by Kerry Bolton
Here we see the character of the merchant-soldier-adventurer who built the empires of Western civilisation through both trade and heroism; the antithesis of the haggling market traders of the Orient and Levant. Hegel commented that “This is what exalts their gain and occupation above itself, and makes it something brave and noble”.63 The soul of the Westerner bordering the oceans is in contrast to that of Orientals likewise bordering oceans yet confined to land. One looks on the ocean as a challenge, the other as a hindrance:
“This stretching out of the sea beyond the limitations of the land, is wanting to the splendid political edifices of Asiatic States, although they themselves border on the sea — as for example, China. For them the sea is only the limit, the ceasing of the land; they have no positive relation to it”.64
Observing the differences within states of peoples according to the impact of upland and lowland geography, Hegel stated of the Persian, Chinese and Indian:
“First as to Geographical position, we see China and India, exhibiting as it were the dull half-conscious brooding of Spirit, in fruitful plains — distinct from which is the lofty girdle of mountains with the wandering hordes that occupy them. The inhabitants of the heights, in their conquest, did not change the spirit of the plains, but imbibed it themselves. But in Persia the two principles — retaining their diversity — became united, and the mountain peoples with their principle became the predominant element”.65
An ethno-psychology is formed by the land, sea and mountains, deserts, steppes and plains, which cause differences in temperament between sub-ethnoi within a super-ethnos. What gives unity to a people by synthesis or symbiosis of such varying ethnoi are the perceptions of common challenges, history, and enemies. Such common experiences transcend primitive tribal blood ties and form a “people”, whose collective experiences are passed along by mechanisms which are only recently being discovered to become a race-soul.
D. H. Lawrence came to similar conclusions as Jung and the German Idealists, referring to the “spirit of place”. Lawrence wrote:
“Every continent has its own great spirit of place. Every people is polarized in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland. Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars: call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality. The Nile Valley produced not only the corn, but the terrific religions of Egypt. China produces the Chinese, and will go on doing so. The Chinese in San Francisco will in time cease to be Chinese, for America is a great melting pot.
“There was a tremendous polarity in Italy, in the city of Rome. And this seems to have died. For even places die. The Island of Great Britain had a wonderful terrestrial magnetism or polarity of its own, which made the British people. For the moment, this polarity seems to be breaking. Can England die? And what if England dies?”66
Lawrence sought out a more genuine existence for the White race by looking at the surviving traditions of the non-white races, in particular the American Indians. This is the theme of The Plumed Serpent67 and The Woman Who Rode Away.68
Lawrence regarded the liberty and equality of the modern world as detaching modern man from the rhythms of the cosmos, which traditional peoples such as the Hopi attempted to maintain amidst the onslaught of a superficial civilisation. He wrote of the proffered freedom, the basis of American democracy that retards the American from finding an inner depth:
“Men are less free than they imagine; ah, far less free. The freest are perhaps least free. Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, Organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was”.69
The “freedom” that is a dogma of the Late West, called “democracy”, and “human rights”, is the freedom to escape from duty, identity, purpose, family, home, homeland, community; in the pursuit of the most superficial layers of the ego. The result is not ego-fulfilment, but dissatisfaction in trying to find an elusive yearning for meaning in what ultimately is selfishness, atomisation, and increasingly in the West leads to suicide, depression, and addiction.
“Environmentalism” and Communism
One of the primary misconceptions from those who oppose Liberal and Leftist theories on history and human nature is that they are dogmatically based on “environmentalism”. Liberals and Marxists are assumed to insist that human nature can be changed at will by changing the environment without regard to genetics. The example is that of Lysenko, the Soviet Russian agronomist who theorised that the characteristics of plants could be changed by altering the environment, and that the changes would be conveyed to subsequent generations. Because such theories rejected the laws of genetic inheritance they were elevated to the status of Soviet dogma in the fight against “fascist science”. The Amercian-Jewish anthropologists Franz Boas, who had numerous Left-wing affiliations, considered the landscape to be of such impact that it could change the skull shape of first generation Sicilian and Jewish immigrant children born in the USA. This is condemned by the Right as typically communistic yet, as we have seen, the conservatives Oswald Spengler and Carl Jung had similar views regarding the impact of landscape on race and cited Boas’ studies. For this they are criticised by Right-wing genetic determinists.
This Right-wing characterisation of Liberal and Marxist theories on environmentalism is inaccurate. Rather, “environmentalism” has been vehemently rejected by the Left precisely because it affirms rather than negates the influence of “biologism”. This is also why “epigenetics”, as will be seen, is problematic for the Left.
The Liberal and Marxist dogmas insist that humankind is, uniquely, totally divorced from nature, including geography. Although Lysenko’s plant environmentalism was imposed as official state dogma in the USSR because it taught that genetics is irrelevant to plant breeding, it was not claimed that this proved human characteristics were also changed geographically. Such a notion implied there are biological laws at work that transcend laws of social production. Classical Leftist theory states that the laws of social production – Marxist “dialectal materialism” – are solely responsible for shaping history and human characteristics. While Marx was one of the primary “Hegelians of the Left”, this Hegelian Leftism required the repudiation of two primary elements of Hegel’s philosophy: “spirit” as the animator of nature, and nature as the animator of race and history. History is only impelled by changes in social production, according to Marxism. Marx wrote of this:
“In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society — the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. …”70
The genesis of an ethnos through the collective overcoming of the geographical challenges of oceans, rivers, steppes, mountains, deserts, jungles, cannot be accepting as the driving force of history by Marxism, because these factors render social production subsidiary rather than determinative. While Marx saw capitalism as being responsible for what he called a “metabolic rift” between man and nature, which has recently provided justification for a belated Marxist entry i
nto the “green” movements, the theory does not relate to the environmental role in race-formation and history. What is called “Marxist geography” examines geography again from the viewpoint of social production.
Since the implosion of the Soviet Union, the geographical formation of race has become a significant influence on scholarship and politics. However this ethnogenesis had been established as a field of research during the Soviet years by Dr. Lev Gumilev. He endured considerable opposition despite his references to Engels and use of occasional Marxist terminology.
The Communists critiqued ethnogenesis as a form of biologism that undermined dialectical materialism. F. V. Konstantinov, a leading Soviet philosopher, wrote that humankind was not subject to the laws of the natural world:
“Human society is the highest link in the general chain of development of the material world. It represents a specific part of the material world with its special laws of movement and development that apply to it alone… The movement of society is subject to laws that are different from the laws of the natural world”.71
Joseph Stalin rejected the geographical impact on history, because social development is “incomparably faster” than geographical changes, and cannot be the “principal cause for directing social development”.72 “Geographical materialism”, like genetics, was condemned as the science of “geopoliticians”, “fascists”, and “imperialists”. In the 1930s geography was divided into “economic” and “physical” branches, to separate the studies of social laws and environment. Nature was seen as the enemy of human development, and something that must be reconstructed. This was the doctrine behind the massive construction projects regardless of ecology. The aim was the creation of a “new Soviet man”.73 Although Gumilev tried to frame his theories in Marxian terms, his premise is fundamentality different: It was “the ethnos that was shaped by the geographical environment and adapted to it, and not the other way around”. The ethnos was “a natural part of… an ecological niche”. He attempted to bypass his problems with Communist dogma by conceding that the ethnos reshapes the landscape for its needs. Nonetheless the premise remained that it is “the landscape that defines the possibilities of the ethnic collective at the moment of its creation”.74
Where the German Idealists refer the national-soul or race-soul, Gumilev formulated the concept of the passionarnost,75 a kind of human photosynthesis for converting energy from the “biosphere” that vitalises an ethnos, which declines when it is entropically expended.76 This ethnic passionarnost might in its character, if not its origins, be considered as the collective equivalent to lIbido, Jungian “psychic energy”, or the élan vital of Bergson’s philosophy.
Race as Historical Destiny
Historical “race” formation is contrary to reliance on genetics. The genetic determinism of the “Right” can be as dogmatic as the economic determinism of the Left.
We have considered various theories that are often at odds with the scientism of the 19th to 21st centuries, and even prior to that with the fracturing of knowledge during the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras by philosophers and scientists such as Decartes. What is the “modern mind” to make of such metaphysical concepts as archetypes, zeitgeist, the spirit of nations, race-soul, and the discredited theories of Lamarck and Lysenko on the “inheritance of acquired characteristics”, that seem to be a throwback to superstition?
In recent years there has been a questioning of the materialistic, mechanistic assumptions of “modern science”. Credible scientists are looking at subtleties in the cosmos that have been obscured, and even dogmatically stifled. Some of these theories and hypotheses on the nature of the cosmos provide added dimensions of perception that might be applicable to “race” and “ethnos” beyond the zoological, while giving “race” a depth that repudiates those who, in the name of what is “modern”, claim that there are no “races” because of the zoological unity of the nebulous mass called “humanity”. While there is an underlying unity of all life, there are those who for ideological reasons seek to take that unity to lengths that would ultimately make life amorphous.
The antagonism between those who regard zoological races as being of prime significance in history and culture, and those who regard race as a “social construct” both appeal to genetics. The “anti-race” advocates state there is more genetic variation among “races” than there is between “races;” that there are no specific genes that determine “race.” The zoological materialists, on the other hand, advocate genetic determinism, and state that there are crucial genetic differences. Both rely on mechanistic assumptions.
The metaphysical basis of “race” expounded by Spengler, Herder, Jung, and others, considers the matter from another perspective, and challenges the materialism that has dominated questions of race even prior to Mendel’s discovery of the laws of hereditary. These concepts are regarded as un-scientific, and rendered obsolete by Mendel and Darwin. However, as in much else, modern methods of empirical evidence are re-discovering the knowledge that has been discarded as superstition when it does not accord with the materialistic paradigm.
Phenotypic Plasticity 77
Oswald Spengler 78 and Carl Jung referred to Franz Boas on the impact of the environment on the formation of race. This seemingly communistic, Lamarckian and Lysenkoan espousal of environmentalism, and the repudiation of Mendelian genetics was used by the Left to undermine the race consciousness of Caucasians, especially in the USA. Yet both Spengler and Jung reaffirmed the reality of “race”.
Franz Boas, regarded as the father of modern anthropology, claimed that the skull shape of immigrant children is changed by the new land in which their parents settle. Therefore one of the most important identifiers of “race” – skull shape – does not seem to be as fixed as hitherto assumed.79 Boas and Spengler refer to the pioneering statistical studies of the physiology of White, Indian and Negro soldiers conducted for the U.S. military after the Civil War.80
Boas leaves the question open as to whether changes in head-form among Hebrew infants might be caused by methods of cradling, but this does not apply to Sicilian infants. Neither does this apply to “Bohemian” infants who showed a change of face width.81 Boas did not claim to have solved the problem as to why the changes occur, only that head-forms change without a change of descent.82
Those who repudiate the impact of environment on phenotype state that genes are not altered in such a manner by the environment, and such changes cannot be passed along to subsequent generations. They object that Lysenko spent decades in the USSR trying to prove a similar theory. This controversy about the “inheritance of acquired characteristics” raged for decades into the 20th century.83 One of the most notable challenges was by August Weismann who cut the tails from hundreds of mice for twenty-two generations to show that the lack of a tail would not be inherited by subsequent generations.84 Conversely, Boas, in a study for the U.S. Immigration Commission on the physical assimilation of races, found that the first generation of European immigrants (in this study Sicilians and Jews) showed significant changes in skull shape within the first generation. The East European Jews became longer headed, and south Italians shorter headed, within the first generation, even when the parents are new arrivals. William Ridgeway, professor of archaeology at Cambridge, considered the anthrometric findings on skull form and other physical factors indicated that “the whole bodily and mental make-up of immigrants may change”, under the impress of the American environment.85
Boas presented his findings in 1911 to an academic conference on race in London. He began by raising the assumption about hereditable I.Q. differences among European races, and questioned whether far-reaching changes might occur not only through social but also geographical environment.86 He suggested that race types might not be as fixed by heredity as assumed. Boas, without being dogmatic, referred to the hypothesis of William Ridgeway, stating:
“It would seem, however, that besides the influences of more or less favourable environment which af
fect the form of the body during the period of growth, a number of other causes may modify the form of the body. Professor Ridgeway goes so far as to think that the stability of human types in definite areas and for long periods is an expression, not of the influence of heredity, but of the influence of environment; and that, on the other hand, the modifications of the human form which are found in the Mediterranean area, in Central Europe, and in North-western Europe, are due to the differences of climate, soil, and natural products. It does not seem to me that adequate proof can be given for modifications of the human form as far-reaching as those claimed by Professor Ridgeway, although we must grant the possibility of such influences. We have, however, good evidence which shows that the various European types undergo certain changes in a new environment. The observations on which this conclusion is based were made by me on emigrants from various European countries who live in the city of New York, and on their descendants”.87
Among the changes summarised by Boas on his study were that “American-born descendants of immigrants differ in type from their foreign born parents. The changes which occur among various European types are not all in the same direction.88 They develop in early childhood and persist throughout life”.89
There have been claims that Boas’ findings are incorrect or minor.90 When Boas’ report was released it was scrutinised for statistical inaccuracies, which Boas addressed at the time.91 Recently his results have been re-evaluated. One such re-evaluation, using new methods of analysis, states: