A plate from Buffon's Histoire naturelle: sometimes science smells bad.
I've just had an old Facebook meme brought to mind this week. It was called, more or less, 25 Things About Me, and perhaps you remember it, too. Users were invited to author a note that listed twenty-five lesser-known facts about themselves; and these ranged from the very light and trivial to the astonishingly intimate, each based of course on the disposition of its confessor. Once posted, one tagged to the note twenty-five other friends deemed worthy of sharing, and in so doing obliged them to generate in turn lists of their own. And so it went as the meme spread throughout the site's usership. Actually, it was pretty good as far as Facebook things go - definitely more interesting than playing Farmville - and it came at a time when I think users were less leery than today and definitely more interested in exploring the potential of online social networking platforms. It was even referenced by Jimmy Fallon in the "Weekend Update" segment on Saturday Night Live.
I mention the 25 Things today in part because I participated, too; and really, since I am considered wordy, I was pretty happy to do so. An observation (or maybe a warning), though: it garnered a far more varied range of responses than originally speculated - but that's another story altogether. It's mentioned today mostly to resurrect a particular entry on the list:
Well, so I felt in January of 2009, and I still do today. I'm pretty sure that half of what's rolling around in your head and mine is pointless, that only time will sort it out, and that frankly by that time we'll probably be dead.19. I find that if one looks at the history of human culture, of human thought and belief and social attitudes and mores, the vast and contradictory and now often disproved mass of it all tends most often in my eyes to point to an enduring arbitrariness as a quality of the human condition. I believe that at least half of what we believe today is false or a construct of convenience or at best a charming naiveté, but I could not tell you which half.
I'm guessing one could call this a kind of epistemological skepticism. It's the product of education and my experience of the everyday, too. When I started college, I knew I wanted a liberal arts sort of underpinning to my education and ended up with a B.A. in Religious Studies, with a minor in English. This was after a lot of major-dabbling, and here I think my family would gleefully interject that one might read major as either a noun or an adjective, if not both. Originally the program culminated in a degree in Philosophy, with a concentration in Religious Studies; and when a separate and distinct Religious Studies major emerged, I jumped ship. But whatever the title, what the substance of either really breaks down to is a bunch of different people entertaining a bunch of different and often wildly contradictory ideas - of both truth and Truth - over the great expanse of human history. And so at some point one is compelled to ask: Well, so much certainty in the thinkers and believers, but how can it all be true?
The answer of course is that it can't; that a lot of it is actually bullshit. Or blindness. Or wishful thinking. Yet people lived and died making of these sorts of things the compasses of their lives, pretty much none the wiser we can see today. And speaking of today, I don't know that a look at our world exactly encourages optimism that humanity has improved its interior lot: any cursory glance through the average Facebook news feed will illustrate that. To be clear, though, I definitely do not mean to say that we should abandon the endeavor of human thought as futile. Nor am I really positioning myself here a conscious proponent of agnosticism. Rather, I do favor a healthy sort of self-skepticism: the self-consciousness to know that what you hold to be true, you may do so not for its content and correspondence to reality, but often for what the holding does for you. And finally I am saying this: enjoy the history of human thought, because it is fucking hilarious.
So what actually prompted this remembrance of Facebook past is a bit of hilarity found in my latest read, another of the terrific books I picked up along my tour through Virginia last fall. The book is titled Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America, and it's written by Lee Alan Dugatkin, a professor of biology at the University of Louisville. I won't
attempt to abstract the entirety of its contents, but the better part of the book examines
the origins and effects of one of the less-enlightened ideas coming out of the so-called Enlightenment: the Theory of American Degeneracy. And (news to me in 2012 and maybe you, too) basically this was a very widely embraced belief of the 18th and 19th century that every living thing - man included - either born of or once integrated into the landscape of the Americas basically went to shit.
Say whaaat?
The idea was birthed from the pen of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, (1707-1788) - a preeminent natural scientist, mathematician, and later director of the Royal Gardens in France. So sweeping was Buffon's influence that he's often credited as "the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century." His popularity is due in large part to his persuasive and eloquent writing style, which prompted the widespread readership of his 36 tome Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, as it appeared in successive volumes from
1749 to 1788. And not only among his scientific peers but also the literate lay-public,
especially participants in the idea-fueled salon culture of 18th century France.
Thomas Jefferson to the rescue...
Dugatkin spells out Buffon's stance pretty well in the preface of his book:
In his massive encyclopedia of natural history, Histoire Naturelle, Buffon laid out what came to be called the theory of degeneracy. He argues that, as a result of living in a cold and wet climate, all species found in America were weak and feeble. What's more, any species imported into America for economic reasons would soon succumb to its new environment and produce lines of puny, feeble offspring. America, Buffon told his readers, is a land of swamps, where life putrefies and rots. And all of this from the pen of the preeminent natural historian of his century.
There was no escaping the pernicious effects of the American environment - not even for Native Americans. They too were degenerate. For Buffon, Indians were stupid, lazy savages. In a particularly emasculating swipe, he suggested that the genitalia of Indian males were small and withered - degenerate - for the very same reason that the people were stupid and lazy.
The environment and natural history had never before been used to make such sweeping claims, essentially damning and entire continent in the name of science. Buffon's American degeneracy hypothesis was quickly adopted and expanded by men such as the Abbé Raynal and the Abbé de Pauw, who believed that Buffon's theory did not go far enough. They went on to claim that the theory of degeneracy applied equally well to transplanted Europeans and their descendants in America. These ideas became mainstream enough that Raynal felt comfortable sponsoring a contest in France on whether the discovery of America had been beneficial of harmful to the human race.
Wow. Can you imagine such crap being proposed - as scientific truth no less - about these big, beautiful Americas of ours? This level of ridiculousness, it's a challenge to fully wrap one's head around it. Yet that this was a commonly held and enduring prejudice is equally dumbfounding: these ideas were readily picked up by intellectual leaders like Voltaire, Kant, and Hegel. Even Charles Darwin came to the Americas with degeneracy on his mind - in 1831, forty-three years after Buffon's death.Books on American degeneracy were popular, reproduced in multiple editions, and translated from French into a score of languages including German, Dutch, and English; they were the talk of the salons of Europe and the manor houses of America. And it wasn't just the intelligentsia of the age who were paying attention - this topic was discussed in newspapers, journals, poems, and schoolbooks.
Well, I doubt anyone would question the eternal spring of Eurocentrism. But it's not often one has cause to envision the American "Founding Fathers" on the short end of the social stick, themselves obliged to buck against a strange sort of pseudo-scientific, multi-tentacled racism. Against taxation and the lack of representation, yes; but a real second-class human gradation on grounds other than the economics and geographic far-flungedness, no.
Thomas Jefferson and fellow 18th & early 19th century leaders knew from experience the idea of degeneration to be complete garbage, and they were also acutely aware of the damaging effect such a belief would have on the future progress of the fledgling America. Jefferson, whose passion and pleasure was natural science, made it is his mission to combat the sentiment and particularly to have the influential Count Buffon recant. His strategy was to present the Count with proof contradictory to his claims of degeneracy and diminution, in part with a taxidermied specimen of the towering American moose - as Dugatkin recounts in his aptly-named Jefferson and the Giant Moose. It was his work in collecting data to rebuff the Count that Notes on the State of Virginia - Jefferson's only published true book - was compiled and penned, an almost accidental bi-product of the endeavor.
Apparently the Comte de Buffon was of a school of natural scientists who generally did not often venture out into nature. Instead they formulated theory based on both observations made from specimens in the great cabinets being amassed at the time, as well as taking data from the flow of often fanciful published reports of travelers and explorers. And it should be noted that the authors of these accounts were, in the interest of boosting readership, seldom above the occasional outrageous claim. Buffon actually did have access to some live animals in the royal collection, and apparently he also experimented in making observations of animals in captivity - as the following passage amusingly illustrates:
Now that's what I call science. I mean, really, need one be so heavy-handed with the natural bit?Buffon was also able to gather data directly on some species, albeit in very unnatural settings. One such setting was his family estate, where he cordoned off one area and attempted to create a "semi-wild" environment that he stocked with foxes, hedgehogs, cats, chickens, dogs, badgers, and a monkey named Joko. Though Buffon was able to gather some data at Montbard, most of the time his collection of animals went about chasing each other, burning themselves near fires, and begging their keepers for food. Buffon gathered a bit more reliable data at the Royal Menagerie, where he verified what he had heard about zebras and elephants by observing them person.
From Buffon's volumn on Ornithology. I don't know what the hell is going on here, but it's starting to look like a Walton Ford painting...
The human detail of Buffon's American degeneracy theory reflects a larger overarching racial interest. I suppose one might give him credit for subscribing to monogenism (according to Wikipedia, "the concept that all races have a single origin"), which really might have seemed like a progressive idea at the time. The fact that it has its own definitive name is, I think, evidence that it has not always been regarded as a given. But, and here Eurocentrism springs again eternal, Buffon and colleagues believed Adam & Eve - that is to say, the mint, in-the-box collector's edition of man - were Caucasian, and "that other races came about by degeneration from environmental factors, such as the sun and poor dieting." Buffon's ideas of environment-based influence in an organism's outward physical expression of course predate Darwin's theories on evolution and natural selection - and they also offer a sort of naiveté that is actually rather amusing to read. Writes Dugatkin:
The second pattern Buffon discerned centered on climate and skin color. Because humans were all part of a single race, Buffon believed that skin color was, in part, a direct result of climate. Africans, for example, were dark-skinned, but they would become light skinned if they were moved to northern climates for a few hundred years. Buffon went so far as proposing a direct test of this hypothesis: "To put the change of colour in the human species to the test of experiment, some Negroes should be transported from Senegal to Denmark, where the inhabitants have generally white skins, golden locks, and blue eyes, and where the difference of blood and opposition of colour are greatest." Then, in order to remove the effects of racial mixing on skin color, Buffon suggested that "these Negroes must be confined to their own females, and all crossing of the breed scrupulously prevented. This is the only method of discovering the time necessary to change a Negro into a White, or a White into a Black, by the mere opposition of climate." From there it would become the anthropologist of the future's job to see what sorts of changes would take place in these African Danes...
Well, I have to say I would also be interested in the progress of those Danish Africans unwittingly transplanted to an isolated existence in Senegal: "Hello, are you black yet?... No, not yet? OK, will check back in another hundred years..."
So why then did a nonsensical idea like the theory of degeneracy gain such traction in Europe? Apparently, part of it was anxiety over emigration and the economic potential of the New World. Monarchs, aristocrats, and the established order were concerned over the fact that people were increasingly less bound to the status quo. They could now buy a tract of land and simply leave - both Europe and eventually Monarchical governance, too. Abbé de Pauw, author of Philosophical Researches on the Americans and by far the most cunty of the pro-degenerists, is credited with writing to incur the favor of his patron, Frederick the Great, who had in fact instituted an agency in Hamburg "whose sole function was to prevent emigration to the New World, and instead to attract potential newcomers to Prussia."
Well, it's interesting to me that Buffon's theory - which was in large part constructed from observations of natural curiosities of the cabinet - is today itself the curiosity. And as anti-American as it was, in an interesting twist the very theory of American degeneracy and subsequent battle to disprove it is, according to Dugatkin, what gave rise to our national self-image of "America as a beautiful, vast, resource-rich region, and its inhabitants as healthy, hardworking people in tune with nature." And so that's an idea that - even if it might fall into that 50%-chanced realm of the bullshit we cling to - is certainly worth hanging on to all the same.
- a.t.s
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