MDDM Folly, Rabbit in the Moon & American race relations in the news

[Doug Millison]

I point you to M&D, where Pynchon treats the issue you raise, in some
depth.  Here's a starting point:


"Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,--Tops and Hoops, forever
a-spin.... Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating.  History
is not Chronology, for that is left to Lawyers,-- nor is it  Remembrance,
for Remembrance belongs to the People.  History can as little pretend to
the Veracity of the one as claim the Power of the other,-- her
Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc,spy,
andTaproom Wit,-- that there may ever continue more than one life-line back
into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forbears in forever,-- not a
Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,-- rather, a
great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong,
vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common."
(M&D, 349)


At 3:54 PM -0400 7/12/02, MalignD at aol.com wrote:
>Perhaps you can explain to me how "a deeper truth, a bigger more
>comprehensive kind of 'history'" can be mined from the patently preposterous
>and grossly ahistorical.

...

The New York Review of Books
June 15, 1989

Review

Who Are These Coming to the Sacrifice?

By Jasper Griffin

Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume 1:
The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985
by Martin Bernal
Rutgers University Press, 575 pp., $15.00 (paper)

[...]
The book makes two central assertions. The first is that the ancient Greeks
themselves said that their country had received settlers from Egypt in the
distant past, and that their mathematics, philosophy, and religion were in
vital measure derived from Egypt and to a lesser degree from Phoenicia.
That is the "Ancient Model," which is in fact true. The second assertion is
that this model, long accepted, has in the last two centuries been denied
and replaced by an "Aryan Model," which asserts that the Greeks, an
Indo-European people of invaders from the north, may or may not have
learned various things from the East but learned nothing of importance from
Egypt. This has happened, Bernal argues, because the racist thought of
Europe and North America could not accept that the Greeks could have been
conquered or instructed by Africans. Some scholars denied the Eastern
influence, too, out of anti-Semitism; others found a way of accepting it
which insisted that the important Easterners were not Semites. For these
scholars either Sumerians or Iranians are the favored peoples, so far as
influence on Greece is concerned.

[...]

It is a spectacle both comical and depressing to see the unself-conscious
way in which historians, both inside and outside universities, reflect the
prejudices of their times in their subject matter. Bernal has some
excellent discussions here, for instance on the historian Barthold Georg
Niebuhr and on Matthew Arnold. About Arnold he writes:

Where Dr. [Thomas] Arnold's love of Greece meshed with his Protestantism,
Teutonism and anti-Semitism, his son's Hellenism was explicitly linked to
the vision of the Indo-European or Aryan race in a perpetual struggle with
the Semitic one, or to the conflict between "cultivated" and bourgeois
values. And in this, of course, he was following a well-beaten path. In
theory-like Michelet, Renan and others-he accepted, as Bunsen put it, that
"If the Hebrew Semites are the priests of humanity, the Helleno-Roman
Aryans are, and ever will be, its heroes." All, however, clearly felt that
in granting the Semites religion they were granting them too much.

[...]


 The negative parts of Bernal's book show how often scholars have confused
facts and value judgments; the positive part exemplifies the same relation
in a different way. With so much at stake, in self-definition and racial
pride, it is likely that the struggle over the identities and the relations
among Greeks, Egyptians, Semites, and black Africans will be a long one.