by Kerry Bolton
“Let us try to interpret the phenomenon described. If ethnoi are processes, then, when two dissimilar processes clash, interference will arise disturbing the rhythm of both components. The resulting association will be chimeric, which means unstable to outside effects and short-lived. Death of the chimeric system will entail annihilation of its components and extinction of the people involved in the system. Such is the general mechanism of the disruption of the pattern, but it has its exceptions, namely that with slackening of the original rhythms a new one sometimes arises, i.e. a new ethnogenctic inertial process. I shall not say yet what this is associated with, because this is too serious a matter to resolve as a side-issue.10 But endogamy is clearly necessary in order to maintain ethnic traditions, because the endogamous family passes on a developed stereotype of behaviour to a child, while an exogamous one passes on two stereotypes that mutually cancel each other out. Exogamy, which is not related at all to ‘social states’ and lies on a different plane, thus proves to be a factor of ethnogenesis, i.e. a real, destructive factor during contact on a superethnic level. And even in rare cases when a new ethnos develops in a zone of contact, it absorbs, i.e. annihilates, both of the former ones”.11
While it appears that Gumilev is proposing a zoological outlook on race, he rejects this. Ethnos and zoological race are distinct. Hence, differences are more marked between ethnoi than between zoological races. It is ethnos that expresses a “community of fate”, a sense of common past and future, built up around myths, customs and religions. Gumilev writes of this distinction between ethnoi and zoology, and reiterates the role played by geography in the formation of ethnoi:
“In conclusion, let me point out that in the example cited, and also in the overwhelming majority of cases, the racial principle plays no role. It is not a matter of somatic differences, but rather of behavioural ones, because the steppe dwellers, Tibetan hill men, and Chinese belonged to a single, first-order Mongoloid race, and it is obvious that, with closer approximation to second-order race, North Chinese are racially closer to Xiang-bi and Tibetans than to Southern Chinese. But the outward similarity of cranial indices, eye color, hair color, epicanthus, etc., has no significance for ethnogenetic processes.
“It is also obvious from the example adduced that the link between ethnos and topography, sometimes doubted, really exists. The Hunni, having seized the valley of the Huangho, pastured their cattle there; the Chinese acquired the arable, and built canals; but their hybrids, not having the skills of either cattle-herding or cultivation, predatorily fleeced neighbours and subjects, which led to the formation of long-fallow lands and restoration of the natural biocoenosis, although impoverished by the cutting down of forests and the killing of ungulates during the emperors hunts. Everything tallies.
“… [I]f an ethnos is the result of a long-lasting process of ethnogenesis, it is part of the biosphere of Earth, and since changes of terrain through the use of technique are linked with an ethnos, ethnology should be ranked among the geographical sciences although it draws its initial material from history in the narrow sense of the term, i.e. study of events in their connection and sequence”.12
Gumilev’s views have been considered here, albeit only partially, because he became an influential ethnologist even within the USSR, during the later phases when conservative elements of the nominally “Communist” state were looking for doctrinal foundations beyond Marxism. With the fall of the USSR Gumilev’s theories have gained widespread support, reaching into the highest echelons of the State.13 As Russia struggles for her place as leader of a post-Western dispensation, ethnogenesis is likely to provide a significant contribution to the post-Western world-view if Russia succeeds in fulfilling her culture-mission.
Gumilev referred to inherited “stereotypes of behaviour” of an ethnos, “the behavioural skills” according to geographical adaptation, handed down through generations. Although Gumilev was not a Spenglerian, his “rhythms” are analogous to Spengler’s life-cycles; ethnoi are analogous to Spengler’s non-zoological conception of “race”, and both considered geography as moulding ethnos. Gumilev refers to organic cycles similar to those of Spengler, based in Gumilev’s system on the influences of cosmic energies in affecting the life cycles of an ethnos, in a process called the “aging of the ethnos”: “Every ethnic system, like a living organism, passes the stage of adolescence (growth and expansion), maturity (maximum activity) and old age (decay and decomposition)”.14
The “Race-Forming Idea”
The German scholar Eric Voegelin published two books on race in Germany in 1933, the year of Hitler’s assumption to Government, which repudiated the genetic determinism of English thought. These were Race and State and The History of the Race Idea: From Ray to Carus.15 Voegelin explained the “race” concept in terms of the “race-soul” that pervades the entire body. Those who share this race-soul are members of the same “race”. He was writing in the tradition of the German Idealists, Fichte, Herder, et al. It is ironic that the “Nazis” adopted the English darwinian and French positivist materialistic conceptions of “race” from Houston Stewart Chamblerain16 and Arthur de Gobineau, rather than those of German Idealism.
Voegelin considered Othmar Spann (1878-1950), professor of economics and sociology at the University of Vienna, to have undertaken the only significant philosophical attempt at the time to examine the foundation of race as having social origins. Voegelin saw the merit of Spann’s theory in seeing race not as originating with biology but with an Idea. This race-forming Idea provides unity among those who possess it and is the medium by which spirit enters the material world. Race emerges and changes as the result of spiritual, not biological, laws. This is not to say that an individual can change his race as he changes his clothes (or gender) as is the vogue today, but that races are born, and their character changes, in the spiritual experiences of communities. Voegelin quotes Spann:
“It is the great founders of religions, sages, and rulers who impart to their peoples new religious life ..., who deeply stir up the people’s feeling for life. It is they who give new impetus to racial formation and thus succeed in changing the natural species image of man (das stammliche Artbild). The spiritual history of archetypal humanity is primarily religious history. It was Schelling who endeavoured to explain race formation from this point of view.17
Spann regarded ethnos or volk, as the basis of the organic, “spiritual community”, sharing a culture that provides the social bond.
Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854), German Idealist philosopher, similarly called the ideas that form individuals into a community the community’s myth. It is not the people, ethnos or race that create the myth but the myth that creates the ethnos. It is the ability of individuals to identify with this myth that shapes the common outlook cementing individuals into a community. Every ethnos has its formative myth. It is what defines that ethnos and what sustains it.
If there were ever an Australasian ethnos as there might be in future centuries, especially if conscious of common enemies in the region, the formative myth would be that of the Anzac. Russia’s ethnos and state-forming myth is the battle of Kulikovo Field against the Tatars in 1380. The Hebrews have their founding myth of Abram and his spiritual progeny chosen by Yahweh, an eternal covenant with God as a “chosen people”, with sustaining rites such as circumcision as a symbol of membership of the ethnos, and celebrations such as Passover. The Afrikaners were maintained as an ethnos by the myths of Blood River and “The Great Trek”.
Voegelin considered that the primacy of materialism in the sciences had obscured the understanding of race. Anthropology textbooks that define race without considering spirit are inadequate.18 Voegelin begins the Introduction to The History of the Race Idea with a discussion on ideas about physique. The race-idea had become dominated by the body-idea. This is a retrograde step, having replaced the theories of the German Idealists such as Herder who considered spirit. However, the study of external phenomena cannot comprehend the spiritu
al character of race.
Voegelin objected to the zoological materialism that dominated National Socialist race-theory in Germany. In this he was similar to other German conservatives such as Spengler. Voegelin rejected the notion that “the historical substance can be produced at will by industrious organizations for the breeding of racially pure bodies[...]. It is a nightmare to think that we should recognize the people whom we follow and whom we allow to grow close to us, not by their glance, speech, or comeliness (am Blick, am Wort und an der Gebaerde), but by their cranial index and the measured proportions of their extremities”.
Voegelin and other German conservatives rejected the materialism of National Socialist race-theory for reasons that also applied to their criticism of liberalism and Marxism. All three rejected the spiritual essence of man, although for National Socialism this was not an explicit rebellion against the spirit, and theorists continued to refer to “race souls”. Alfred Rosenberg,19 while rejecting the primacy of spirit in race-formation as proposed by Spengler and Voegelin, did not reject the existence of the race-soul. The National Socialist movement accepted something of the legacy of Fichte and Herder, although the English-led materialistic Zeitgeist represented by Darwin, Malthus and Galton predominated. Race was determined by callipers measuring nasal width, the cephalic index, and other physiological features.
Paul Carus (1852-1919) was, like Voegelin, a German scholar resident in the USA, who regarded darwinism and zoology as regressive methods for studying “race”. He believed that the West had erred in fracturing body, mind and spirit. Carus in The Rise of Man from the first lines called Darwin’s Descent of Man inadequate, being “one-sided”, because Darwin “attempts only to trace the physiological connection of man with a series of lower animals”.20
Ironically, considering Nietzscheanism is often synthesised with Social Darwinism in “Right-wing” race doctrines,21 Nietzsche was prompted to posit his “will-to-power” as the basis of evolution, contra Darwinism, which he regarded as that animalisation of man.22 He considered “natural selection” as more likely to produce bigger and better “brutes” than more and better artists, philosophers and saints.23
In questioning whether the Darwinian belief of “survival of the fittest” is an invariable law of evolution from lower to higher forms, Carus pointed out that “natural selection does not always favour the strongest and the best”. “The ablest flyers on the island are swept by the winds into the ocean, and only the weakest survive, those who are lacking in a special virtue, not the bravest, not the strongest, not the best!” This led Carus to consider the cyclic rise and fall of nations and peoples:
“There are also periods in history when society is radically corrupt and the spirit of the time makes it actually impossible for good men to exist and act morally. The evil influences of tyranny, of corruption or of hypocrisy sweep the brave, the courageous, the honest, the thinking out of existence and allow only the weak, the degenerate, the unthinking to remain. It is true that whatever nation falls under such a blight is doomed. Other nations will take her place, and indeed there have been a number of peoples entirely blotted out in such a way from the face of the globe. We have retrogressive as well as progressive adaptation, and in many cases adaptation is not a sign of progress either in the physical world, or the moral progress of human beings. The law of adaptation explains survival, but not progress”. 24
Carus was writing a decade before Spengler’s first volume of The Decline of The West was published in 1918. He referred to “periods in history” within “the spirit of the time”; the Zeitgeist which determines the character of what unfolds during an epoch. He points out change, adaptation or what we optimistically call “progress” is not synonymous with an upward reach towards the divine, but is more likely to be the reverse, having referred to the traditional religious beliefs in the divine origin of man that were assaulted by darwinism.25 Proper evolution, real “progress” is “tested” by the “growth of the soul.” The “soul-form” is a manifestation of how the organism “feels” towards its environment. Through this evolution of soul-form we are better able to comprehend “the laws of nature, the order of the cosmos, and its divinity”. “The test of progress, in one word, is the realization of truth, extensive as well as intensive, in the soul of man”.26 The more truth the soul comprehends, the more it “partakes of the divinity of its creator”. “It will come more and more in harmony with the cosmos, it will more and more conform to its laws, it will be more religious, the holier, the greater, the diviner, the higher it develops and the further it progresses”.27 Rejecting the assumptions of darwinists such as Thomas Huxley who insisted that civilisation arose from the triumph of brute force and the “survival of the fittest”, Carus stated that the normal state is one of mutual co-operation, manifested in family life and “social faculties”.28
It is the animalisation of man, his reduction to savagery in a raw competition for survival, that eliminates the divine spark. We see the same atavistic urge in Capitalism and Marxism, formulated as doctrines under the same Zeitgeist as Darwinism, to account for history as a “struggle” of contending economic forces; “class struggle” in the case of Marxism, individual struggle in the case of the Free Trade Manchester School, but darwinesque economic struggle nonetheless. England was the home of the economic Zeitgeist which reached it height during the 19th century, and while Marx is regarded as one of the leading so-called “Left-wing Hegelians” of his time, he rejected the spiritual basis of Hegel’s dialectics, and wrote Das Kapital as a resident of Britian, under the impress not of German Idealism but of English economics. Returning to Carus, who rejected such struggle as the basis of history at any level:
“The infuriated savage may be cruel to his enemies, but we must not forget that the fury with which he takes up the combat is prompted by the love of his wife and child, or of his whole tribe, and the rise of mankind would not have taken place without a growth of the more refined sentiments of sympathy, kindness, and love”.29
The collection of families becomes a tribe or a clan, which becomes an ethnos, uniting to overcome challenges, such as the taming of a river or the defeat of an enemy, to hold or take land and resources, and establish themselves in what Gumilev called the “ecological niche” that shapes and sustains an ethnos.
Spirit forms ethnos as a unit of history and culture, not zoology. The Maori race in New Zealand did not and still has not formed a superethnos, despite being confronted by foreign invaders. As separate ethnoi however, the Maori maintains his identity on traditional foundations in the midst of Western decay. These traditional premises are:
Each Maori traces his lineage to a canoe (waka).30
Each Maori identifies with a mountain.
Each Maori identifies with a river.
Hence Maori affinity is based on the inheritance of symbols. Even blood inheritance is predicated on the symbol of a canoe, regardless of genetic admixture. This elective affinity, recognised in New Zealand law in defining a Maori, draws much ridicule and criticism from those who object that many Maori are far more genetically European by zoological criteria. The ideal of many supposedly “conservative” New Zealanders of “One people, one nation, one law”, in forming a New Zealand ethnos from disparate elements is theoretically possible, but shows minimal indication in reality since the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, which was supposed by authority of British legal principles to make Maori and British a single ethnos.
Africans have not formed a superethnos in Africa. Tribalism predominates. Conversely, disparate races have formed ethnoi, such as Europeans, Indians and Africans in South and Central America. Afro-Americans have formed an ethnos via the shared experiences of slavery. However, “Americans” have not formed an ethnos. Nor has the Enlightenment liberal notion of the “social contract”, expressed by the American Constitution and Bill of Rights, welded an American superethnos from disparate ethnoi. The more likely prospect is for the American Enlightenment project at nation-building to break-
up into separate ethnoi that might not even act symbiotically unless confronted by a common enemy.
Spengler on Race-Formation
Spengler rejected the zoological conceptions of “race”. Spengler reiterated history, race and nation as manifestations of soul within the legacy of the German Idealists Herder, Fichte, Scheller, et al. Rootedness of families in landscape produces what Spengler called “race”, which he defined as “a character of duration”.31 This “conception of a morphology of world history”, “of the world-as-history in contrast to the morphology of the world-as-nature”,32 is important in considering the decline and fall of civilisations as an organic process of life cycles, which genetic interpretations overlook or discount.
Spengler in rejecting a zoological interpretation of history as well as a zoological categorisation of “race”, stated that “what I for the first time have pointed out is that ‘nation’, like state, art, mathematics, is only a term, that race-forms like art-forms are determined by the style of a culture and cannot as stationery substances be made the foundation of history”.33 Spengler, like Gumilev later in regard to the “ecological niche” of an ethnos, stated that “races” have a “plant-like” quality, insofar as “a race has roots”. “Race and landscape belong together. Where a plant takes root, there it dies also”. A race is permanently fixed in “its most essential characters of body and soul” to its home. If the race can no longer be found in its home, it has ceased to exist. 34