








 genial of all Enlightenment thinkers. How peculiar that the man most committed to human unity, and to inconsequential moral and intellectual differences among groups, should have changed the mental geometry of human order to a scheme that has served racism ever since. Yet on second thought, this situation is really not so odd for most scientists have been quite unaware of the mental machinery, and particularly of the visual or geometric implications, lying behind all their theorizing.
An old tradition in science proclaims that changes in theory must be driven by observation. Since most scientists believe this simplistic formula, they assume that their own shifts in interpretation record only their better understanding of newly discovered facts. Scientists therefore tend to be unaware of their own mental impositions upon the world s messy and ambiguous factuality. Such mental impositions arise from a variety of sources, including psychological predisposition and social context. Blumenbach lived in an age when ideas of progress, and the cultural superiority of European ways, dominated political and social life. Implicit, loosely formulated, or even unconscious notions of racial ranking fit well with such a worldview indeed, almost any other organizational scheme would have seemed anomalous. I doubt that Blumenbach was actively encouraging racism by redrawing the mental diagram of human groups. He was only, and largely passively, recording the social view of his time. But ideas have consequences, whatever the motives or intentions of their promoters.
Blumenbach certainly thought that his switch from the Lin-naean four-race system to his own five-race scheme arose only from his improved understanding of nature s factuality. He said as much when he announced his change in the second (1781) edition of his treatise:  Formerly in the first edition of this work, divided all mankind into four varieties; but after I had more actively investigated the different nations of Eastern Asia and America, and, so to speak, looked at them more closely, I was compelled to give up that division, and to place in its stead the milowing five varieties, as more consonant to nature. And in me preface to the third edition, of 1795, Blumenbach states
49. Geometer of Race
that he gave up the Linnaean scheme in order to arrange  the varieties of man according to the truth of nature.  When scientists adopt the myth that theories arise solely from observation, and do not grasp the personal and social influences acting on their thinking, they not only miss the causes of their changed opinions; they may even foil to comprehend the deep mental shift encoded by the new theory.
Blumenbach strongly upheld die unity of die human species against an alternative view, then growing in popularity (and surely more conducive to conventional forms of racism), that each major race had been separately created. He ended his thin! edition by writing:  No doubt can any longer remain but that we are with great probability right in referring all... varieties of man... to one and the same species. 
as his major argument for unity, Blumenbach noted that all supposed racial characteristics grade continuously from one people to another and cannot define any separate and bounded group.  For although there seems to be so great a difference between widely separate nations, that you might easily take the inhabitants of the Cape of Good Hope, the Greenlanders, and the Circassians for so many different species of man, yet when the matter is thoroughly considered, you see that all do so run into one another, and that one variety of mankind does so sensibly pass into the other, that you cannot mark out die limits between them.  He particularly refuted the common racist claim that black Africans bore unique features of their inferiority:  There is no single character so peculiar and so universal among the Ethiopians, but what it may be observed on the one hand everywhere in other varieties of men. 
Blumenbach, writing 80 years before Darwin, believed that Homo sapiens had been created in a single region and had then spread over die globe. Our racial diversity, he dien argued, arose as a result of this spread to other climates and topographies, and to our adoption of different modes of life in these various regions. Following the terminology of his time, Blumenbach referred to these changes as  degenerations  not intending the modem sense of deterioration, but the literal meaning of departure from an initial form of humanity at the creation {de means  from,  and genus refers to our original stock).
Most of these degenerations, Blumenbach argued, arose di-recdy from differences in climate and habitat ranging from such broad patterns as the correlation of dark skin with tropical environments, to more particular (and fanciful) attributions, including a speculation that the narrow eye slits of some Australian aborigines may have arisen in response to  constant clouds of gnats... contracting the natural face of the inhabitants.  Other changes, he maintained, arose as a consequence of customs adopted in different regions. For example, nations that compressed the heads of babies by swaddling boards or papoose carriers ended up with relatively long skulls. Blumenbach held that  almost all the diversity of the form of the head in different nations is to be attributed to the mode of life and to art
Blumenbach believed that such changes, promoted over many generations, could eventually become hereditary. ^Vith
Blumenbach upheld the unity of the human species against an alternative view, then growing in popularity (and surely more conducive to conventional racism), that each race had been separately created.
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9. UNDERSTANDING CULTURAL PLURALISM
the progress of time,  Blumenbach wrote,  art may degenerate into a second nature.  But he also argued that most racial variations, as superficial impositions of climate and custom, could be easily altered or reversed by moving to a new region or by adopting new behavior. White Europeans living for generations in the tropics could become dark-skinned, while Africans transported as slaves to high latitudes could eventually become white:  Color, whatever be its cause, be it bile, or the influence of the sun, the air, or the climate, is, at all events, an adventitious and easily changeable thing, and can never constitute a diversity of species,  he wrote.
Convinced of the superficiality of racial variation, Blumenbach defended the mental and moral unity of all peoples. He held particularly strong opinions on the equal status of black Africans and white Europeans. He may have been patronizing in praising  the good disposition and faculties of these our black brethren,  but better paternalism than malign contempt. He campaigned for the abolition of slavery and asserted the moral superiority of slaves to their captors, speaking of a  natural tenderness of heart, which has never been benumbed or extirpated on board the transport vessels or on the West India sugar plantations by the brutality of their white executioners. 
Blumenbach established a special library in his house devoted exclusively to black authors, singling out for special praise the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, a Boston slave whose writings have only recently been rediscovered:  I possess English, Dutch, and Latin poems by several [black authors], amongst which however above all, those of Phillis Wheatley of Boston, who is justly famous for them, deserves mention here.  Finally, Blumenbach noted that many Caucasian nations could not boast so fine a set of authors and scholars as black Africa has produced under the most depressing circumstances of prejudice and slavery:  It would not be difficult to mention entire well-known provinces of Europe, from out of which you would not easily expect to obtain off-hand such good authors, poets, philosophers, and correspondents of the Paris Academy. 
Nonetheless, when Blumenbach presented his mental picture of human diversity in his fateful shift away from Linnaean geography, he singled out a particular group as closest to the created ideal and then characterized all other groups by relative degrees of departure from this archetypal standard. He ended up with a system that placed a single race at the pinnacle, and then envisioned two symmetrical Unes of departure away from this ideal toward greater and greater degeneration.
fore could not use these conventional criteria of raci to establish degrees of relative departure from the 1 ideal. Instead, and however subjective (and even risibl the criterion today, Blumenbach chose physical be; guide to ranking. He simply affirmed that Europeans beautiful, with Caucasians as the most comely of al plains why Blumenbach, in the first quote cited in t linked the maximal beauty of the Caucasians to the p man origin. Blumenbach viewed all subsequent varia partures from the originally created ideal- therefon beautiful people must live closest to our primal hon Blumenbach s descriptions are pervaded by his subj< of relative beauty, presented as though he were discus: jective and quantifiable property, not subject to do agreement. He describes a Georgian female skull (fou Mount Caucasus) as  really the most beautiful form of ... always of itself attracts every eye, however little < He then defends his European standard on aestheti  In the first place, that stock displays... the most bea of the skull, from which, as from a mean and primev others diverge by most easy gradations.... Besides, ii color, which we may fairly assume to have been the pri of mankind, since ... it is very easy for that to dege brown, but very much more difficult for dark to becc Blumenbach then presented all human variety o of successive departure from this Caucasian ideal, er two most degenerate (least attractive, not least n worthy or mentally obtuse) forms of humanity As side, and Africans on the other. But Blumenbach a to designate intermediary forms between ideal an generate, especially since even gradation formed I argument for human unity. In his original four-race could identify native Americans as intermediary bi ropeans and Asians, but who would serve as the t form between Europeans and Africans?
The four-race system contained no appropriate inventing a fifth racial category as an intermediary b ropeans and Africans would complete the new sytru ometry. Blumenbach therefore added the Malay r; minor, factual refinement but as a device for refon entire theory of human diversity. With this one str< duced the geometric transformation from Linnaeu: geographic model to the conventional hierarchy worth that has fostered so much social grief ever s
WE may now return to the riddle of the name Caucasian, and to the significance of Blumenbach s addition of a fifth race, the Malay variety. Blumenbach chose to regard his own European variety as closest to the created ideal and then searched for the subset of Europeans with greatest perfection the highest of the high, so to speak. As we have seen, he identified the people around Mount Caucasus as the closest embodiments of the original ideal and proceeded to name the entire European race for its finest representatives.
But Blumenbach now faced a dilemma. He had already affirmed the mental and moral equality of all peoples. He there-
I have allotted the first place to the Caucasian . makes me esteem it the primeval one. This diverge directions into two, most remote and very different f other; on the one side, namely, into the Ethiopiai the other into the Mongolian. The remaining tw the intermediate positions between that primeval these two extreme varieties; that is, the American the Caucasian and Mongolian; the Malay between Caucasian and Ethiopian. [From Blumenbach s thirc
With one stroke, Blumenbach produced the geometric transformation from Linnaeu. unranked geographic model to the conventional hierarchy o
