Unsuspecting Souls. Barry Sanders
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he claimed, to enter at will into a state of higher consciousness, what he called a “superior state,” lifting him far beyond ordinary clairvoyance. From that rarefied position, he said, he could see the secrets that so many scientists were looking for and failing to find. For instance, the human body became transparent to him, allowing him to view each organ and, most dramatically, those organs with direct access to the source of life. That’s why, without being told the illness beforehand, he could bring patients not just back to health, he wrote, but to extended life. Davis bore witness to the entire process of death and the soul’s voyage to the hereafter, a place that, with the help of a bit of Braidism, he claimed, he had entered many times. And while he could not bring other people to his own superior state, he could, through the use of Braid’s techniques, place them in a trance, allowing them to enjoy, even momentarily, a somewhat higher level of spiritual awareness, and a taste, brief though it was, of eternal life.
But some social philosophers in the period believed that if wakefulness could be disembedded from daily experience, enhanced through various opiate derivatives, muffled through anesthesia, or suspended through hypnotic power, then it did not serve well as the fundament of the human condition. It behaved more like an accessory to something else, something much more thoroughly basic and unshakable. With wakefulness as the defining element, people could easily go through life as transparencies—as ghosts. They might just as well feel that they did not exist, except in those moments of peak emotions—profound euphoria or deep depression. In short, drugs worked at just too ethereal a level for some professionals, the experience just too evanescent in the turbulence of the nineteenth century, to serve such a vital role. Scientists demanded something more perdurable, perhaps even tangible, by which to define human existence. They went off in different directions to find the bedrock, the fundamental.
As with many advances and inventions, this next one also came about quite by accident, but it fit perfectly into the period’s desire to define human essence. A worker in a chemistry laboratory in England, J.E. Purkyne, thought he had found that foundational correlative when he picked up a glass slide one day in 1823 and noticed that he had left behind an indelible, precise impression of the patterns on the ends of his fingers. After some rather simple experimenting, he had to conclude, much to his own amazement, that everybody possessed a unique system of identification within easy reach—at the tips of their fingers. While a person might alter his or her behavior, or even personality traits, or fake being hypnotized, prints persisted absolutely unaltered, over a person’s entire lifetime.
Even before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Herbert Spencer, the English philosopher responsible for the phrase “survival of the fittest,” posited a theory that the growing human sciences later tagged “social Darwinism.” His idea fit tightly into the period’s belief in the inferiority of those people with darker skin. Spencer argued that those with a decided lack of social and moral development—criminals—were nothing more than “savages,” an inborn state, which included the poor, the laboring class, the Irish, women of lower class, and of course blacks. One could spot their internal deficiencies by distinctive outward signs. To ensure the smooth functioning of upper-crust white society, authorities needed to describe, type, classify, and, most important of all, keep these dangerous people under close supervision and observation. To keep its population safe, the state should have to produce a taxonomy of deviants.
Key social changes were underway to place great emphasis on the criminal. The revolution in production created a new bourgeois appreciation of property, bringing with it a wide range of new punishable offenses along with punishments of greater severity. Carlo Ginzburg, in a brilliant essay about crime and punishment in the nineteenth century, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” makes the following observation:
Class struggle was increasingly brought within the range of criminality, and at the same time a new prison system was built up, based on longer sentences of imprisonment. But prison produces criminals. In France the number of recidivists was rising steadily after 1870, and toward the end of the century was about half of all cases brought to trial. The problem of identifying old offenders, which developed in these years, was the bridgehead of a more or less conscious project to keep a complete and general check on the whole of society.
A novelist like Dickens could thus identify all kinds of brutes in his books strictly by their appearances. “Low brow” and “high brow” referred to people’s foreheads—those who looked like Neanderthals or those who looked like intellectuals, as if such a thing were even possible—as they occupied either a lower or higher class. People came into the nineteenth-century world, then, born as criminals, an innate and irreversible fault of character and personality. Anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, ethnographers—all the emerging sciences devoted their attention to identifying and categorizing the antisocial element in society.
We have not shaken ourselves free of such base and racist thinking; it operates for some unconsciously, for others more overtly. But it is, nonetheless, part of the essentialist thinking of the period; a good part of that thinking that tried to find the bedrock of, well, everything. Taxonomies ruled the day: Order and definition and category made the world come alive, and made it possible at the same time for those in authority to control it with ease. One of those most basic and wrongheaded essential nineteenth-century categories was race.
That narrowing of thinking continues through the twentieth century, and on through the twenty-first. The majority of men in prisons today in America are African Americans, the overwhelming majority of those for nonviolent drug offenses—inhaling or ingesting or imbibing some controlled substance. America incarcerates its black adult males at a higher rate per capita than did the South African government during the worst years of apartheid. Sentences turn out to be much harsher for young men of color than for whites who commit the very same crimes.
Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin, knew the problem only too well, and decided to do something about it. Galton had already expressed his deep-seated fear of the end of the “highly evolved” white race in his first major book, entitled Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences, which he published in 1869. In that book, he made his case that the highest ideal for the white race could be found in the ancient Athenians. The closest to them in his day, he maintained, were the aristocratic British. And he named the enemy that threatened the established order and heredity as the darker, lower, and less moral races.
He relied on earlier work on fingerprints carried out by the founder of histology, J. E. Purkyne, who, in 1823, distinguished nine types of lines in the hand, with no two individuals possessed of the same exact combinations. Galton turned Purkyne’s discovery into a practical project and began it by sorting fingerprints into eight discrete categories to use as a tool for mass identification. To make his taxonomy practical, Galton proposed that hospitals take the hand- and footprints of every newborn, thus creating an indispensable record of every citizen’s identity. If someone committed a crime, the authorities could more easily track down the identity of the suspect.
Near the end of his life, in 1892, Galton finished his project of sorting fingerprints and published his results in a long and dull tome titled, very simply and directly, Finger Prints, in which he laid out, with graphic detail, the eight major patterns—swirls, whorls, curlicues, spirals, and so on—shared by every last person in the entire world. England quickly adopted his method, and other countries, including the United States, soon followed. Carlo Ginzburg, in “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes,” says about Galton’s project, “Thus every human being—as Galton boastfully observed . . .—acquired an identity, was once and for all and beyond all doubt constituted an individual.”
We reach an incredible crossroad here: a semiotics of the individual based on patterns—or numbers—and not on anything so indeterminate or even as informative and telling as personality. Ginzburg points out that by the end of the nineteenth century, and specifically from 1870 to 1880, “this ‘semiotic’ approach, a paradigm or model based on the interpretation of clues, had become increasingly influential in the field of human sciences.”
Fingerprints as a unique identifying tool had to compete with an already existing system of identification called bertillonage, named for a clerk at the prefecture of Paris, Alphonse Bertillon.