← This Guy Sucked
Loading summary
Transcript26 lines
- [00:00]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Hi there. It's Claire. If you're hearing me, that means you're listening to the free preview of one of our Patreon episodes. We switch off every week between free and Patreon exclusive episodes. So if you'd like to hear the rest of this conversation, head over to patreon.com thisguysucked and join our honorary haters club. Welcome to this Guy Sucked, the show where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. I'm your host, Dr. Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of suck. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. With me today is Dr. Matt Lauder, who is a senior lecturer, aka associate professor in American Terms in Art History and theory, as well as the director of American Studies at the University of Essex. He is also the host of the excellent tattoo history podcast Beneath the Skin, which I was recently on, so you might be here from hearing me on that. And the author of several books on the history of tattooing, including painted people, 5,000 years of tattooed History, and the brand new book, Tattoos the Untold History of a Modern Art. He's also just kind of a generally lovely chap. So welcome to the show and congratulations on your new book.
- [01:29]
Dr. Matt Lauder
Oh, thank you. I'm glad I'm not the guy that sucks.
- [01:33]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Well, that remains to be seen.
- [01:35]
Dr. Matt Lauder
Fair enough. We've started. Okay, we're just getting going.
- [01:38]
Dr. Claire Aubin
I want to start off by saying that we have many things in common, but one of them looms, I think, larger than the rest, and that is our shared producer and your Beneath the Skin co host, Tom Omani. So now's your opportunity to say mean things about him while he's forced to sit here and listen silently. The sort of cucking of the podcast world if you were so warm up. Question.
- [02:01]
Dr. Matt Lauder
I don't need that in this podcast. I do that to his face.
- [02:03]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Anyway, warmup question today is, what's your least favorite thing about him?
- [02:09]
Dr. Matt Lauder
No, I. Tom's amazing. I. I don't need. I don't need to get him where he can't respond because I do this both off, off air and on air on our podcast. So Tom's amazing. He doesn't suck. My least favorite thing about him is he's he's better looking than me, which you know, is, you know, is embarrassing. When I'm in the room with him, his beauty outshines mine.
- [02:31]
Dr. Claire Aubin
He also does work out quite a lot, which is annoying if you're.
- [02:33]
Dr. Matt Lauder
He's pretty hench.
- [02:36]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. In all actuality, Tom's a legend and a secret lurker in all of these episodes. For those of you listening at home, there's a third party that you're not aware of. I would never deign to insult him lest he make me sound really bad forever and ruin our working relationship. Um, my least favorite thing about him is that he's too good at his job.
- [02:55]
Dr. Matt Lauder
Yeah.
- [02:56]
Dr. Claire Aubin
He did also threaten to edit, to edit out anything mean that we said about him. So who knows if listeners are even hearing this. Let's get into what we're actually here for. Who are we talking about today?
- [03:10]
Dr. Matt Lauder
Well, you know, as probably most people who've been on this show with you already, Claire, there's a, there was a, there was a sort of longish list of people. I think just to be an academic you have to have, you know, people whose work you're engaging with in a kind of critical way. And many of those people whom we criticize suck. But I guess like one guy like looms particularly large over my field insofar as he kind of determines the questions I get asked by journalists quite frequently, even more than a century since he died in 1909. So I, I want to talk to you today about Cesare Lombroso, the Italian criminologist working in, in Turin in Italy in about 1850 to, to 1890 odd and slightly afterwards.
- [04:04]
Dr. Claire Aubin
So he's known for a lot of things which you can kind of like take us through, but he's like allegedly the sort of first criminologist, or is one of these guys who coined the term criminology. Is that right?
- [04:17]
Dr. Matt Lauder
Yeah, he gets kind of like hailed as the father of criminology, kind of criminology as a modern science. He really was super influential in sort of setting up the methods of the early study of criminology, which is essentially a kind of, in his version and to today to some degree as well, a combination of psychology, psychiatry and sociology. You know, he's interested primarily in kind of what makes criminals tick and as we'll come to, what makes criminals different from us wonderful non criminal people. You know, the law abiding, good, solid, upstanding people of the world. You know, in order to do that, he developed a huge sort of body of literature. His most Famous book, I suppose is called the Criminal man, literally called the Criminal man, which was published in the 1870s, translated frequently or translated into English in 1911, went through several editions. His daughter also kind of took on his legacy. Yeah, like as I said, really kind of set the stage for the entire modern field of criminology.
- [05:32]
Dr. Claire Aubin
So much so that his, I think his brain, his head. His brain or his head is literally in the museum of Criminology and Psychiatry in Italy. Like you could see his brain slash head there, which is wild to me.
- [05:49]
Dr. Matt Lauder
Yeah, well, he, as we'll go and talk about, a huge part of his method was like, was literally measuring skulls. You know, he's the skull measuring guy or one of them. A huge part of his. Well, after he died he basically said, look, if I've been measuring people's skulls my whole life, I want my skull to be measured after I die. And so he left his skull for a measuring. I actually was trying to find, I was trying to find like. I was trying to find actually like what people discovered about measuring his skull. I wasn't actually. I'm sure that it is out there, but I wasn't able to locate that information in time to talk about it on today's show. But you know, he, I guess he believed that, you know, his head was not indicative of, of anything other than good upstanding, non criminal behavior. You know, he sort of stood by.
- [06:34]
Dr. Claire Aubin
That for those at home who sort of don't understand this whole skull measuring thing. So Lombroso is a phrenologist, which is, or a sort of proponent of phrenology, which is the study of people's skulls in order to determine their sort of internal personality characteristics. Like the. Using calipers, which is like a measuring instrument which now is like a sort of a funny thing like get out the calipers. Because it's, it's just something we use to say for someone being essentially racist. It was this thing where people would measure your skull and they could say based on the distance between your eyes, you're more likely to be a kind person or a murderer or stupid or whatever it is in order to sort of establish a relationship between your appearance and your internal characteristics, your personality, your, the likelihood of you engaging in certain behavior years, etc.
- [07:29]
Dr. Matt Lauder
Yeah, well, so you know, the idea that what you looked like determined what kind of person you are is like very, very old idea indeed. Like goes back to the ancient world and you know, there's long been a kind of. I mean it's in the Bible, right? This idea that there's some kind of reflection of your moral character to be found on your. On your body. You know, phrenology has antecedent sciences. Science is an inverted commas of, you know, physiognomy. And basically this idea that you could. You basically could tell, as you said, like, what kind of person you are based on what you look like. But Lombroso is coming to his sort of scientific career, if you like, at a time when those really ancient ideas are becoming kind of part of the modern scientific method set. Right. When, you know, in the kind of 19th century, with industrialization and the birth of kind of modern positivist science, Lombroso is sort of taking those very, very old and in some senses, quite kind of intuitive ideas, I suppose, and trying to apply to them, like modern statistical methods and also modern ideas about inheritance and genetics, as we call it today. Post Darwin. He's also working at a time when European colonialism is really kind of taking another gear. And his work is both driving and responding to those new kinds of scientific racism that are occurring in the context of colonialism in North Africa and in the Pacific.
- [09:12]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. And this is really a moment, and this happens obviously, even now, but this is a moment where there is a desire to really quantify and find in hard science, find things like prejudice or find a sort of scientific, unambiguous, concrete reason for things that exist, like racial prejudice. And so this idea of creating science that, like, allows these prejudices to exist and continue is really popular at that time, like, for. In a lot of different ways and by a lot of different people.
- [09:48]
Dr. Matt Lauder
Right. And. And. And, you know, I. One of the degrees that I run at Essex is a joint degree with American Studies in criminology. And often I interview students to come onto that program. And you say, why do you want to study criminology? And their answer is always like, I want to know what makes criminals tick. Right. And it should be. It should be said probably right up top that for all of his influence on the beginning of the field for a very long time, there has been a sense, I mean, even again, as we'll probably get into, or we will get into the. Even Lombroso's peers very quickly noticed some quite glaring methodological errors in his work. Right. And modern Lomborosian studies, I suppose, do sort of acknowledge those flaws. But I was, you know, I was kind of struck by. And this has been happening over the last sort of decade or so, there is a bit of an attempt to kind of rehabilitate at least some of his methods. I mean, there was a paper published back in 2017 by a scholar called Elisabetta Sigilvani at New York University in a journal of the history of medicine in Italy, where basically she says, and I'll read the abstracts of the paper. Like Italian physician and anthropologist Lombroso established her relations criminological sciences by introducing a biological theory of delinquency, which was later discredited and replaced by the sociological approach. The theory of the born criminal was poor in methods and analysis and turned out to be controversial in its formulations, assumptions, and mostly its predictions. However big, however lads, recent research in behavioral genetics and neuroscience has brought back some version of the Lombrosian idea by providing evidence for the genetic and biological correlates of criminality. This research has been impacting legal proceedings worldwide. And then she says to go on. On the one hand, this paper argues against the idea that contemporary theories are radically deterministic, while on the other hand, it aims at rehabilitating the intellectual image of Lombroso by showing the denigration of his brilliant work by his successors was unjustified.
- [11:50]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Oh, my God.
- [11:52]
Dr. Matt Lauder
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a huge amount of, like, contemporary behavioral genetics. And also, you know, there's lots of work kind of criticizing the Lombrosian nature of things like facial recognition algorithms in contemporary criminological and, you know, police work. So, yeah, these ideas are sticky and, you know, they have a huge kind of complicated intermix of prejudice and data and poor methods and, you know, desire to discover something that probably is worth discovering, which are the causes of criminality and antisocial behavior. But even though, again, to be totally fair on my criminological colleagues, most modern criminology has understood that the Lombrosian skull measuring stuff is not actually the way to figure out what causes crime. There are huge amounts of evolutionary psychology, forensic science, forensic psychology as well, which, which want to kind of use different kind of tools to measure something in the body that is is imagined to give rise to delinquency.
- [13:01]
Dr. Claire Aubin
It seems like thus far there are kind of two categories of guys who sucked on the show so far. One who is kind of REM for not sucking, like, is revered in some way, but actually sucked. And then the other, and the latter category, which I think Lombroso falls into, is a guy who is not publicly remembered or revered in any massive way or outside of their field and really sucked or in some way kind of set the conditions for life as we now know it through the way that they sucked. And I think he falls into that category in that most people will not be familiar with him, but he messed a lot of stuff up for a lot of people. And so I think it's important also to talk a little bit about how he gets to the point where he starts working on this stuff. So like you said, he's Italian, he's born in Verona, he had medical training, he went to medical school at the University of Pavia in Italy. In 1859 he became an army surgeon. And then about seven years later, he became a visiting lecturer at the university where he did his medical training. So he has like a sort of level of, sort of credential and like respect already at that point. In 1871, he becomes the head of Pesaro, also Italian, their insane asylum. And this is where I think his personal, personal suckitude kind of ascends. And that's where he, because he starts with some of this stuff earlier and then after he starts heading this insane asylum and particularly for the sort of like criminally insane, that's where a lot of this stuff really, really begins. He begins studying the physical bodies of the criminally insane and becomes a sort of criminal anthropologist. And that's sort of how he shapes his life from there on out. In 1878, he moves to Turin, becomes a professor of forensic medicine and hygiene. And that is the moment in which he writes his book Criminal man, which you mentioned earlier. He also has a follow up book called Criminal Woman. Because it's different.
- [14:53]
Dr. Matt Lauder
Well, no. So the thing with the Criminal Woman book, I mean, it's so interesting. So again, as we'll talk about, like his basic theory is that criminals are a sort of lesser subspecies of human being. Right. It's basically his theory which has kind of causes and implications that we'll get into. But he also thinks that in some senses women are a lower form of life than men. But at the same time. Right. So at the same time women commit crime at less, lower rates than men and did do even in the 19th century. And so he's got these two conflicting theories of like lesser beings are more likely to commit crime. And he has a kind of teleological, evolutionary or pseudo evolutionary argument underpinning that right away. He thinks that the, the less evolved you are, I mean, so many air quotes around all these words for people listening without benefit of video. Like he believes basically the less evolved you were, the more kind of atavistic and primitive a type you were, the more inclined to criminal behavior you were. But he also believed that women were closer to that than men. But also, that doesn't fit with the other part of his. The other leg of his theory that the women commit crime less, less frequently. So he ends up like he's got to pick racism or misogyny, and he sort of. He can't quite deal with it.