Nationalism and Culture (53 page)

RACE RESEARCH AND RACE THEORY. CONCERNING THE UNITY OF THE GENUS MAN. THE ALLEGED ORIGINAL RACES OF EUROPE. CONCERNING THE CONCEPT "RACE." THE DISCOVERY OF THE BLOOD-GROUPS AND THE RACE. PHYSICAL CHARACTERS AND MENTAL QUALITIES. GOBINEAU'S THEORY OF THE INEQUALITY OF THE RACES OF MEN. THE ARYANS. HISTORY AS RACE CONFLICT. RACE THEORY AND SEIGNORIAL RIGHT. CHAMBERLAIN'S RACE THEORIES. CHAMBERLAI N AND GOBINEAU. THE GERMAN AS THE CREATOR OF ALL CULTURES. CHRIST AS A GERMAN. PROTESTANTISM AS A RACE RELIGION. "GERMANDOM" AND "JEWDOM" AS OPPOSITE POLES. THE POLITICAL ENDEAVORS OF CHAMBERLAIN. LUDWIG WOLTMANN'S THEORY. RACE THEORY AND HEREDITY. THE INFLUENCE OF THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT. MODERN RACE THEORIES. THE "RACE SOUL." RACE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GERMAN BEARERS OF CULTURE. THE POWER OF ACQUIRED CHARACTERS. HUNGER AND LOVE. RACE IN THE WORLD WAR. THE NORDIC THEORY. DENUNCIATION OF OTHER RACES. THE CONSEQUENCES OF A DELUSIVE CONCEPTION. CONTRADICTIONS IN MODERN RACE LITERATURE. MEN AND IDEAS IN THE LIGHT OF RACE THEORY. RACE AND POWER.

BESIDES the concepts already discussed concerning the character of the nation there is another which today is very clamorous and has gained many adherents, especially in Germany. We are here speaking of "community of blood" and of the alleged influence of race on the structure of the nation and on its spiritual and cultural creative endowment. From the very beginning we must make here a clear distinction between purely scientific investigations concerning the origin of races and their special characteristics, and the so-called "race theories" whose advocates have ventured to judge the mental, moral and cultural qualities of particular human groups from the real or imaginary physical characteristics of a race. The latter undertaking is extremely risky, inasmuch as we are quite uncertain not only of the origin of races, but of the origin of men in general, and have to rely solely upon hypotheses, not knowing how far they correspond to reality, or fail to do so.

Scientific authorities are not agreed in their opinions as to the age of the human race. It was some time before they were willing to place the first appearance of man on earth as far back as the Glacial Epoch. However, the opinion is lately gaining ground that man's past can be traced back to the Tertiary Period. We are also completely in the dark concerning man's original home. Decided differences of opinion among the most noted representatives of biological science have again been brought sharply to the front during recent years by the results of the Cameron-Cable expeditions in South Africa and the Roy Chapman Andrews American expedition in Outer Mongolia. The question also remains unanswered whether the appearance of mankind was confined to a definite region or occurred in various parts of the earth approximately at the same time. In other words, whether the genus Man sprang from a single stem and the differences of race were subsequently caused by migrations or changes in the external conditions of life, or whether difference of race was due to descent from different stems from the very beginning. Most researchers today still maintain the standpoint of monogenesis and are of the opinion that mankind goes back to a single original source and that race distinctions appeared only later through change of environment. Darwin maintained this point of view when he said: "All human races are so immensely closer to one another than to any ape that I am inclined to view them as descending from a single form." What has caused prominent men of science to adhere to the unity of the human species is principally the structure of the human skeleton, which determines the whole bodily formation, and which among all races shows an astonishing similarity of structure.

To all these difficulties must be added the fact that we are not at all clear about the concept of "race," as is seen from the arbitrary way men have played about with the classification of existing races. For a long time we were content with the four races of Linnaeus j then Blumenbach produced a fifth and Buffon a sixth; Peschel followed at once with a seventh and Agassiz with an eighth. Till at length Haeckel was talking of twelve, Morton of twenty-two, and Crawford of sixty races—a number which was to be doubled a little later. So that as respectable a researcher as Luschan could with justice assert that it is just as impossible to determine the number of the existing races of men as of the existing languages, since one can no more easily distinguish between a race and a variety than between a language and a so-called dialect. If a white North European is set be-'kie a Negro and a typical Mongolian the difference is clear to any layman. But if one examines thoroughly the countless gradations of these three races one reaches a point at last where one cannot say with certainty where one race leaves off and the other begins.

The Gothic word, reizza, really had only the meaning of rift or line.^ In this sense it found admission into most European languages where it gradually was called upon for the designation of other things and still is. Thus in English we understand by "race" not only a specific animal or human group with definite hereditary physical characteristics, but the word is also used for contests in speed, as for instance, horse-race. Also we speak of the race of life, and a mill-race. In France, the word acquired, among other meanings, also a political meaning, as applied to the succession of the various dynasties. Thus the Merovingians, the Carolingians and the Capets were spoken of as the first, the second and the third race. In Spanish and Italian also, the word has a similar variety of meanings. Later, it was used mainly by breeders of animals—until gradually it became the fashionable slogan for particular political parties. Thus we have become used to connect the word race with a concept which is itself unclear. As eminent an anthropologist as F. von Luschan dared to say: ". . . yes, the word race itself has more and more lost its meaning and had best be abandoned if it could be replaced by a less ambiguous word."

Since the discovery of the famous human skeletal remains in Neanderthal (1856) scientific research has made about a hundred similar discoveries TrTvarious parts of the earth, all of which are traceable to the Glacial Age. We must, however, not overestimate the knowledge gained from them, for nearly all are single specimens with which no certain comparisons can be made. Besides, bone remnants alone give us no idea whatsoever concerning the skin color, hair and superficial facial structure of these prehistoric men. From the skull structure of these human specimens only one thing can be stated with a certain degree of definiteness, namely, that in these discoveries we are dealing with at least three different varieties, which have been named after the places where they were discovered. So we now speak of a Neanderthal race, an Aurignac race and a Cro-Magnon race. Of these, the Neanderthal man seems to have been the most primitive, whereas the Cro-Magnon man, both from his skull structure and the tools discovered, seems to have been the most developed scion of the European population at that time.

In what relationship these three races—assuming that we are really dealing with races—stood to each other and where they came from, no one knows. Whether the Neanderthalers really originated in Africa and emigrated to Europe, or whether they had inhabited great sections of our continent for thousands of years until about 40,000 years ago they were driven out by the immigrating Aurignac race, as Klaatsch and Heilborn assumed, is of course only hypothesis. It is equally questionable vA^ether the Cro-Magnon man is in fact the result of a mixture of the Neanderthal

1 Some English philologists trace the verb "to write" to reizza, as it originally meant to mark something.

and the Aurignac man, as some investigators have assumed. Entirely mistaken is the attempt to derive the present European races from these three "original" races, since we cannot know whether in these varieties we are really dealing with original racial types or not. Most probably not.

Not only in Europe are pure races wanting j we also fail to find them among the so-called savage peoples, even when these have made their homes in the most distant parts of the earth, as, for example, the Eskimos or the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. Whether there were once "original races" can hardly be affirmed today j at least our present state of knowledge does not justify us in making definite assertions which lack all convincing proof. From this it appears that the concept of race does not describe something fixed and unchangeable, but something in a perpetual state of flux, something continually being made over. Most of all we must beware of confusing race with species or genus, as is unfortunately so often done by modern race theorists. Race is only an artificial classification concept of biological science used as a technical device for keeping track of particular observations. Only mankind as a whole constitutes a biological unit, a species. This is proved primarily by the unlimited capacity for crossbreeding within the genus man. Every sexual union between offspring of the most widely different races is fruitful j also unions of its progeny. This phenomenon is one of the strongest arguments for the common origin of human kind.

With the discovery of the so-called blood groups it was at first believed that the problem of race had been solved j but here, too, the disillusionment followed swiftly. When Karl Landsteiner had succeeded in proving that men can be distinguished according to three different blood groups, to which Jansky and Moss added a fourth, it was believed that this difference in the blood, a fact of great importance especially for medical science, would establish the existence of four primary races. But it was soon discovered that these four blood groups can be found among all races, though blood group three is rare among American Indians and Eskimos. Above all, it was shown that a long-skulled blond with all the marks of the Nordic race may belong to the same blood group as a dark-skinned Negro or an almond-eyed Chinese. Doubtless a very sad fact for those race theorists who have so much to say about the "voice of the blood."

The majority of race theoreticians maintain that so-called "race characteristics" are a heritage created by nature itself unaffected by external life conditions and are transferred unchanged to the progeny, providing that the parents are racially related. Hence, the race destiny is a blood-fate which none can escape. By race characteristics we mean primarily the shape of the skull, the color of the skin, the special kind and color of the hair and eyes, the shape of the nose, and the size of the body. Whether these characteristics are indeed so "inalienable" as race theorists maintain.

whether they can really be changed only by crossing of races, or whether natural or social environment cannot also effect a change of purely physiological race characteristics, is for science a chapter far from closed.

How the special characteristics of the various races originally appeared we can today only guess, but in all probability they were in one way or another acquired by a change in the natural environment—a view held today by the most prominent anthropologists. There exist already quite a number of established facts from which it appears that physical race characteristics may be changed by external life conditions and the change inherited by the descendants. In his excellent work. Race and Culture^ Friedrich Hertz records the experiments with mollusks and insects by the two researchers, Schroder and Pictet, who by changes in environment succeeded in altering the nutritional instincts, mode of ovulation and of pupation, and the procreative instinct so thoroughly that the changes were transmitted by inheritance, even though the modified conditions were later removed. The experiments which the American scholar. Tower, made with the Colorado beetle are well known. Tower exposed the insects to colder temperatures and by these and other influences succeeded in effecting a change in certain characteristics which also were inherited by the progeny.

E. Vatter records the experiences of the Russian anthropologist Ivanowsky during the three-year famine period in Russia after the war. Ivanowsky had made measurements of 2,114 "len and women from the most varied parts of the country at half-yearly intervals, so that every individual was examined six times. Thereby it was discovered that the cross-section of the body was reduced an average of four to five centimeters, and the circumference of the head as well as its length and breadth was reduced and the cephalic index changed. This was true among the Great Russians, as also among the White and Little Russians, Syrians, Bashkirs, Kalmucks, and Kirgizes. (Among the Armenians, Grusians, and Crim-Tartars it was raised.) Likewise, the percentage of shortheads had increased, and the nasal index had become smaller. According to Ivanowsky, "The unchangeableness of anthropological types is a fable." ^

Change of food, of climate, influence of higher temperatures, greater humidity, and so on, unquestionably result in alterations of certain body characteristics. Thus the well-known American anthropologist, F. Boas, was able to prove that the skull formation of the descendants of immigrants showed a marked change in America, so that, for instance, the descendants of shortheaded Oriental Jews became longer-headed, and the long-headed Sicilians became shorter-headed j the skull, that is, tends to assume a certain form of cross-section.^ These results are the more

^ Ernst Vatter, Die Rassen und Volker der Erde. Leipzig, 1927, p. 37. ^ F. Boas in Die Zeitschrift fiir Ethnotogie, 1913; Band 45. Compare also the same author's Kultur und Rasse. Zweite Auflage, Berlin, 1922.

remarkable because they deal with a change in bodily characteristics which can only be explained by the action of external influences on the so-called "hereditary purity of the race." Of quite especial, and in its results as yet quite incalculable, significance are the results achieved in late years by the action of Roentgen and cathode rays. Experiments made at the University of Texas by Professor J. H. Miller yielded results which lead us to anticipate a complete revolution in theories of heredity. They not only prove that artificial interference with the life of the germ-mass leading to a controlled change in the race characteristics is possible, but also that by such experiments the creation of new races can be effected.