In which we confront the terrible “racism” of H. P. Lovecraft.

Table of Contents

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, 1890–1937 (image)

The sweet remembrance of the just

Shall flourish when they sleep in dust. Headstone

Who controls the past controls the future.

Who controls the present controls the past. Eric Arthur Blair

The barren, bloody fields of postmodern “thought” (-policing) are pockmarked with the desecrated graves of Western history’s greatest minds — enemies of The People, dug up and strung up for thoughtcrimes against humanity, the post-Christian sins: reckless intolerance, receiving stolen privilege, grand theft human dignity… the list goes on.

Carlyle is convicted of “conscious and unconscious participations in the cultural evils of nineteenth-century Britain” (Duke Journals). Did he not deny the sacred “assumption that under the skin, people are all the same” (Econlib)? Worse still, “Carlyle supported hierarchy, a world view where the competent made decisions for the incompetent.” Screw you, Carlyle! This is America: where incompetents make all the decisions!

Haul in “troublesome” Chuck Darwin (The Independent): “no doubt about it,” the man believed in “racial inequality” — no, not as proof positive of the vast white conspiracy, but as “a natural condition that will frustrate any cultural efforts to mitigate it.” Obstruction of social justice! Stereotype threats! No wonder racial inequality has frustrated all cultural efforts to mitigate it. Will the defendant own up to his “legacy”?

Those who argue that some peoples are cleverer than others insist that theirs are scientific claims, to be judged by their content rather than their context, according to facts rather than values.

Round here, Mr. Darwin, we call that aiding and abetting an anthropologist.

Crazy old Aristotle, for some crazy reason, “believed that nature ordained not only physical differences between male and female but mental differences as well” (Women’s Studies Encyclopedia). What? Huh? Men and women are different?

The tenacity with which this key sexist concept has been held by historically acclaimed thinkers and writers testifies to the appalling ease with which ignorance can pose as knowledge and with which the self-aggrandizing prejudices of those who wield intellectual and social power can pass as rational judgment.

Only “the scrutiny of feminist scholars” could expose this so-called philosopher’s “great error of judgment” — a result, I’m sure you’ll all agree, “nothing short of momentous.” This “feminist critique,” we are assured (by feminist scholars), “is both informative and liberating.” For example: quoting a bit from Aristotle’s History of Animals (c. 350 BC) —

The female is softer in disposition than the male, is more mischievous, less simple, more impulsive, and more attentive to the nurture of the young. […] Woman is more compassionate than man, more easily moved to tears, at the same time is more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold and to strike.

(which obviously bears no resemblance to reality) — then adding a sarcastic quip: “Fine examples of his observational powers.” Take that, dad! I mean, patriarchy!

No less an authority than the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (branching out into “feminist history”) informs us that Aristotle’s “litany” is not only “false” (no evidence is necessary, and none is provided), but also hurtful to the delicate feelings of “women studying or teaching Aristotle,” being so “dispiriting” and “annoying.” Aww, baby.

“As briefs for racial supremacy go,” Lothrop Stoddard’s Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy “is eerily serene” — “its hatred rationalized” (The Atlantic). But don’t be fooled! According to one Hua Hsu, who definitely read past the title, Stoddard and his fellow “white men of comfort and privilege” were filled with “dread” at the “fraying of the fixed, monolithic identity of whiteness that sewed together the fortunes of the fair-skinned,” as you can clearly see in The Rising Tide of Color (1920):

Whatever may be its ultimate goals, Japanese foreign policy has one minimum objective: Japan as hegemon of a Far East in which white influence shall have been reduced to a vanishing quantity. That is the bald truth of the matter — and no white man has any reason for getting indignant about it. Granted that Japanese aims endanger white vested interests in the Far East. Granted that this involves rivalry and perhaps war. That is no reason for striking a moral attitude and inveighing against Japanese “wickedness,” as many people are to-day doing. These mighty racial tides flow from the most elemental of vital urges: self-expansion and self-preservation. Both outward thrust of expanding life and counter-thrust of threatened life are equally normal phenomena. To condemn the former as “criminal” and the latter as “selfish” is either silly or hypocritical and tends to envenom with unnecessary rancor what objective fairness might keep a candid struggle, inevitable yet alleviated by mutual comprehension and respect. This is no mere plea for “sportsmanship”; it is a very practical matter. There are critical times ahead; times in which intense race-pressures will engender high tensions and perhaps wars. If men will keep open minds and will eschew the temptation to regard those opposing their desires to defend or possess respectively as impious fiends, the struggles will lose half their bitterness, and the wars (if wars there must be) will be shorn of half their ferocity.

Instead we got the patented Roosevelt peace plan: provoke the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor (Tansill, 1952), then bomb the little yellow bastards into oblivion, so he and his good friend Stalin could carve up the world for themselves (Flynn, 1951).

Masses of panicked and terrified Japanese civilians scrambled to escape the inferno, most unsuccessfully. The human carnage was so great that the blood-red mists and stench of burning flesh that wafted up sickened the bomber pilots, forcing them to grab oxygen masks to keep from vomiting. [History.com]

“To meet Soviet needs” (PBS).

Oh, yeah, and George Orwell was “a reactionary, Imperialist racist” (The Exiled).

I’m a twentieth century man,

But I don’t want to die here. The Kinks

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die. The Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred

Which brings us to Howard Phillips Lovecraft — if that is his real name.

Claims to be over two hundred years old. Also claims to be Providence, Rhode Island. Never have I encountered a man with less respect for the sanctity of human life! There he sits, masked and manacled. I assure you it is for our own protection.

Is the prosecution prepared to make its opening statement?

Lovecraft is “widely considered today to have had unacceptable racist views,” writes David Barnett. “And yet, despite his prejudices,” “his work remains insanely popular.”

So why do we continue to fete Lovecraft instead of burying him quietly away?

Why indeed. We find your reading habits suspicious, comrade, so take care.

Technically, “Lovecraft’s racism doesn’t negate his accomplishments,” according to Nicole Cushing (cited by the Atlantic, and Barnett in the Guardian). Mind you, “it would be too easy to point to Lovecraft’s racism” — in other words, his point of view on the observable patterns of biological variation in modern hominids, and how they might explain social and cultural variation in same — “and dismiss him as an undistinguished crackpot who deserved nothing better than publication in the pulps.” But really, you shouldn’t worry: she’s “not saying Lovecraft should be tossed from the canon.”

I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water. I just think it’s time for the horror genre to take a good, long look at the tub and come to terms with the fact that there’s an awful lot of bath water.

To clarify: when Nicole says it’s time we had a “discussion about race in regard to H.P. Lovecraft,” she doesn’t actually mean a discussion about race (what it is, why it matters, and so on). What she has in mind is a denunciation of racists — white people, that is, who feel the wrong feelings and think the wrong thoughts. Go ahead: “discuss.”

Jeff VanderMeer is “moving past Lovecraft”: although “WeirdFictionReview.com loves traditional storytelling as much as edgy, transgressive fiction and nonfiction and art,” it has “no interest in promoting problematic past attitudes or prejudices,” particularly “non-progressive attitudes toward race and other cultures.” Jeff emphasizes that “WeirdFictionReview is devoted to all kinds of nuanced, difficult, experimental, and at times transgressive material.” It’s just that none of them include “racism” like Lovecraft’s, because that would be “straight-up stupid,” “nuance-less” “bullshit.” So write whatever you like! As long as it’s progressive. (Transgression has its limits.)

But Damien Walter isn’t ready to move on. Lovecraft was a “petty minded bigot and racist” who “encoded” his “fears in fiction,” and since, “of course, there are still a lot of unreformed bigots and petty racists out there doing exactly that,” the question we must (apparently) all ask ourselves is: ‘What do we do about Lovecraft?’

Imagine an average non-fandom type person encountering two facts. One; H P Lovecraft is hailed as a founding figure of weird fiction, thousands of fans still adore his work, hundreds of writers have worked in his Cthulhu mythos, dozens of anthologies are published in his name every year, and the World Fantasy Award goes so far as to give his head away as a trophy, all of which adds up to a remarkable kind of ancestor worship. Two; H P Lovecraft was a racist. I don’t think it would be unreasonable of that average non-fandom type person to assume those fans are a bunch of racists as well.

On the other hand, Damien is not at all concerned (and really, why would he be?) about what the average non-fandom type person might deduce from his insight that “young white men often number among the most useless and deficient individuals in society.” And speaking of the first-person plural: “Let’s fight the white maleness of geek culture,” Damien urges us. “We demand a Doctor Who that isn’t a White British Male,” he insists, and it’s just awful that we “continue to laud the television show when we are ignored.”

This, of course, is anti-racism. Because “privilege.” Which is totally a real thing, and not at all made up (Issue 10). So shut up, whitey! Don’t ask stupid questions.

Damien’s solution to the Lovecraft problem is, of course, “to include the discussion of Lovecrafts [sic] racism whenever we talk about his life and writing” — and what a thoughtful discussion that will be. Also, take his face off the World Fantasy Award.

(Let’s dispense with “the conservative values of Golden Age SF” while we’re at it. We should no longer “pander to the bigotry of conservative readers” who, in their “predictably intractable ignorance,” continue to believe that sex is “biological.”)

But does the posthumous punishment fit the retroactive thoughtcrime? “Whoa doggy, the dude is racist,” Betsy Phillips notes with characteristic ThinkProgress gravitas.

And not just in the “oh, he had some unfortunate personal beliefs, but we can overlook them and still enjoy his art” way. […] So what do you do with an author who is hugely influential and, in many ways, rightly so, whose work has some enormous problems?

What indeed is an appropriate sentence? Her answer is positively inspired: take whatever “Lovecraft stuff” is in the public domain — and politically correct it:

Lovecraft’s politics are right at the heart of his stories. You take the heart out, and I’m not sure how Lovecraftian what’s left is. But I’m also not sure that’s all that terrible. We seem to be doing all right with reanimating the heartless corpses of his work and putting them work [sic] to our own ends. That seems fitting.

I really can’t imagine a more elegant punishment. Or a crueler one.

Well, I think we’ve heard enough. Ladies and gentlemen, the facts are in; the witnesses, on record; the defendant’s guilt, clear beyond a hint of a trace of a shadow of a quibble of a doubt. For racist white racism in the first, second and third degrees, the court hereby sentences Howard Phillips Lovecraft — also known as H. von Liebkraft, also known as Henry Paget-Lowe, also known as H. Phylipse van Kasje, also known as L. P. Drawoh, also known as O’Howard McPhillips, son of Lovecraft, also known as Lewis Theobald, Junior, also known as Ludovicus Theobaldus, Secundas, also known as Theobaldus Fantasticus, also known as Theobaldus Anglissimus, also known as Theobaldus Ambulaus, Grand Titan of the KKK, also known as Theobaldus Perkins —

“Wait!”

— also known as Archibald Maynwaring, also known as Lothario Honeycomb, 13th Earl of Stonybroke, also known as Valentine Bolling Fitz-Randolph Byrd of Virginia, also known as Humphry Littlewit, also known as Epicurus Lackbrain, also known as Timon Coriolanus, Esquire, also known as Luis Randolfo Cartero y Teobaldo, also known as Páppos Nekrophilos, also known as Caelius Alhazred Moreton O’Casey —

“Stop!”

— also known as Tomeron the Accurst & Decayed, also known as Melmoth III of the Acropolis of Leng, also known as Luve-Keraph of the Windowless Steeple, also known as Abdul Alhazred of the brotherhood of djinns and afrits, c/o the Caverns of Khaf, also known as Eċh-Pi-El, Priest of Azathoth, Guardian of the Black Flame of Nng & Yeb, c/o the Temple of Azathoth, that which gibbers mindlessly in Darkness at the Centre of Ultimate Chaos, the Pulse-Beat of the Cosmic Fungus enveloping Yaddith in the Ætherless Gulf of Re-entrant Angles beyond the 8th Trans-Imaginational Ring of Finite Continua, from the Infra-Dimensional Abyss outside Time & Space, whence springs upward the Singing Flame of the Unknown City, also known as the Old Man Without a Beard, also known as Grandpa Cthulhu, also known by several other names which, despite the best & bravest efforts of top xenolinguists at Miskatonic University, apparently cannot be translated into any known tongue —

“STOP THE TRIAL!” Enter: a soft little stripy orange kitty.

“nooo not to punish, i like a lovecraf and he like me” (cat)

The kitty points out that we have not actually heard a single word from the defendant (on account of the mask, manacles, and I think someone put masking tape on his mouth too). It’s a fair point, especially coming from such a small cat. “Meow meow.”

I tell you what: bear with me, it might sound crazy, but — why don’t we try to understand what Lovecraft actually believed, and why he actually believed it? What the heck, right, guys? I mean, it’s not like he’s going to convince us. Of racism.

… Right?

“Meow meow.”

(Unless otherwise noted, all selections are from the 1976 Arkham House printing of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters, and identified by volume and page number.)

If our goal is to understand how Lovecraft thinks — about anything, but especially race, culture and civilization — then we have to adopt his cosmic perspective (I.24):

Our human race is only a trivial incident in the history of creation. It is of no more importance in the annals of eternity and infinity than is the child’s snow-man in the annals of terrestrial tribes and nations. […] How arrogant of us, creatures of the moment, whose very species is but an experiment of the Deus Naturae, to arrogate to ourselves an immortal future and considerable status!

Lovecraft bases all of his fiction “on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large” (II.150), for the universe is “a wholly purposeless and essentially temporary incident in the ceaseless and boundless rearrangements of electrons, atoms, and molecules which constitute the blind but regular mechanical patterns of cosmic activity” (II.41).

Thus (I.334):

The values of mankind regarding “beauty” and “fineness” mean absolutely nothing to the blind gods of the ultimate abyss, to whom all things are alike; and those gods, in their brainless, sightless grinding of the eternal mill may sometimes accidentally favour and sometimes accidentally frustrate what we locally, arbitrarily, and accidentally happen to esteem as beauty and fineness.

On the plus side, the universe isn’t actively out to get us (V.195):

The truth is that the cosmos is blind & unconscious — not giving a hang about any of its denizens, nor even knowing that they exist. It doesn’t try to pain them any more than it tries to help or please them — & if any of them can manage to have a good time somehow, in spite of the chaotic jumble of conditions & emotions around & within them, that’s quite all right with the universal powers that be.

“Scientific indifferentism,” Lovecraft names his point of view (V.343): “the solar system is a meaningless drop in an unknown and purposeless cosmos, but what the hell of it?” If organic life is “trivial” in the grand scheme of things, and the universe is “indifferent & unconscious” — why, “that forms no occasion for sorrow on man’s part” (V.69):

Whether he has a fairly good time or a wretched time being alive depends greatly on his own skill & good sense in adapting himself to the environment within which accident has thrown him. Barring unusual external misfortunes, a man of sense can generally gain enough contentment to make existence at least no worse than non-existence. There is always pleasure in artistic expression, the acquisition of ideas, & the trace of vague expectancy inherent in any experience whose future stages are beyond fathoming.

“To be bitter is to attribute intent and personality to the formless, infinite, unchanging, and unchangeable void. We drift on a chartless, resistless sea. Let us sing when we can, and forget the rest” (I.335). What else is there? “We are conscious by accident, and during the unfortunate instant that we are so, it behooves us only to mitigate our pain and pass our time as agreeably as we may” (I.260). Oh, you “ephemeron of one cosmic moment” (I.284) — go find happiness on your own terms (III.20):

Is not emotional satisfaction the only supreme goal of any intelligent life? The cosmos contains nothing of greater importance for the negligible atoms called human beings than the condition of being elegantly amused. It is only mental laziness and artificial convention which can lead us to measure “accomplishment” by the approval of others. […] We can very logically say that the satisfaction of our own emotions is the one solid thing which we can ever get out of life.

Make the “transition from the idealism of youth to the realism of middle life” (I.111),

when the thinker realises that there is no such thing as ideal happiness and justice and ceases to strive after illusions so empty and unreal. Solid bourgeois contentment — with the settled conviction that wild pleasures are too rare, elusive, and transitory to be worth seeking — is the best state of mind to be in. One should come to realize that all life is merely a comedy of vain desire, wherein those who strive are the clowns, and those who calmly and dispassionately watch are the fortunate ones who can laugh at the antics of the strivers. The utter emptiness of all recognised goals of human endeavour is to the detached spectator deliciously apparent — the tomb yawns and grins so ironically! Whatever bliss we can gain, is from watching the farce, removing ourselves from the strife by not expecting more than we receive, and revelling in that world of the unreal which our imagination creates for us. To enjoy tranquillity, and to promote tranquillity in others, is the most enduring of delights. Such was the doctrine of Epicurus, the leading ethical philosopher of the world. If one’s interest in life wanes, let him turn to the succour of others in a like plight, and some grounds for interest will be observed to return. About the time I joined the United I was none too fond of existence. I was 23 years of age, and realised that my infirmities would withhold me from success in the world at large. Feeling like a cipher, I felt that I might well be erased. But later I realised that even success is empty. Failure though I be, I shall reach a level with the greatest — and the smallest — in the damp earth or on the final pure. And I saw that in the interim trivialities are not to be despised. Success is a relative thing — and the victory of a boy at marbles is equal to the victory of an Octavius at Actium when measured by the scale of cosmic infinity. So I turned to observe other mediocre and handicapped persons about me, and found pleasure in increasing the happiness of those who could be helped by such encouraging words or critical services as I am capable of furnishing. That I have been able to cheer here and there an aged man, an infirm old lady, a dull youth, or a person deprived by circumstances of education, affords to me a sense of being not altogether useless, which almost forms a substitute for the real success I shall never know. What matter if none hear of my labours, or if those labours touch only the afflicted and the mediocre? Surely it is well that the happiness of the unfortunate be made as great as possible; and he who is kind, helpful, and patient, with his fellow-sufferers, adds as truly to the world’s combined fund of tranquillity as he who, with greater endowments, promotes the birth of empires, or advances the knowledge and civilisation of mankind. Thus no man of philosophical cast, however circumscribed by poverty or retarded by ailment, need feel himself superfluous so long as he holds the power to improve the spirits of others.

As for misanthropy — you must be joking! “Anti-humanism, in its extreme phases, becomes exceedingly ridiculous, since it assumes as many values of purely arbitrary unreality as does pro-humanism” (II.165). In the end, both are just “silly and unscientific” to Lovecraft: “Why men are any more essentially offensive — apart from one’s personal taste — than trees, is something I can’t possibly see.”

Does he sometimes seem to hate mankind? “Honestly,” he writes, “my hatred of the human animal mounts by leaps and bounds the more I see of the damned vermin” and “the workings of their spiteful, shabby, and sadistic psychological processes” (I.211). But he’s suffering from one of his terrible migraines (ever had one?) at the time, and afterwards explains: “I’m really frightfully human and love all mankind, and all that sort of thing.” It is just that one is bound to become a bit of a cynic “when one thinks.”

At such times the herd seems a bit disgusting because each member of it is always trying to hurt somebody else, or gloating because somebody else is hurt. Inflicting pain seems to be the chief sport of persons whose tastes and interests run to the ordinary events and direct pleasures and rewards of life — the animalistic or (if one may use a term so polluted with homiletick associations) worldly people of our absurd civilisation. … I may be human, all right, but not quite human enough to be glad at the misfortune of anybody.

If you’re wondering how to reconcile all this happy-talk with Lovecraft’s choice of subject matter, well illustrated by the opening of The Call of Cthulhu (1926) —

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

— just know that to Lovecraft, there will always be “a giddy exhilaration in looking beyond the known world into unfathomable deeps, and a haunting thrill in thoughts of the cryptically horrible” (I.116). And he will never understand “how your imagination can fail to react to these mysterious abysses; how you can escape the burning curiosity of a child at a nearly-closed door through whose crevice come sounds of strange and unearthly wonder, and fragments of sights that suggest unthinkable things.”

Ah, the simple joys of cosmic horror.

Lovecraft is “an absolute sceptic and materialist” (II.41), it’s true. On the other hand, if “nothing really matters,” then logically “the only thing for a person to do is to take the artificial and traditional values he finds around him and pretend they are real; in order to retain that illusion of significance in life which gives to human events their apparent motivation and semblance of interest.” Call him an absolute relativist (II.356):

In a cosmos without absolute values, we have to rely on the relative values affecting our daily sense of comfort, pleasure, & emotional satisfaction. What gives us relative painlessness & contentment we may arbitrarily call “good,” & vice versa. This local nomenclature is necessary to give us that benign illusion of placement, direction, & stable background on which the still more important illusions of “worthwhileness,” dramatic significance in events, & interest in life depend. Now what gives one person or race or age relative painlessness & contentment often disagrees sharply on the psychological side from what gives these same boons to another person or race or age. Therefore “good” is a relative & variable quality, depending on ancestry, chronology, geography, nationality, & individual temperament. Amidst this variability there is only one anchor of fixity which we can seize upon as the working pseudo-standard of “values” which we need in order to feel settled & contented — & that anchor is tradition, the potent emotional legacy bequeathed to us by the massed experience of our ancestors, individual or national, biological or cultural. Tradition means nothing cosmically, but it means everything locally & pragmatically because we have nothing else to shield us from a devastating sense of “lostness” in endless time & space.

To attack tradition as arbitrary or artificial would be missing the point (I.262):

All the life we can ever imagine is the artificial and arbitrary network of illusions with which we may happen to surround ourselves. We know that all are the mere result of accident and perspective, but we gain nothing by tearing them down. ’Tis indeed uncommon senseless to tear down with a rusty dung-fork a mirage which never really existed. I think it best becomes a man of sense to chuse whatever sort of agreeable fancies best amuse him, and thenceforward to revel innocently in them; sensible that they are not real, but equally aware that since reality does not exist, he can gain nothing and lose much by brushing them away.

From a cosmic perspective, Lovecraft’s traditionalism makes a lot of sense (II.125):

It is because I am a complete sceptic & cynic, recognising no such qualities as good or evil, beauty or ugliness, in the ultimate structure of the universe, that I insist on the artificial & traditional values of each particular cultural stream — proximate values which grew out of the special instincts, associations, environment, & experiences of the race in question, & which are the sole available criteria for the members of that race & culture, though of course having no validity outside it. These backgrounds of tradition against which to scale the objects & events of experience are all that lend such objects & events the illusion of meaning, value, or dramatic interest in an ultimately purposeless cosmos — hence I preach & practice an extreme conservatism in art forms, society, & politics, as the only means of averting the ennui, despair, & confusion of a guideless & standardless struggle with unveiled chaos.

You see, “there is nothing anti-ethical or anti-social” in his cosmicism (V.241):

Although meaning nothing in the cosmos as a whole, mankind obviously means a good deal to itself. Therefore it must be regulated by customs which shall ensure, for its own benefit, the full development of its various accidental potentialities.

This is, quite simply, Lovecraft’s definition of civilization: “the state of development and organisation which is capable of gratifying” our “complex mental-emotional-aesthetic needs” (II.290); for “the greater our philosophic & aesthetic expansion, the more sources of contentment we shall generally be able to find in life” (IV.417).

Remember: to Lovecraft, “the paramount end, aim, and object of life is contentment or tranquil pleasure” (I.215). This, he believes, “can be gained only by the worship and creation of beauty, and by the adoption of an imaginative and detached life which may enable us to appreciate the world as a beautiful object […] without feeling too keenly the pain which inevitably results from reflecting on its relation to ourselves.” And so:

We advocate the preservation of conditions favourable to the growth of beautiful things — imposing palaces, beautiful cities, elegant literature, reposeful art and music, and a physically select human type. [I.207]

Lovecraft is ready to go way beyond conservatism to achieve these things. “We are proud to be definitely reactionary, since only by a bold repudiation of the ‘liberal’ pose and the ‘progress’ illusion can we get the sort of authoritative social and political control which alone produces things which make life worth living” — not this “modern worship of empty ideals,” like the “false idol” of democracy. “Ludicrous,” says Lovecraft:

What is more important, is to perpetuate those things of beauty which are of real value because involving actual sense-impressions rather than vapid theories. “Equality” is a joke — but a great abbey or cathedral, covered with moss, is a poignant reality. It is for us to safeguard and preserve the conditions which produce great abbeys, and palaces, and picturesque walled towns, and vivid sky-lines of steeples and domes, and luxurious tapestries, and fascinating books, paintings, and statuary, and colossal organs and noble music, and dramatic deeds on embattled fields… these are all there is of life; take them away and we have nothing which a man of taste or spirit would care to live for. Take them away and our poets have nothing to sing — our dreamers have nothing to dream about. […] What we must do is to shake off our encumbering illusions and false values — banishing sonorous platitudes in a civilised realisation that the only things of value in the world are those which promote beauty, colour, interest, and heightened sensation. The one great crusade worthy of an enlightened man is that directed against whatever impoverishes imagination, wonder, sensation, dramatic life, and the appreciation of beauty. Nothing else matters. And not even this really matters in the great void, but it is amusing to play a little in the sun before the blind universe dispassionately pulverises us again into that primordial nothingness from whence it moulded us for a second’s sport.

The Last Judgement by Michelangelo (image)

Now, Lovecraft is certainly an atheistic traditionalist (I.17):

I am not an orthodox disciple of religion, but I deem it dangerous to tamper with any system so manifestly beneficial to morality. Whatever may be the faults of the church, it has never yet been surpassed or nearly equalled as an agent for the promotion of virtue. And the same thing applies to our present social system. It has its defects, but is evidently a natural growth, and better fitted to preserve an approximate civilization than any Utopian scheme conjured up over night by some artificially thinking radical.

And so, while “the younger generation cannot regard the old theistic teaching as anything but out-and-out mythology” given “the enormous strides of contemporary science,” Lovecraft “cannot sympathise with the violent anti-Christian agitators and ‘debunkers,’” for apart from its “excellent sociological value,” religion “will always have a retrospective beauty which no impersonal aesthete can fail to respect” (II.227).

Lovecraft, self-identifying as “an atheist of Protestant ancestry,” singles out Catholicism in particular as “really an admirable faith,” especially for artists (II.104):

It is the inheritor of ancient and beautiful rhythms of thought, cadence, and gesture which thousands of years of human feeling have woven symbolically and expressively around the various significant points of mortal experience; and as such it cannot help having a profound and genuine artistic importance and satisfyingness. It is the oldest continuously surviving poem of life that the races of Western Europe possess, and as such has an authority — which no other one system of symbolic expression can claim. It seems to me that if one is to have anything so extra-rational as religion of any sort the Catholic and Episcopal systems are the only two sects with enough roots and anchors in the past to make them worthy of the affiliation of an artist. The life which they express is the natural, simple life of elder times, before the spread of industrialism and scientific discovery began its present transformation and destruction of society. No religion could express more, because all religion is a traditional art form dependent on a simple and continuous heritage.

Unfortunately, “the future civilisation of mechanical invention, urban concentration, and scientific standardisation of life and thought is a monstrous and artificial thing which can never find embodiment either in art or in religion.” Tradition is in decline (II.228):

Spengler is right, I feel sure, in classifying the present phase of Western civilisation as a decadent one; for racial-cultural stamina shines more brightly in art, war, and prideful magnificence than in the arid intellectualism, engulfing commercialism, and pointless material luxury of an age of standardisation and mechanical invention like the one now well on its course. It would be better if we could still be naive, beauty-loving, and ignorant — yet we cannot turn the clock back. Memphis and Nineveh, Babylon and Persepolis, Carthage and Ctesiphon, Athens and Lacedaemon, Rome and Alexandria, Antioch and Tyre — all these have had their day and their sunset; their grandeur and their fall. In the face of such a pageant of history it would be folly to expect anything else of the existing civilisation. This age in America corresponds quite startlingly to the luxurious and disillusioned age of Antonines in the Roman Empire — when Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Athens and New Carthage blazed in the sunset that was to mark the death of the ancient world. A gradual death, of course, which took many centuries in dragging itself out. If I were at all a mundane person — at all disposed to identify myself with one age any more than with any other — I would probably be greatly depressed by the existing phase of European culture; since I have no respect whatever for the hectic mechanical world which is supplanting the simpler, tradition-anchored world into which I was born. Fortunately for me, though, I am not greatly engrossed in external reality; so that my imagination is as free to live in another age as in this. It is only these broad, historic sweeps of life which interest me.

We set out to understand how Lovecraft thinks, and so far we’ve identified two major components: what I call the cosmic perspective and atheistic traditionalism. The final piece is a “profound respect for pure intellect” (II.124); in other words, for reason.

I should describe mine own nature as tripartite, my interests consisting of three parallel and dissociated groups — (a) Love of the strange and the fantastic. (b) Love of the abstract truth and of scientific logick. (c) Love of the ancient and the permanent. Sundry combinations of these three strains will probably account for all my odd tastes and eccentricities. [I.110]

Just a few examples of strain (b): “My object in all arguments is not to make any preconceived opinion of mine seem right, but merely to discover and establish the truth, whatever the truth may be” (V.13). “My objectivity, always marked, is now paramount and unopposed; so that there is nothing I am not willing to believe” (I.302). “I take keen delight in using my mind to study out some problem in science, philosophy, or history which really puzzles me” (IV.77). “To emerge from the artificial fog of empty, resonant, mystical words without a single real idea behind them, into the clear light of minds with actual conceptions, is a tonic to the intellect” (I.134), etc.

Now, tradition certainly gives life meaning — but it’s no substitute for thought (III.267):

Tradition is virtually the only standard, or value, or criterion of interest and direction-purpose illusion, that we have in the world of feeling, action, and art. There it is supreme. But in the world of thought and reality it is a perfectly meaningless thing; and has no effect except to place obstacles in the way of the discovery of truth. When we wish to obtain any actual knowledge of the cosmos and its properties, we must at once put out of our heads all the accumulated notions concerning such things which miscellaneous experience and slipshod inheritance have blindly saddled upon us. “Good,” “evil,” “duty,” “direction,” “purpose,” “dignity” — applesauce! We must cease to be parts of any system of preconceived bias — Christian, moral, humane, or anything like that — and become simple free inquiring agents, each alone and fearless, facing the varied phenomena of the external world with such processes of cognition and such stores of correlative background-data as repeated former tests may have shewn to be authentick. If then we find any of the old traditions verify’d, well and good. But we must not accept anything on any authority save the actual present evidence of the cosmos as judged by the tested information of contemporary science.

He reasoned his way into traditionalism, and so is willing to be reasoned out of it:

My own views of social organisation change constantly as new evidence and fresh trends appear from year to year — the only persistent factor being my settled conviction that the best civilisation is that which gives the freest play and greatest encouragement to the highest (i.e., most evolved) attributes of mankind. [IV.223]

And what is the highest, the “most exalted attribute of our species”? Why, “the acute, persistent, unquenchable craving TO KNOW” — “a human impulse which, despite its restriction to a relatively small number of men, has all through history proved itself as real and as vital as hunger — as potent as thirst or greed” (I.61). “For evolved man — the apex of organic progress on the Earth — what branch of reflection is more fitting than that which occupies only his higher and exclusively human faculties” (I.106)?

Remember: to Lovecraft, at times “the herd seems a bit disgusting” (I.211).

Inflicting pain seems to be the chief sport of persons whose tastes and interests run to the ordinary events and direct pleasures and rewards of life.

But we may be able to “overcome” this “natural hatefulness and loathsomeness of the human beast” through reason: “by a transference of interests to abstract spheres.” Since reason is universal, we have an interesting corollary: Lovecraft can extend humanity to star-spawned vegetable monsters — At the Mountains of Madness (1931):

And now, when Danforth and I saw the freshly glistening and reflectively iridescent black slime which clung thickly to those headless bodies and stank obscenely with that new unknown odour whose cause only a diseased fancy could envisage […] we understood the quality of cosmic fear to its uttermost depths. It was not fear of those four missing others — for all too well did we suspect they would do no harm again. Poor devils! After all, they were not evil things of their kind. They were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them — as it will on any others that human madness, callousness, or cruelty may hereafter drag up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste — and this was their tragic homecoming. They had not been even savages — for what indeed had they done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch — perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defence against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia… poor Lake, poor Gedney… and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last — what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn — whatever they had been, they were men!

Anyway, given this exalted attribute, “the absolutely first requirement of any mature or genuine civilisation is complete intellectual and artistic freedom; so that no restriction whatever would be placed upon any sort of individual thought or tastes” (V.12).

An opinion changed by force is an opinion not really changed at all. No real civilisation wishes to change anyone’s opinion except through rational arguments.

Lovecraft is setting quite a high standard for a civilized society (V.117):

It is really a crime against a child to attempt to influence his intellectual belief in any way. Anything like bias or indoctrination should be confined to such broad concepts as have been universally found expedient & harmonious through racial experience — concepts like honesty, order, non-encroachment, &c., which relate to practical conduct & not to matters of opinion. So far as points of theory & belief are concerned, the only decent & honourable thing to do with a child is to teach him strict open-mindedness & intellectual integrity — urging him to accept nothing through mere hearsay or blind tradition, but to judge everything honestly himself on the basis of existing evidence. […] All attempts to mould belief on emotional, non-rational grounds are to be condemned without qualification as unworthy of any organism as highly evolved as man. This applies to non-religious and anti-religious propaganda as much as to religious propaganda. The Russian soviets are just as reprehensible in warping popular emotions in favour of religion. What really ought to be taught people is how to think. Nine-tenths of the people in the world never really think on any topic of large scope. They imagine they have “opinions” — but these “opinions” are so completely the product of irrational emotion, blind heritage, & sheer mental indolence, as to be unworthy of the name. And this applies to most atheists as well as to most religious people. We would be a lot better off if our preceptors would stop trying to teach us special attitudes, & buckle down to the vital business of teaching us accurate thought & strict intellectual honesty.

His standard is not being met. See if any of this sounds familiar (V.283):

The more I observe the abysmal, inspissated ignorance of the bulk of allegedly cultivated people — folks who think a lot of themselves and their position, and who include a vast quota of university graduates — the more I believe that something is radically wrong with conventional education and tradition. These pompous, self-complacent “best people” with their blind spots, delusions, prejudices, and callousness — poor devils who have no conception of their orientation to human history and to the cosmos — are the victims of some ingrained fallacy regarding the development and direction of cerebral energy. They don’t lack brains, but have never been taught how to get the full benefit of what they have. They squander energy on the vapid and meaningless intricacies of bridge whist, yet gape like bewildered yokels at the historical and sociological changes taking place around them. They potter around with crossword and jigsaw puzzles, yet look upon the vestigia of the past with no more comprehension than that provided by flashy guidebooks and superficial (and biassed) history courses. They mull over the technicalities of football, yet lay aside only half-understood the Harper’s to which they ostentatiously subscribe. They memorise useless gossip about people and families as commonplace as themselves, yet know no more about atoms, nebulae, and genes than a stevedore — and no more about minerals than I do! They grope blindly through a world whose landmarks are hidden from them — throwing the beams of their lanthorns on some trivial object or objects pulled out of their pockets, instead of letting those beams shine on the terrain around, behind, and ahead. They are more ridiculous than the peasants and coal-heavers they despise — for instead of merely pure ignorance they possess the hypocritical combination of ignorance plus baseless pride and complacency.

It’s the ignorance and complacency that irk him, you see — not that they’ve failed to accept some theory of Lovecraft’s. “Of course, I respect equally the opinions of anyone who, from the same realistic data, builds up different conclusions” (III.54). “As for arguments — I can’t afford to detest them since they are all that ever bring out the truth about anything” (IV.57). Lovecraft is nothing if not open minded (IV.102):

I never take offence at any genuine effort to wrest the truth or deduce a rational set of values from the confused phenomena of the external world. It never occurs to me to look for personal factors in the age-long battle for truth. I assume that all hands are really trying to achieve the same main object — the discovery of sound facts and the rejection of fallacies — and it strikes me as only a minor matter that different strivers may happen to see a different perspective now and then. And in matters of mere preference, as distinguished from those involving the question of truth versus fallacy, I do not see any ground whatever for acrimonious feeling. Knowing the capriciousness and complexity of the various biological and psychological factors determining likes, dislikes, interests, indifferences, and so on, one can only be astonished that any two persons have even approximately similar tastes. To resent another’s different likes and interests is the summit of illogical absurdity. It is very easy to distinguish a sincere, impersonal difference of opinion and tastes from the arbitrary, ill-motivated, and irrational belittlement which springs from a hostile desire to push another down and which constitutes real offensiveness. I have no tolerance for such real offensiveness — but I greatly enjoy debating questions of truth and value with persons as sincere and devoid of malice as I am. Such debate is really a highly valuable — almost indispensable — ingredient of life; because it enables us to test our own opinions and amend them if we find them in any way erroneous or unjustified. One who never debates lacks a valuable chart or compass in his voyage for truth — for he is likely to cherish many false opinions along with sounds ones for want of an opportunity to see each opinion viewed from every possible angle. I have modified many opinions of mine in the course of debate, and have been intensely grateful for the chance of so doing.

Bayesians take note: Lovecraft could be quite the rationalist (III.267).

Real probabilities about the structure and properties of the cosmos, and its relation to living organisms on this planet, can be reach’d only by correlating the findings of all who have competently investigated both the subject itself, and our mental equipment for approaching and interpreting it — astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and so on. The only sensible method is that of assembling all the objective scientifick data of 1931, and forming a fresh chain of partial indications bas’d exclusively on that data and on no conceptions derived from earlier and less ample arrays of data; meanwhile testing, by the psychological knowledge of 1931, the workings and inclinations of our minds in accepting, connecting, and making deductions from data, and most particularly weeding out all tendencies to give more than equal consideration to conceptions which would never have occurred to us had we not formerly harboured provisional and capricious ideas of the universe now conclusively known to be false. It goes without saying that this realistic principle fully allows for the examination of those irrational feelings and wishes about the universe, upon which idealists so amusingly base their various dogmatick speculations.

Still, we should remember the “rusty dung-fork,” and ask ourselves if a truth is “of sufficient importance to warrant the shattering of a beautiful illusion” (II.226).

I really wish this generation did know less, so that it might return to the unperplexed tranquility of former times — the tranquility of simple loyalty to King and Church, amidst which those idyllic figures, the country ’squire and the parish vicar, could regain something of their olden significance. Certainly, the acquiescent, dogmatic, and well-ordered life of simple ages had, with all its glaring defects, a fundamental harmony and good taste that we seek in vain amidst the excesses of that “jazz period” to which the invention of complex machinery and the spread of democratic fallacies have jointly given birth. Thus I am, whilst utterly radical in such departments of sheer intellect as science and philosophy, thoroughly and cynically conservative — even reactionary — in social and political matters; a Tory, Czarist, Junker, patrician, Fascist, oligarchist, nationalist, militarist, and whatever else of the sort you can find in Webster’s Dictionary or Roget’s Thesaurus!

Which reminds me: isn’t this guy supposed to be some sort of racist?

Trigger warning for common sense: it is an “obvious fact,” to Lovecraft at least, “that different lands, races, & conditions naturally develop & demand different cultural standards & usages & different ethical & social codes” (II.26). Moreover, different cultures, past and present, can be ranked according to (what seems to Lovecraft) a rather natural criterion — given that “mankind must be regulated by customs which shall ensure the full development of its various accidental potentialities” (V.241).

There are high cultures, which utilise a great many possibilities of the human brain-structure, & low cultures, which utilise relatively few. It isn’t hard to tell them apart when our eyes aren’t blinded by modern theorising — we know that Greece & China & France & Italy have built up marvellously fine edifices, & that our own Anglo-Saxon edifice isn’t much below them in many ways — & we also know that the Arabs, Hindoos, Mayans, Egyptians, Persians, Babylonians, etc., built up edifices with greater crudities & limitations, which left more or less extensive tracts of human thought & feeling unutilised & wasted. [III.64]

Note that Lovecraft, according to his own criterion, ranks his culture below several others. On the other hand, he really is an Anglo-Saxon supremacist (III.79):

It is my one dominant wish that an Anglo-Saxon culture exist, that it be paramount in the world, & that it be so organised as to retreat as far as possible from the primitive toward the fullest utilisation of the manifold & delicate cosmos-exploring & pleasure-experiencing capacities of the human species.

Is this a contradiction, in light of his fundamental “principle that one’s view of the cosmos should be objective, uncoloured, & impartial”? Not really (III.78):

Have I ever objected to personal bias so long as it does not colour one’s perception of the external world? Haven’t I confessed to strong prejudices & enthusiasms in a dozen odd directions here & there? Didn’t I freely say that I think Anglo-Saxon culture is worth fighting for, that I’m intensely fond of cats, that ancient Rome arouses my enthusiasm, that India gives me a pain in the neck, & so on, & so on? Hell! Everybody has his personal likes & dislikes — but the point is, that a man of sense doesn’t let these things make him believe what ain’t so, & disbelieve what is so! There’s where I try to be impartial.

And so, from his impartial cosmic perspective, Lovecraft is able to examine his own personal enthusiasms, including cultural chauvinism. Remember (II.125):

I insist on the artificial & traditional values of each particular cultural stream — proximate values which grew out of the special instincts, associations, environment, & experiences of the race in question, & which are the sole available criteria for the members of that race & culture, though of course having no validity outside it. These backgrounds of tradition against which to scale the objects & events of experience are all that lend such objects & events the illusion of meaning, value, or dramatic interest in an ultimately purposeless cosmos.

Thus Lovecraft’s Anglo-Saxon supremacism must be seen as a special case of his multicultural traditionalism. In short: benevolent chauvinism for everyone (III.207).

No one thinks or feels or appreciates or lives a mental-emotional-imaginative life at all, except in terms of the artificial reference-points supply’d him by the enveloping body of race-tradition and heritage into which he is born. We form an emotionally realisable picture of the external world, and an emotionally endurable set of illusions as to values and direction in existence, solely and exclusively through the arbitrary concepts and folkways bequeathed to us through our traditional culture-stream. Without this stream around us we are absolutely adrift in a meaningless and irrelevant chaos which has not the least capacity to give us any satisfaction apart from the trifling animal ones. […] Therefore a native culture-heritage is the most priceless and indispensable thing any person has — and he who weakens the grasp of a people upon their inheritance is most nefariously a traitor to the human species.

Mount Fuji (image)

Lovecraft invites us to consider how “a normal Yankee feels like a fish out of water in a crowd of cultivated Japanese” — “his mental and aesthetic superiors” (III.254).

No normal being feels at ease amidst a population having vast elements radically different from himself in physical aspect and emotional responses. […] We can all visit exotic scenes and like it — and when we are young and unsophisticated we usually think we might continue to like it as a regular thing. But as years pass, the need of old things and usual influences — home faces and home voices — grows stronger and stronger; and we come to see that mongrelism won’t work. We require the environing influence of a set of ways and physical types like our own, and will sacrifice anything to get them. […] That is all there is to life — the preservation of a framework which will render the experience of the individual apparently relevant and significant, and therefore reasonably satisfying. Here we have the normal phenomenon of race-prejudice in a nutshell — the legitimate fight of every virile personality to live in a world where life shall seem to mean something.

Biological superiority really doesn’t enter into it (II.71):

Only a damn fool can expect the people of one tradition to feel at ease when their country is flooded with hordes of foreigners who — whether equal, superior, or inferior biologically — are so antipodal in physical, emotional, and intellectual makeup that harmonious coalescence is virtually impossible. Such an immigration is death to all endurable existence, and pollution and decay to all art and culture. To permit or encourage it is suicide. […] Biologically, the Nordic is probably not superior to the best Mediterranean stock; or the unbroken and now almost extinct Semitic white stock; but just as the Chinese culture ought to be preserved where it is once entrenched, where the Nordic culture is once entrenched, it must be preserved.

As long as we’re talking about the Chinese (V.78):

Only an ignorant dolt would attempt to call a Chinese gentleman — heir to one of the greatest artistic & philosophic traditions in the world — an “inferior” of any sort… & yet there are potent reasons, based on wide physical, mental, & cultural differences, why great numbers of the Chinese ought not to mix into the Caucasian fabric, or vice versa. It is not that one race is any better than any other, but that their whole respective heritages are so antipodal as to make harmonious adjustment impossible. Members of one race can fit into another only through the complete eradication of their own background-influences — & even then the adjustment will always remain uneasy & imperfect if the newcomer’s physical aspect forms a constant reminder of his outside origin.

This is Lovecraft’s racial and cultural supremacism (III.276):

No anthropologist of standing insists on the uniformly advanced evolution of the Nordic as compared with that of other Caucasian and Mongolian races. As a matter of fact, it is freely conceded that the Mediterranean race turns out a higher percentage of the aesthetically sensitive, and that the Semitic groups excel in sharp, precise intellection. It may be, too, that the Mongolian excels in aesthetick capacity and normality of philosophical adjustment. What, then, is the secret of pro-Nordicism among those who hold these views? Simply this — that ours is a Nordic culture, and that the roots of that culture are so inextricably tangled in the national standards, perspectives, traditions, memories, instincts, peculiarities, and physical aspects of the Nordic stream that no other influences are fitted to mingle in our fabric. We don’t despise the French in France or Quebeck, but we don’t want them grabbing our territory and creating foreign islands like Woonsocket and Fall River. The fact of this uniqueness of every separate culture-stream — this dependence of instinctive likes and dislikes, natural methods, unconscious appraisals, etc., etc., on the physical and historical attributes of a single race — is too obvious to be ignored except by empty theorists. […] What we mean by Nordic “superiority” is simply conformity to those character-expectations which are natural and ineradicable among us. […] We know perfectly well that the Italians excel us in the capacity to savour life and beauty — that their centres of taste are better developed than ours — but they annoy us and fail to fit into our group because their gland-functionings and nerve-reactions do not correspond to what our own heritage has made us expect. We do not call them inferior, but simply admit that they are different beyond the limits of easy mutual understanding and cultural compatibility. […] Living side by side with people whose natural impulses and criteria differ widely from ours, gets in time to be an unendurable nightmare. We may continue to respect them in the abstract, but what are we to do when they continue to fail to fulfil our natural conception of personality, meanwhile placing all their own preferential stresses on matters and ideals largely irrelevant and sometimes even repugnant to us? And don’t forget that we affect alien groups just as they affect us. Chinamen think our manners are bad, our voices raucous, our odour nauseous, and our white skins and our long noses leprously repulsive. Spaniards think us vulgar, brutal, and gauche. Jews titter and gesture at our mental simplicity, and honestly think we are savage, sadistick, and childishly hypocritical. […] What’s the answer? Simply keep the bulk of all these approximately equal and highly developed races as far apart as possible. Let them study one another as deeply as possible, in the interest of that intellectual understanding which makes for appreciation and tolerance. But don’t let them mix too freely, lest the clash of deep and intellectually unreachable emotions upset all the appreciation and tolerance which mental understanding has produced. Above all, don’t get led off on a false trail through observing the easy camaraderie of a few cosmopolitan intellectuals and aristocrats in whom similar manners or special interests have temporarily overridden the deep wells of natural feeling ineradicable from the bulk of each of the divergent race or culture groups represented.

I think that bears repeating (III.272):

Nothing but mischief can be caused by the sentimentalists who try to pretend that different cultures can understand and like one another, or that leaders in different nations will ever coöperate through a common love of mystical (and mythical) cosmic obligations. […] Actually, as Spengler shews, cultures are profoundly rooted, prodigiously unique, and externally hostile things — whose differences are far greater than is commonly suspected. We cannot judge cultures, and their deep instinctive attitudes toward one another, by the unctuous amenities of the few internationally-minded aristocrats, intellectuals, and aesthetes who form a cosmopolitan and friendly group because of the common pull of surface manners or special interests. Of course these exotic specimens get on well enough together — but the real peoples as a whole are another matter!

Before we continue, I strongly recommend that you read the following articles:

Topics covered:

genetics of intelligence;

genetics of race;

race differences in intelligence; and

what will happen to you if you try to talk about them.

Figure 2a from Tishkoff et al., Science (2009):

principal components analysis of individual genotypes

Now, the reader with a keen eye for thoughtcrime and a well developed sense of outrage will have picked up on a key bit of racial heresy already (III.276):

No anthropologist of standing insists on the uniformly advanced evolution of the Nordic as compared with that of other Caucasian and Mongolian races.

Yes, Lovecraft believes in evolution. Gasps all ’round! He has deduced that culture is rooted not only in the accidents of history, but in biology as well (IV.247):

Of course Hitler is an unscientific extremist in fancying that any racial strain can be reduced to theoretical purity, that the Nordic stock is intellectually & aesthetically superior to all others, & that even a trace of non-Nordic blood — or non-Aryan blood — is enough to alter the psychology & citizenly potentialities of an individual. These assumptions, most certainly, are crude & ignorant — but the anti-Hitlerites are too cocksure when they maintain that the fallacy of these points justifies a precisely opposite extremism. As a matter of fact — all apart from social & political prejudice — there indisputably is such a thing as a Nordic subdivision of the white race, as evolved by a strenuous & migratory life in Northern Asia & Europe. Of course, very little of it remains Simon-pure at this date — after all the mixtures resulting from its contacts with other stocks — but anyone would be a damn fool to deny that certain modern racial or cultural units remain predominantly & determinantly Nordic in blood, so that their instincts & reactions generally follow the Nordic pattern, & differ basically from those of the groups which are predominantly non-Nordic. Anybody can see for himself the difference between a tall, straight-nosed, fine-haired dolichocephalic Teuton or Celt (be he blond or dark) on the one hand, & a squat, swarthy Latin, aquiline Semite, or brachycephalic Slav on the other hand. And even if a Teutonic or Celtic group happens to pick up & assimilate substantial numbers of Latins, Semites, or Slavs, it will continue to think & feel & act in a characteristic Nordic fashion as long as the old blood remains predominant, & the culture-stream remains unbroken. It is of course true that the cultural heritage is more influential than the biological, but only a freakish extremist would reduce the biological to negligibility. Separate lines of evolution have certainly developed typically differing responses to given environmental stimuli. As for the question of superiority & inferiority — when we observe the whole animal kingdom & note the vast differences in capacity betwixt different species & sub-species within various genera, we see how utterly asinine & hysterically sentimental is the blanket assumption of idealists & other fools that all the sub-species of Homo sapiens must necessarily be equal. The truth is, that we cannot lay down any general rule in this matter at the outset. We must simply study each variety with the perfect detachment of the zoölogist & abide by the results of honest investigation whether we relish them or not. And what does such a study tell us? Largely this — that the australoid & negro races are basically & structurally primitive — possessing definite morphological & psychological variations in the direction of lower stages of organisation — whilst all others average about the same so far as the best classes of each are concerned. The same, that is, in total capacity — though each has its own special aptitudes & deficiencies.

This is the sort of thing his critics have in mind when they talk about his “racism.”

Sunand Tryambak Joshi is a leading expert on Lovecraft and “weird fiction” in general. He is also, by the way, an Indian immigrant to America, and a bit of an activist: author of The Angry Right: Why Conservatives Keep Getting It Wrong and God’s Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong; compiler of Documents of American Prejudice: An Anthology of Writings on Race from Thomas Jefferson to David Duke and In Her Place: A Documentary History of Prejudice Against Women.

From his 2001 biography, A Dreamer and a Visionary: H. P. Lovecraft in His Time:

The one area of Lovecraft’s thought that has — justifiably — aroused the greatest outrage among later commentators is his attitude on race. […] Lovecraft retained to the end of his days a belief in the biological inferiority of blacks and also of Australian aborigines, although it is not clear why he singled out this latter group.

Yes, why indeed would Lovecraft single out aboriginal Australians — with their dismal average intelligence, spectacular crime and general social dysfunction — along with sub-Saharan Africans? Why these two? Quite the mystery we have on our hands…

I will remind you that Lovecraft believes that “mankind must be regulated by customs which shall ensure the full development of its various accidental potentialities” (V.241); the development, that is, “of all the powers latent within man” (V.13), as opposed to

human degradation or retardation in any form — violence, ugliness, ignorance, sensuality, brutality, cruelty, abnormality, filth, cloddishness, rapacity, egotism, encroachment, violations of physical or spiritual integrity, and everything that goes with a dull acquiescence in the animal patterns of the lower part of creation.

Those who would drag us down can be considered the “‘enemy of humanity’” (V.244):

While not all of this minority would care to lower the prevailing life-level to the wholly savage state, it is undeniable that they would like to see it pulled down to an intolerable degree of mediocrity. This actual hostility to the best human achievements is found in many proletarian groups and peasantries, and was markedly manifest in the earlier stages of both French and Russian revolutions. It also exists in the theories of many “back-to-nature” cults which stem from Lord Monboddo and Rousseau — and is of course strong among a good many of the backward races themselves, who hate the white man and all his works.

Or maybe Lovecraft just hates everyone with dark skin. Because that makes sense.

Mr. Joshi continues:

In my view, Lovecraft leaves himself most open to criticism on the issue of race not by the mere espousal of such views but by his lack of openmindedness on the issue, and more particularly his resolute unwillingness to study the most up-to-date findings on the subject from biologists, anthropologists, and other scientists of unquestioned authority who were, through the early decades of the century, systematically destroying each and every pseudoscientific ‘proof’ of racialist theories. In every other aspect of his thought — metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, politics — Lovecraft was constantly digesting new information (even if only through newspaper reports, magazine articles, and other informal sources) and readjusting his views accordingly. Only on the issue of race did his thinking remain relatively static. He never realized that his beliefs had been largely shaped by parental and societal influence, early reading, and outmoded late nineteenth-century science. The mere fact that he had to defend his views so vigorously and argumentatively in letters — especially to younger correspondents like Frank Long and J. Vernon Shea — should have encouraged him to rethink his position; but he never did so in any significant way.

Really? He “never realized”? We’re talking about H. P. Lovecraft, right? This is the same guy who warned us that “any belief or emotional bias, no matter how untrue or absurd, can be implanted in the brain & nervous system of a human being with tremendous force & firmness if the victim be inoculated with it in infancy” (V.117); who noted that “real probabilities about the structure and properties of the cosmos can be reach’d only by weeding out all tendencies to give more than equal consideration to conceptions which would never have occurred to us had we not formerly harboured provisional and capricious ideas of the universe” (III.267); who boasted: “I can change my theories as often as valid evidence is changed, or as my judgment improves through exercise in the province of philosophical reflection” (I.135); and so on and so forth. I just want to be clear: that guy needs to be encouraged to rethink his position on anthropology?

For the record, Lovecraft did rethink his position on race at least once, experiencing “a sense of mortification at a slight scientific error — an error whereby I had estimated too large a gap betwixt the species homo sapiens and homo niger vel Africannus” (that would be black people). “I now saw that these species, together with the extinct pithecanthropus erectus of Java, represent less evolutional separation than I had before calculated” (I.118). You see? We’re not so different after all!

Now may be a good time to point out that non-Africans, and only non-Africans, actually share Neanderthal DNA. Hey, Neanderthal DNA — could this be a thing? That explains other things? I feel like it might be. It used to be okay to think about such things:

“The genes for red hair and pale skin didn’t match well enough to show a correlation, but I found a correlation for genes linked to other traits. There’s a gene cluster linked to advanced mathematics skills, information processing, logic, analytical intelligence, concentration skills, obsession-compulsion and Asperger’s syndrome. That cluster correlates very strongly. I can trace some genes back to the interglacial around 450,000 years ago, and others back to another burst of evolutionary innovation during the Eemian interglacial about 130,000 years ago.” She rambled on with endless details. Something wasn’t right. She was linking genes for advanced mental skills to Neanderthals. “I’m confused,” I said when she paused for a breath. “You’re correlating genes linked to modern human intelligence with Neanderthal populations. What am I missing?” “You didn’t want to hear me, I knew that.” “No, I want to hear you. I just asked a question.” “You don’t, because I already told you.” I looked at Beth blankly, realizing I was missing a key part of the puzzle. “You said these were Neanderthal genes?” “Yes, they were,” she said. “They weren’t in the modern human genome until Neanderthals interbred with Cro-Magnons between 25,000 and 30,000 years ago.” “Advanced mathematical processing? Shouldn’t that have been missing from the Neanderthal genome?” “No, I found that Neanderthals lacked genes linked to successful socialization and management skills. They could count perfectly well, but they couldn’t deal with groups. Socialization genes came from Sapiens.”

(Speculative fiction by a science journalist, Jeff Hecht — written before we found out who does and who doesn’t have Neanderthal DNA.)

Oh, and it also turns out that aboriginal Australians and Melanesians (for example, Papua New Guineans) also share some of their DNA with another extinct type of hominid, called the Denisovans. Which is pretty neat (is all I’m saying).

The evolution and spread of the Denisovans (image)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled social constructs. Mr. Joshi, as you may recall, cites “the most up-to-date findings from biologists, anthropologists, and other scientists of unquestioned authority” — up-to-date in “the early decades of the century,” that is. The twentieth century. I worry a little when scientists go “unquestioned” for any length of time. Doesn’t that tend to undermine the reliability of science? In any case:

The brute fact is that by 1930 every ‘scientific’ justification for racism had been demolished. The spearhead of the scientific opposition to racism was the anthropologist Franz Boas (1857–1942), but I find virtually no mention of him in any of Lovecraft’s letters or essays. The intelligentsia — among whom Lovecraft surely would have wished to number himself — had also largely repudiated racist assumptions in their political and social thought. Indeed, such things as the classification of skulls by size or shape — which Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard waste much time debating in their letters of the 1930s — had been shown to be preposterous and unscientific even by the late nineteenth century.

Why, just look at Lovecraft’s preposterous and unscientific ideas (V.77):

Of the complete biological inferiority of the negro there can be no question — he has anatomical features consistently varying from those of other stocks, & always in the direction of the lower primates. Moreover, he has never developed a civilisation of his own, despite ample contact with the very earliest white civilisations. Compare the way the Gauls took on the highest refinements of Roman culture the moment they were absorbed into the empire, with the way the negroes remained utterly unaffected by the Egyptian culture which impinged on them continuously for thousands of years. Equally inferior — & perhaps even more so — is the Australian black stock, which differs widely from the real negro. This race has other stigmata of primitiveness — such as great Neanderthaloid eyebrow-ridges. And it is likewise incapable of absorbing civilisation.

“Neanderthaloid eyebrow-ridges”? Lovecraft, you so crazy!

“Australian Aborigines have a prominent brow ridge, a fact that helped

lead Thomas Huxley to argue that Neanderthals were indeed human” (PBS)

Compare Franz Boas (1894), spearhead of the scientific opposition to racism:

We find that the face of the negro as compared to the skull is larger than that of the American, whose face is in turn larger than that of the white. The lower portion of the face assumes larger dimensions. The alveolar arch is pushed forward and thus gains an appearance which reminds us of the higher apes. There is no denying that this feature is a most constant character of the black races and that it represents a type slightly nearer the animal than the European type. […] We find here at least a few indications which tend to show that the white race differs more from the higher apes than the negro.

Oh…

But does this anatomical difference prove that their mental capacity is lower than that of the white? The probability that this may be the case is suggested by the anatomical facts, but they by themselves are no proof that such is the case. I shall revert to this subject later on.

When Mr. Joshi declares that “the classification of skulls by size or shape had been shown to be preposterous and unscientific even by the late nineteenth century,” I suspect he’s thinking of phrenology: assessment of personality traits from the contours of the skull — which doesn’t work, and was discredited in the nineteenth century. But phrenology is not the same as physical anthropology, like examining skulls from different races and observing differences, which you can see for yourself right here:

“Although the concept of race assessment is controversial, certain features of the skull may be of use in differentiating ancestral groups.” In this case: European, Asian, African, and Australian (images)

If Mr. Joshi is, in fact, mixing up the two (he wouldn’t be the first), it is particularly regrettable in this case because Lovecraft actually names phrenology, along with psychoanalysis, among the “false arts” — the cognitive pseudosciences — which “must necessarily fail because of the essential complexity of the human mind” (II.93).

Mr. Joshi’s anti-racialist hero Boas continues:

We will now turn to the important subject of the size of the brain, which seems to be the one anatomical feature which bears directly upon the question at issue. It would seem that the greater the central nervous system, the higher the faculty of the race and the greater its aptitude to mental achievements. Let us review the known facts. Two methods are open for ascertaining the size of the central nervous system: the determination of the weight of the brain and that of the capacity of the cranial cavity. The first of these methods is the one which promises the most accurate results. Naturally, the number of Europeans whose brain weights have been taken is much larger than that of individuals of other races. There are, however, sufficient data available to establish beyond a doubt the fact that the brain-weight of the whites is larger than that of most other races, particularly larger than that of the negroes. That of the white male is about 1370 grammes. The investigations of cranial capacities are quite in accord with these results. According to Topinard the capacity of the skull of males of the neolithic period of Europe is about 1560 cc.; that of modern Europeans is the same; of the Mongoloid race 1510 cc.; of African negroes 1405 cc.; and of negroes of the Pacific ocean [e.g., aboriginal Australians] 1460 cc. Here we have, therefore, a decided difference in favor of the white race. These differences cannot be explained as the effect of difference in stature, the negroes being at least as tall as the Europeans.

Which brings me to a fundamental problem with modern Lovecraft criticism. To your typical literary critic circa 2014 AD, if someone chooses to say something like “black people have smaller brains than white people” — well, that person is obviously a racist; in other words, stupid, ignorant, crazy, evil, or otherwise mentally defective (Issue 28). The problem is: in the actual world we actually live in, black people actually do have smaller brains than white people. You may not have heard about it, but it’s still true.

In interpreting these facts we must ask, Does the increase in the size of the brain prove an increase in faculty? This would seem highly probable and facts may be adduced which speak in favor of this assumption. […]

Boas, of course, did not have access to an MRI or even an IQ test — but we do.

We have now gone over the field of anatomical differences between races so far as they have a bearing upon our question. Our conclusion is, that there are differences between the physical characters of races which make it probable that there may be differences in faculty. No unquestionable fact, however, has been found yet which would prove beyond a doubt that it will be impossible for certain races to attain a higher civilization.

As an exercise, the reader can update this 120-year-old conclusion.

It was in his later work that Boas really set about (as Mr. Joshi put it) systematically destroying each and every pseudoscientific ‘proof’ of racialist theories (PBS; sic):

ALAN KRAUT: There were voices like that of Franz Boas, the anthropologist from Columbia University, who argued that immigrants weren’t of an inferior genetic type; they were simply people whose life experiences, had been different. […] And, in fact, Boas conducted a study which demonstrated that in the second and third generations, the children and grandchildren of newcomers in their bodily type tended to resemble more native-born youngsters than youngsters coming as new immigrants to the United States. Those findings were very, very significant because they told those Americans who were sort of on the fence, not completely opposed to immigration but not quite in favor completely either, that they really had less to fear than perhaps they thought about these newcomers and what their bodies would mean to the American population.

A politically valuable study indeed — and not just for immigration reform:

LEE D. BAKER: The scope of the study was just awesome. [Boas] measured thousands upon thousands of New York schoolchildren to demonstrate one thing: he stated that immigrants in the United States after one generation look nothing like their parents in terms of whatever people were measuring in terms of head size before. So, immigrant children, their measurements were indistinguishable with their American counterparts that had been here for years.

[…]

Remember when [the eighteenth century French evolutionist Jean-Baptiste] Lamarck had said that [when] giraffes hold their neck higher and higher, they get higher necks? Well, Boas is almost making a Lamarckian argument that just by being in America, you look more American. In many respects Franz Boas was demonstrating the plasticity of human potential in terms of in the right environment: individuals can look very much different than in different environments. It’s almost intuitive now. […] In some respects Franz Boas had a master plan in terms [of] trying to unseat this notion that there [are] real hierarchies in terms of culture, races and language.

[…]

Organizations like the NAACP involved Franz Boas in their publications [and] symposiums — as well as [in] their efforts to organize and lobby Congress [on] behalf of this idea of equality. [They wanted] to demonstrate that America needs to live up to its creed, this notion of equality for all Americans. The pillars of democracy should stand for all. That was their argument. But they didn’t have any scientific data to back that up. So they turned in many respect to Franz Boas.

[…]

What happened after that was a long and fruitful relationship between Franz Boas, W. E. B. DuBois and many other scholars in the African community. Even though Franz Boas was not embraced heartily during this first decade of the twentieth century by other scientists, he was embraced heartily by African Americans and other reform-minded folks arguing for equality. And it was his research that provided the initial scientific underpinning for their claims for equality. During Brown v. Board of Education, one of the important briefs that was used was a social science statement on race. [The] important brief that convinced Earl Warren to bring a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court forward on the Brown decision was based on Franz Boas’ earlier work. One could argue you found Changes in Bodily Form — in this notion that races are not necessarily static, and races cannot be seen as superior or inferior — in that 1954 statement. So in many respects it was Franz Boas’ work on Changes in Bodily Form that enabled the social science statement in Brown to move forward.

It really was a radical finding:

MATTHEW JACOBSON: He’s saying, “You know, you’re saying that Hebrews or Mediterraneans or Celts, or whoever they are, are so innately Hebrew, Mediterranean or Celtic that they’re never going to change; they’ll never be anything else. And yet, right here in front of our very eyes, right here on American soil, just looking from one generation to the next, we can see all kinds of bodily changes and facial changes that point to something else in the development of these peoples than the hereditarians are willing to take into consideration.”

[…]

Boas does a study of his own. He does very precise measurements of bodily form in various ways to determine that while the hereditarians are arguing that so innate are racial differences that they will never change — once a Celt, always a Celt. Boas is now saying, “Well, if we measure a difference from one generation to the next, right here on American soil we have proof that that hereditarian argument is mistaken. In fact, we see tremendous changes, and we can measure them between the Celts of yesteryear and the American-born Celt.”

[…]

The real contribution of Changes in Bodily Form is as the most radical kind of critique of the hereditarian argument and the most radical kind of advancement of a truly environmentalist kind of approach. [He was saying:] “we can measure as a way of finding out the truth about humanity and all its diversity.” And what he is finding goes right at the heart of the hereditarian argument, because in his measurement of body shape and body form and body type and the like, he finds that in fact there’s a tremendous change between the pure types from the old world and the pure types from the new world, that in fact immigrants over even just a short span of time, over one generation, might change quite a bit in a physical, measurable way. And what that implies is that the hereditarians have it completely wrong. I mean, they are talking about immutable types. They are talking about unshakable characterology. They are talking about a kind of being, a racial being that is etched in stone that will never change anything. Right before your eyes, right here among these throngs that you are so worried about, if you are in the new world, we can see changes, and quite rapid ones at that.

Yeah, about that…

Just one year after Mr. Joshi published A Dreamer and a Visionary, and two years after PBS took on “scientific racism” in The First Measured Century, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences released ‘A reassessment of human cranial plasticity: Boas revisited’ by Corey Sparks and Richard Jantz, covered by Nicholas Wade in the New York Times (2002): ‘A New Look at Old Data May Discredit a Theory on Race.’

Two physical anthropologists have reanalyzed data gathered by Franz Boas, a founder of American anthropology, and report that he erred in saying environment influenced human head shape. Boas’s data, the two scientists say, show almost no such effect. The reanalysis bears on whether craniometrics, the measurement of skull shape, can validly identify ethnic origin. […] “I have used Boas’s study to fight what I guess could be considered racist approaches to anthropology,” said Dr. David Thomas, curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. “I have to say I am shocked at the findings.” Forensic anthropologists believe that by taking some 90 measurements of a skull they can correctly assign its owner’s continent of origin — broadly speaking, its race, though many anthropologists prefer not to use that term — with 80 percent accuracy. Opponents of the technique, who cite Boas’s data, say the technique is useless, in part because environmental influences, like nutrition or the chewiness of food, would overwhelm genetic effects. Boas measured the heads of 13,000 European-born immigrants and their American-born children in 1909 and 1910 and reported striking effects on cranial form, depending on the length of exposure to the American environment. But in re-examining his published data, Dr. Corey S. Sparks of Pennsylvania State University and Dr. Richard L. Jantz of the University of Tennessee find that the effects of the new environment were “insignificant” and that the differences between parents and children and between European- and American-born children were “negligible in comparison to the differentiation between ethnic groups,” they are reporting today in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The groups that Boas studied were Bohemians, Hungarians, central Italians, Jews, Poles, Sicilians and Scots. As to why he drew the wrong conclusion, Drs. Sparks and Jantz note that he was much involved in disputing contemporary belief that many different racial types could be reliably distinguished. Boas’s motives, they write, “could have been entwined in his view that the racist and typological nature of early anthropology should end, and his argument for dramatic changes in head form would provide evidence sufficient to cull the typological thinking.” Dr. Jantz said that Boas “was intent on showing that the scientific racism of the day had no basis, but he did have to shade his data some to make it work that way.”

[…]

The new report raises the issue of whether an earlier generation’s efforts to play down the role of genetics in fields like behavior and racial variation may not have been carried to extremes. […] Dr. Thomas said that “once we anthropologists said race doesn’t exist, we have ignored it since then.” In that context, the reanalysis of Boas’s data “really does have far-reaching ramifications,” he said.

No kidding: the actual, historical reason why people today believe things like “race is only skin deep” or “race is a social construct” is because a German anthropologist fudged his numbers to claim that living in America changes the shape of your skull.

Consider those far-reaching ramifications lost on literary critics. In a 2012 roundtable discussion at RevolutionSF, for example, Dave Farnell refuses to “make excuses” for Lovecraft being a “great big racist” — excuses like being right about everything.

He was a highly intelligent and educated person, well read in the scientific literature which was quickly toppling pseudo-scientific claims that supported racism one after another. It is disturbing that a guy who was open-minded in so many ways, able to be persuaded to take very different positions on so many subjects over his lifetime, was so inflexible and closed-minded about race.

[…]

My recommendation is to concede the point and take it as a lesson that even the most brilliant people — indeed often the most brilliant people — are complete idiots in one way.

Stupid Lovecraft! Doesn’t he realize that moving to America will warp your bones?

May I end up next to Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius in the devil’s mouth at the center of hell if I ever fail to present my most honest assessment and best judgment of the evidence for empirical truth. Stephen Jay Gould

How can one trust a person so prejudiced as to neglect overwhelming evidence? Hans Eysenck

Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek,

but don’t trust an Armenian. George Orwell

Franz Boas, activist anthropologist and “spearhead,” as S. T. Joshi put it, “of the scientific opposition to racism,” is hard at work, demolishing race science:

the most radical kind of critique of the hereditarian argument and the most radical kind of advancement of a truly environmentalist kind of approach…

Pushing immigration reform on an unwilling electorate:

they told those Americans who were sort of on the fence… that they really had less to fear than perhaps they thought about these newcomers…

Supplying the federal government with the “evidence” it needs to legislate for equality:

he was embraced heartily by African Americans and other reform-minded folks arguing for equality… provided the initial scientific underpinning…

All for a good cause!

In some respects Franz Boas had a master plan in terms [of] trying to unseat this notion that there [are] real hierarchies in terms of culture, races and language.

Franz, the man with the master plan.

Meanwhile, the House Committee on Un-American Activities under J. Parnell Thomas issues its Report on Civil Rights Congress as a Communist Front Organization (1947):

The ink was scarcely dry on the Stalin-Hitler pact presaging the disastrous Communist-led strikes in North American Aviation and Allis-Chalmers, the peace strikes in universities, and the fulminations against President Roosevelt as an “imperialist warmonger,” when Earl Browder, then general secretary of the Communist Party of the United States and passport forger, sounded the usual warnings about the imminent menace to our civil liberties. Speaking at the National Conference for Civil Liberties in New York City on October 14, 1939, he declared: The forces which are moving against American civil liberties are the same forces which want this war to go on as long as possible for the sake of the profits they expect to make out of it, and which are preparing to take this country into the war at an opportune moment… the forces involving America in the senseless destruction and slaughter of the imperialist war strike first of all against the Communist Party because they see in it the leader and the symbol of all the deepest antiwar and peace sentiments of the masses, which they wish to silence and to crush. Thereafter, a maze of organizations was spawned for the alleged purpose of defending civil liberties in general but actually intended to protect Communist subversion from any penalties under the law. Among these organizations were the Committee for Citizenship Rights, the Committee for Civil Rights for Communists, Detroit Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Greater New York Emergency Conference on Inalienable Rights, Michigan Civil Rights Federation, Minneapolis Civil Rights Committee, National Committee for People’s Rights, the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties, and numerous other special committees under various guises. Former Attorney General Francis A. Biddle characterized the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties, the chief national organization on this list, as follows: The program of the federation parallels closely the Communist Party line of 1940… One of the tactics which they use to attack the (national defense) program was the emphasis on the threat to civil liberties and the rights of labor and of minority groups… The defenses of Communist leaders such as Sam Darcy and Robert Wood, party secretaries for Pennsylvania and Oklahoma, have been major efforts of the federation.

And what is this “National Federation for Constitutional Liberties,” exactly? The House Committee on Un-American Activities, this time under Martin Dies, can fill us in with its Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States (1944):

Out of 77 top-ranking sponsors and leaders of the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties we find at least 45 who represent what is probably the most impressive aggregation of Communist talent ever assembled in a single organization throughout the long history of the Communist Party’s transmission belts in this country. By that we do not mean that all of them have been publicly avowed, card-holding members of the Communist Party. Many of them are members of the Communist Party, but by Communist talent we mean that they have occupied prominent positions of leadership in the numerous fronts which have been set up by the Communist Party, occupied in addition to their affiliation with the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties. These persons are not the mere rank-and-filers of the party’s transmission belts; they are the leaders of the Communist Party’s front movement in the United States. Among the more prominent of these leaders, we list the following together with some of their other positions in Communist or Communist front organizations:

Coming in at number three:

Franz Boas, national chairman of the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom.

Quite a tricky fellow, you see, this Boas — but not unique.

Richard Lewontin (more on whom later) eulogizes his colleague Stephen Jay Gould in the communist — I mean, um, “socialist” — magazine Monthly Review (2002):

At the level of actual political struggles, his most important activities were in the fight against creationism and in the campaign to destroy the legitimacy of biological determinism including sociobiology and racism. […] He was one of the authors of the original manifesto challenging the claim of sociobiology that there is an evolutionarily derived and hard-wired human nature that guarantees the perpetuation of war, racism, the inequality of the sexes, and entrepreneurial capitalism. He continued throughout his career to attack this ideology and show the shallowness of its supposed roots in genetics and evolution. His most significant contribution to the delegitimation of biological determinism, however, was his widely read exposure of the racism and dishonesty of prominent scientists, The Mismeasure of Man. Here again, Gould showed the value of going back to square one.

Why, thank you, Dr. Lewontin! Yes, the value of going back to square one.

Not content simply to show the evident class prejudice and racism expressed by American, English, and European biologists, anthropologists, and psychologists prior to the Second World War, he actually examined the primary data on which they based their claims of the larger brains and superior minds of northern Europeans. In every case the samples had been deliberately biased, or the data misrepresented, or even invented, or the conclusions misstated.

“He actually examined the primary data,” you see. Although, technically… he didn’t.

In 2011, PLoS Biology published a remarkable paper: ‘The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias.’

Stephen Jay Gould, the prominent evolutionary biologist and science historian, argued that “unconscious manipulation of data may be a scientific norm” because “scientists are human beings rooted in cultural contexts, not automatons directed toward external truth,” a view now popular in social studies of science. In support of his argument Gould presented the case of Samuel George Morton, a 19th-century physician and physical anthropologist famous for his measurements of human skulls. Morton was considered the objectivist of his era, but Gould reanalyzed Morton’s data and in his prize-winning book The Mismeasure of Man argued that Morton skewed his data to fit his preconceptions about human variation. Morton is now viewed as a canonical example of scientific misconduct. But did Morton really fudge his data? Are studies of human variation inevitably biased, as per Gould, or are objective accounts attainable, as Morton attempted? We investigated these questions by remeasuring Morton’s skulls and reexamining both Morton’s and Gould’s analyses. Our results resolve this historical controversy, demonstrating that Morton did not manipulate data to support his preconceptions, contra Gould. In fact, the Morton case provides an example of how the scientific method can shield results from cultural biases.

Gould could be quite the storyteller:

Gould famously suggested that Morton’s measurements may have been subject to bias: “Plausible scenarios are easy to construct. Morton, measuring by seed, picks up a threateningly large black skull, fills it lightly and gives it a few desultory shakes. Next, he takes a distressingly small Caucasian skull, shakes hard, and pushes mightily at the foramen magnum with his thumb. It is easily done, without conscious motivation; expectation is a powerful guide to action.” While Gould offers this as only a “plausible scenario,” and did not rem