The Freeman Book by Albert Jay Nock

Author:Albert Jay Nock [Albert Jay Nock]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-1-61016-290-6
Publisher: B. W. Huebsch, Inc.
Published: 1924-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

THE DIVINE RIGHT OF LINEAGE

TRULY, the progress of knowledge is slow and painful. For at least a score of years, anthropologists have been pointing out that race has often little to do with either language or nationality. Indeed, during the great war some of them made heroic efforts to put the essential information before the public, but, as Schiller might say, against folk-science even the anthropologist battles in vain.

Yet the relevant facts are by no means difficult to get at. Go to any large gathering of Germans and scrutinize the crowd. Then compare them with the people you saw at the French theatre two or three winters ago. The chances are that you can match rather more than half the individuals of either group in the other; on the score of mere looks the greatest specialist in the world could never tell which were Germans and which were French. On the other hand, even a careless observer would note that neither the French audience nor the German Verein represents a homogeneous group. If they are truly representative gatherings, a number of conspicuously tall men will be found to stand out sharply in either case from a larger body of moderately-sized ones. There will be a few markedly fair individuals amidst a number of distinctly darker type. Again, there will be decided differences in the shape of the heads: in both assemblies there will be men, the width of whose heads is rather more than eight-tenths of the length, while in others the relative width descends towards three-fourths or even falls below that ratio.

Having regard then to the way in which these three traits are associated, we might classify each of our artificial national groups into natural biological ones. From this point of view we should then be able to set off in both of them a subdivision of tall, fair and rather long-headed men, leaving another made up of stocky, darker-haired and markedly broad-headed individuals. From the French audience we might further segregate some men of pronouncedly swarthy complexion, shorter than the broad-skulled group, rather longer-headed even than the tall group. To this last subdivision there would be no equivalent among the Germans. Ignoring it, however, for the present, we may say that a scientist classifying mankind as to physical appearance alone would not hesitate to combine certain Frenchmen and Germans into one division and certain others into a second division altogether irrespective of the differences in speech and political affiliation. To use the accepted nomenclature, he would recognize not a French and a German race, but a tall Nordic or Teutonic and a medium-sized Alpine race, each including at the same time natives of both countries.

But in making this classification the investigator is creating two ideal types, to which only a minority of individuals conform at all closely. There are many men who are both tall and dark, for example; just as there are many short blonds. Nature, in other words, has not really segregated all existing individuals into the two types, Nordic and Alpine.

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