It is hard to know who were the first racists in the history of humankind.
But a primitive racist format plus sexism would have been useful to promote the superiority of tribes over others in the fight for survival. Though racism and sexism are still entrenched in today's societies, they are not necessary a means of human survival but a means to control people, to steal from each others and to affirm some social groups and individuals superiority over others. This leads to patriotism, border protections and wars. A varied religious component of our beliefs strongly influence culturalism which, mixed with bad sciences, can lead to more extreme racism, phrenologic dictums and sexism.

And this still permeates all aspects of our social networks, including sport and secret societies. This will influence rabid governments and all the midgets purporting to represent social groups in parliament. We are all "racists", sexist and sociopaths in various proportions as we defend "our turf" — being aggressed from various quarters of ignorance, including our own. 

We always need to revise our own positions in order not to become entrenched or calcified in our curiosity and acceptance. This is true, especially in our old age, considering that our brain shrinks after the age of 25, naturally losing about 15 per cent of its mass by age 75... Yet we, old foggies, still need to maintain a certain equity in reality, while exploring loopiness in imagination, to limit delusions. And this also goes for you, the young textors with no other reasons for texting than texting is an app.

The section 18C of the act should not be necessary in a civilised group.

The Murdoch press decries its existence with "There is much to commend the view that a provision such as section 18C has no place in a liberal democracy. In her biography of Voltaire blah blah blah...", while others will say the current debate around 18c is a ridiculous furphy, and why free speech has never really been under threat.

But section 18C is unfortunately necessary because of all our ningnongerry towards the weak, towards the different and because of our resentment of those in power who golden-shower us with crap. A perfect Utopian world demands that we'd be super-knowledgeable, accepting of a single grey rainbow colour and possibly not be satirical. It ain't going to happen. So we have to manage our differences and our ignorance by various means including insults from which the weakest of us need protections against, especially unfair mention of their origins. The rich usually walk with a certain amount of sociopathy, disguised as confidence, with which they dismiss criticism by climbing to the top of the pile. This is success and there are specific corporate training pathways that help manage this sociopathy without overtly becoming a bastard. Leaders soon learn the tricks of smooth duplicity, elegant hypocrisy and double-talk, which we, down below, accept to a point. Democracy is not perfect. Idiots have the same right as the elite, but the elite often makes sure idiots know where their bread is buttered from, while dismissing philosophical freedom under false pretences of freedom to be a dork — or as a famous George Brandis said "the right to be bigots". Disinformation is rife.

Ignorance is culturally entrenched as a pathway to bliss. Partial ignorance is cultivated by various media and religious organisms in order to create converts to various ideas, mostly bathed in historical repeat of stupidity and specialising in dodging reality. Reality is hard, complex and shifting. As soon as history is written, it is contested. 

It was not until the middle of the 17th century, that women were allowed to be "actors" in the English theatres. 

"His Majesty being at a Representation of Hamlet and thinking the Entry of the Queen, in that play, a little too tedious, one of the Actors most humbly acquainted the Audience that the QUEEN was not quite shaved..." Thomas Betterton (17th century writer/critic — The History of the English Stage). On that night the Queen in Hamlet was played by Edward Kynaston. 

Soon after, the first women to appear on stage were described by critics as "whores", foul and "undecent"... and "possibly in search of a husband" — as whoring was a "common" tactic used by women to attract a provider to marry, then. 

So society suffers from various incentive to manage copulation and origin of the cash for support of individuals and offsprings. We accept a certain level of disparity, say between the wages of a street cleaner and that of a CEO, via the outrageous fees of a tradesperson, but there are still annoying disparities, especially in regard to women's remuneration. So there are many currents and countercurrents in our acceptance of "others", albeit reluctantly.

Here I was piqued by a mention of the book by Andrew Bolt "Worth fighting for" (Wilkinson Publishing, June 2016) which apparently is on an international mystery tour, courtesy of some Bolt’s fans. Every couple of days the Herald Sun columnist posts a picture of his book in an exotic location, on a train, in a field of tulips, always urging readers to buy a copy for just $29.99 via a link. 

Bolt explains: “My book is on an odyssey, visiting Bath, the skulls of Montpellier..."

I have no idea what's in the book itself. And I do not want to assume that it could be the same neo-racist crap Bolt dishes out daily on his shows and in his humourless opinionated pieces. So what has Bolt's book to do with culturalism? 

I did not have to read the complete list of Bolt's book "odyssey" locations to get a whiff of what could embolden Bolt. 

Bath is about the Roman Empire and CIVILISATION par excellence. Some of Bath as a fine place of Antiquity remind us that there were more refinements in some olden societies than in our washing-on-the-line-barbecue-on-Sunday plebian network. There is a latent superiority in what the Roman did, which for our own jealousy and sad religious beliefs, we trashed with barbarism. 

The "Skulls (Giants) of Montpellier" is a hoax — on the same level as the Story of Scion was in the late 1950s, a fabrication which by various incarnations led to the movie "The Da Vinci Code". All come from that country of great tall tales, the country of Rabelais, namely France. Tall tales of course is not unique to France, considering Germany and the eastern countries have had their fair share of telling literary fibs — and the Poms are good at it as well.

François Rabelais (1483?–1553) was a major French Renaissance writer, humorist, physician, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He was a writer of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, bawdy jokes and songs. His best known works are about the tribulations of Gargantua and Pantagruel, TWO GIANTS — drawn from the folklore in which giants, dragons and ogres "lived", designed to scare people, especially kids, about shitting in the woods. 

 

Many literary critics consider Rabelais as one of the great writers of world literature and among the creators of modern European writing. The word "Rabelaisian" defines someone or something that is marked by gross robust humor, extravagance of caricature, and bold naturalism. Welcome to my world, though I tend to limit the gross insults to those who deserve it. Rabelais was a master of the hoax. 

 

So what is it about giants?

 

The "Giants of Montpellier" were the 19th century equivalent of fait-divers in the French press of stories "published" in the Northern Territory Gazette about a 30-metre croc or a goggle-eyed aliens invasion on a lazy Sunday. And of course some of the scientists of the day played along despite having zero proofs. Not even the "bones" found are particularly human and the skulls do not exist. What had existed before were "oversized" reproductions of the human skull in order to teach anatomy in some medical faculties. You see where I am going...

 

One must also contemplate that contemporary Jules Verne had been science-fictionalising at full bore as well and some of the earliest cinematic efforts were about creating UNREALITY... Georges Méliès was at the forefront of this trickery.

 

Méliès was a prolific innovator in the use of movie special effects, such as substitution splices, multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, weirdo sets and hand-painted colour. His films include A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904), both involving strange, surreal journeys somewhat in the style of Jules Verne, that are considered among the most important early science fiction films. 

One of the problem here is that "The Skulls of Monpellier" hoax was used by racist scientists, such as Count Georges Vacher de Lapouge, to prove a point. That he was a bullshitter?

Born in 1854, Lapouge was a French anthropologist. First a magistrate then librarian, he was a theorist of eugenics and anthroposociology. Atheist, anticlerical and socialist activist, he was one of the founders of the French Workers' Party. Georges Vacher de Lapouge added upon the racist theory of Gobineau in the late nineteenth century. 

Lapouge was a Darwinist. He was convinced and confident of the victory of the Aryan over the Jews. He published in 1899 the text of his lectures under the title: The Aryan, its social role, subtitled "free course of Political Science, taught at the University of Montpellier (1889-1890)", which provided the building blocks of nazi antisemitism.

Classifying and prioritizing human races, he determined several types in Europe:
Homo europeus, grand, blond (Anglo-Saxon or Nordic), Protestant ruler and creator;
Homo alpinus, such as the Auvergne and the Turk, "perfect slave fearing progress";
Homo contractus, or Mediterranean, such as the Neapolitan and Andalusian, was declared an inferior race.

Lapouge being a zoological scientist, proposes to designate a community made up of different racial elements, but sharing the same culture, under the term "ethnic" group, a word he was the first to mention. Lapouge promoted Gobineau's views expressed in "Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races", 1853–1855).  Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau argued there were differences between human races and that the European race was supreme. It is one of the earliest examples of scientific racism.

Expanding upon Boulainvilliers' use of ethnography to defend the Ancien Régime against the claims of the Third Estate (the poor, peasants, plebs, commoners, unemployed), Gobineau aimed for a universal explanatory system —namely, that race is the primary force determining world events. Using scientific disciplines, Gobineau divided the human species into three major groupings, white, yellow and black, claiming to demonstrate that "history springs only from contact with the white races." 

 

Among the white races, he distinguishes the Aryan race as the pinnacle of human development, comprising the basis of all European aristocracies. However, inevitably, the mixing of races led to the "downfall of civilisations".

Gobineau was convinced of the importance of the racial factor in the evolution of civilisations and emphasizes the physiological and psychological inferiority of the mixed races and the risk of extinction of the races, by interbreeding.

Lapouge introduced the term "eugenics" into the French language, in 1886, as translation of the English noun "eugenics" proposed three years earlier by Francis Galton.

Sir Francis Galton, FRS (1822–1911) was an English Victorian statistician, progressive, polymath, sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, and psychometrician. He was knighted in 1909.

 

He created the statistical concept of correlation and regression toward the mean. He was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences and inheritance of intelligence, and introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys for collecting data on human communities, which he needed for genealogical and biographical works and for his anthropometric studies. Here comes the census.

 

He was a pioneer in eugenics, coining the phrase "nature versus nurture". His book "Hereditary Genius" (1869) was the first social scientific attempt to study genius and greatness.

 

As an investigator of the human mind, he founded psychometrics (the science of measuring mental faculties) and differential psychology and the lexical hypothesis of personality. He devised a method for classifying fingerprints that proved useful in forensic science. He also conducted research on the power of prayer, concluding it had none. 

 

As the initiator of scientific meteorology, he devised the first weather map, proposed a theory of anticyclones, and was the first to establish a complete record of short-term climatic phenomena on a European scale. He was Charles Darwin's half-cousin. Not all that bad, the old Galton...

As opposed to the warmongering Darwinians (precursors to the Neocons "using war as an improvement of the human species"), Lapouge considered that, if war was a selection factor "among uncivilized peoples," the weakest succumb first — however, in modern warfare, "the risk of being removed by premature death would be incurred by the most healthy individuals, the fittest ". Anticipating future wars in a world where "nations become huge in a too small universe," he considered the militarism of European nations from the late nineteenth century jeopardising the future of the continent, for the benefit of America and the Far Orient (China).

He was noted for delivering this prophecy at a meeting in 1886, as Chair of Anthropology: "I am convinced that in the next century, we shall kill by the million..."

Lapouge, in his racialism and racism, was neither pro-birth nor neo-growth, nor an enthusiastic supporter of the indefinite improvement of the human species, he believed only in the power of regeneration through voluntary selection of quality progenitors — and denounced the illusions of those who trust education and action in the social environment to "improve" or remodel humankind... As a materialistic scientist, he did not believe in the value of dogma and was ranked rather among the prophets of the fatal final decadence. The Christians are waiting for this one daily.

Georges Vacher de Lapouge "calculations" indicated the Neolithic GIANT of Montpellier was about 3.5 meters tall, and several hundred kilograms in weight (11 feet 6 in. and 1,000 pounds).  "The size of these bones were truly remarkable", Lapouge wrote in La Nature. The skulls are still nowhere to be seen...

So where to here? We need to protect ourselves from racism and sexism. We are making progress, but the tone out there is resistance to change. People like Bolt can trumpet their views which sometimes go beyond the legally acceptable. 18C is here to stay. We need some home improvements. 

One of the most needed improvement is to free our social nurture from the shackles of religious bigotry. It is well known that nearly all humans regarding of race, can perform with a genius-like ability, despite variation of DNA reactivity to various substances (alcohol, drugs, vitamins). Most of our handicap in this development are our social moralistic restrictions, especially those that endeavour to narrow the scope of our natural curiosity, while our character should strengthen our understanding of ethics in diversity and in peace.

PEACE

Gus Leonisky
Your local social nut....

PS: According to some, Rabelais wrote the famous sentence for his will: "I have nothing, I owe a great deal, and the rest I leave to the poor"

 

 

Illustration at top:

Gustave Doré, L'enfance de Gargantua, projet d'illustration pour les oeuvres de Rabelais, aquarelle, plume et encre noire sur traits de crayon sur papier, Musée d'art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg.