The Decline and Fall of Civilisations

by Kerry Bolton

  “A race does not migrate. Men migrate, and their successive generations are born in ever-changing landscapes; but the landscape exercises a secret force upon the plant-nature in them, and eventually the race-expression is completely transformed by the extinction of the old and the appearance of a new one. Englishmen and Germans did not migrate to America, but human beings migrated thither as Englishmen and Germans, and their descendants are there as Americans”.35

  Spengler accepted the race-forming force of the landscape in changing the physiology and soul. He referred to studies that had shown that “Whites of all races, Indians and Negros have come to the same average in size of body and time of maturity, referring to the studies of American anthropologist Franz Boas that indicated the impact of environment on the change in skull shape of American-born children of Sicilian and German-Jewish migrants. Spengler stated that assumptions should not be made about race based on ancient skulls, such as those of the Etruscans, Dorians and others.36 These views more than any other make the acceptance of Spengler problematic for Right-wing zoological materialists. Spengler wrote that “of all expressions of race, the purest is the House”, expressing the “prime feeling of growth” of a race.37 Hence, Spengler studied the meaning of Doric columns, the domed mosque, and Gothic spires, each expressing the soul of a civilisation more so than cranial angles.

  Carl Jung on Race-Formation

  Carl Jung (Swiss born) developed a German School of Psychology, as there is a German School of Political Economy (Friedrich List), and a German School of Cultural Morphology (Spengler). “Analytical psychology” was Jung’s answer to the materialistic “psycho-analysis” of his mentor Sigmund Freud. Jung wrote of his visit to the USA that he was struck by the metaphysical impress of the land on race-formation, referring, like Spengler, to Boas’ studies:

  “In 1909 I paid my first short visit to the United States… I remember, when walking through the streets of Buffalo, I came across hundreds of workmen leaving a factory. The naïve European traveller I was then could not help remarking to his American companion: ‘I really had no idea there was such an amazing amount of Indian blood in your people.’ ‘What,’ said he, ‘Indian blood? I bet there is not one drop of it in this whole crowd.’ I replied: ‘But don’t you see their faces? They are more Indian than European.’ Whereupon I was informed that probably most of these workmen were of Irish, Scottish, and German extraction without a trace of Indian blood in their veins. I was puzzled and half incredulous. Subsequently I learned to see how ridiculous my hypothesis had been. Nevertheless, the impression of facial similarity remained and later years only enhanced it. As Professor Boas maintains, there are even measurable anatomical changes in many American immigrants, changes which are already noticeable in the second generation”.38

  Jung continued explaining, as did Spengler, that the impress of the landscape moulds race. In the footsteps of the German Idealists, Jung alluded to the spirit of the land:

  “To a keen European eye there is an indefinable yet undeniable something in the whole makeup of the born American that distinguishes him from the born European.

  “Man can be assimilated by a country. There is an x and a y in the air and in the soil of a country, which slowly permeate and assimilate him to the type of the aboriginal inhabitant, even to the point of slightly remodelling his physical features.

  “The foreign country somehow gets under the skin of those born in it. Certain very primitive tribes are convinced that it is not possible to usurp foreign territory, because the children born there would inherit the wrong ancestor spirits who dwell in the trees, the rocks, and the water of that country. There seems to be some subtle truth in this primitive intuition. That would mean that the spirit of the Indian gets at the American from within and without. Indeed, there is often an astonishing likeness in the cast of the American face to that of the Red Indian”.39

  Not only is there an impress on the physical by metaphysical forces, but there is an impact on the collective psyche, or group memory:

  “The external assimilation to the peculiarities of a country is a thing one could almost expect. There is nothing astonishing in it. But the external similarity is feeble in comparison with the less visible but all the more intense influence on the mind. It is just as though the mind were an infinitely more sensitive and suggestible medium than the body. It is probable that long before the body reacts the mind has already undergone considerable changes, changes that are not obvious to the individual himself or to his immediate circle, but only to an outsider. Thus I would not expect the average American, who has not lived for some years in Europe, to realize how different his mental attitude is from the European’s, just as I would not expect the average European to be able to discern his difference from the American. That is the reason why so many things that are really characteristic of a country seem to be merely odd or ridiculous: the conditions from which they arise are either not known or not understood. They wouldn’t be odd or ridiculous if one could feel the local atmosphere to which they belong and which makes them perfectly comprehensible and logical”.40

  Jung proceeds to describe the national spirit.

  “Almost every great country has [what] one might call its genius or spiritus loci. Sometimes you can catch it in a formula, sometimes it is more elusive, yet nonetheless it is indescribably present as a sort of atmosphere that permeates everything. ... In a well-defined civilization with a solid historical background, such as for instance the French, you can easily discover the keynote of the French espirit: it is an ‘a glorie,’ a most marked psychology in its noblest as well as its most ridiculous forms.

  “The old European inheritance looks rather pale beside these vigorous primitive influences. Have you ever compared the sky-line of New York or any great American city with that of a pueblo like Taos? And did you see how the houses pile up to towers towards the centre? Without conscious imitation the American unconsciously fills out the spectral outline of the Red Man’s mind and temperament.

  “There is nothing miraculous about this. It has always been so: the conqueror overcomes the old inhabitants in the body but succumbs to his spirit. Rome at the zenith of her power contained within her walls all the mystery cults of the East; yet the spirit of the humblest among them, a Jewish mystery society, transformed the greatest of all cities from top to bottom. The conqueror gets the wrong ancestor spirits, the primitives would say: I like this picturesque way of putting it. It is pithy and expresses every conceivable implication”. 41

  While German Idealism, through Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1893) gave Western philosophy the notion of Zeitgeist, or the “Spirit of the Age,” and volkgeist or “spirit of a people,” Jung refers here to the “spirit of a loci.” Since that time the Jewish culture has given a pervasive Jewish countenance to American culture, in addition to Negroid rhythm and Indian nomadicism. Of the Negro influence Jung observed:

  “Another thing that struck me was the great influence of the Negro, a psychological influence naturally, not due to the mixing of blood. ... The peculiar walk with loose joints, or the swinging of the hips so frequently observed in Americans, also comes from the Negro. American music draws its main inspiration from the Negro, and so does the dance”.42

  The USA has an inner primitivity behind the façade of Western technology. This difference between the inward substance and outward form of a culture Spengler referred to as pseudomorphosis,43 borrowing the word from geology. This bastardous chaos is celebrated throughout Western civilisation as “cultural enrichment”, and expressing a “common humanity”, but what occurs, when a synthesis cannot be reached giving impetus to something new and stronger, such as occurred with the Christianisation of Europe that created Western High Culture, is a culture-abortion, not a birth or rebirth. Of this fetish for the alien, Jung said, “This craving for things foreign and faraway is a morbid sign”.44 Jung continues:

  “[T]he American presents a strange picture: a European with Negro behaviour and an Ind
ian soul. He shares the fate of all usurpers of foreign soil. Certain Australian primitives assert that one cannot conquer foreign soil, because in it there dwell strange ancestor-spirits who reincarnate themselves in the new-born. There is a great psychological truth in this. The foreign land assimilates its conqueror. But unlike the Latin conquerors of Central and South America, the North Americans preserved their European standards with the most rigid puritanism, though they could not prevent the souls of their Indian foes from becoming theirs. Everywhere the virgin earth causes at least the unconscious of the conqueror to sink to the level of its indigenous inhabitants”.45

  Jung regarded the American White as different in both look and mentality from the European. He stated that Europeans find it difficult to tell what race a White American is when dressed in Indian garb, and Indians dressed as Whites. He believed this to be observable in other nations too, commenting that “Man can be assimilated by a country”. “That would mean that the spirit of the Indian gets at the American from within and without”.46 Jung saw the mind as being continually “moulded by earthly conditions”. He stated that a large population of Europeans transplanted to a strange soil and climate can be confidently expected to undergo psychic and perhaps bodily changes in the course of a few generations, without the admixture of “foreign blood”. Jung stated that this is observable in the differences among Jews, moulded by different localities, in spite of the similarity of race. Although difficult to define, the differences are readily felt by acute observers of human nature.47

  Jung stated that the “greatest experiment” in modern times was the settlement of a predominantly Germanic population to North America. Admixture with Indians did not play any role in the race-formation of the “Yankee”, yet Jung observed on his first visit to the USA, as cited above, that White Americans appeared so similar to Indians he had assumed there had been wide-scale racial admixture. He understood the “Indianisation” of Americans many years later when he analysed large numbers of American patients. “Remarkable differences were revealed in comparison to Europeans”, in terms of psyche.48

  The other influence on forming the “Americans” has been the Negro, again not through miscegenation; particularly on the emotions, and most apparent in the way that an American laughs, the loose jointed way of walking and the swinging of the hips. Negro influence could be seen already by Jung on American music, dance, the phenomenon of the “revival meeting” that was popular then, and other manifestations of religious feeling, the “ceaseless gabble” expressed in the manner of American newspapers, “more like the chattering of a Negro village” than the character of Germanic forebears. “The almost total lack of privacy and the all-devouring mass sociability remind one of primitive life in open huts where there is complete identity with all members of the tribe”, the open doors and the lack of hedges.49 Interestingly, because the Negro is a minority and did not threaten to engulf the White, as in Africa, Jung did not regard the Negro influence as necessarily negative, unless one had “jazz phobia”. Whether Jung would still be of the same opinion, with the excess primitivity that now dominates American culture, and its reach across the world, is another matter. Jung opined that while the Negro influence is shown on outward behaviour, the Indian influence impresses on the inner life of the psyche.50

  While the Negro manifested in the most superficial levels of the psyche in American patients, it is “only in very deep analysis” that Indian symbols appeared. This was so for example in the archetype of the “hero-motif” as an Indian.51 The “hero” archetype is man’s highest ideal. Jung compared the rigours of American sports training, in contrast to the European, to that of Indian initiation. He held the American virtues to be Indian virtues: tenacity and endurance towards goals.52

  Jung also saw the influence of the shaman (conjuror and medicine man) in American religious experiences such as Spiritualism and Christian Science, popular at the time, as manifestations of this Indian influence on the psyche. Both were forms of exorcism, the latter the exorcising of sickness.53 The “power word”, the magic of words expressed in advertising, was seen then by Europeans as peculiarly American, which Europeans then “laughed at”. Jung commented: “It is yet to be seen what America will do with it”. 54 “Thus the American presents a strange picture: a European with Negro behaviour and an Indian soul”.55

  The magic of words is now used to control the world. The “words of power” include “democracy, “human rights” and “progress”, which when uttered can strike the opposition mute.

  The impress of the land on the American character has been reflected in a certain American nomadism, observed in high levels of geographic mobility. Over the period of 1999-2000 43.4 million Americans moved house. Elazar saw a nomadic character in such mobility; “a compulsion to move about” that has created “a nation of restless wanderers unlike any in the world”, “scornful of that attachment to place that restrains the European”.56

  As Jung commented, such attachment is not only a restraint, but also a bond with the land, to form an ethnos moulded and sustained by group-memories and symbols, or what Jung called archetypes. Of these archetypes the British psychologist William McDougall wrote:

  “... each race and each people that has lived for many generations under or by a particular type of civilization has specialized its ‘collective unconscious’, differentiated and developed the ‘archetypes’ into forms peculiar to itself ... He [Jung] claims that sometimes a single rich dream has enabled him to discover the fact, say, of Jewish or Mediterranean blood in a patient who shows none of the outward physical marks of such descent…”57

  Count Hermann Keyserling, an important philosopher of Weimar era Germany, in close contact with Jung, writing of the “psychology of nations”, likewise asserted, at a time when the Hitlerites were on the rise, that “In Germany anyone who places the accent mark on blood rather than spirit is in the deepest sense of the word a racial alien and not the person in whose veins Nordic blood flows”. Jay Sherry states in his thesis on Jung that “Keyserling saw race as just one factor in the formulation of a philosophy of humanity that also included the spirit and the environment”.58 Keyserling, in critiquing National Socialist philosopher Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the 20th Century, wrote: “Rosenberg’s book made clear to me that National Socialism is, in its present form, basically hostile to the spirit.”59

  Place and Land in the Making of Culture

  G.W.F. Hegel, the philosopher-historian, wrote of the “World Spirit” which manifested through nature as peoples and nations, infused with a “soul” whose unique character is shaped by geography. Explaining the “geographical basis of history”, Hegel wrote:

  “Contrasted with the universality of the moral Whole and with the unity of that individuality which is its active principle, the natural connection that helps to produce the Spirit of a People, appears an extrinsic element; but inasmuch as we must regard it as the ground on which that Spirit plays its part, it is an essential and necessary basis. We began with the assertion that, in the History of the World, the Idea of Spirit appears in its actual embodiment as a series of external forms, each one of which declares itself as an actually existing people. This existence falls under the category of Time as well as Space, in the way of natural existence; and the special principle, which every world historical people embodies, has this principle at the same time as a natural characteristic. Spirit, clothing itself in this form of nature, suffers its particular phases to assume separate existence; for mutual exclusion is the mode of existence proper to mere nature. These natural distinctions must be first of all regarded as special possibilities, from which the Spirit of the people in question germinates, and among them is the Geographical Basis. It is not our concern to become acquainted with the land occupied by nations as an external locale, but with the natural type of the locality, as intimately connected with the type and character of the people which is the offspring of such a soil. This character is nothing more nor less than the mode and for
m in which nations make their appearance in History, and take place and position in it. …”60

  Hegel listed three primary geographical features that shape the soul of a people:

  “(1) The arid elevated land with its extensive steppes and plains.

  “(2) The valley plains — the Land of Transition permeated and watered by great Streams.

  “(3) The coast region in immediate connection with the sea.

  “These three geographical elements are the essential ones, and we shall see each quarter of the globe triply divided accordingly. The first is the substantial, unvarying, metallic, elevated region, intractably shut up within itself, but perhaps adapted to send forth impulses over the rest of the world; the second forms centres of civilization … ; the third offers the means of connecting the world together, and of maintaining the connection”.61

  The first, arid plains and steppes, are the abode of the Mongols, conducive to nomadism, although similar regions exist in Arabia and South America. The horse is central to the Mongols, for both nourishment (milk) and war.

  The valley plains traversed by rivers in such locations as Babylonia, Egypt, China and India. Here great states are formed, based on agriculture, in contrast to the nomads of the arid steppes and plains.

  The lands of coasts and rivers allow for ready communication and travel. Hegel refers to the character of coastal peoples in a manner that Spengler was to call “Faustian” for Western man:

  “The sea gives us the idea of the indefinite, the unlimited, and infinite; and in feeling his own infinite in that Infinite, man is stimulated and emboldened to stretch beyond the limited: the sea invites man to conquest, and to piratical plunder, but also to honest gain and to commerce. The land, the mere Valley-plain attaches him to the soil; it involves him in an infinite multitude of dependencies, but the sea carries him out beyond these limited circles of thought and action. Those who navigate the sea, have indeed gain for their object, but the means are in this respect paradoxical, inasmuch as they hazard both property and life to attain it”.62