I.D. Greeks 0016

‘White men’ want to get to the point, not to the context. The very abstract and racial epithet is a practical summation of attitude and judgment discarding all particularity, individuality, and specific instances. It is a way of “getting to the heart of the matter,’ supposedly a path of truth. But it is all too obvious to anyone and everyone that in actual use it does exactly the opposite, it covers truth up. Such pointing-at, distinguishing from others, as in “white men” would be rejected by the traditional oral (epic) poet on the practical and contextual grounds that ‘he,’ again a practical summation evading real difficulty (Samuel Butler and Robert Graves both argued that the ‘author’ of the ODYSSEY was a woman), is wanting to find a unity of communication, of sympathetic reception in his audience to facilitate his performance and reception of reward. The epic poet wants practical summation also but as all inclusive, as in enlarging ‘his’ audience by identifying what all hold in common as true. So ‘he’ would be solidly against making groups differences obvious and important but rather in identifying what every individual as an individual values, and therefore each member of the group is performed before as both individually receptive while yet both poet and audience as a whole recognize possession of a common desire. This necessitates the breaking down of differences, the breaking down of anything that cannot be practically ignored. And if it can be practically ignored, then it is not important to the epic poet.

One such thing would be skin color or any sort of so-called racial differences. One might well wonder about the variety of necessarily inherited physical varieties in mainland Greece, amplified in the southern islands like Santorini (Thera) and Krete, and immensely more variegated in Anatolia. This is just speculation on my part. If anyone has specific instances or arguments against this, I would like very much to hear it. But the main basis for this pure inference upon my part is, to me, the incredibly strange exact likeness in culture and physiology, or rather the complete absence of differentiation which we so-called modern people automatically look for between different peoples. Differentiation as identifying ‘others,’ even if supposedly for the friendliest of reasons, has become so natural in travel and ethnological contexts that we no longer think about it seriously except on the shallow level of what is “politically acceptable.” But the whole concept of race and racial distinction was a creation of otherwise reputable scientists (e. g. Louis Aggasiz) using their earned scientific credibility to support a popular idea and desire to prove ‘white men’ are physically inborn (eventually genetically) ‘superior,’ sometimes in physical virtues (“healthy” versus “degenerate”), many times in terms of moral superiority (based upon knowledge of Christianity or an abstract, ‘scientific’ derivative thereof), and always upon intellect (not just greater efficiency in solving complex problems but in seeking “higher truths” versus “native slyness,” “cunning,” “craftiness,” “shrewdness,” “deception,” and “trickery” to gain things they have not rightfully earned). The whole pseudo-science of race was initially founded upon the arbitrary (though, at the time, seemingly obvious, self-evident – but from where did that self-evidence arrive? The ancient Greeks thought the intellect was located in the heart, not the brain.) choice of measuring brain cases, therefore brain size (actually not necessarily congruent) and equating that with intelligence on the basis that people with the smallest brains were then amazingly discovered to have darker skins and/or primitive or degenerate culture. The fact that there was no factual and certainly no scientific basis for establishing amount of intelligence is based on amount of brain or, sometimes more ‘scientifically,’ cortex tissue, did not seriously cross their minds in the slightest. It was also ignored that some animals had much larger brains, including cortex tissue, than human beings (One scholar explained the giant brain of a sperm whale as necessary to govern its gigantic body. But a right whale, with the same size body, has a tiny brain) as well as the fact that some animals with almost microscopic brains had an enormous variety AND variability of abilities as well as great to tiny size.

This became, when united with the evolutionary theories of Darwin, supposedly the product of divine plan and temporal evolution toward a prescribed and predestined goal, i. e., since that is the ‘direction’ where time, presupposing unthinkingly that time has direction other than one’s personal death, is going. And the end of time reveals the ultimate ‘scientific’ physiological accomplishment or divine reward where it is ‘discovered’ the “white man” is much farther along the road to scientific or theological salvation.

But as actual facts began to be discovered by prehistoric archeologists (that the brains of homo neanderthalensis and homo sapiens Cromagnon were larger than modern man’s, homo sapiens sapiens, a name [wise wise man] I think that has fallen out of fashion in modern anthropology) and physical anthropologists like Alfred Russel Wallace (that the black skinned Australasian inhabitants of New Guinea had larger brains than ‘white men’) made discovering the already assumed conclusion of white supremacy much more difficult and they had to turn to other means of determining the validity of “white” racial superiority such as counting the number of crenulations on the cortex of the brain, etc.

This doctrine was called “Progressive Evolution.” It is associated with Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer as well as Charles Darwin. To some degree they are responsible for it. But this is just the problem, especially with such men who actually tried to be just and fair in their relations with other human beings. Race is an insidious and subversive doctrine. The accident of the historical discovery of the logical completeness and total coherence of the ‘theory’ of evolution (which is only a so-called “theory” on the level of Kopernicus’ and Issac Newton’s and Einstein’s discoveries) made it a factual “advance” and accumulation of real knowledge that unintentionally and offhandedly carried with it unexamined philosophical implications and doctrines which, if they had been clearly separated from the actual “theory of evolution” (the word “evolution” itself in English carrying a temporally value enhancing implication with it), would undoubtedly have rejected by most or all of them. That this is true is actually quite explicit in Darwin’s concept of the “niche” which each version of living being filled. This is simply the natural situation at a specific time and place that determines what kind of life can survive or not survive within it. ‘Historically’ it is completely blind. It has absolutely no direction. Species are selected but purely on the grounds of completely accidental favorable or unfavorable congruence with the “niche.”  There is no implication in the concept of “niche” of any “better” or “worse.” Where fish survive, man as man cannot. Where eagles and vultures survive, man simply as man cannot. Where dinosaurs survived, man as only man could not. Through his extensions NOW  man can ‘be’ there but he can never SURVIVE there as a animal properly fitting its niche. This does not make man ‘inferior’ to the fish, the bird, or dinosaur. In this context, “inferiority” is utterly ridiculous.

Unfortunately, these men, however did not adequately extend their thinking to so-called “primitive” cultures where highly cultured and very educated Englishmen would die easily and quickly, something Alfred Russel Wallace learned to appreciate. And since Wallace was English, he proves that even Englishmen can adapt as he did to a very hostile, anti-English environment by essentially going “native”! In fact, a great number of ‘Englishmen’ learned to survive in a non-English niche in this fashion including such notables as Joseph Conrad and T. E. Lawrence. However, all these men brought into question the traditional value of being a properly civilized Englishman as opposed to the patriotic and racial  denigration, “going native.”

Culturally, the possession of writing was always considered a great validation of cultural superiority – until the English in India realized they had to contend with a culture that possessed a written tradition not only much older and much more complex in thought than theirs, but, heaven forbid, these brown skinned people with tiny brain cases were the actual direct cultural ancestors of our far superior Aryran cultural heritage. The way this logical conclusion was evaded, ignored, or discounted for over a hundred years would be a fascinating, though disgusting, study in the ways “fair play” and objective science can be fundamentally perverted.

In dealing with the Trojans and the Achaens of Homer’s ILIAD, we have known by logical necessity there must have been fundamental cultural and ‘racial’ differences. If Homer had not been accepted as the epiphany of Hellenic culture, and in turn the highest accomplishment in West European literary culture with whom only Shakespeare could compete, I am sure in the second half on the nineteenth century we would have discovered that Homer was a mere folk balladeer of little intellectual interest.

The point is the epic poet had to fundamentally question all ‘his’ habitual assumptions inherited from his parents and local culture on the practical grounds of creating a performance pleasing to the greatest possible number of people. It was not intellectual nor philosophical nor religious nor cultural. Rather, the value of acceptance and appreciation of performance actually superceded the value of those things. The value of filling one’s belly superceded any judgments of the people he was performing for. He did not want to teach them new ways nor change them into better people but to get them to give him what ‘he’ wants, food, shelter, applause. This, hunger, is the very beginning of historical materialism for Sartre and is the necessary ground of Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” where each level of the pyramid of the needs of the physical individual must first and continuously satisfied before ‘higher’ levels on the pyramid like art and culture can be reached. “Human needs arrange themselves in hierarchies of pre-potency. That is to say, the appearance of one need usually rests on the prior satisfaction of another, more pre-potent need. Man is a perpetually wanting animal . . .” (quoted from Colin Wilson’s NEW PATHWAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution, New American Library, 1974, pg. 147). Wilson goes on to say, “A creature that has never had a full stomach is incapable of conceiving any other need . . .” (148). Though the satisfaction of “physiological” needs lets one ‘ascend’ to satisfying other important needs, important only when basic needs are first satisfied, such as “safety, love, esteem, and self-actualisation,” (149), the physiological needs can never be left behind or ignored either in oneself or in others. All “the hierarchy of needs” is the subject of the epic poet. This is what generic, plain ordinary people want to hear about. Anything that interferes with the hierarchy of needs in his audience interferes with the poet’s hierarchy of needs.

There is nothing more important that can set them aside except something completely antagonistic to the well-being of the epic poet. ‘He’ does not care if his audience is dark skinned. What ‘he’ cares about is being fed. And, after being fed, he still stays strictly within the hierarchy of needs because any distraction from that in his performance distracts ‘his’ audience from giving ‘him’ his reward. His own satisfaction can only be achieved through the universal satisfaction of his audience, and the only way such “universal satisfaction” can be best achieved is having a performance satisfactory and unsurprising, expected, to everyone at all times in any place. Performing the “expected” is the only way a ‘universal’ audience can judge and appreciate a performance. They already know what is to be preformed. It is how well it is preformed by which the poet will be rewarded. If the audience is surprised, if one member heard it differently elsewhere praising their enemies as better than they are, or anything new the audience does not already know well, will make the audience, at best, uncertain, and the poet just as uncertainly fed.