pile of dirt was nearby, along with a shovel, a small shallow wooden box with a screen, and some bags.  I stopped and asked what he was doing.  He said he was doing archaeology for a class project.  He showed me some bits of pottery and a handful of rusty nails.  He let me hold them.  He even let me do a little digging.  

About a decade later I was majoring in Anthropology with a concentration in Archaeology.  My favorite class, ever, was a lab in human osteology.  Bones, human bones.  Ancient bones. My favorite professor, Dr. Ann Palkovich, was giving the class.   The bones we were studying were from a dig in the middle east, Israel, I think.  They were approximately two millennia old.

Every Friday there was a quiz.  There were about a dozen small boxes, labeled with a number, and in that box was a fragment of a bone.   Our task was to identify it.  Was it a bone?  If so, was it a human bone?  If it was a human, what bone was it?  What side of the body?  As the course progressed, and our skills and knowledge developed, the bone fragments became smaller and smaller. 

One day, walking into the lab, sitting on the tables were skulls from the collection.  Their empty eye sockets – orbits technically – beckoned.  Holding one, looking into the empty orbits, one wondered what that person had seen, what their life was like.  Skeletons spoke to us.  They told us their age, height, sex, what diseases they may have had, a history of injuries, markers of malnutrition, signs of what labor they engaged in.

Skulls have a very disturbing history in anthropology I learned in another class.  Much of it dark. Stephen Gould’s Mismeasure of Man greatly influenced me; a tattered copy of his book sits next to my keyboard as I type.

 In the mid- to late-19^th century, the emerging science of anthropology was consumed by racist notions of white European superiority.  There was a confluence of 18^th century notions human species being divided into race-based species — endowed with different levels of intelligence—and empire, colonialism, and Darwinian evolution.  Scientifically determined racial hierarchies of intelligence and civilizations were developed, with white European men (and their descendants) at the very top, with blacks at the very bottom.  Women of every race were also inferior to the men within their race.

This combination of naturalists, anthropologists, and cranks set out to scientifically prove that whites were superior.  The skull was the key, they thought.  Skulls were collected (mostly looted and stolen) from around the world and the craniums volumes were measured.  Cranial volume was a measure of brains, or intelligence.  And wouldn’t you know it.  Skulls of white European origin men had the highest cranial volumes.  Blacks the lowest.  Criminals also had the lower cranial volumes…. as did women.

The results were rigged we know.  Through both intentional and unintentional selection biases, data was manipulated or ignored.   This era of scientific racism had massive consequences.  It informed government policies on immigration, policing, the penal system well into the 20^th century.  It served to justify colonization, empire, slavery, Jim Crow, and oppression of certain peoples.  You see, they believed, blacks could never be civilized, or intelligent, or worthy of humane treatment.  

You hear this racist legacy now when a white person says a black person is articulate.  Or, read that Florida’s school curriculum requires teachers to teach that black slaves learned life affirming skills from their white owners.  Or when black and women generals are fired for no reason other than their skin color or gender.  Hegseth believes that blacks and women can’t achieve high ranks in the military without preferential, woke, promotions. They are, Hegseth is convinced, inherently inferior intellectually and morally.

I thought scientific racism had met an ignoble death.  But alas, it’s rearing its ugly head once again and is alive and well in Trump’s world.  It is a corner stone of America’s foreign and domestic policies of the current administration.  Trump’s national security policy paper claims that western European civilization is being diluted by immigrants from Africa and the Middle East.  His constant demeaning of Africans – Somalis are low-IQ – or banning of visas from mostly African and Islamic countries, harken back to that dark age of scientific racism. 

Does Trump not know that the wheel was simultaneously invented in Mesopotamia (Southern Iraq), Turkey, and in Hungry (per recent study), some six thousand years ago while west Europeans were, well, still eating each other.

Does Trump not know that the chemical compound now known as gunpowder, was invented in China in the 9^thcentury? Then about four centuries later the Chinese also invented the cannon.  According to a Ming dynasty book, they called it a “thousand ball thunder cannon.” Now that’s cool. West Europeans, were, well, still too uncivilized to invent a cannon.

Does Trump not know that an Arab mathematician at Baghdad University in the 9^th century, wrote a book titled “Al-jabr ‘wa al-muquabala“?  Or, as we know it, Algebra.   Mohamed al-Kwarizimi, is the father of Algebra and the namesake of Algorithm. West Europeans, were, well, still in the Dark Ages. 

Does Trump not know that our number system 0 to 10 (the Arabic System) was invented in India, adopted by Arabic mathematicians?  That zero was not a western invention? In addition, trigonometry developed over millennia in Babylonia, India (sine, cosine, versine is attributed to an Indian mathematician and astronomer named Ayabhata), and the Arab world before reaching so-called western civilization, those great Teutonic cultures, who, were, well, still eating without proper utensils.

(Note to dumbass Texas: since you recently codified a state school curriculum denigrating Islam and the Arab world perhaps you ought to ban the teaching of high-level math. Don’t want them ‘Arab’ ideas to infect your children’s brains do you?)

So called western civilization is greatly indebted to other “civilizations.”  All those right-wing gun owners who don’t want to be replaced and fear western civilization is in terminal decline fearfully clutch guns made possible by those barbarians, the Chinese. 

Perhaps the one thing so-called western civilization can lay claim to is Democracy.  A Greek word meaning rule by the people.  Our Constitution’s preamble, “We the people….” traces directly back to Ancient Athens.  Mind you, in the late 19^th century as Greeks emigrated to the U.S. they weren’t welcomed.  One person wrote they were ‘broken men from a broken land.’

Paradoxically, America’s claim to fame – a constitutional republic where the people rule – our one true gift to the world, is being laid to waste day-by-day by Trump, his administration, and his supporters that insatiably guzzle his tonic of racism and white supremacy.  Quite the contradiction to destroy democracy to save it from the clutches of non-western civilization.

The movement of people, and thus, ideas and inventions over millennia are what makes humans so powerful.  When you block the movement of people, you also block innovation and new ideas.  These inventions and ideas are what power our modern way of life in America.  A cumulative synthesis of ideas spanning peoples across the globe. Building walls and rejecting new people invites a slow decline and death of American civilization, not a golden age, but a new dark age.