The Civic Platform - A Political Journal of Ideas and Analysis

“THE 19TH CENTURY concepts of race, people, nation, and State are exclusively of Rationalistic-Romantic provenance.

They are the result of imposing a thought method adapted to material problems on to living
things, and thus they are materialistic. Materialistic means shallow
as applied to living things, for with all Life, the spirit is primary,
and the material is the mere vehicle of spiritual expression. Since
these 19th century concepts were rationalistic, they were basically
unfactual, for Life is irrational, unamenable to inorganic logic and
systematization. The Age upon which we are entering, and of which this
is a formulation, is an Age of Politics, and hence an age of facts.
The broader subject is the adaptation, health and pathology of High
Cultures. Their relationship to every type of human grouping is a
prerequisite to examining the last problems of Cultural Vitalism. The
nature of these groupings will therefore be looked at without
preconceptions, with a view to reaching their deepest meanings,
origin, life, and inter-connections.

Material inanimate objects retain their identity through the years,
and thus the type of thinking suited to dealing with material things
assumed that the political and other human groupings in existence in
1800 represented something a priori, something of the very essence of
permanent reality. Everything was regarded as a creation of one of
these “peoples.” This applied to the arts of form, literature, State,
technics, culture generally. This view is not in accordance with
historical facts.

The first concept in order is Race. The materialistic race-thinking of
the 19th century had particularly heavy consequences for Europe when
it was coupled with one of the early 20th century movements of
Resurgence of Authority.

Race has two meanings, which will be taken in order, and then their
relative importance in an Age of Absolute Politics will be shown. The
first meaning is an objective one, the second subjective.

The succession of human generations, related by blood, have the clear
tendency to remain fixed in a landscape. Nomadic tribes wander within
larger, but equally definite, bounds. Within this landscape the forms
of plant and animal life have local characteristics, different from
transplantations of the same strains and stocks in other landscapes.
From these and other facts, both comparatively new and of ancient
observation, it is apparent that the landscape exerts an influence on
the human stocks within its bounds as well as on the plant and animal
life. The technic of this influence is beyond our ken. The source of
it we do know. It is the cosmic unity of the totality of things, a
unity which shows itself in the rhythmic and cyclic movement of
Nature. Man does not stand out of this unity, but is submerged in it.

His duality of human soul and Beast-of-prey is also a unity. We
separate him thus to understand him, but this cannot disturb his
unity. Nor by separating in our thoughts the aspects of Nature can we
destroy its unity. The moon cycle stands in a relationship to many
human phenomena, of which we can know only what, but never how. All
movement whatever in Nature is rhythmic — the movement of streams and
waves, of winds and currents, of appearance and disappearance of
living individuals, of species, of Life itself.

Man partakes of these rhythms. His particular structure gives these
rhythms their peculiarly human form. The side of his nature that
expresses this connection is Race. Race in a man is the plane of his
being which stands in relationship to plant and animal life, and
beyond them, to the great macrocosmic rhythms. It is, so to speak, the
part of Man that is generalized into, absorbed into the All, rather
than his soul, which defines his species, and sets him off from all
other forms of existence.

Life manifests itself in the four forms: Plant, Animal, Man, High
Culture. Distinct though each is, yet it is related to all the others.
The animals, subject as they are to the soil, retain thus in their
being a plane of plantlike existence. Race is the expression of the
plant-like and also of the animal-like in Man. The High Culture, by
being fixed for its duration to a landscape, retains also a connection
with the plant world, no matter how defiant and free-moving are its
proud creations. Its high politics and great wars are an expression of
the animal and human in its nature.

Some of the totality of human characteristics are soil-determined,
others are stock-determined. Pigmentation is one of the latter, and
survives transplantation to other areas. It is not possible to list
all of even the physical characteristics according to such a scheme,
for the data has not been gathered. But even so, it would not matter
to our purpose, for the most important element also in the objective
meaning of race is the spiritual.

Some stocks are undoubtedly more highly endowed than others in certain
spiritual directions. Spiritual qualities are as diverse as physical
qualities. Not only average height of body varies, but also average
height of soul. Not only skull-shape and stature are soil-determined,
but so must be some spiritual properties. It is impossible to believe
that a cosmic influence which puts its mark on human bodies passes
over the essence, the soul. But so thoroughly mixed have all the
stocks been, or so repeatedly skimmed by History, that we can never
know original soul-qualities of landscapes. Of the racial qualities of
a given population on the spiritual side, we can never know which are
soil-bound, and which have been produced by the amalgamation of stocks
through the generations. To a practical century like this, and the
next, origins and explanations are less important than facts and
possibilities. Therefore our next concern must be with race as a
practical reality rather than with its metaphysics.

We have seen that race is connected with landscape and with stock. Its
outer manifestation is a certain, typical expression, a play of
features, a cast of countenance. There are no rigid physical indicia
of this expression, but this does not affect its existence, but solely
the method of understanding it. Within wide limits, a primitive
population in a landscape has a similar look. But closer scrutiny will
be able to find local refinements, and these again will branch down
into tribes, clans, families, and finally individuals. Race, in the
objective sense, is the spirituo-biological community of a group.

Thus races cannot be classified, other than arbitrarily. The
materialistic 19th century produced several classifications of this
arbitrary kind. The only characteristics used were, of course, purely
material ones. Thus, skull-form, was the basis of one, hair and speech
type of another, nose-shape and pigmentation of another. This was at
best mere group anatomy, but did not approach race.

Human beings living in contact with one another influence one another,
and thus approach one another. This applies to individuals, where it
has been noted through the ages in the fact that an old married couple
come to resemble one another physically, and it applies to groups as
well. What is called the “assimilation” of one group by another is not
at all merely the result of commingling of germ-plasm, as materialism
thought. It is mostly the result of spiritual influence of the
assimilating group on the newcomers, which is natural and complete
when there are no strong barriers between the groups. The lack of
barriers leads to the disappearance of the racial boundary and
thereafter a new race is present, the amalgamation of the two previous
ones. The stronger one is influenced usually but slightly, but there
are various possibilities here, and an examination of them belongs
properly to a subsequent place.

We have seen that race, objectively used, describes a relationship
between a population and a landscape, and is essentially an expression
of cosmic beat. Its prime visible manifestation is the look, but this
invisible reality expresses itself in other ways. To the Chinese, for
instance, smell is a hall-mark of race. Certainly audible things,
speech, song, laughter, also have racial significance. Susceptibility
to disease is another racially-differentiated phenomenon. The
Japanese, Americans, and Negroes have three different degrees of
resistance to tuberculosis. American medical statistics show that Jews
have more nervous disease, more diabetes, and less tuberculosis than
the Americans, and that in fact the incidence of any one disease shows
a different figure for the Jews. Gesture, gait, dress, are not without
racial significance.

But the face is the great visible sign of race.
Race, being an expression of the cosmic, is informed throughout with
the urge to continuity, and a racially ideal woman is always thought
of, quite unconsciously, as the potential mother of strong sons. The
racially ideal man is the master who will enrich the life of the woman
who secures him as the father of her children. The degenerate
eroticism of the Hollywood type is anti-racial: its root-idea is not
Life-continuity, but pleasure, with the woman as the object of
pleasure, and the man as the slave of this object.

This striving of a race towards its own physical type is one of the
great facts with which one cannot tamper by trying to substitute
ideals of amalgamation with types totally alien, as Liberalism and
Communism tried to do during the reign of Rationalism.

Race cannot be understood if it is inwardly associated with phenomena
from other planes of life, such as nationality, politics, people,
State, Culture. While History in its advance may bring about for a few
centuries a strong relationship between race and nation, that is not
to say that a preceding racial type always forms a subsequent
political unit. If that were so, none of the former nations of Europe
would have been formed on the lines they were. For example, think of
the racial differences between Calabrian and Lombard. What did they
matter to the history of Garibaldi’s time?

This brings us to the most important phase of the objective meaning of
Race in this age: History narrows or widens the limits of
race-determinacy. The way this is done is through the spiritual
element in Race. Thus a group with spiritual and historical community
tends to acquire also a racial aspect. The community of which its
higher nature partakes is transmitted downward to the lower, cosmic
part of the human nature. Thus in Western history the early nobility
tended to constitute itself as a race to complement its unity on the
spiritual side. The extent to which this proceeded is still apparent
wherever historical continuity of the early nobility has been
maintained to the present day.

Race influences History by supplying its material, its treasures of
blood, honor, and strong instincts. History in turn influences Race by
giving to units of high history a racial stamp as well as their
spiritual one. Race is a lower plane of existence, in the sense that
it is closer to the cosmic, more in touch with the primitive yearnings
and urges of Life in general. History is the higher plane of existence
where the specifically human, and above that, the High Cultural,
represent the differentiation of forms of Life.

Race is not group anatomy;
Race is not independent of the soil;
Race is not independent of Spirit and History;
Races are not classifiable, except on an arbitrary basis;
Race is not a rigid, permanent, collective characterization of human
beings, which remains always the same throughout history.

The 20th century outlook, based on facts, and not on the
preconceptions of physics and mechanics, sees Race as fluid, gliding
with History over the fixed skeletal form determined by the soil. Just
as History comes and goes, so does Race with it, bound in a symbiosis
of happening. The peasants now tilling the soil near Persepolis are of
the same race as those who planted or roamed there a thousand years
before Darius, regardless of what they were called then, or what they
are called now, and in the time between, a High Culture fulfilled
itself in this area, creating races now gone for ever.

This last error — the confusing of names with unities of history or
race — was one of the most destructive made by 19th century
materialism. Names belong to the surface of history, not to its
rhythmic, cosmic side. If the present-day inhabitants of Greece have
the same collective name that the population of the same area had in
Aristotle’s time, is anyone deceived into thinking that there is
historical continuity? Or racial continuity? Names, like languages,
have their own destinies and these destinies are independent of
others. Thus from the common language, it should not be inferred that
the inhabitants of Haiti and those of Quebec have a common origin, but
this result would occur of necessity if 19th century methods were
applied to the present, which we know, as well as to interpretation of
the past from left-over names and languages. The inhabitants of
Yucatan to-day are racially the same as in 100 A.D.,
even though they now speak Spanish, and then spoke a nowvanished
tongue, even though they have a different name now from then. In
between occurred the rise, fulfillment and wiping out of a High
Culture, but after its passing, Race became once more the primeval,
simple relationship between stock and landscape. There was no high
History to influence it, or for it to influence.

RACE, as has been shown, is not a unit of existence, but is an aspect
of existence. Specifically it is the aspect of existence in which the
relation of the human being to the great cosmic rhythms is revealed.
It is thus the non-individual aspect of Life, whether it be the life
of a plant, animal, or human being.

The plant exhibits — at least, not to us — no consciousness, i.e.,
no
tension with its environment. The plant has thus only race, so to
speak, for it is totally submerged in the cosmic flow. The animal
exhibits tension, consciousness, individuality. Man has in addition
self-consciousness and the ability and necessity of living a higher
life in the realm of symbols. All men have this, but the difference in
degree between primitive man and Culture-man in this respect is so
vast that it seems almost a difference in kind.

It is the racial beat which informs primitive impulses, which informs
action generally. Opposed to it is the illuminated part of the mind,
the rootless reason, the intellect.

Race impels toward self-preservation, continuance of the cycle of
generations, increase of power. Intellect decides the meaning of the
Life, and the aim, and this may, for various reasons, deny one or all
of these fundamental urges. The celibacy of the priest and the
sterility of the libertine both come from intellect, but one of them
is an expression of High Culture, and the other is the denial of
Culture, an expression of total degeneracy. Intellect may thus be in
the service of Culture, or opposed to it.

Race is, in the first instance — in its subjective sense — what a
man
feels. This influences, whether immediately or eventually, what he
does. A man of race is not born to slavery. If his intellect counsel
him to a temporary submission, rather than an heroic death, in the
hope of future changes, it is a mere postponement of his breaking out.
The man without race will submit permanently to any humiliation, any
insult, any dishonor, so long as he is permitted to live. The
continuance of breathing and digestion are Life to the man without
race. To the man of race, Life itself represents no value, but only
Life under the right conditions, affirmative Life, rich, expressive
and growing.

Heroism can be motivated from either side of the soul: the martyr dies
for the Truth which he knows, the fighting man who dies with weapons
in his hands rather than submit to his enemies dies for the honor that
he feels. But the man who dies for something higher shows that he has
race, regardless of his intellectualized motives. For Race is the
faculty of being true to one’s self. It is the placing of a
beyond-value on one’s own individual soul.

In this subjective sense, Race is not the way one talks, looks,
gestures, walks, it is not a matter of stock, color, anatomy, skeletal
structure, or anything else objective. Men of Race are scattered
through all populations everywhere, through all races, peoples,
nations. In each unit they make up the warriors, the leaders of
action, the creators in the sphere of politics and war.

Thus in the subjective sense, there is also a hierarchy of race. Above
the men of race, below — those without race. The first are swept up
into action and events by the great cosmic rhythm of motion, the
second are passed over by History. The first are the materials of high
History, the second have outlasted every Culture, and when the
stillness resumes its sway over the landscape after the whirlwind of
events, these are the great mass.
Race in the subjective sense is thus seen to be a matter of instinct.
The man with strong instincts has race, the man with weak or bad
instincts has it not.

Race in the objective sense is a creation of history. One’s destiny
must express itself within a certain framework — the framework of
Fate. Thus a man of race born in Kirghizia belongs by Fate to the
barbarian world of Asia with its historical mission of destruction of
the Western Civilization. Rare exceptions are of course possible —
Life submits to no generalization entirely. Some Poles, Ukrainians, or
even Russians, might be impelled by their souls to share the spirit of
the West. If so, they belong to the Western race, and every healthy,
ascendant race accepts recruits who come in on its terms and who have
the proper feeling. In the same way, there are numerous intellectuals
in the West who feel community with the outer idea of Asiatic
Nihilism. How numerous they are is indicated by the journalism, novels
and plays that live from them. But the converse would not be true of
men without race — they are not even acceptable to the enemy. They
have nothing to contribute to an organic group — they are the human
grains of sand, atoms of intellect, without cohesion upwards or
downwards.

Every race, no matter how transitory it may be contemplated from the
viewpoint of History, expresses a certain idea, a certain plane of
existence by its life, and its idea is bound to be attractive to some
individuals outside it. Thus in Western life, we are not unfamiliar
with the man who, after associating with Jews, reading their
literature, and adopting their viewpoint,actually becomes a Jew in the
fullest sense of the word. It is not necessary that he have “Jewish
blood.” The converse is also known: many Jews have adopted Western
feelings and rhythms, and have thereby acquired Western race. This
process — contemptuously called “assimilation” by the Jewish leaders
—
threatened during the 19th century the very existence of the Jewish
race by ultimate absorption of its total racial body into the Western
races. To halt it, the leaders of the Jews evolved the program of
Zionism, which was solely an expedient for maintaining the unity of
the Jewish race, and maintaining its continued existence as such. For
this reason they also recognized the value of anti-semitism of the
social type. It was serving the same purpose of preserving the racial
unity of the Jews.

The dying out of racial instincts means the same thing to an
individual as it does to a race, people, nation, State, Culture:
unfruitfulness, lack of will-to-power, lack of ability to believe in
or follow great aims, lack of inner discipline, desire for a life of
ease and pleasure.

The symptoms of this racial decadence in various parts of the Western
Civilization are manifold. There is first the ghastly distortion of
the sexual life arising from the complete dissociation of sexual love
from reproduction. The great symbol of this in the Western
Civilization is everything suggested by the name Hollywood. The
message of Hollywood is the total significance of sexual love as an
end in itself — the erotic without consequences. The sexual love of
two grains of sand, two rootless individuals, not the primeval sexual
love looking to the continuity of Life, the family of many children.

An erotomania is abroad through our civilization, not indeed like the
sexual obsession of the 13th century which was at least racially
affirmative, in that it increased the Western Peoples, but always a
purely rootless erotic-without-consequences. This spiritual disease is
the suicide of the race.

The weakening of the will — Nietzsche called it “paralysis of will”
—
another symptom of dying out of racial instincts, leads to a total
deterioration of public life in the afflicted races. Government
leaders dare not offer a stern program to their masses of human grains
of sand: they abdicate, but remain in office as private men.
Government ceases; the only functions that continue are the ones that
have always gone on, no new aim, no sacrifices. Keep the old going; no
creation! No effort! That would be too hard. Keep the pleasures going,
the panem et circenses. Never mind the necessities of life, we are
willing to renounce them as long as we have the pleasures.

This weakening of the will leads to voluntary abandonment of empires
conquered with the blood of millions over ten generations. It leads to
abysmal hatred of whoever and whatever represents sternness, creation,
the Future. One of its products is Pacifism, and the only way a
racially-dissolving population can be driven to war is through
conscription coupled with pacifist propaganda — “This is the last war
— actually it is a war against war.”

WE ATTAIN NOW to the grand formula of the 20th century outlook on
Race: Race is a horizontal differentiation of men. The materialism of
the 19th century, confusing race with anatomy, regarded Race as a
vertical differentiation of men. It was “abstract” — away from
Reality
— and started from the will-to-systematize, rather than from quiet
contemplation of the living facts. Such contemplation was made
difficult for them by the existence of political nationalism, which
tried to build walls of all kinds between the Western races and
peoples.

But had they been able to pierce through to a view of the facts, these
materialists would have seen that the races of Europe were the
creations of History and not a mere continuation of the aboriginal
material that was present in 900 A.D., before the beginning of high
History in this area. Viewing the process of creation of races, they
would have seen the far greater significance of Race in the subjective
sense than in the objective sense. For it is always men of race that
create the deeds of History, and the units they are leading are of
secondary importance.

The attempt to create a vertical system of races was Apollonian — it
was an effort of the intellect. Actually Race has the primary meaning
of presence of strong cosmic rhythm — a Dionysian meaning.

What matters to a unit engaged upon a mission is the strength of will
which other groups can bring to it. To interpret the historical
mission as one of “safe-guarding the purity of the race,” in a purely
biological sense is sheer materialism. Race, in both its meanings, is
the material of History, not the reverse. Race supplies the
fruitfulness, sureness, and will-to-power to the Mission. The Mission
can never be to make the race “pure” in a biological sense, however
satisfying such a result would be esthetically. And with this last
word is touched upon the other factor in the tragic connection of this
old-fashioned outlook on Race with the strong, vital movement of
Resurgence of Authority: We have seen that all the 19th century
concepts in this sphere — Race, People, Nation, State, Culture —
were
of Rationalistic-Romantic derivation. Romantic — half of this
misalliance of the Future and the Past is traceable to
romantic-esthetic notions. Its presence there can only be superfluous.

It only matters that the Cultural Mission be accomplished, even though
in the process everything else is wiped out. And after that? Did
Darius ever think that lions would one day be roaming his terrace of
Persepolis ? And if he had, what could he have done about it? History,
with its great rythms — the widest and deepest we know — is also
submerged in the Cosmos, and for Culture-man to think that he can
impose his will on the millennially remote future is only a tribute to
his pride of intellect, but no compliment to his wisdom. We are
thinking here in centuries, not in months or years. One must oppose
the attitude of après moi la deluge which prevails at this moment. It
is not a shirking or evading of duty to say that only the historical
Mission matters, but the highest possible affirmation of Duty.

To Race there is no duty. Race in the vertical sense is an
abstraction, corresponding to nothing existing. If taken seriously, it
leads the victim off the path of History and into an esthetic
cul-de-sac.

To the 20th century outlook, a man does not belong to a race — he
either has race, or does not. If the former, he has value to History,
if the latter, he is valueless, a lackey.

The attempt to interpret History in terms of Race must be abandoned.
The 20th century sees it quite otherwise. That attempt was a fad,
historically speaking. It had a vogue of a century. It is now quite
dead. Its last formulation, and its most radical, attempted even to
intervene in the sphere of action. That was the last such attempt. An
Empire of a thousand years duration — yes, that has been actualized
—
in India, China, Egypt. But the last nations that laid the foundations
of these Empires could not know whether the barbarians would come soon
or never. Montezuma’s Empire would also have lasted a thousand years
—
but the Spaniards appeared. There is no guarantee of duration, racial
or other. Actually it is Race that must be interpreted in terms of
History, for that is the factual developmental-sequence. This
viewpoint is not a fad, an arbitrary abstract picture, but one
reflecting the facts of history.

BOTH MEANINGS of Race, the objective and the subjective, have a
meaning for policy in the 20th century.

The objective meaning of Race describes a group which shares a certain
basic, instinctive rhythm. This racial stamp has been given to it by
History, which narrows or widens the limits of this Race, depending on
the character and magnitude of the historical Mission.
Such a race is the creation of History, and not of a text-book scheme
first planned on paper and then put into actuality. It is not a
creation of a man, as such — although a man may by his personality be
the vehicle of History, and may be the focus of historical energy on
to the creation of a race. But important is: as far as policy is
concerned, one can only work with the races existing. They cannot be
created or disposed of by human fiat.

Existing races are a mixture, as far as stock is concerned. There is
nothing to be done about this. Such a mixture of stock is not
“impurity,” in any true, factual, meaning of that word. “Purity” in
racial matters means inclusiveness of the entire population within the
same historical feeling and cosmic beat. “Purity” is directed to
feeling, and not to anatomical derivation. This is true even in the
most objective meaning of the word Race, and a fortiori is it true of
Race in the subjective sense. The hierarchy of races is a fact of
which policy must take cognizance.

Race is the material of History, it is the treasure which a
population brings to an Idea. The stronger the racial instincts of the
population, the greater its promise of victory. Consequently anything
which strikes at the strength of these instincts is the enemy of the
highest significance, and even of the very existence, of the race.
These instincts are self-preservation, fruitfulness, increase of
power. Without these there is no Idea, no History — there is only the
collection of human grains of sand — and later a pyramid of skulls
erected by outer barbarians.

Thus the whole liberal-democratic ideology, with its “individualism”
that is a mere negation of everything superpersonal, its “happiness”
ideal that encourages every weakness and self-indulgence, its
erotomania which distorts the whole sexual life into a barren disease
of the will, its “tolerance” which seeks to breakdown the cohesion of
the race by denying its existence, its materialism which denies all
spiritual values, all higher significance of human life, its pacifism
which values weakness above virility, its ideal of Mediocrity by which
it opposes every creative man and the Idea he represents in History,
its cult of the proletarian as the highest element, its total
renunciation of the Soul of Man — this is the great enemy of Race.

The man of race disciplines himself — because he needs discipline.
Strong instincts need a strong will. Race is also a residue of inner
chaos, for only out of chaos can come creation, whether of thought or
deed. Strong instincts are the prerequisite of every outstanding
performance even the creation of a work for the intellect. The
raceless, rootless-intellectual attitude has no inner imperative — it
shrugs its shoulders and says “So what?” Such an attitude is that of
finished men — they are used up before they start. They can insist on
nothing, compel nothing, perform nothing. A hundred men of race
without particular intellectual qualifications can accomplish more
under the same leader than a thousand intellectuals from the pavements
of the great cities. A man of race is not yet finished — he offers
material for performance.

This explains why the various European races were so easily
assimilable one in the other, how they disappeared in a generation
into the new pulse and feeling — they shared the same Culture.
Although they belonged to separate races, nevertheless there was a
higher stratum of Life that included all these races as manifestations
of its superpersonal Life. Thus these vertical divisions of mere race
did not separate Western men.

Nor did they separate non-Westerners from Westerners. Actually, this
is no blending, no amalgamation; it is simply the increasing of the
receiving race. They bring only their blood and numbers; they can
bring no Idea, for it already is an Idea.”