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138 The One and the Many
class, and race, and sect.” But the problem of difference was deeper than that.
If viewed on a horizontal plane, differences were functionally essential to a
thriving global network, for by definition only different musical notes— the
diverse needs and capabilities of peoples— could produce a melodious harmony
of interests. But differences were also vertical. The nineteenth century,
in many ways a century of global integration, was also an epoch in which
flourishing doctrines of nationality, race, and imperialism divided peoples
into higher and lower sorts. In this spirit, George Cary Eggleston observed
that the world “is filled chiefly with inferior people.” 2
For most people, it was race, above all, that explained backwardness and inferiority.
“Race is all, there is no other truth,” said the hero of Benjamin Disraeli’s
novel Tancred, echoing the mantra of the British racial theorist Robert
Knox. This fixation on race makes for something of a problem, for as the historian
George Fredrickson has noted, “What makes Western racism so autonomous
and conspicuous in world history has been that it developed in a
context that presumed human equality of some kind.” One can understand
how contradictory doctrines might exist side by side in a state of antagonism
within a society, but how was it that liberals could be simultaneously racist and
universalist without fatally compromising their beliefs and their self- integrity?
Ideologically, the stakes were quite high, for hard racialist doctrines flew in the
face of the civic religion of republicanism, the core beliefs of Christianity, and
the tenets of Enlightenment universalism. The belief in racial superiority, explained
the editor of Appletons’, was “anti demo cratic, and originates in the
most stationary civilizations of the far East, and is a part of the hateful doctrine
of caste.” It was hardly a secret that racism and its fellow- traveler, caste consciousness,
had potentially devastating implications for American po liti cal
beliefs. 3
Doctrines of racial superiority, by throwing into question the claim that
Christianity was a universal faith, had the potential for provoking a much
more explosive struggle between religion and science than the one that actually
took place. Although the Bible was ambiguous about the moral status of
slavery, it was outspokenly egalitarian in its position on the essential unity of
humankind. For those who believed in the historically close connection between
Protestantism and po liti cal liberty, caste and Christianity were, prima
facie, “utterly irreconcilable.” Caste might make religious sense in India, said
one missionary, but Christians who believed in caste dishonored their God.