pwa wrote: ↑19 Feb 2024, 7:35am
Last night my wife returned home from visiting her mother, armed with an antique book she had acquired. It purports to be a book of facts about the world, but through the prism of the British Empire. I can find no date on it, but at the moment I'm thinking it must have been written about 1920. And many of the "facts" within it amount to "old wives tales" and theories based on bigotry. I was reading it after consuming a glass of wine, so it made me laugh. But it could equally well be seen as sad and appalling.
The "facts" about other (than white) races are stark and without any restraint. The white Northern European race is the cleverest, probably helped by a temperate climate that has made us busy and industrious. The darker races (subdivided and talked about in some detail) are less intellectual and benefit from being governed by the white race. Maories are the cleverest of the darker people. Dutch people in Holland are nicer than Dutch people in southern Africa because the African climate makes them irritable. And so on. All bonkers, and unacceptable to modern thinking. And generally just plain wrong.
And this brought home to me that utter rubbish has been disseminated as fact throughout history. It has shaped thinking and helped to make the societies we have lived in. What has changed is the way in which utter rubbish is passed around, discussed and reinforced. The big change is the Web.
So true, such "facts" are always very carefully protected and controlled when Government wishes them to be normalised in people's minds. When very large sums of money are involved, use of "facts" can create perceptions in many/most which are a very long way from The Truth.
In his 1911 essay "The Mind of Primitive Man", Franz Boas contended intellectual ability was not determined by race, against the prevailing slants offered by various Western Governments at the time.
Despite the clear evidence presented, he was attacked for his work with others often citing studies that supported their views, nitpicking their way through his work and dismissing his findings as ideologically driven or lacking empirical rigour. His critiques of racial theories were seen as radical at the time and led to tensions with more mainstream anthropologists and biologists who stuck to the accepted racial classifications.