Nationalism and Culture (54 page)

From all this it appears that bodily characteristics are by no means unchangeable and that a change can be effected even without racial crossbreeding. It is even more monstrous to infer mental and spiritual characteristics solely on the basis of bodily ones and deduce from them a judgment about moral worth. It is true that Linnaeus, in his attempts at a racial classification of humanity, took moral factors into consideration when he said:

The American is reddish, choleric, erect; the European, white, sanguine, fleshy; the Asiatic, yellow, melancholy, tough; the African, black, phlegmatic, slack. The American is obstinate, contented, free; the European, mobile, keen, inventive; the Asiatic cruel, splendor-loving, miserly; the African, sly, lazy, indifferent. The American is covered with tattooing, and rules by habit; the European is covered with close-fitting garments and rules by law; the Asiatic is enclosed in flowing garments and rules by opinion; the African is anointed with grease and rules by whim.

But Linnaeus was not in his scheme conforming to any political theories. The very naivete of mentioning tattooing, clothing and greasing of the body along with forms of government proves the innocence of his effort. But, however odd the notions of the Swedish naturalist may seem to us today, we still have no right to laugh at them in view of the shameful flood of so-called race literature that has rolled over us during the last two decades, with nothing better to offer than Linnaeus could say two hundred years ago. For when the Swedish scholar brought tattooing, clothes and greasy black bodies into combination with forms of government, he did far less harm than when today men try to deduce the capacity for culture, the character and the moral and spiritual disposition of the separate races from the color of their skins, the curve of their noses or the shape of their skulls.

The first attempt to explain the rise and fall of peoples in history as a play of race antagonisms was made by the Frenchman, Count Arthur Gobineau, who during his diplomatic career had seen many distant lands. He was a fairly prolific writer, but we are interested here only in his

magnum opus, Essai sur Vinegalite des races humaines ("Treatise on the Inequality of the Races of Men"), which first appeared in 1855. According to his own statement, the Parisian Revolution of February, 1848, gave Gobineau the first impulse toward the formulation of his ideas. He saw in the revolutionary occurrences of that time only the inevitable consequences of the great upheaval of 1789^^94, amid whose violent convulsions the feudal world fell in ruins. Concerning the causes of this collapse he had formed his own judgment. For him the French Revolution was nothing else than the revolt of the Celto-Romanic race mixture that for years and years had lived in intellectual and economic dependence on the Franco-Norman master caste. This caste was made up, according to Gobineau, of the descendants of those Nordic conquerors who had at one time invaded the country and subjected the Celto-Romanic population to their rule. It was this race with its blue eyes, its blond hair and its tall figure that held for Gobineau the sum-total of all mental and physical perfection, whose superior intelligence and strength of will in themselves guaranteed to it the role which it was, in his opinion, destined to play in history.

This idea was by no means entirely new. Long before the time of the French Revolution it had bobbed up in the minds of the aristocracy. Henr i de Boulainvilliers (1658-1722), author of an historical work which was not published until after his death, maintained that the French nobles of the ruling caste were descended from the Germanic conquerors, while the great mass of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry was to be regarded as the progeny of the conquered Celts and Romans. Boulainvilliers tried on the basis of this thesis to justify all the privileges of the nobles, in opposition to both the people and the king, and demanded for his class the right to keep the government of the country always in their hands. Gobineau adopted this theory, extending it considerably to apply to the whole of human history. But since he—as he himself once said—"believed only that which seemed to him worth believing," it happened inevitably that he pushed on to the most daring conclusions.

Just as Joseph de Maistre once declared that he had never met a human being, but only Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, and so on, so also Gobineau maintained that the abstract human being existed only in the minds of philosophers. In reality the human being is only the expression of the race to which he belongs; the Voice of Blood is the Voice of Fate, from which no people can escape. Neither the climatic environment nor the social conditions of life have any influence worth mentioning on the constructive power of peoples. The driving force in all culture is race, above all the Aryan race, which even under the most unfavorable conditions is capable of the greatest achievements so long as it avoids mixture with less worthy racial elements. Following the classification of the French naturalist, Cuvier, Gobineau distinguished three great racial groups, the

white, the yellow and tbj? black. Each, according to Gobineau, represented a separate experiment of God in the creation of manj God had begun with the Negro, coming round at last to the creation of the White Man in His own image. Among .these three great racial groups there existed no inner relationship, since they were descended from different stems. Everything outside of these three basic races was racial mixture—for Gobineau, mongreldom—which had come into being by interbreeding of white, yellow and black.

It is clear that in Gobineau's opinion the white race is far superior to the other two. It is in the best sense a "noble race," for besides its physical beauty it possesses also the most distinguished mental and spiritual qualities—above all, mental breadth of view, superior capacity for organization, and in particular that inner urge of the conqueror which is entirely lacking in the yellow and black races and which gives to the Aryans alone in history the power to found great states and civilizations.

Gobineau distinguishes ten great culture periods in history, which include all the significant epochs in human civilization, and attributes them exclusively to the activity of the Aryan race. The origin, development and decay of these great epochs constitute, according to his understanding, the entire content of human history j for civilization and degeneration are the two poles about which all events turn. Gobineau, to whom the idea of organic evolution was entirely unknown, tried to explain the rise and decay of the great civilizations by the degeneration of races, or rather, of the ruling race, since for him the mass of less important beings which constitutes the great majority in every state exists only for the purpose of being governed by the racially pure conquerors. Changes in social relationships and institutions are to be attributed solely to changes of race. The decay of a dominion and its culture occurs when a great deal of other blood is mixed with that of the conquerors' caste. From this ensues not only an alteration in external race characteristics, but also a change in the spiritual and mental impulses of the master race which leads to gradual or rapid decay. In this inner decay of the noble race is found the final and authentic explanation of the decline of all great cultures.

The stronger the component from the white race in the blood of a people, the more prominent will be its cultural activity, the greater its power of building a state; while too strong an infusion of Negro or Mongolian blood undermines the creative cultural characteristics of the old race and gradually brings about its inner dissolution. In contrast with Chamberlain and most of the exponents of modern race theories, Gobineau was thoroughly pessimistic about the future. He could not escape the conclusion that the Germanic race, this "last bud upon the Aryan stem," as he called it, was doomed to inevitable destruction. The wide dissemination of republican and democratic ideas seemed to him an unfailing sign

of inner decayj they foretold the victory of "mongreldom" over the Aryan Noble Race. According to Gobineau only a monarchy can accomplish anything lasting, since it contains in itself the basic law of its being, while a democracy is always dependent on external powers and so can do nothing important. Only the degenerate blood of the mixed race demands democracy and revolution. On this point Gobineau is close to the views o f Joseph ^e Maistre, the standard-bearer of reaction, with whom he has much else in common^ including actually hair-raising distortion of historical facts and almost inconceivable naivete of ideal interpretations. Although de Maistre found the root of all evil in Protestantism, it came to the same thing in the end, for democracy was for de Maistre^jpolitical v ariety of Protestantism.

On one point Gobineau is sharply at issue with all later advocates of the race theory: he has no sympathy with nationalistic ambitions and regards the notion of the "fatherland" with outspoken antagonism. Because of his aversion to everything that savored of democracy no other position was possible. Then, too, it was from the French Revolution that the idea of the fatherland and the nation received the special imprint they bear today. This was enough to make Gobineau despise it as a "Canaanitish abomination" which the Aryan race had, against its will, taken over from the Semitic. As long as Hellenism had remained Aryan, the idea of the fatherland had been entirely alien to the Greeks. But as the intermixture with the Semites progressed farther and farther, monarchy had to give place to the republic. The Semitic element impelled toward absolutism, as Gobineau put it; still the Aryan blood which was still active in the mixed race of the later Greeks was opposed to personal despotism such as was common in Asia and arrived logically at the despotism of an idea—the idea of the fatherland.

On this point Gobineau is thoroughly consistent: his hostility to the idea of the fatherland is the immediate and deliberately derived product of his race theory. If the nation were in fact a community of descent, a race-unity, then the race instinct must be its strongest cementing material. If, however, it is made up of the most varied race constituents—a fact which no race theorist dares to dispute—then the notion of race must act on the concept of the nation like dynamite and blow to bits its very foundation. More talented and imaginative than any of his successors, Gobineau recognized clearly the opposition between race and nation j and between the pure-race ruling stfatum of the nation and the "mongreldom" of the great masses he had drawn a sharp line which our nationalistically inclined race theorists have tried in vain to bridge over. The notion that the great masses of the nation are merely Helots who must without choice submit to the rule of a privileged caste determined by blood is in fact the greatest danger to national cohesion.

The admirers of Gobineau have tried to account for the master's attitude on this point by explaining that he cherished in his mind an ideal fatherland corresponding to his innermost feeling and that he did not fail to take into account that patriotic need which is said to dwell in every man. But such an explanation is without value. If man can arbitrarily set up for himself the fiction of an ideal fatherland, that merely proves that the notions of the fatherland and the nation are fictitious concepts which can be drilled into the individual and can at any time be driven out by other fictions. Gobineau was a fanatical opponent of the equality of human rights i therefore the Revolution appeared to him as a desecration of divinely established order. His whole race ideology was merely the product of a profound wish: to implant in men a belief in the unalterability of social inequality. As Malthus had explained to the "superfluous" that life's table did not have places for all, so Gobineau wished to prove to the world that the enslavement of the masses is ordained by fate and is a law^ ojfjiature. Only when the instincts of the inFen'or mixed race begin to work in the blood of the master caste does the belief in the equality of everything in human form arise. For Gobineau this belief was an illusion which must lead irrevocably to the destruction of all social order.

Although little recognition was accorded Gobineau in his native France, even his purely literary work receiving less appreciation than it deserved, he exercised upon the development of race opinions elsewhere, especially in Germany, an influence that is not to be underestimated. Through his acquaintance with RichardJWagner, in whose home he first made the acquaintance of Schemann, the German biographer and translator of Gobineau, there was later formed the so-called "Gobineau Society" which looked after the dissemination of his work on race and further advanced the notions of the imaginative Frenchman to whom, in spite of all his scientific shortcomings, there cannot be denied a certain greatness which is entirely lacking in his later followers.

A much stronger influence on the development of the race doctrine in Germany, and also outside it, was exercised by the Englishman, Houston StewaiLChamberlain^ whose work. Die Grundlagen des ig. Jahrhunderts ("Foundations of the Nineteenth Century") (1899), was rather widely circulated. Chamberlain enjoyed the special favor of William II, whom he knew how to approach from his most vulnerable side. He compared William's reign to a "rising morning" and testified that he was "really the first emperor." For such bald flattery the present Lord of the Castle of Doom had a very receptive ear, so it could not fail that Chamberlain by high command advanced into the ranks of the great contemporary minds. The Grundlagen found a rapid sale among the members of the ruling caste in Germany. In order to assure for his work the widest possible circulation, a special fund was established j the Kaiser endorsed the work in

person and so became benefactor to many a German private or state library and to all the schools of the Reich. According to von Billow's malicious statement, William used to read whole sections of the book to the ladies of his court, until they fell asleep.

As a rule Chamberlain is regarded merely as the perfecter of Gobineau's race theory j emphasis, however, is always laid on his mental superiority. It is impossible to oppose such a view too strongly. Chamberlain was merely the beneficiary of Gobineau, without whom his Grundlagen would be unthinkable. No one who has carefully compared the two works can avoid this conclusion. Chamberlain first became acquainted with Gobineau's racial philosophy of history in the home of his father-in-law, Richard Wagner, and appropriated its essential features for his own work.