Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference

My most recent book, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2015) has been published, and is available for order both on the PUP website as well as on Amazon. Here is an excerpt, from the conclusion:

It was in large part the systematization of nature, in generally avowedly artificial classifications, that led to the emergence of racial realism in the modern period. It was quite enough to devise complicated schemata or groupings-together of all natural beings, including human beings and their purported subtypes, to reify the categories of race that so many modern people have taken for granted. It was not necessary, in addition, to produce philosophical arguments in defense of racial essentialism. Race, then, as an entity on a par with phlogiston, cosmic radiation, or gluons, is not invented in the modern period. What is invented is a system of racial typology, which in turn promotes a new way of talking about human diversity --a discourse, if you will--, and which supervenes on the prior and parallel project of biological taxonomy, even as it explicitly and repeatedly denies that the divisions it is making are actually given in nature. This new typology, finally, may be said to be the result of an increasing concern in the modern period to understand the human being as a thoroughly natural being, as exhaustively comprehensible within the terms of a system of nature that also includes primates, quadrupeds, molluscs, and plants. The insertion of the human being into such a system of nature, as we have attempted to show here, had profound implications for philosophical anthropology in the widest sense: for the understanding of human nature, and of the nature of human difference.

There is a certain responsibility, in addressing a subject as contemporary and unresolved as race, to not treat it from a dusty and antiquarian point of view, but also to seek to bring something to current discussions that might help to lessen this idea’s harmful effects. We began this book with an epigram from W. E. B. DuBois, identifying ‘color prejudice’ in the Southern United States as a ‘curious kink of the human mind’, and then proceeded to investigate the concept of race as it unfolds from the Spanish Renaissance to the German Enlightenment, thus in a chapter of history that plays out mostly before the institutions of prejudice that interest DuBois had taken shape. This may seem an avoidance of the pressing matter at hand, but the approach here has been motivated by the conviction that these curious kinks of US history, which in the end is the history of utmost concern to the present author, may best be seen as a local inflection of a deep global history. This history must be uncovered and analyzed in order for the seemingly intractable local pathologies, the ‘kinks’ to which DuBois refers, to be properly diagnosed and remediated. There can be no easy division between the antiquarian and the contemporary, since the way we talk about race is in large part an accrual, a distillation of history. There may be transhistorical and innate predispositions to divide human society into a fixed number of essentialized subgroups, but it would be extremely hasty to suppose that these kinks of the human mind are somehow etched into the human brain. Between any possible predisposition and the actual modern history of thinking about race, there is a tremendous amount of room for conceptualizing alternative paths our deepseated propensities for thinking about human diversity might have taken, and could still yet take. 

Recent work in the ‘philosophy of race’, particularly in the Anglo-American tradition, has provided remarkable insight, borrowing much from empirical psychology, into the way implicit bias functions to heighten and perpetuate racial prejudice in society.[1] This is valuable work, but so far it has not offered much in the way of positive prescriptions for correcting those false beliefs we evidently harbor unknowingly. One possible path towards correction might be discovered in the project of improved historical awareness. Our perception of social reality, our implicit biases, and our explicit beliefs are all historically conditioned. For this reason, the categories that come into play in much of our effort to make sense of social reality are much better understood not as natural kinds, or even as candidates for natural kindhood, but as historical kinds, to be questioned and challenged not only in clinical experiment and conceptual analysis, but also in the archives: the open record of our wrongs, conceptual and moral at once. 

---

[1] In addition to the titles cited in chapter 1, see Lawrence Blum, “Stereotypes and Stereotyping: A Moral Analysis,” in Philosophical Papers 33, 3 (2004): 251-290; Daniel Kelly and Erica Roedder, “Racial Cognition and the Ethics of Implicit Bias,” in Philosophy Compass 3, 3 (2008): 522-540; Daniel Kelly, Luc Faucher, and Edouard Machery, “Getting Rid of Racism: Assessing Three Proposals in Light of Empirical Evidence,” in Journal of Social Philosophy 41 (2010): 293-322; Eric Schwitzgebel, “Acting Contrary to Our Professed Beliefs, Or, The Gulf Between Occurrent Judgment and Dispositional Belief,” in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 91, 4 (2010): 531-553; Nilanjana Dasgupta, “Implicit Attitudes and Beliefs Adapt to Situations: A Decade of Research on the Malleability of Implicit Prejudice, Stereotypes, and the Self-Concept,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 47 (2013): 233-279. 

Matt Bieber's Life in the Loop: Essays on OCD

I tend towards a fairly hardcore social constructionism about most mental-health diagnoses. I've read Michel Foucault and Ian Hacking, and I'm well aware of the historicity of ways of classifying and enacting whatever it is that's eating at our souls. World War I ends and young men stop fuguing; no one has come down with an attack of St. Vitus' Dance for some centuries now. These days PTSD is in fashion, the proximate causes of which range from surviving heavy combat in Iraq to having to read Ovid's Metamorphoses in a humanities survey course.

I'm not saying we aren't all feeling something, that we don't all have a current running through us that at one minute charges us up with the life force only to send us convulsing to the ground with its cruel and insupportable shocks the next. I'm saying that how we describe this current has much more to do with the way the people around us are chattering than with the way our own private neurons are firing. 

Except when it comes to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This, I maintain, is a real illness, like diabetes. I know because I suffered from it for a few years in my early twenties, and the experience of it remains one of the most basic autobiographical facts in my repertoire, the talking-point I pull out most readily when it comes to the difficult matter of who I am and what my whole thing is.

When I was an undergraduate I was so obsessed with getting perfect grades that I developed a web of elaborate rituals designed to absorb the letter 'A', and to cast out the letter 'B' (and to a lesser extent 'C', 'D', and 'F', which seemed less threatening because they were so far from any real possible outcome of my academic work). So I would swallow whenever I read an 'A' on a page, and I would make a sort of retching noise whenever I came across a 'B'. When I wanted to stop reading a book, I had to stop at the first line on the top right hand page that had, as its final grade-relevant letter, an 'A'. I had to quickly close the book at that point, to ensure that I did not see any lower grade-letters after finishing the 'safe' line.

I would similarly swallow and reject letters on street signs as I was driving down the road; if I accidentally passed a sign on the highway on which the last letter I saw was a 'B' rather than an 'A', I would be required to get off at the next off-ramp, go back two on-ramps in the reverse direction, and pass the problematic sign again in order to get a glimpse of an 'A'. The announcement of upcoming avenues was always a breeze, while boulevards were tricky, and their abbreviation as 'blvd.' enough to trigger a full-blown crisis. 

When I spoke, too, and had to use the bad letters, I had a whole mantra, a sort of prayer, that I would mumble under my breath after nearly every sentence, which contained only 'A's and helped to counteract the negative charge of the other letters. (If you must know, the precise sentence was: That's not great, lovely man. I have no idea what it meant, or how I landed on it. Its interest to me was entirely phonetic, containing as it did just the right combination of linguo-dentals, nasals, plosives, and glorious open-throated 'A's, to lift the miasma.)

I also could not handle odd numbers. There was a sort of innate metaphysics to this: I wanted everything, everywhere in the cosmos, to be paired off with another thing. Sometimes, when faced with a lone object, such as a piece of chalk, I would break it in two, so that the two could be friends, or perhaps lovers. If I walked past a bush, and brushed the side of it once, I would have to return to brush it again, so that the first brushing could have its eternal partner in the second brushing. 

I am not exaggerating when I say that these rituals consumed my whole life. I spent these years without friends. Who could have friends under such circumstances? My chalk and my brushings all had friends, thanks to my solicitude, but I was deeply alone.

I do not mean to boast when I say that this disorder, however apparently rooted in dumb superstition, afflicts the intelligent at far greater rates than the dim. This has long been my prejudice, anyway, but it was powerfully confirmed in my recent reading of Matt Bieber's In the Loop: Essays on OCD. These days, the only lingering symptom of my own OCD is that I am unable to say 'no' whenever I'm asked to write something. I'll write the very worst letters with abandon, too. I'll write strings of F's if I feel like it, and swallow them up. I'm cured. Or, rather, I'm no longer showing symptoms of obsessive compulsiveness, but only symptoms of severe graphomania, which is probably an evolved stage of the same old illness. Anyhow, on occasions like the present one I'm grateful for this relatively mild form of enslavement. 

People with OCD are smart, as I've said, but for the most part they keep silent about it, because it's embarrassing as hell: the gaping abyss between our conscious beliefs (enlightened, scientific) and the things we find our bodies doing, between our goal-directed and hyper-efficient management of our time and the gross inconvenience of the rituals; the unshareable privacy of it all; the ridiculous side-effects of the tricyclics. 

So we ordinarily just keep quiet, and direct our intelligence elsewhere. But this is not what Bieber has done, and I for one am extremely grateful to him for this. His is a revealing, honest, humorous, and moving account of what it is like, what it is really like, to be an obsessive compulsive. 

I'm not going to join some support group or in any way seek to reify this dumb quirk any more than I already have here --and I was joking about the diabetes comparison; I don't have a fucking clue what the ontological status of OCD is, I only know that the medication didn't help nearly as much as just getting older and growing out of it did--, but the sense of solidarity that Bieber's essays instills in me is really something quite remarkable, and reminds me again, as the best writing about bad things can do, that what's bad is human too, and whatever is human is not so bad. 

Cross-posted with 3 Quarks Daily.

Post-Scripta:

I think I graduated with a 4.13 grade-point average. I got 102% in my advanced logic course, and a letter of recommendation from its instructor saying that this was the highest grade of any student ever to take that course with him. This is how I went from being a high-school dropout in 1990 to getting into a fairly selective graduate program a few years later. Whatever I have managed to accomplish, I owe to this illness, and I think this is why it occupies such a large space in my attempts at self-narration. 

I still can't stand the letter 'D', and sometimes find myself muttering countervalent words in order to remove its taint from my mouth. Honestly, what a horrible letter. 

Why Rachel Dolezal Still Matters After Charleston

In the first days following the news of Rachel Dolezal’s ruse, there appeared to be some real hope emerging that, at long last, the deadlock of identitarian politics might finally be over. Compelling voices spoke up to acknowledge the simple truth, that identitarianism is essentialism, no matter how much its defenders will ornament their essentialism with the acknowledgment that race is, in the end, a social construction. No one said it more compellingly than Adolph Reed, Jr., who seemed almost poised to become the progressive voice of the new political moment: one that pays attention to serious things. 

But then, yesterday, yet another racist attack by a homegrown terrorist took place, and even before the crime scene had been cleaned up we Americans were being scolded for having considered the possibility, for a moment, that racial categorisation (and the essentialism that flows from the practice) is something we might hope to move beyond. Right away, people were being referred to, in the identitarian manner, as ‘bodies’ instead of as people. And the fact of ‘being a black body’ was reinscribed back into the natural order of things. As Jelani Cobb wrote in The New Yorker, closing off the Dolezal affair, "The existential question of who is black has been answered in the most concussive way possible: the nine men and women slain as they prayed last night at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, were black."

But the existential question needs to be asked again and again, and the belief that there is a simple answer to it is part of the reason America cannot overcome its murderous pathology, cannot really end the Civil War. Rachel Dolezal grew up in a society that told her, constantly: "You're white, you're white, you're white," and she seems to have thought to herself, "Really, now, can it be so simple as that?" Dylann Roof heard the same refrain, and said, "Why yes I am!" It worked its way into his brain like a worm. I’ll take Dolezal's response to the myth of whiteness over Roof's any day, as we all should, and I refuse to feel bad about the supposed frivolity of the possibilities Dolezal's life seemed, for a moment, to open up. Since when is there a moral duty to remain faithful to the accidents of your birth, and to accurately report your vital-statistical information to the whole world? I'm with Dolezal: I don't give two shits what my ancestors say about who I ‘really’ am (unless it happens to agree with me, which in my case it mostly does). I'm not interested in whether there's a pathology behind it in her case. We all have the right to reinvent ourselves. That's freedom, and it should be spread more broadly still, not condemned and pathologized and restricted. 

I recently clicked on a link that brought me to the blog of a young Canadian identitarian. On her ‘about’ page she noted that she lived on unceded First Nations territory and was thus a settler colonialist; that she was white but of a low-income background; and that she had some ancestry from Southern and Eastern Europe that in the recent past would have marked her out in North American society as a target of discrimination. Now where have I seen this before? I thought. Who else spells out their ancestry in their very first presentation of self? Oh I remember: it was in the personal ads on the Stormfront website! (I have an anthropologist colleague here in Paris who introduced me to this dark world, and who is working, in a broadly Foucauldian vein, on American white supremacists; he thinks all Americans are bonkers when it comes to race, and likes to cite a TV show he saw during his fieldwork that featured Snoop Dogg trying to guess, from a panel of candidates, who was genetically the most African.) The white supremacists state these supposedly self-defining ‘facts’ as points of pride, rather than as a sort of helpful identification key for others to place you on the privilege map, but the implicit theory of selfhood is the same. Dylann Roof shares with the young identitarians, purportedly of the left, the same fantasies about how it is we come to be who we are. I am with Reed and Foucault and Dolezal: a motley group of course, but all at least united in their rejection of essentialism.

Again, don’t take this as an expression of fixation on what was ultimately a frivolous media spectacle. I mean it: until Americans overcome their essentialism about race, their inscription of the Black-white divide into the basic ontology of the world, Charleston is going to keep on happening. It is in the interest of white supremacy that this divide be maintained, and the left, for as long as it continues in its identitarian errancy, is being duped into helping to maintain it. 

Rachel Dolezal and the Spectre of Trans-Species Identity

I try not to weigh in on ephemeral online outrages, but there's one thing I just can't resist the urge to bring up in connection with the recent flare of fascination with Rachel Dolezal's inner life and its outer expression. Not only are there plainly important parallels to questions of gender identity, in spite of all the overly anxious and hasty insistence to the contrary. Race and gender are themselves both just the tip of the iceberg.

There is massive evidence that for most of human history, in most human societies, claims of trans-species identity were taken very seriously, at least as seriously as Caitlyn Jenner's claim as to her true identity. That is, one could be outwardly a human being, for example, and inwardly a jaguar. The possibility of recognition as a trans-species person, moreover, was gradually squelched in 'western' society in a transformation that runs parallel to the suppression of transgender identities (Aristotle's Metaphysics marks an important moment in this transformation, while Ovid's Metamorphoses --which, I gather, young defenders of the fluidity of gender identity would prefer not to read!-- testifies to the endurance of a deeper layer). And in the one case as in the other, what we see is a suppression in the proper sense, involving persecution and violence.

Bear cults survived throughout Europe into the 12th century, and they were based on the belief that their members were ancestrally related to bears and could take on a visibly ursine nature in ritual circumstances. These traditions were broken up by force by the late middle ages, and now, today, western human beings think of themselves as existing across a vast ontological gap from other animal species, and regard non-western claims of trans-species identity as vestiges of comically unscientific, primitive ways of apprehending the world.

Poets still sometimes return to these ways, but when they do we assume they are just being poets. There are sexual subcultures ('Furries', etc.) that model themselves after identitarian movements, and end up, inevitably, looking like gross parodies of these movements. Important to note here, though, is that transgender identity has developed in our society from a seemingly parodical subculture ('trannies', etc.) into a form of souci de soi, of the practice of the art of becoming who one is, than which nothing is more respectable or urgent. What if the reduced and ridiculous expression of animality in current sexual subcultures is, similarly, a consequence of the way in which this dimension of human experience of our own embodiment is demeaned and marginalised?

Another important point of analogy here is the way in which these parallel experiences, of trans-gender and trans-species identity, have been clinicalized and pathologized in the modern period. A condition known as 'clinical lycanthropy' is well documented in the psychiatric literature. To what non-pathological premodern variety of human experience does this diagnosis testify? People used to transform into wolves and experience, in that condition, the truest and most exalted expression of who they really are. Now they turn into wolves, likely in a somnambulant state, and they are hauled off to psychiatrists and loaded up with meds.

The prejudice against experience of human life as continuous with other forms of animal life is the result of a distinct local history: the same local history that for so long insisted on an ethnographically anomalous binary gender distinction between male and female. Throughout this history, of the thriving and eventual suppression of the possibility of both trans-gender and trans-species identity, trans-race identity was not an issue, as race had not yet been invented. And yet, at the present moment, in the hyper-anomalous United States, a claim of trans-race identity seems to be much more audacious than a comparable claim of transgender identity, as it appears to bridge a vast ontological gap that in the case of gender has been broken down over the past few decades. It is the legacy of American anti-Black racism that makes the gap appear unbridgeable in the case of race. It is a result of the legacy of European anthropocentrism and anti-Indigenism that we don't even notice, for now, the massive, looming issue of our (real) shared identity with the rest of the living world, and the possibility of being inwardly a jaguar or a bear that this opens up. 

Three Translations from Old High German

Wes er mit mir pflaege 
niemer niemen
bevinde daz, wan er und ich, 
und ein kleinez vogellîn: 
tandaredei, 
daz mac wol getriuwe sîn.

What he did to me 
May no one ever 
Know but he and I 
And a little bird: 
Tandaredei 
(Who can keep a secret).

*

Mich dunket niht sô guotes noch sô lobesam 
sô diu liehte rôse und diu minne mîns man. 
diu kleinen vogellîn 
diu singent in dem walde: dêst menegem herzen liep. 
mir enkome mîn holder geselle, ine hân der sumerwunne niet.

I think nothing so good or praiseworthy
As the bright rose, and my dear one's love.
The little bird
That sings in the forest sets many a heart a-flutter
But if my sweetheart cometh not, no summer sun can melt my butter.

*

Dû bist mîn, 
ich bin dîn, 
des solt dû gewis sin. 
dû bist beslozzen 
in mînem herzen, 
verlorn ist daz sluzzelîn: 
dû muost ouch immér darinne sîn.

You are mine,
I am thine,
Of this much please be certain.
You're under arrest.
Your cell? My breast. 
The key? Don't know.
Really, now. You mustn't go.