Who Remembers Soranus?

Man is Bourne

When you come as an inhabitant to this earth, you do not have the pleasure of choosing your dwelling, or your career. You do not even have the privilege like those poor little shivering souls in “The Blue Bird,” of sitting about, all aware and wondering, while you are chosen, one by one to take up your toilsome way on earth. You are a helpless victim of your parents’ coming together. There is denied you even the satisfaction of knowing that they created you, in their own bungling fashion, after some manner of a work of art, or of what they imagined an adequate child should be. On the contrary, you may be merely an accident, unintentioned, a species of catastrophe in the life of your mother, a drain upon the resources that were none too great already. And your parents have not only not conceived you as a work of art, but they are wholly incapable after you are born of bringing you up like a work of art.

Randolph Bourne. Old Tyrranies

The American writer and political activist Randolph Bourne may well have counted himself unlucky from the first moment of his birth. An accident with forceps as he struggled out between his mothers thighs left him with a misshapen ear, at four tuberculosis of the spine stunted his growth and hunched his back. By age thirty-two he was dead, a victim of the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which ravaged a world already suffering from the results of a war he opposed so vehemently. He gives us a grim picture of a universe in which we are victims of blind chance and circumstance before we are even born. If his words seem bitter then this is a man who lived in a society where judgement was based on the superficial. It is still true: All too easily we turn away from the crippled and infirm.

“the doors of the deformed man are always locked, and the key is on the outside. He may have treasures of charm inside, but they will never be revealed unless the person outside cooperates with him in unlocking the door.” He writes in his essay The Handicapped.

“for at the bottom of all the difficulties of a man like me is really the fact that his self-respect is so slow in growing up”

Faced with such a negative world-view it would be easy to retreat into a fatalistic, sceptical view of things, but Bourne doesn’t, instead he finds a firm bedrock of inner conviction to anchor himself to (he uses the language of religion to describe it),  it was a theory based on social progress. “For this is the faith that I believe we need today, all of us–a truly religious belief in human progress, a thorough social consciousness, an eager delight in every sign and promise of social improvement, and best of all, a new spirit of courage that will dare. I want to give to the young men whom I see–who, with fine intellect and high principles, lack just that light in their faces that would give them a purpose and meaning in life–to them I want to give some touch of this philosophy–that will energize their lives, and save them from the disheartening effects of that poisonous counsel of timidity and distrust of human ideals which pours out in steady stream from reactionary press and pulpit.” A theory where man has within him a higher creature. His change is not to his inward character, as H. G. Wells or George Bernard Shaw believe is necessary, rather the higher man is already there, all along, stifled by the conditions around him. It is not man as such that needs to alter, it is his surroundings. Bourne recognises two separate factors: “a social and group capacity” and a “individual and personal one”. The former is the more dominant, the individual is forced to conform, his true self subsumed by its demands. It is a harsh taskmaster, as the crippled Bourne could vouch.  By separating the two he has at least stated the problem.

“Really to believe in human nature while striving to know the thousand forces that warp it from its ideal development…this is my religion on its human side.” For man is shackled, in a sense they are deformed mentally as much as Bourne himself is physically.

“This is the goal of my religion-the bringing of fuller, richer life to more people on Earth….And this is not to be a mere philosophical precept which may well be buried under a host of more immediate matters, but a living faith, to permeate one’s thought, and transfuse one’s life.” To Bourne education can achieve this end. Man must mature mentally for he is still in the process of evolving, says Wells, man is evolved, replies Bourne, he just doesn’t know he is, because his surroundings blind him to it. The difference is subtle, but there. He is trapped like a puppet, held fast by the strings that bind society together, and moved by them. Cut them and he can move freely, sit up and take stock of his predicament. He can do something about it. The fatalism of Bourne’s doomed world of chance and circumstance is removed. He has found a way out. It is a dangerous thought though, it invites the Burkean nightmare of the Terror. The overthrow of everything will bring human perfection. Man is only the way he is because of the social system. The social system is a virus, destroy it and a new man is born. Healed and harmonious, in tune with his fellows. The stunted twisted anaemic individual rises up, stretches his flowering shining ebony body to the heavens and greets a new epoch in his story. He was a giant after all, it was only the world that was lacking.

Man is a Work of Art

The Greek physician Soranus of Ephesus explains the reason for the rise of ape-like looking men in the ancient world (it is the latest fashion in pets) and how to ensure your offspring are well proportioned: “some women, seeing monkeys during intercourse, have borne children resembling monkeys. The tyrant of the Cyprians, who was misshapen, compelled his wife to look at beautiful statues during intercourse and became the father of well-shaped children; and horse-breeders, during covering, place noble horses in front of the mares.”¹ The tyrant of the Cyprians was lucky. In Sparta, physical perfection was all in in a race of men bred to be warriors. Legend has it the weak child was left at the foot of mount Tatygetus to die of exposure.² Exposure was seen as a form of birth control in a society where abortion would have been dangerous to the health of the mother. But did the Spartans ever do it? Could it be a case of our idea of the perfect human form is given root in these mighty warriors, and an ideal demands the removal of the weak. Disabled people did exist in Greece. The Spartan king Agesilaus II was born with one leg shorter than the other but was still trained in traditional Spartan methods. Such is the western desire for perceived normality in children that we abort children for having hair lips, despite this being easily correctable. Our Utopian futures offer a race of perfect humans gene massaged in the womb. We should note the Yoruba concept of beauty. The Yoruba are an African ethnic group that mostly inhabit Nigeria. To the Yoruba external beauty is recognised as a mere superficial veneer. Real beauty is the moral character of the person, bound up with helping others, doing her chores well, being a great aid to the greater community. So the most beautiful woman in a community could be the most displeasing to our western eyes, where the image is all.

There was once a lady called Julia Pastrana who, according to Darwin “was a remarkably fine woman,”³ he then goes onto say, “but she had a thick masculine beard and a hairy forehead; she was photographed, and her stuffed skin was exhibited as a show; but what concerns us is, that she had in both the upper and lower jaw an irregular double set of teeth, one row being placed within the other, of which Dr. Purland took a cast. From the redundancy of the teeth her mouth projected, and her face had a gorilla-like appearance.”⁴ Observers who met her (Darwin didn’t) say she had a fine singing voice, could read, and converse well on many subjects in English and Spanish. “She was all womanly: kind, very charitable and accomplished; she possessed a sweet voice & great taste in music; she spoke three languages, and danced with ease, lightness & grace” Her husband, who managed her as a displayed freak, allowed intimate examinations, and she fared better under the pen of Darwin than of a Doctor Alexander B. Mott, who declared her to be the offspring of the mating of a human and an Orang hutan. Humanity to him was skin deep.⁵

Some say there was, long ago, a race of hominids called Boskop Man.⁶ 10,000 years past they walked the ocean shores in Africa as the last ice age came to an end. They are often known by the Afrikkans word Strandlooper, “the beach walkers.” They were small in body with huge heads and child like faces. They lived simple lives, but they had greater brains than ours. The thinking goes that they cared nothing for technology, they were hunter gatherers, but because they had such huge brains then they must have used them for something. And because of this they contemplated the world in ways only the enlightened Buddha could know.

In The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, the unnamed narrator travels far into the future and finds mankind has evolved into two separate species, the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi have become lazy, without threat (they have wiped out the dangerous animal species, and we presume disease also) or challenge (their food is provided for them) they have regressed mentally. In the George Pal film version of 1960 they are blond, blue eyed Aryans. The dark after image of the National Socialist dream.

Aren’t the Boskop people a 20th/21st century Eloi, only with active intellects? The Eloi of the film are classical beauty, a fixed ideal, the Aryan master race of the Nazi horror made flesh. They also represent a pre-modern world view. In a god created universe they are how the original man looked, modelled, by a god artist, into a perfect David. They are man before the Fall, before he was driven from the primordial garden. But the Boskop are what a Darwinian driven species  sees itself becoming, there was no first man, no god given mould, instead there is progress, the Darwinian future, evolutions product. The Eloi’s mistake is they have ceased to move forward. This is their failure. By standing still they doomed themselves. To a society where we weigh progress as change, a smarter race can not just think differently, they must look different. They are what we see ourselves becoming, creatures of brain not brawn. They resemble the greys of alien lore which might not be by chance. Their lack of technology and simplicity in living is because they have found something else, within. Perhaps they have harnessed mental powers such as telepathy or telekinesis, rather than the  cyborg of man and machine which science and the futurists offers us, they are a Luddite version of the coming superman. They are, in the words of  Loren Eiseley: “the men of the future.” who came before their time. They were an evolutionary failure because the world not ready for them. Someday, unimagined years hence, they may come again.

There was another race of hominids who once walked the Earth, the Neanderthals. These, according to Wells, were savage and brutal creatures. In his short story The Grisly Folk they are described as “Hairy or grisly, with a big face like a mask, great brow ridges and no forehead, clutching an enormous flint, and running like a baboon with his head forward and not, like a man, with his head up,” and that “he must have been a fearsome creature for our forefathers to come upon.” And in the story he is indeed, for a pair of them abduct and feed on one of the children of a tribe of our early ancestors who have wandered into their territory. Hairy and apelike they resembled Julia Pastrana. And, like the Morlocks of his story, they were savage. The Morlocks, having evolved to live underground, are hiding away in the dark, The Morlocks ultimate regression was to become cannibal, preying on the Eloi aspect of himself, eating his own beauty. Yet in reality we know, like the Strandlopers, Neanderthals buried their dead with ritual. Evidence for flowers have been found  in graves. They made cave paintings and decorated shells. And they may have played flutes too, in which case they knew music. It seems they mourned and knew beauty, and their brains where greater than ours, also like the Strandlopers. Only, like Julia, they weren’t beautiful in looks themselves, so they became savages, Morlocks to the Strandloper’s Eloi.

In a cut scene from the book version of The Time Machine, the narrator moves further through time to discover man’s final fate. On a bleak moor, under an orange sun, he has become a rabbit-like creature, hopping around in an almost mindless ignorance and preyed on by giant centipede-like monstrosities. He mocks the forward ever upward promise of evolution.

Plato in the Symposium has the prophetess Diotema speak of the beauty of the mind being more honourable than the beauty of the outward form. For there are levels of beauty. We ascend to the absolute beauty. She tells Socrates that he would move beyond the shallow beauty of fair boys and youths into a real of the absolute. Beauty is not skin deep, as the Yoruba people understand. Leave a Bourne or a Julia in a room to converse with a sighted woman and a blind woman. After half an hour who would understand their true character more? Perhaps the blind woman sees best after all.

We like our outsiders, in a perverse way, for they are different in looks, they give us someone to blame for the mess of our own lives or the society around us. Call them Black, Jew, Gypsy, Arab, they suffer because they are different. Anyone with a skin tone of a different shade to European norms stands out, and be careful not to open your mouth, an unplaced accent could mean a foreigner and you could join those silent ones of a “funny tinge”.

When the Enlightenment broke on the Western mind it brought with it concepts such as the rights of man. The Inalienable Rights. Equality was one.

But paying lip service to the higher ideals of the enlightenment is easy, it’s when they impact  with reality that problems occur. Being a critical bystander is fine, but what happens when you have to make decisions?

Man is Nobel

In 2017 the government of Myanmar began to ethnic cleanse, an ugly term fore genocide, the Rohingya people⁷, while the world looked on in apparent horror (but did nothing). The State Counsellor (a position akin to a Western Prime Minister) of that country, Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Prize winning laureate, encouraged it and defended it later at the UN. The shock-waves reverberated that she could do such a thing. But why should we in the West be surprised at this? Why shouldn’t someone share the same prejudices as the majority of her fellow countrymen? Given that Myanmar is among the most deprived nation in Asia, why wouldn’t it seek scapegoats for it’s problems? After all Western politicians are happy to target immigrants to round up a few more votes when it suits them, why should she be so special? Isn’t it we who expect too much by proclaiming these people as heroes. They do the pure saintly stuff so we don’t have to. So we carry them on our shoulders like Catholic icons on saints days, parading them through the streets of our own failures pointing them at the stars, which, being mere mortals, we can never reach. They are also there to show it is possible to be a saint , it could be me if I wanted (only I don’t want the inconvenience). It’s part of the job description. Like Buddha with enlightenment they live the saintly life in our place so we don’t have to. By supporting them I engage with their actions. Even if it is only in the most superficial way, I can switch off from worrying or the cares it brings, they do all the uncomfortable stuff. In ancient societies the woman wailed and shrieked at funerals. Professionally. The lamentation of the women. In the Bible the Lord of hosts calls for the professional mourners to mourn for his people:

Thus saith the Lord of hosts, Consider ye,
and call for the mourning women, that they
may come; and send for cunning women, that
they may come:
And let them make haste, and take up a
wailing for us, that our eyes may run down
with tears, and our eyelids gush out with waters.
Jeremaih 9; 17-18

It would be wrong though to see this as a simple monetary arrangement, an absolution of duty by those hiring them, the hired mourners had a role to play then, it was a skill learned, and part of a societies reaction to death. A shared social grief and a means of overcoming loss, after all birth and death are the two unavoidables. modern society gives us a perverse version of this, shorn of its deepest meaning, we seek to avoid rather than to engage with grief. In 20th century Britain there was a company called Rent a Mourner where professional actors where hired to pretend to be family members or friends, they would mingle with guests and act out the lie. We could ask what is the point of this, after all the dead man is hardly going to care what the living think, so it must then be his surviving family who want to put on a false show of their relatives popularity and social standing, even to the extent that he bred well. It was a purely monetary transaction and tips were expected. When we have reached this stage then why not go the whole way, after all funerals are generally miserable things, and send the professionals in everyone’s place?⁸ My chances of being embarrassed are also zero.
In a society where I want all the advantages without having to think of what they entail on a wider level, on the political, on the environmental, the other, the professional hero, is waiting in the wings for the messy stuff. I can go about my business knowing this other is out there somewhere in my place.⁹ And what is even better is that other somewhere is off-stage.
But there is a danger with these enlightened ones of our imaginations. As Rohingya shows, as the villages burn, as the black smoke clouds shift in the sky and the people are driven away or worse, we discover to our dismay that the Nobel can do the horrible.

Julia Pastrana was Beautiful.

Notes

¹ Soranus, Gynecology, Tr. Owsei Temkin, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1991, pp. 37-38.

<² Named after the nymph Tyaygete, one of the seven Pleiades sisters.

³ C. R. Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication,  1st edn, 1st issue, vol. 2., London: John Murray, 1868, p328.

⁴ Darwin is incorrect in saying she had a double row of teeth. Her mouth condition was apparently due to gingival hyperplasia. Her full condition is described as “generalised hypertrichosis associated with gingival hyperplasia.” The most famous photo of her shows her in her embalmed state after death. See Professor A. E. W. Miles, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicines, v.67(2), 1974 Feb.

⁵ Her husband, after her death (she died in childbirth), sold her body and that of her son, who survived her by only a few days, to a Russian university professor who preserved them. Even in death she had the indignity of being displayed for the public’s amusement. Only in 2013 was she finally laid to rest.

⁶ See Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey, Vintage Books, 1957, and Lyall Watson, Earthworks: Ideas on the Edge of Natural History, Hodder and Stoughton, 1986.

⁷The Rohingya claim a thousand years of history, to the government of Myanmar they are “Bengalis”, referencing their neighbour state Bangladesh, and therefore immigrants, illegally squatting in the country. Religion plays its part, Buddhist monks (the Wests ultimate idea of the religion of peace) stir the nationalist mix of intolerance and difference against the mostly Muslim Rohingyans.

⁸Is this not unlike Japan where you can hire a fake family for your grandparents? Indeed there is a woman who hires a man to pretend to be a dad for her child. He himself has no emotional attachment to the family seeing it as a job, the woman dreams of marriage to him and a family unit, it remains to be seen how the truth will impact the child.

⁹Our others have become younger, children now front campaigns for female rights and the environment. Perhaps it is the innocence we can attach to them. They are uncorrupted. What happens to them when they grow up?