The new Victorians.

• Author: Reed, Adolph, Jr.
• Position: Persistence of racist-based theories of public and foreign policy - Class Notes - Column

As Professor Kathryn Oberdeck of the University of Illinois likes to say, the Twentieth Century has not been so appealing that we should have to live through it all over again. Her insight seems truer all the time.

In the last week and a half I read three tracts that uncannily echo Victorian-era racial ideology--all by people with reputable mainstream affiliations. With a word change here and there to avoid unfashionably direct references to racial determinism, today's rhetoric about race, culture, and "Western Civilization's" conflicts and responsibilities in the Third World builds on insidious Nineteenth-Century theories.

Samuel Huntington, distinguished professor and director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard (as well as Vietnam war strategist, CIA consort, and house intellectual for the Rockefellers' Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission), in an article from last summer's Foreign Affairs, announced:

"The world will be shaped in large measure by the interaction among seven or eight major civilizations...Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, SlavicOrthodox, Latin American, and possibly []] African. The most important conflicts of the future will occur along the fault lines separating these civilizations from one another [because] differences among civilizations are not only real, they are basic.... The people of different civilizations have different views on the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views on the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy. These differences are the product of centuries. They will not soon disappear. They are more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes.... The paramount axis of world politics will be the relations between `the West and the Rest.'"

Compare this with the peroration by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (also at one time a Harvard professor) in behalf of restricting immigration in 1896. After asserting the affinity of the "English-speaking, Germans, Scandinavians, and French" and the confluence of those and "allied races" as the basic population in North America, Lodge counterpoised them to the rest of the world, which he divided among Southern and Eastern Europeans, "Mongol," "Negro," and "Hindoo."

"The men of each race possess an indestructible stock of ideas, traditions, sentiments, modes of thought, an unconscious inheritance from their ancestors, upon which argument has no effect. What makes a race are their mental and, above all, their moral characteristics, the slow growth and accumulation of toil and conflict," Lodge wrote. "These are the qualities which determine their social efficiency as a people, which make one race rise and another fall."

On the subject of rising and falling, I then happened upon Tribes: How Race, Religion, and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy, published in 1993 by Joel Kotkin, when he was a senior fellow at the Center for the New West and an international fellow at the Pepperdine University School of Business and Management. As an example of Kotkin's atavism (to use a suitably Victorian term), he rhapsodizes about the British and American imperial era:

"But the...