Cultural Vitalism

247 Introduction For the first time is developed here the thesis of Cultural Vitalism, the physiognomy of the adaptation, health, or illness of a High Culture. Heretofore, a Culture has usually been looked upon as a result, a mere sum total of collective activity of human beings and groups of human beings. To the extent that its unity and continuity was perceived at all, this was regarded as purely materially-linked “influence” of individuals, groups or written ideas on contemporaries or posterity. But with the advance of age of the Western Culture, its unity began dimly to be perceived. This unity was formulated in very different ways, with different points of origin, different laws of development, but the essential idea was the unity of the Culture. Even in the home of Materialism, Benjamin Kidd recognized the inner unity of the West in his work “Western Civilization.” Nietzsche, Lamprecht, Breysig, Meray, are only a few of those who sensed this idea. In an age which starts from facts, and not from programs, which submits to realities without trying to make them pass a rationalistic test, it has become self-evident,

248 spiritually compulsory to think within this new framework. If two individuals, widely separated geographically, and in no contact with one another, develop similar inventions, similar philosophies, chose the same subject matter for drama or lyric — this is not “influence” nor “coincidence,” but a reflection of the development of the Culture to which both belong. From the higher Cultural standpoint the arguments about who was the first to invent this or that device, who originated this or that idea, are quite barren. These questions are not on any higher plane than the legal, at best. If the development in question is one of superpersonal force, and not a mere personal amusement, it is the development of the Culture, and the fact that it was expressed simultaneously by more than one person only testifies to its Destiny-quality. The nature of the unity of the Culture is purely spiritual in its origin. The material unity that follows is the unfolding of the precedent inner, spiritual unity. Life is the actualizing of the possible; the development of a High Culture is the unfolding, over the predetermined organic life-span, of the inner possibilities contained in the Culture-soul. The one in which we live is the 8th High Culture to appear on this planet. The unity and inner relationship of the totality of forms and creations of any one of the others is apparent to us, because we stand completely outside it and cannot enter into the nuances of its soul, since we belong to another. This impenetrability of an alien Culture is part of a wider organic generalization: even the spirit of another age of our own Culture, of another nation, another individual, in the last analysis, presents difficulties to complete understanding. The technique of comprehension of other life-forms is living into them. To measure, time, and calculate the behavior of another organism is valueless to organic assimilation. Materialistic “psychology,”

249 with its heaps of results on paper, never aided one individual to understand another. If any identity was reached, it was in spite of the abstract equipment. Difficulty in assimilating oneself into other organic forms, understanding them, penetrating them, is a matter of degree. A person with similar character is readily understood by us. If his character is dissimilar, but his background is similar, he can be understood with more difficulty. Different nationality, different race, different cultural origin, raise successively steeper barriers to mutuality. This sets out one of the problems of Cultural Vitalism. The question is: to what extent can a Culture impress new populations entering its area with the Cultural idea? Subsidiary problems arise from the fact that such new populations may have one or all of various kinds of cohesiveness, that of a people, or of a race, or of a nation, or of a State, or of another Culture. The further problem arises of the precise relation of the Culture to the populations in its service, and to those outside its area. It is formulated in this way because High Cultures are bound to a landscape, and the formative impulses appear always in the original landscape, even in the last phase, that of Civilization, in which the Culture externalizes itself completely and expands to its furthest limits. The expansive, externalizing tendency begins already in the middle of the life span, but it only becomes dominant with the sharp caesura marked by the crisis of Civilization. For us the symbol of this break is Napoleon. Since his time the populations of the entire Earth have been brought within the arc of the most unlimited Imperialism known to history. They stand however in varying relationships to the Mother-Idea of this Imperialism, and these relationships must also be examined.

250 The Articulation of a Culture The nations, thought-forms, art-forms, and ideas which are the expression of the development of a Culture are always in the custody of a comparatively small group. How large this group is, how easily it can replenish itself, depends on the character of the Culture. In this respect, the Classical Culture is instructive. Its Ideas were one and all exoteric: Socrates conducts his philosophizing in the agora. In our case the picture of Leibnitz or Descartes carrying on such activity would be ludicrous in the extreme, for Western philosophy is the possession of a very few. But any Culture, even the exoteric Classical, is restricted for its full expression, in whatever direction, to certain levels of the populations in its area. Culture is by its very nature selective, exclusive. The use of the word in the personal sense — a “cultured” man — describes a man out of the ordinary, a man whose ideas and attitudes are ordered and articulated. Cultured in the personal sense means devoted to something beyond oneself and one’s own domestic well-being. In the 19th century

251 world-picture, with its atomistic mania, only individuals existed, nothing higher, therefore the word was used to describe a practitioner or appreciator of art or literature. But patriotism, devotion to duty, ethical imperative, heroism, self-sacrifice, are also an expression of Culture — primitive man does not evince them. A war is just as much an expression of Culture as a poem, a factory as a cathedral, a rifle as a statue. A high Culture in the course of its fulfillment acts in all directions of thought and action, and on every person within its area. The intensity of its action in a given direction depends on the Culture-soul: some of the Cultures have been passionately historical, like the Chinese; some completely ahistoric, like the Indian; some have developed massive technics, like the Egyptian and our own, some have ignored technics, like the Classical and Mexican. The intensity of the impression of the Culture on individuals is proportional to their receptivity to spiritual impressions. The individual of small soul and limited horizon lives for himself because he understands nothing else. To such a man Western music is merely an alternate up and down, loud and soft, philosophy is mere words, history is a collection of fairy-tales, even the reality of which is not inwardly felt, politics is the selfishness of the great, military conscription a burden which his lack of moral courage forces him to accept. Thus even his individualism is a mere denial of anything higher, and not an affirming of his own soul. The extraordinary man is the one who puts something else before his own life and security. Even as he faced the firing squad, William Walker could have saved his life by merely renouncing his claim to President of Nicaragua. To the common man, this is insane. The common man is unjust, but not on principle; he is selfish, but is incapable of the imperative

252 of Ibsen’s exalted selfishness; he is the slave of his passions, but incapable of higher sexual love, for even this is an expression of Culture — primitive man simply would not understand Western erotic if it were explained to him, this sublimation of passion into metaphysics. He lacks any sort of honor, and will submit to any humiliation rather than revolt — it is always leader-natures who revolt. He gambles in the hope of winning, and if he loses, he whimpers. He would rather live on his knees than die on his feet. He accepts the loudest voice as the true one. He follows the leader of the moment — but only so far, and when the leader is eclipsed by a new one, he points out his record of opposition. In victory he is a bully, in defeat he is a lackey. His talk is big, his deeds small. He likes to play, but has no sportsmanship. Great thoughts and plans he castigates as “megalomania.” Anyone who tries to pull him up and along the road of higher accomplishment he hates, and when the chance offers, he crucifies him, like Christ, burns him, like Savonarola, kicks his dead body in the square in Milan. He is always laughing at the discomfiture of another, but he has no sense of humor, and is equally incapable of true seriousness. He denounces the crime of passion, but eagerly reads the literature of such crimes. He herds in the street to see an accident, and enjoys seeing another sustain the blows of fate. He does not care if his countrymen are spilling their blood as long as he is secure. He is everything mean and unheroic, but he lacks the mentality to be Iago or Richard III. He has no access to Culture, and, when he dares, he persecutes anyone who has. Nothing delights him more than to see a great leader fall. He hated Metternich and Wellington, the symbols of Tradition, he refused, as Reichstag, to send ex-Chancellor Bismarck a birthday greeting. He makes up the constituency of all parliaments everywhere, and he invades all councils-of-war to advise prudence

253 and caution. If beliefs to which he was committed become dangerous, he recants — they were never his anyway. He is the inner weakness of every organism, the enemy of all greatness, the material of treason. It is not such human stuff that an exacting High Culture can use to further its Destiny. The common man is the material with which the great political leaders in democratic conditions work. In earlier centuries, the common man did not attend the Cultural drama. It did not interest him, and the participants were not yet under the Rationalistic spell, the “counting-mania,” as Nietzsche called it. When democratic conditions proceed to their extreme, the result is that even the leaders are common men, with the jealous and crooked soul of envy of that to which they are not equal, like Roosevelt and his coterie in America. In his cult of “The Common Man,” he was deifying himself, like Caligula. The abolition of quality smothers the exceptional man in his youth and turns him into a cynic. In earlier centuries there was no suggestion anywhere that the masses of the population had a part to play. When this idea does triumph, it turns out that the only role these masses can play is the passive one of unwieldy building material for the articulate part of the population. What is the physical articulation of the body of the Culture? The more exacting the nature of the Cultural task, the higher the type of humanity required for its performance. There is in all Cultures a spiritual level of the entire population called the Culture-bearing stratum. It is this articulation of Culture-populations alone which makes the expression of a High Culture possible. It is the technic of living, the habitus of the Culture. The Culture-bearing stratum is the custodian of the wealth of expression-forms of the Culture. To it belong all the creators in the domains of religion, philosophy, science, music, literature,

254 the arts of form, mathematics, politics, technics, and war, as well as the non-creators who fully understand and themselves experience the developments in this higher world, the appreciators. So, within itself the Culture-bearing stratum is articulated into creators and appreciators. It is in general the latter who transmit the great creations downward, insofar as this is possible. This process serves to recruit the higher material, wherever it appears, into the Culture-bearing stratum. The process of replenishment is continually going on, for the Culture-bearing stratum is not hereditary in any strict sense. The Culture-bearing stratum is a purely spiritual level of the populace of the Culture. It has no economic, political, social, or other hallmark. Some of its most luminous creators have lived and died in want, e.g., Beethoven and Schubert. Other souls, equally creative, but less rugged, have been strangled by poverty — Chatterton. Many of its creative members go through their lives entirely unnoticed — Mendel, Kierkegaard, Copernicus. Others are mistaken for mere talents — Shakespeare, Rembrandt. The Culture-bearing stratum is not recognized by its contemporaries in any way as a unity, nor does it recognize itself as one. As a stratum it is invisible, like the Culture it carries. Because it is a purely psychic stratum, it can be given no material description to satisfy the intellectuals. Even the intellectuals would admit however that Europe or America could be thrown into a material chaos from which it would take years to emerge if the few thousands in the higher technical ranks were removed. These technicians are a part of the Culture-bearing stratum, although it is not merely occupational. Technicians of course, like economic leaders, or military leaders, play purely subordinate roles in the Culture-drama. The most important part of this stratum at any one time is the group which is the

255 custodian of the highest Idea. Thus in Dante’s time, Emperor and Pope were the two highest symbols of reality, and it was in the service of either one of these symbols that the leading members of the Culture-bearing stratum were then to be found. The highest symbolic force was then transferred to the dynasties, and dynastic politics claimed its lives during its centuries. With the coming of Enlightenment and Rationalism, the whole West goes into a crisis of long duration, and not less does the Culture-bearing stratum. It was split even more than usual, and only now, after two centuries, is it possible to restore its basic unity. I say more than usual, for it must not be supposed that the Culture-bearing stratum ever was a sort of international, a freemasonry. On the contrary, it supplied leaders on both sides of every war and every tendency. II Within this stratum there is constant struggle between Tradition and Innovation. The strong, vital part naturally represents the new, forward development, affirming the next age. It is the function of Tradition to assure continuity. Tradition is the memory of a superpersonal soul. It must see that the same creative spirit of the grand past is present at each innovation. The crisis of Rationalism places the same frightful strain on the higher stratum that it does on the entire organism. The step forward — Democracy — is affirmative in the last analysis, because it is an historical necessity in the life of a Culture, as we know from history. But it is a difficult step for men to take who have given their lives to construction and creation, for to mobilize the masses is to destroy. The step from Culture to Civilization is a fall; it is the onset of senility. For this reason, leaders whose center of gravity was on the side of culture resisted

256 the Revolution of Democracy with all their power — Burke, Goethe, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Metternich, Wellington, Carlyle, Nietzsche. The Culture-bearing stratum, articulated into creators and appreciators, is invisible as such. It corresponds to no economic class, no social class, no nobility, no aristocracy, no occupation. Its members are not all public figures by any means. But by its existence, this stratum actualizes a High Culture on this earth. If a process had existed by which members of the stratum could be all selected, the extra-European forces would probably have exterminated it in the attempt to destroy the West. The attempt would not have succeeded, for this stratum is produced by the Culture, and after a long period of chaos — a generation or two, depending on circumstances — this Cultural organ would have been again present, including in its numbers descendants of the invaders, who would also succumb to the Idea. The possibilities in this direction will be more thoroughly examined later. In a political age, it is natural that the best brains go into politics and war. Those who are equal to renunciation and sacrifice are the heroes of this realm. War-politics is preeminently the field of heroism, and the sacrifices in this realm are never in vain from the Cultural standpoint, for the war itself is an expression of Culture. Considered from the rationalistic standpoint, it is stupid to devote one’s life to an idea, any idea whatever. But once again, Life, with its organic reality does not obey Rationalism with its urge to mediocrity. Thus the best are culled from every generation and impelled into the service of the Culture. The noblest of all are the heroes, who die for an idea; but everyone cannot be a hero, and the others live for an idea. An invariable characteristic of this level is its spiritual sensitivity, which brings it more impressions than the others receive.

257 This is coupled with more complex internal possibilities, which order the volume of impressions. It can feel the new Spirit of the Age before it is articulate, before it triumphs. This also describes all great men, and one reason so many perish violently is that they promulgated things which were “ahead of their time.” These men lived in a world more real than that of the “realistic” people, and these same “realists” are outraged and burn the Savonarola whom they would follow unquestioningly a generation or two later. This vital plane is only a psychic-Cultural unity during the long centuries of the Culture, but with the coming of the late Civilization — mid-20th century — the dominant idea of the entire Culture is political. Napoleon’s “Politics is destiny” is even more true now than when he said it. The two ideas of Democracy and Authority stand opposed, and only one of them belongs to the Future. Only Authority represents a step forward, and thus the strongest, most vital, creative elements in the Culture-bearing stratum are found in the service of the resurgence of Authority. It has become political-Cultural. Since the Culture-bearing stratum has its highest importance in an age like the present one, when quality reasserts itself against quantity, it must be defined now as precisely as possible. The notion of mere prominence must be dissociated strongly from the idea of belonging to this stratum. Wagner, Ibsen, Cromwell, none of whom were prominent until middle life, were nonetheless in this plane of life and thought in their previous years. The notion of prominence is related to the idea of the Culture-bearing stratum in this way: every man who is prominent in any field, and who also has inner gifts, of vision, appreciation, or creativeness, naturally belongs to this stratum. Prominence however may be the result of accident of birth or fortune, and Europeans have seen two periods in recent

258 history — after the first two World Wars — when nearly all the ruling politicians in Europe were simply common men thrown up by chance and the distorted life of the higher organism. The Culture-bearing stratum has its highest importance now, rather than in previous centuries, because it is a relatively tinier minority. The vast increase of numbers in Europe — it tripled in population in the 19th century — did not increase the numbers of this stratum, nor of higher natures generally. This stratum was as numerous in the time of the Crusades as it is now. It is simply the way of Culture to choose minorities for its expression. Multiplication of population is downwards. The tension between quantity and quality grows greater with the increase of numbers, and the Culture-bearing stratum acquires a mathematically higher significance. The tension can be suggested in figures: there are not more than 250,000 souls in Europe who constitute by their potentialities, their imperative, their gifts, their existence, the Culture-bearing stratum of the West. Their geographical distribution has never been entirely uniform. In that nation which the Culture chose for the expression of The Spirit of the Age as it chose Spain for the expression of Ultra-montanism in the 16th and 17th centuries, France for the Rococo in the 18th century, or England for Capitalism in the 19th, there was always a higher proportion of the culturally-significant than in countries which were not playing the leading Cultural role. This fact was known to the extra-European forces in their attempt to destroy the Western Civilization after the Second World War, and was utilized as far as it could be within the limits of expediency. The real purpose behind the mass-hangings, mass-looting, and mass-starvation, was to destroy the few by destroying the many. The articulation of the Culture has three aspects: the Idea itself, the transmitting stratum, those to whom it is transmitted.

259 The latter comprise the vast numbers of human beings who possess any refinement whatever, who maintain a certain standard of honor or morality, who take care of their property, who have self-respect and respect the rights of others, who aspire to improve themselves and their situation instead of pulling down those who have enriched their inner life and raised themselves in the world. They are the body of the Culture vis-à-vis the Culture-bearing stratum as its brain, and the Idea as its soul. In each person who belongs to this numerically large group there is a quantum of ambition and appreciation toward the creations of culture. They furnish the instruments by which creators can carry out their work. By this means they give significance to their own lives, a significance which the underworld would not understand. The role of a Maecenas is not the highest, but it is of Cultural value. Who knows whether we would have Wagner’s greatest works but for Ludwig II? When we read the results of a great battle, do we always realize that it was not simply a chess-game between two captains, but that hundreds of firm officers and thousands of obedient men died to write this line in history, to make this day and date forever remembered? And when a threatened sack of society is put down by the police and Army, the casualties on the side of order thus give by their deaths a higher significance to their lives also. Not everyone can play a great role, but the right to give meaning to his life cannot be taken from a man. But beneath all this is the stratum totally incapable of cultural attainment, even the most modest: the mob, canaille, Pöbel, underworld, profanum vulgus, the “common man” of the American cult. These preside at every Terror, listen wishfully to every Bolshevik agitator, secrete venom at the sight of any manifestation of Culture or superiority. This stratum exists at all stages of every Culture as the Peasant’s Wars, the Jacquerie,

260 Wat Tyler, Jack Cade, John Ball, Thomus Münzer, the Jacobins, the Communards, the Spanish militiamen, the mob in the square in Milan, are there to show. As soon as a creative man makes his resolve and proceeds with his work, somewhere else in a dark envious soul there rises a crooked determination to stop him, to smash the work. In his later years the Nihilist Tolstoy gave perfect expression to this basic fact with his formula that not even one stone should be on top of another. The slogan of the Bolshevik in 1918 was also illuminating: “Destroy Everything!” In our age this underworld is in the possession of the class-warriors, the rear-guard of Rationalism. It is thus working, from the larger political viewpoint, solely for the extra-European forces. Previous rebellions of this stratum were all doomed because of the unity of the Culture, the pristine vigor of the creative impulses, and the lack of external danger of such crushing proportions as exists in this age. Its history is not yet over with. Asia has use for this stratum, and plans for it.

261 Tradition and Genius There are two different ways in which the Culture-bearing stratum can perform its function. The first is through the presence of a high tradition of accomplishment along a given line, a “school”; the second is through the instrumentality of occasional genius. They can combine, in fact they are never completely separated, for individual genius is always present at the formation of a tradition in the first instance, and the presence of the tradition is not hostile to genius when it does appear. Nevertheless they are different methods of Culture-expression, and both have importance to the 20th century world-outlook which is here formulated in its essentials. Italian painting from 1250 to 1550 is an example of a tradition at work. The Flemish-Dutch school of the 17th century is another. It was not necessary for a painter in one of these schools to be a great master in order to express himself fully. The form was there, unquestioned, it was only required to master it and to contribute one’s personal development of its possibilities. Spanish and German painting on the other hand

262 represent a collection of great originals, and not the sure forward progression of a tradition. The sublimest tradition of all was the Gothic architecture to c. 1400. So powerful was the tradition that the idea of a work of art, which pre-supposes a personality creating it, did not even exist. But traditions like this are not confined to arts. Scholastic philosophy represented the same superpersonal unity working itself out through many personalities all in the service and development of a tradition. From Roscellinus and Anselm through Thomas Aquinas to Gabriel Biel, the problems and their complete exploitation are continuous. Each thinker, regardless of his gifts, whether a man of genius, or merely a hard worker, was trained by his predecessors and himself developed into his successors. It was not the solutions, and not even always the questions which were continuous — it was the method and thoroughness of investigation and formulation which showed the presence of the tradition. From Cromwell to Joseph Chamberlain — the beginning and the end of that high political tradition which built the great British Empire, which at its highest point exerted its control over 17/20ths of the surface of this earth — England was the example of the possibility of tradition in politics as well as in philosophy, music, and the arts of form. How many men of political genius appeared in the Premiership during these centuries? Only the two Pitts. Nevertheless, England emerged from all the general wars of those centuries with increased power — Thirty Years War, 1618–1648, Spanish Succession War, 1702–1713, Austrian Succession Wars 1741–1763, Napoleonic Wars, 1800–1815, Wars of German Unification, 1863–1871. Only one serious blunder was made during these centuries, the loss of America, 1775–1783. The essence of this tradition was nothing other than applying only political thinking

263 to politics. Cromwell the theologian departed from this only occasionally, and more in words and expressions of sympathy than in actions. His successors in the tradition of Empire-building were not burdened with his heavy theological equipment, which they transformed into cant, a word translatable into no other European language. The technic of cant was what enabled English diplomacy to score continued successes in the world of facts, i.e., the world of violence, of cunning, of sin, while maintaining before itself the attitude of selfless morality. To enrich the country by new possession was thus “bringing civilization” to “backward” races. And so on, through the whole gamut of political tactics. Traditions show in this example one of their prime characteristics: they are not efficacious unless profoundly mastered by the individuals. Thus other European statesmen during the 19th century, the century of the Anglicization of Europe, attempted to utilize cant and merely made themselves ridiculous. Wilson, the American world-saver who modestly offered himself as President of the World-as-Morality, went too far. A sure tact was the prerequisite of successful employment of cant, and this required for its mastery growing up in a cant-saturated atmosphere. In the same way the Austrian officer corps — whose ethical qualities Napoleon missed in his own officers — presupposed a life-long preparation and training in a certain atmosphere, and not three months military training on the basis of an “intelligence test.” The great thing about a tradition is that the leader of the moment is not alone — the qualities he lacks, and which the situation may need, are sure to be present somewhere in the entourage. The presence of a political tradition makes it extremely unlikely in the first place that an incompetent will be placed in a position of high political authority, and if it does

264 happen that a weak personality arrives on the heights by chance, tradition again makes his early departure certain. It might be supposed that this is contradicted by the case of Lord North, but the initial blunders of his American policy were only seen as such in retrospect. If he could have followed them up with further strict measures, America would not have been lost, but his domestic situation vis-à-visthe Whigs on the one hand and the monarch on the other, was difficult in the extreme, and his policy was hamstrung by the same type of Rationalist elements who were preaching “Contract Social” and “Rights of Man” on the continent. On the contrary, the successful avoidance of Revolution and Terror from the Wilkes affair in mid-18th century through the horrors of ‘93, the general revolutionary waves of 1830 and 1848, was attributable to the presence of an unimpaired tradition. Tradition is not a rigid thing, a guarantee of certain results. Not at all, for in History, it is the unexpected which happens. The imponderables make their appearance. Incident plays counterpoint to Destiny. A slight gap may appear also in a tradition, but the health of the tradition-bearing stratum shows itself by quickly closing the opening. A tradition of statesmanship is a sort of Platonic idea of excellence which molds men, as far as possible, in each case, and serves as a form for their personal expression. The results are shown by a high average of training and ability. Fortunate is the political organism with such leadership! What is missed in one place is picked up in another; individual quirks are not allowed to become political dogmas. The last result of the presence of a tradition in a political unit is that Destiny is kept on a sure path and Incident is minimized.

265 Genius The name genius, describing a certain small stratum of humanity, came into the effective vocabulary of the Western Culture only with the advent of Humanism. The 20th century means by this word what Emerson meant by “Representative Man,” or Carlyle by “Hero.” The comprehensive delineation of the subject of Genius by Lange-Eichbaum, the distinguished European scholar, has given the word its content for this age. We no longer see genius under an aspect of causality or predestination. This was the only way Materialism could understand the word. Nietzsche pierced through this predestination idea of genius with his aphorism: the higher the type a man represents, the greater is the improbability that he will succeed, because of the increased diversity and difficulty of his life-conditions. The word genius thus has acquired through the centuries a large objective content, and has come self-evidently to contain within it the idea of fame. If the word were to be used purely subjectively, it would describe simply a man with great creative force. There are

266 always some of these men at work, but their creative efforts may be in any of the various directions of Culture. The test of creative force has come to be success, namely the personal success of the man in translating his personal potentialities into creation, whether of thought or deed. Not absolute success is meant, for this would exclude nearly all men. Neither Wallenstein, Cromwell, Napoleon, or the Hero that we have seen, attained absolute success. The success of each was however personal, in the sense that posterity can read his name in the skies at night. It is the Spirit of the Age which influences greatly the direction of the creative ability of men of genius. Thus in the Gothic religious time, many men of genius became religionists, philosophers, saints and martyrs. In the Enlightenment, men of genius appeared as artists and universal men. In the time of Civilization men of genius appear mostly in the externalized pursuits of technics, economics, politics and war. All tendencies exist in all ages, but in each age one Idea is uppermost. High politics is appropriate in every age and in the coming age it is the leading Idea. In our times, and the next times, the men of creative force will be found largely concentrated in the service of the Resurgence of Authority. The crass stupidity of Rationalism and Materialism was nowhere more perfectly in evidence than in its attempt to make the word genius into an intelligence term. Naive “tests” were even devised to detect the presence of “genius,” which could be shown by a number. In the Age of Materialism, there was no scruple about weighing and numbering the faculties of the Soul. The fact is that intelligence is the functional opposite of Genius. Intelligence is dissection, genius is creation; one is analysis, the other is synthesis; the first is directed toward the Part, the second toward the Whole. They are related as terrestrial and astral, counting and imagining.

267 It must be said that while Genius is great creative force, each man has some creative force, enough to make of his own life such a work that those who come after him need never be ashamed of him. The interest of the 20th century is in politics, and hence the significance of Genius in this sphere will be examined here. It is best understood by comparison with Tradition in politics. Tradition secures the steady fulfillment of the Idea by training up the available talent to a high average level. It is superior to Genius as a vehicle for the actualization of an Idea, for the life span of the Tradition is also the life span of the Idea, while Genius is allotted only the usual three score and ten. The passing of Genius leaves a gap, but the Tradition only passes with the fulfillment of the Idea itself. In the larger sense, Cromwell is the beginning of the English national political tradition. Yet, in a narrower, personal sense, he did not found a tradition, for after his death, it was but a matter of months before the Dynasty was back, and Cromwell’s body was exhumed and dragged through the streets of London by wild horses. But when once the English political tradition was founded in the Cromwellian spirit, it lasted right through to Joseph Chamberlain. What is Genius in politics? How does it manifest itself in this realm? In one thing simply: it represents the Idea of the Future. If one were to state the relation to the Present of the masses, a Tradition, and Genius, he would say that the masses are always behind the Present, the Tradition is alert at each moment adjusting to the Future, but the Genius represents the Promethean thrusting into the Future with unleashed force. Genius is dependent for its actualization on the appreciation of the Culture-bearing stratum, or nation-bearing stratum. Talent can understand anything that Genius can imagine or create, once it is actualized, but Genius always impresses at first

268 as fantastic. Alexander the Great, Frederick the Great, Cromwell, Napoleon, the Hero of this age, all impressed most people at the beginning of their careers, as being unworldly, out of touch with Reality. There was some justification for this, for they were in touch with a new world, the next Reality. In this connection, the use of the word Present is only a figure of speech. Actually, there is no Present in the world of politics: the Present is simply the point of tension between Past and Future. Genius in politics belongs always on the side of the Future. Genius is great creative force; in the realm of action, creation is of deeds; deeds are the form of the actualization of the Future. At the very beginning of the Civilization period of the Western Culture, two extraordinary men stand opposed, Napoleon and Metternich. Only the Empire-builder had genius; his opponent, though equal in political skill, in assessment of the “realities” of the time, and in force of character, was a mere conserver, a servant of the Past. The “realities” he cognized were those of the immediately previous Reality, not those of the coming Reality. It is Genius of Napoleon’s kind that occasionally appears and delivers the new Spirit of the Age, the new Reality. Talent of Metternich’s kind lacks the vision of the Genius, and it is solely accidental whether or not he opposes him. If Metternich had been a Frenchman, he would have been a Minister of Napoleon. What precisely are the qualities of Genius in politics, which constitute its maestria and its inner imperative? First, vision. It sees the possibilities of the Future, and its mind is thereby freed from the trammels which hinder the average man in his thinking. To the prosaic mind, everything which is, represents the end of all development, the Future is to be a mere extension of the Past. Second, spiritual purity: the ordinary man is an eclectic; he carries in his head hundreds of contradictory ideas

269 and beliefs. Not so the creative man in politics: he thinks along one line, and one line only. This gives to his enemies the opportunity of convincing many that he is mentally ill, and they have never failed to do so, from Alexander to the Hero we have seen. But political Genius and its enemies pass into two different categories of History. His name is written in bronze letters as the symbol, meaning, apotheosis, and incarnation of the Spirit of his Age; his enemies turn out on this high plane to have been merely the material with which he hewed his deeds. Third, intensity: the voice of Genius commands; it is harsh, intolerant. It demands and impels upward. Genius is inseparable from the presence of a rushing inner chaos, the prerequisite of formative work. Under a Frederick, or a Charles XII, men will overcome tactical odds of 5-to-1, strategical odds of 30-to-1. But not under Laudon, or the Archduke Charles, or a Grant. These latter need crushing superiority to make up for their inner lack. Fourth, the sense of a Mission. This vision, purity, and intensity are all brought into an ethical focus: the things which he sees are stamped with Necessity, and he must actualize them. This accounts for the powerfully dramatic influence of a political Genius upon the facts of History. His forceful mission compels everyone to orient himself to it. Everyone is either with him or against him. He becomes the center of the world. Lastly, an Imponderable. Genius is Life at its highest human potential, and all Life is uncanny, irrational, mysterious. There is something about Genius that makes men rise spiritually. It is the Something that gave Napoleon victory on almost every field, that sat like an eagle on the shoulder of Moltke, as he worked quietly at his task of shaping the form of the 20th and 21st centuries. It may be merely the personality accompanying these extraordinary gifts. It may be a transcendental emanation from the higher organism — it is unknowable, but it is there.

270 Genius and the Age of Absolute Politics There can be no question that a Tradition, which makes use of the ever-present talent of the successive generations, is superior to Genius for the purpose of actualizing an Idea in its perfection. But the Idea will be actualized without either of them; their presence, together or separate, affects only the rhythmic sureness and external purity of the Life-process. The soul of each Culture is an organism, and therefore possesses the mark of individuality. This is stamped on everything connected with the Culture, including its History-style. Just as persons differ in their way of expressing themselves — one man forceful and imperious, another quiet, but equally effective — so do High Cultures. The Classical offers a strong contrast to our own in this. Its historical style, in comparison with ours, is one of Incident. Accents are not sharp, transitions are not conscious, or marked by the intensely formed turning-points of the Western history. While their men of genius were not fewer, Genius played a smaller role in the working-out. Genius was the focus of less force. Western nations have also seen great developments which

271 were unaccompanied by the phenomenon of direction of the whole Idea on to one man. For instance, the German Wars of Liberation, 1813–1815, England’s transition to Democracy, 1750–1800. But in the middle of the 20th century we see about us the wreckage of the two centuries of Rationalism: the high old traditions of the West have been mostly destroyed. The horizontal war of the banker and the class-warrior against the Western Civilization have laid the old quality low. But History has not stopped, and the greatest imperative of all in the political sphere is now operative. A new quality-tradition is arising. As the philosopher of this age has said, there are no longer in the world any sacred forms of political existence whose very age is an unassailable power. Since an effective Tradition is absent in the political realm of the Western Civilization, we may expect that the Western demand for sharp accents in History will repose gigantic forces in the hands of individual men. The Hero whom we have seen was a symbol of the Future. History does not stop; no one man is more important than History. The relationship of political Genius to the mass was misread by 19th century Materialism, and also by Nietzsche. Materialism regarded the great politician as bound to work for the — of course — material improvement of the mass. Nietzsche regarded the masses as existing only to produce the great men. But the idea of purpose cannot describe the process as it is. Apart from all ideology, the great man and the masses are a unity, both are in the service of the Idea, and each finds his historical significance only with regard to the counter-pole. Carlyle voiced the instinctive demand of this age when the idea of authority and monarchy has once again a good conscience: find the Ablest Man, and let him be king.

272 Democratic ideologists, with their heads buried deep in the sand, say that maybe a bad monarch will appear. But the imperative of History is not to produce a perfect system, but to fulfill the historical mission. It was this that produced Democracy and it is this that now pays no attention to the whining of the Past, but only to be the rumble of the Future. Good or bad, the monarchs are coming. On the front of the tottering edifice is printed in gaudy letters: Democracy. But behind it is seen to be a cash-till, and the banker sits, running his hands through the money that was the blood of the Western nations. He looks up in terror, as the sound of marching feet is heard. The Future of the West demands the committing of great forces into the hands of great men. The erection of a Tradition of politics is a hope; from the chaos of 1950 there is no hope. Only great men can bridge the gap.

273 Race, People, Nation, State 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

274 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. Any excrescence of theoretical equipment on a political movement is a luxury, and the Europe of 1933-2000 can afford none such. Europe has paid dearly for this Romantic concern with old-fashioned racial theories, and they must be destroyed. II 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. The anthropological studies of the 19th centuries uncovered a mathematically presentable fact which affords a good starting-point to show the influence of the soil. It was discovered that for any given inhabited area of the world there was an average

275 cephalic index of the population. More important, it was learned, through measurements on immigrants to America from every part of Europe, and then on their children born in America, that this cephalic index adheres to the soil, and immediately makes itself manifest in the new generation. Thus long-headed Jews from Sicily, and short-headed ones from Germany, produced offspring with the same average head measurement, the specifically American one. Bodily size and span of growth were two other characteristics in which all types whatever in America, Indians, Negroes, white men, were found to have the same average, regardless of average size and growth-span of the countries or stocks from which they came. In the case of immigrant Irish children, coming from a country of a very long growth-span, the response to the local influence was immediate. 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.

276 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,

277 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. To what race does a man belong? We know at first glance, but exactly what sign tells us this cannot be materially explained. It is accessible only to the feelings, the instincts, and does not yield itself to the scale and balance of physical science. 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

278 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. III 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. We do not

279 know what it is that conveys race in the physiognomy, and attempts to reach it by statistics and measurements must fail. This fact has caused Liberals and other materialists to deny that race exists. This incredible doctrine came from America, which is veritably a large-scale racial laboratory. This doctrine really only amounts to a confession of total inability of Rationalism and scientific method to understand Race or subject it to order of the type of the physical sciences, and this inability was known before by those who have clung to facts and resisted anti-factual theories. Suppose that a man were to familiarize himself thoroughly with the measurements — length of nose, brows, chin, width of brow, jaws, mouth, etc. — of every face he knew until he could fairly well say from a new face what its measurements would be. If he were then given a set of measurements merely written down as such, does anyone think that even such a specially trained person could form any idea in his mind of the racial expression of the face from which the measurements were taken? Of course not, and the same is true of any other expression of race. Another important objective aspect of race finds an analogy in the fashions of female physiognomy which come and go in a Late urban civilization. When a given female type is held up as an ideal, it is a fact that the kind of woman who is sensitive to this sort of thing very soon develops the facial expression of this type. In the domain of Race a similar phenomenon exists. Given a race with a certain, distinct cosmic beat, its members develop automatically an instinct for racial beauty which affects the choice of mates and also works on each individual soul from within, so that this double impetus forms the racial type pointing toward a certain ideal. This instinct for racial beauty, needless to say, has no connection with the decadent erotic-cults of the Hollywood type. Such ideals are purely individual-intellectual,

280 and have no connection with 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

281 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. An important example of this is the creation of the Jewish race that we now know in the millennium of ghetto-existence in Europe. Leaving to one side for the moment the different world-outlook and culture of the Jew, this sharing by a group, whatever the basis of its original formation as such, of a common fate for centuries will hammer it into a race as well as a spiritual-historical unit. 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. The method of racialization of an historical unit, as the Western nobilities were racialized, is through the inevitable cosmic rising in such a group of an ideal physical type, and the instinct for racial beauty, which work together through the germ-plasm and inwardly in each soul to give this group its own look, that individualizes it in the stream of history. Once this community of fate departs, through the vicissitudes of History, this race vanishes also, never to appear again. IV From this point the fundamental misunderstanding of the 19th century materialistic interpretation of race appears clear and distinct:

282 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.,

283 even though they now speak Spanish, and then spoke a now-vanished 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. In the time of the Egyptian Culture, a people called the Libyans gave their name to an area. Does that mean that whoever inhabits this are from then on related to them? The Prussians in the year 1000 A.D. were an extra-European people. In 1700 the name Prussia described a nation in the Western style. Western conquerors merely acquired the name of the tribes they displaced. That which went under the various names of Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Jutes, Varangians, Saxons, Vandals, Norsemen, Danes, came from the same racial material, but the names do not show it. Sometimes a group gives its name to an area, so that after it is displaced, the old name passes to the conquering group; this was the case of Prussia and Britain. Sometimes a group takes its name from an area, like the Americans. As far as the Race-History symbiosis is concerned, names are accidental. They do not indicate any sort of inward continuity by themselves. The same is true of language. Once the idea is grasped that what we call history really means High History, that this is the history of High Cultures, and that these High Cultures are organic unities expressing their inner possibilities in the profuse forms of thought and happening which lie before us, a deep understanding follows of the way in which History uses whatever human material lies to hand for its fulfillment. It puts its impress on this material by creating historical units out of groups hitherto often very

284 iverse biologically. The historical unity, in harmony with cosmic rhythms governing all Life from plant to Culture, acquires its own racial unity, a new racial unity, removed, by its spirituo-historical content from the former, primitive, simple relationship between stock and soil. But with the departure of High History the fulfillment of the Culture, the spiritual-historical content recedes forever, and the primitive harmony resumes its dominant position. The previous, biological, history of the groups taken by a High Culture play no role in this process. Previous names of indigenous tribes, previous wanderings, linguistic equipment — none have any meaning for high History, once it sets upon its course. It starts, so to speak, from a clean slate. But it remains this way also, in its ability to take in whatever elements enter into its spirit. New elements, however, can bring nothing to the Culture — it is a higher individuality, and thus has its own unity, which cannot even be influenced, other than superficially, by an organism of equivalent rank, and a fortiori cannot be changed in the slightest in its inner nature by any human group. Thus any group coming within the area of a Culture is either within the spirit of the Culture, or without it — there is no third alternative. Organic alternatives are always only two: Life or Death, sickness or health, forward development or distortion. When the organism is put off its true path by external influences, crisis is bound to follow, crisis which will affect the entire life of the Culture, and will often involve the destiny of millions in confusion and catastrophe. But this is an anticipation. The objective meaning of race has other aspects important to a 20th century outlook. It has been seen that races — meaning here primitive groupings, simple relationships between soil and human stock — have different gifts for historical purposes.

285 We have seen that Race influences History as well as the converse. We come to the hierarchy of races. V The materialists could, of course, not succeed with all their attempts to make an anatomical classification of races. But races can be classified according to functional abilities, starting from any given function whatever. Thus a hierarchy of races can be based on physical strength, and there is little doubt that the Negro would stand at the top of such a hierarchy. There would however be no point in such a hierarchy, because physical strength is not the essence of human nature in general, and even less of Culture-man in particular. The fundamental impulse of human nature — above the instincts toward self-preservation and sex, which man shares with other Life-forms — is the will-to-power. Very seldom is there any struggle for existence among men. Such struggles as do occur are nearly always for control, for power. These take place within couples and families, clans, tribes, and among peoples, nations, States. Therefore the basing of a hierarchy of races on strength of will-to-power has a relation to historical realities. Such a hierarchy can have, of course, no eternal validity. Thus the school of Gobineau, Chamberlain, Osbom and Grant was on the same tangent as the materialists who announced that there is no such thing as Race, because they could not discover it with their methods. The mistake of the former was to assume the permanence — backwards and forwards — of races existing in their time. They were treating races as building-blocks, original material, and ignoring the connections of Race and History, Race and Spirit, Race and Destiny. But at least

286 they recognized the existing racial realities of their time, their sole mistake consisting in regarding these realities as rigid, existing rather than becoming. There was also in their approach a remnant of genealogical thinking, but this sort of thinking is intellectual and not historical, for History uses the human material at hand without questioning its antecedents, and in the process of using it, this human material is placed in relation to the vast, mystical force of Destiny. This remainder of genealogical thinking tended to create divisions in thought between Culture-peoples corresponding to no divisions in actuality. The further materialistic tendency developed to extend the principles of heredity which Mendel had worked out for certain plants to the subject of human Race. Such a tendency was doomed to be fruitless, and after almost a century of barren results, it must be abandoned in favor of the 20th century outlook which approaches History and its materials in the historical spirit and not in the scientific spirit of mechanics or geology. Nevertheless the school of Gobineau at least started from a fact, and this brings it much closer to Reality than the learned fools who looked up from their rulers and charts to announce the demise of Race. This fact was the hierarchy of races for Cultural purposes. In their day the word “culture” was used to designate literature and the fine arts as distinct from the ugly, brutal things like economics, technics, war and politics. Hence the center of gravity of these theories was on the side of intellect rather than on the side of the soul. With the coming of the 20th century outlook, and the clearing from the air of all Materialistic-Romantic theories, the unity of Culture was perceived through all its various manifestations of arts, philosophy, religion, science, technics, politics, State-forms, race-forms, War. Therefore

287 the hierarchy of races in this century is one based on degree of will-to-power. This classification of races is also arbitrary, from the intellectual standpoint, just as much as one based on physical strength. It is, however, the only one suitable for us in this age. Nor is it rigid, for the vicissitudes of History are more important in this realm than heredity-transmitted qualities. There is to-day no Hindu race, although there once was. This name is a product of accomplished history, and corresponds to no racial group. Nor is there a Basque race, a Breton race, a Hessian race, an Andalusian race, Bavarian race, Austrian race. Similarly, races existing to-day in our Western Civilization will also disappear with the advance of history over them. The source of a hierarchy of races is History, the forces of happening. Thus when we see a European population, with its own racial stamp, the English, hold down a population of hundreds of millions of Asiatics for two centuries with only a handful of its own troops, as the English did India, we call that race one with a high degree of will-to-power. During the 19th century, amid 300,000,000 Asiatics, England had a tiny garrison of 65,000 white troops. The mere numbers would mislead if we did not know that England was a nation in the service of a High Culture and India a mere landscape with primitive millions teeming in it, a landscape that had been also at one time the area of a High Culture such as our own, but had long since returned to its pre-Cultural primitivity within the ruins and monuments of the past. Knowing this, we know thereby that the source of this stern will-to-power is at least partially in the force of the Destiny of the Culture of which England was an expression. When we see a race like the Spanish send forth two bands like those of Cortez and Pizarro, and read of their accomplishments,

288 we know we are in the presence of a race with high willpower. With a hundred-odd men, Pizzaro set out to overcome an empire of millions. The project of Cortez was of a like boldness — and both achieved military success. It is not a slave race that can do such things. Aztec and Inca were no raceless populations, but were themselves the vehicle of another High Culture, a fact which makes these exploits almost incredible. The French race in the time of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars was in the service of a Cultural idea, the mission of changing the whole direction from Culture to Civilization, of opening the Age of Rationalism. The enormous force which this living idea lent to the armies of France is shown by the 20-year succession of military victories over all the armies that repeated coalitions of all Europe could throw against them. Under Napoleon’s personal command, they achieved victory in more than 145 out of 150 engagements. A race equal to such a test was one of high will-power. In each of these cases, the race was one created by History. In such a unit, the word race contains the two elements: the stock-landscape relationship, and the spiritual community of history and Cultural idea. They are, so to speak, stratified: beneath is the strong, primitive beat of the cosmic rhythm in a particular stock; above is the molding, creating, driving Destiny of a High Culture. When Charles of Anjou beheaded Conradin, the last Hohenstaufen Emperor, in 1267 Germany disappeared from Western history, as a unit with political significance, for 500 years, reappearing in the 18th century in the double form of Austria and Prussia. During these centuries, the high history of Europe was made by other powers mostly with their own blood. This meant that — in comparison with the vast expenditure of blood over the generations of the others — Germany was spared.

289 To understand the significance of this fact, we must go back to the purely biological origin of races of Europe. VI The primeval population-streams which came out of the North of the Eurasiatic land-mass from 2000 B.C. right down to 1000 A.D. — and after — were probably of related stock. Barbarians called Cassites conquered the remains of the Babylonian Culture, about 1700 B.C. The next century Northern barbarians called Hyksos by the Egyptians threw themselves at the ruins of the Egyptian Civilization and subjected it to their rule. In India, the Aryans, also a Northern barbarian horde conquered the Indian Culture. The populations which appeared in Europe over the millennium and a half ending 1000 A.D. under the various names. Franks, Angles, Goths, Saxons, Celts, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Lombards, Belgae, Norsemen, Northmen, Vikings, Danes, Varangians, Germani, Alemani, Teutones — and other names — are all of similar stock. It is very probable that the conquerors of the older Civilizations eastward were of similar stock with the Western barbarians who threatened Rome for centuries and finally sacked it. The great sign of this stock was blondness. Wherever to-day blonde traits are found, elements of this Northern stock have at some past time found their way. These Northern barbarians conquered the indigenous populations of all Europe, constituting themselves an upper stratum, supplying the leadership, fighting-men, and laws, wherever they went. Thus they represented the ruling-stratum in the territories now known as Spain, Italy, France, Germany, England. Their numerical proportion was greater in some places than in others, and with the arising of the Western Culture, c. 1000 A.D., it was on this strong-willed primitive stratum that the

290 idea took hold. From having been the conqueror of fulfilled Civilizations, this stock now was itself selected to fulfill the Destiny of a High Culture. That which distinguished this primitive biological population-stream is its strong will. It is also this strong will — and not only the inner Idea of the Culture itself — that contributes to Western history the unique forcefulness of its manifestations in all directions of thought and action. Think of the Vikings, in the gray dawn of our history reaching America from Europe in their tiny ships! This is the sort of human material which contributed its blood to the Western races, peoples and nations. It is to this treasure of being that the West owes its prowess on the battlefield — and this fact is known all over the world, whether it is theoretically denied, or not. Ask any general in any army whether he would rather have under his command a division of soldiers recruited from Pomerania, or a division of Negroes. Unhappily for the West, the Russian populations contain also a strong strain of this Northern barbarian stock. It is not in the service of a High Culture, but stands to us as did the Gauls to Republican and Imperial Rome. Race is material for events, and it is available to the will-to-annihilate as freely as it is to the will-to-create. The Northern barbarian stock in Russia is still barbarian, and its negative mission has given it its own racial stamp. History has created a Russian race, which is steadily widening its racial boundaries by taking up into it and impressing with its historical mission of destruction the population-streams of its vast territory. In the hierarchy of races based on will-to-power, the new Russian race stands high. This race needs no moralistic propaganda to fan its militancy. Its barbarian instincts are there, and can be relied on by its leaders.

291 Because of the fluid nature of Race, even the hierarchy of races based on will-to-power cannot succeed in ordering all races now existing. For instance, would the Sikhs stand above the Senghalese, or below, the American Negroes above or below the Aymara Indians? But the whole purpose of understanding the varying degrees of will-to-power in different races is a practical one, and applies in the first instance to our own Western Civilization. Can this knowledge be used? The answer is that not only it can, but it must be, if the West is to live out its life span and not to pass into slavery to Asiatic annihilation-hordes under the leadership of Russia, Japan, or some other militant race. Before this information can be applied with full insight and with no danger of old-fashioned misunderstanding, the subjective meaning of Race must be examined, and beyond it the ideas connoted by the terms People, Nation and State.

292 Subjective Meaning of Race 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. The stronger

293 these things are in relation to the racial plane, the more the existence bears an intellectual instead of a racial stamp. Each individual, as well as each higher organic unit, has these two aspects. 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,

294 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. The Chinese mothers counsel their children with the ancient admonition: “Make thy heart small.” This is the wisdom of the man without race, and of the race without will. The men of race are skimmed off every population that is caught up into the course of motion of a High Culture, and this process continues through the generations of History on the heights. What is left is the fellaheen. 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. Strength of intellect has nothing to do with the existence of race — it may merely, in some cases, such as that of the man who takes a vow of celibacy — influence the expression of a part of race. Strong intellect and strong instincts can co-exist — think of the Gothic bishops who led their flocks to war — they are merely opposed directions of thought and action, but it is the instincts that furnish the driving force for great intellectual accomplishments also. The center of gravity of ascendant Life is on the side of instinct, will, race, blood. Life which places rationalistic ideals of “individualism,”

295 “happiness,” “freedom” before the perpetuation and increase of power is decadent. Decadent means — moving toward extinction, extinction of higher Life in particular, and finally even of the life of the race. The intellectual of the great city is the type of the man without race. In every Civilization, he has been the inner ally of the outer barbarian. This quality of having race has, obviously, no connection with which race one feels community. 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,

296 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. II 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. One child is permitted, as being a more complicated toy than a dog, perhaps

297 even two, one boy and one girl — but the family of many children is a subject for humor to this decadent outlook. The instinct of decadence takes many forms in this realm: dissolution of Marriage by divorce laws, attempts to discard, through repeal or non-enforcement, the laws against abortion, preaching in the form of novel, drama, journalism, the identification of “happiness” with sexual love, holding it up as the great value, before which all honor, duty, patriotism, consecration of Life to a higher aim, must give way. 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

298 against war.” Only an intellectual could be taken in by such stark Unreality. The weak will of society manifests itself in the Bolshevism of the upper classes, the sympathy with the enemies of society. Anyone with unimpaired will however is really felt to be the enemy — even cogent reasoning is hated: ideals are so much less demanding. Mediocrity rises over the horizon of a dying race as its last great ideal; total mediocrity, renunciation of all greatness and distinction of any kind whatever; also mediocrity of the racial blood-stream — anyone can come in now, not only on our terms, for there are no more terms, and there are no racial differences, everything is one, dull, eventless, mediocre. The weakening of the will is not hard put to find an ideology which rationalizes it as “progress,” everything desirable, the aim of all previous history. The democracy-liberalism complex lies to hand, and it acquires in such times the meaning of Death — of race, nation and Culture. There are no human differences, everyone is equal, men are women, women are men, “the individual” is everything, Life is a long holiday whose main problem is devising new and more stupid pleasures, there is no God, no State, off with the head of anyone who says there is a mission, who wishes to resurrect Authority. These symptoms, or similar ones, will be found present at the demise of every upper stratum whose will is weakened. Thus Tocqueville has described for us how the French upper stratum of 1789 had no suspicion whatever of the impending Revolution, how nobility waxed enthusiastic over the “natural goodness of Humanity,” the “virtuous people,” the “innocence of Man” while the Terror of 1793 lay before their very feet — spectacle terrible et ridicule. Did not the Petrine nobility of Russia up until 1917 go through the same performance? The Tsar resisted pleas to leave while there was time with “My

299 people will not hurt me.” Their picture of the Russian peasant was that of a happy, simple muzhik, basically good. Similarly the weakening of the Western will in certain countries was shown by the deluge of pro-Russian propaganda spread, sometimes with official encouragement, in those countries from 1920 to 1960.

300 Horizontal Race vs. Vertical Race 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

301 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. The 20th century viewpoint in this matter starts from facts, and the observed fact is that all strong minorities — both within and without a High Culture — have welcomed into their company the outsider who was attracted to it and wished to join it, regardless of his racial provenance, objectively speaking. The racial snobbery of the 19th century was intellectual, and its adoption in a too-narrow sphere by the Resurgence of Authority in Europe between the first two World Wars was a grotesquerie. 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. Esthetics is however a domain of its own, and does not have sufficient vitality to supply the

302 motivation of a political struggle. Its presence there can only be superfluous. The stark historical value in this matter is simply this: 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 rhythms — 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 aprés 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

303 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.

304 Race and Policy 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

305 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. The strength of will of the Russian race is an ominous fact which cannot be explained away by intellectualizing. This strength is reflected in physical stamina which enables the Russian soldier to recover from wounds which would be fatal to a Western soldier. The will-to-power diffused through the Japanese race places it high in the hierarchy of races. The force this gives to the body of a nation is shown by the physical performance of Japanese infantry, matched by only one of the Western races still existing. The two general physical types which make up the body of the Japanese race show perfectly the fact that purity means prevalence everywhere of the same feeling, cosmic rhythm, and not of the same physical structure, pigmentation, or shape of head, for spiritually these two physical types are both Japanese. The lower degree of will-to-power of the populations in the areas called China, India, and Africa generally is also a fact for policy to apply. This is, of course, no attempt to contradict that some tribes in these areas have strong will-to-power, but only a general observation of these large areas. Anything that is a fact is material for policy, no matter how general, or how specific, so long as it relates to action. Important as these general facts as to the hierarchial ordering of extra-European races are, Race has a vastly more important aspect for policy, and that is the strength of our own race. Race is the material of History, it is the treasure which a

306 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 break down 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. Part of this degeneration is organic — more of it is deliberately spread abroad within our Civilization by alien distorting elements which either belong to, or sympathize with, Asia in the annihilation battle for Western survival that will take up this century and the next. It is quite obvious that anything that undermines the will-to-power and the virility of the West ripens it for Asiatic slaughter. It should be equally obvious that the world-outlook that is thus eating away at the Western soul must be ruthlessly eradicated wherever it lurks by whatever means necessary. Thus even if one may have clung to his little ideal of “freedom” or “happiness” during the 19th century — the century of security, of comfort, of money-making and

307 money-spending — he must renounce it now in the century when the very foundations of the life of our Culture are under attack from below and without — an attack in each case that means to destroy everything. To retain such ideals is to become the inner enemy of the West. Thus Western policy must declare this outlook and its adherents to be the inner enemy. It must supplant its superannuated ideology by the strong, manly one appropriate to this Age of Absolute Politics. It must root out its ideas, its leaders, its techniques. Any groups that are committed to this outlook by their inner constitution and spiritual existence must be proscribed. Western policy has the duty of encouraging in its education of the youth its manifestations of strong character, self-discipline, honor, ambition, renunciation of weakness, striving after perfection, superiority, leadership — in a word — 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. An intellectual cannot be inspired — enthusiasm he regards, quite seriously, as pathological, as mania. He prefers to sit in

308 his cocktail lounge or his sidewalk cafe, sipping his alcohol and preserving the degagé manner. The talk is of pathetic ideals of social and sexual atomism, of “new artistic tendencies,” of “the subconscious,” of “democracy” — but over it all is the perfume of decay. It is a world of boredom, a blase degeneration, the casual bumpings and connections of grains of sand — in one word, the sarcophagus of the race. Baudelaire, with his preoccupation with corpses, is its perfect expression: the world of the intellectual is the putrescence of the superpersonal soul. Where this sort of material has influence, the barbarian has easy conquests. Western policy must recognize these facts. Education policy, propaganda, public life, must form the race away from this charnel outlook. To keep away from all these forms of decadence is to safeguard the strength of the race. To allow them is to promote the death of the race. II We have seen the power of a race imbued with an historical idea to take up alien human material into it, and imbue it with its own rhythm. This phenomenon must be more closely examined. We have seen this sort of thing throughout all history. Thus the Romans accepted into their racial body whoever was capable of Romanness, and wished to be able to say with the same inner pride as the dwellers on the Seven Hills — Civis Romanus sum. Up until 1933, America had thus taken up into its race many millions of immigrants from Europe and from the Balkans. The Russians have been thus increasing their numbers steadily through the past three centuries. In each of these cases, the essence of the ingress of the alien

309 into the proper racial body is his total absorption into the new idea, his complete adoption of the new plane of existence, his total loss of the old existence. With human beings, the word “total” refers to the soul. If his soul can assimilate, his body can. Thus Frenchmen settled in Brandenburg en masse during the 18th century. Thousands upon thousands of Germans have settled in France. Frenchmen settled in America in great numbers. So did Englishmen. Italians have moved to France in enormous numbers. The examples are almost endless. In each case, the newcomers disappeared as a group. As individuals, their blood-stream continued in the new landscape, but it now had a new cosmic beat. French Huguenots in Brandenburg became Prussians, in Ireland they became Irish. Spaniards in Ireland became Irish. English in America became Americans. Germans in France became Frenchmen; in Argentina, Argentines; in America, Americans. The newcomer in this process, as individual or as group can contribute nothing on the superpersonal level. His contribution is limited to his personal qualities of instinct or talent as individual, of healthy instincts as group. Cultural things he cannot contribute, because they cannot be received. A unit itself under the impress of a High Culture cannot assimilate anything on the cultural level from a group under the impress of another High Culture. 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

310 when the incoming non-Westerners sought to preserve no barrier of their own: during the youth of our Culture, on the Eastern Marches of Europe, many thousands of Slavs were assimilated into the European races, disappeared into them and became completely European. Western policy of the future must remember facts of this kind. 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. Only a superficial view could attach importance to words, phrases, even vocabularies, or to quaint social customs that the receiving race may adopt from the newcomers in the process of assimilating them. These things are merely the traces by which one can trace the influx after the passage of generations. Thus some Irish family names are “de la” this or that, Spaniards “di,” Frenchmen and Americans “von,” Germans “de.” It is no sign of any continuity other than that of the germ-plasm, this of foreign family names, after assimilation has occurred. In fact it is noticeable, and is part of old European wisdom that — in the beginning, at least — this new element has a higher radar potential than the absorbing race generally. Hence the old expressions: Hibernis ipsis Hiberniores, päpstlicher als der Papst. The man who comes from the periphery to the center of an Idea has an enthusiasm that the older members do not feel. What they take for granted is to him inspiring in its excellence. It is the zeal of the convert. But there are cases where this assimilation does not occur. They are the cases where there is a cultural bar between the two populations. Either they are each under the impress of a Culture, or else one group is and the other is not, and is negative. Thus, during the reign of Catherine the Great, and at her

311 invitation, thousands of German farmers and craftsmen came to Russia. Land on the Volga river was given to them, and there they remained until very recent history. By the 20th century, their numbers were about 350,000. But — during the generations of their residence in Russia, they had retained their orientation to Europe. Their Russian environment, culture-less and primitive, had been unable to deprive them in any way of their character as a fragment of a High Culture. The Bolshevik regime did what time never could have done: it exterminated them by starvation and dispersal through Asia. Other German colonies preserved their European Culture along the Baltic shores of Russia, and in the primitive Balkan area. The new Asiatic will to annihilate the West has now exterminated them all whether in Rumania, Serbia, Bohemia, Poland, Bulgaria. The best-known example of this organic regularity, and the most Fate-laden for all concerned, was the contact between the group called Jews and the Western Culture. Until the discovery of the organic unity of a High Culture, and its inner articulation, no final understanding of what has come to be called “the Jewish problem” was possible. At this point, only the racial aspect of this problem is touched on, and it is only necessary to explain the origin of the Jewish race now existing. The Jew is a product of another Culture. When the Western Culture arose, the Jews were distributed through a part of its area, mostly in Spain and Italy. The Arabian Culture, then in its very last stage, had created the Jews as a unity, and they were in the form of this expiring Culture. Hence the stirrings of the Western Idea could not touch them inwardly at all. They held themselves entirely aloof from anything Western. They had an entire world-outlook and world-feeling of their own, which needed no impulse from without, that could only resist any other Culture. This basic fact kept the Jew entirely separate

312 from the West spiritually and racially — the West rejected his world-feeling, he rejected its. Mutual hatred and mutual persecution only strengthened the Jewish race, sharpened its cunning, and increased its resentment. Thus we see that while mere race cannot prevent assimilation of new stock from outside, Cultural barriers will. Certain numbers must of course be present for an alien group to maintain its identity within the body of a culturally-alien host. A tiny group could not so preserve itself. That there is nothing about the Jewish race physically that is unassimilable is shown by what happened in Spain. There late in the 15th century the monarch compelled them either to adopt Christianity or leave the country. Most Jews left, but the descendants of those who adopted Christianity and raised their children among Westerners disappeared into the Spanish race. Another example of a Cultural barrier is the relation of Russia and the West. There it is the purely negative will to destroy Culture that has prevented assimilation of Russia by the West, despite the fact that Peter the Great and his dynasty after him tried by every means to Westernize Russia for three centuries. The outburst of 1918 was primarily an expression of the great fact of the failure of the Petrine effort — it had been only superficially successful and had not penetrated to the depths of this powerful negative soul. The Western Culture is the great barrier that also prevents racial assimilation either way in large numbers. For this same reason, Chinese and Japanese, who have behind them and in their souls the Chinese Culture that was fulfilled by 1000 B.C., cannot be assimilated by Westerners racially in numbers. The converse is also true: if a colony of Westerners were planted in the middle of China, 1000 years hence it would be still Western surrounded by the totally alien Chinese. This

313 is the explanation of the anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese laws and activity of the Americans from the middle of the 19th century to the present. It is the numbers that create these racial questions. If a tiny group is involved, it will disappear; if a group of significant numbers is present, separated by a Cultural barrier from the surrounding population, it will not. III To think is to exaggerate; to separate a thing into elements is to give a picture that is bound to disturb the natural order of the relationships. And yet it is a necessity of thought and presentation to examine and set forth things serially. Thus constant precedence has been given to Culture as a barrier to assimilation of populations, because it is an immensely more important one, since it is race-creating. Cases exist, however, where race-difference in the physical sense is so vast that assimilation seems to be impossible. There are no such problems in Europe, but they occur in various Western colonies, such as America and South Africa. Race in the subjective sense influences the choice of a mate. If racial instincts are strong, they prevent the taking of a mate belonging to a race of totally alien characteristics, even physically. Thus the Negro in general rejects the white race, and the white generally rejects the Negro. The Culture barrier is also present, for the Negro is below our Culture, even though he has lived within its area for centuries. It is those whose racial instincts are attenuated in both cases who accept the totally alien physically. The case of America shows the limits of racial assimilability between populations totally alien physically. There the

314 liberal-democratic-communist-ideology has openly sought by all possible means to promote a blending of these two races. The only result it has had is to arouse racial bitterness that finds expression in bloody riots which proceed to mass-killings on both sides. The only reason the subject of the Negro is touched here — its political significance is treated with America — is that it seems to be the extreme case of race-difference preventing assimilation. How much of this is due to the primitivity of the Negro, and how much to his total physical difference, we do not know. The touching of this racial-frontier case of the Negro however, shows to Europe a very important fact — that race-difference between white men, which means Western men, is vanishingly small in view of their common mission of actualizing a High Culture. In Europe, where hitherto the race difference between, say, Frenchman and Italian has been magnified to great dimensions, there has been no sufficient reminder of the race-differences outside the Western Civilization. Adequate instruction along this line would apparently have to take the form of occupation of all Europe, instead of only part of it, by Negroes from America and Africa, by Mongols and Turkestani from the Russian Empire. We have reached now the last and deepest relationships between Race and Policy: Policy is charged with actualizing an historical Mission, the saving of the Western Civilization from decadence within, and from the barbarian without. Whether this is to succeed will depend on the strength of racial instinct left, by which is meant the instincts of self-preservation, fruitfulness, and will-to-power. Any man who shares the feeling of this Mission, and any

315 group which shares it, belong to us in this greatest of all battles in 5,000 years of history, regardless of the derivation of the man or group. Any group or idea which does not share this feeling, and wishes to further its own aims within the West is an inner enemy. Any group or idea which weakens in any way the racial strength of the West is an inner enemy. Policy has the great double task of eradicating the inner enemy in order to salvage the racial instincts of the West, and of training this race into a sure and firm unit for a century of warfare. The two great mistakes of materialism in the field of Race must be a cast into the dead past of Materialism: on the one hand the denial of Race, on the other hand the primacy of Race before Culture. The aim of Policy is to actualize our Western Imperium — whoever introduces racial theories of materialistic provenance, whether in the name of “tolerance,” which means we should abandon our instincts, or in the name of “racial purity,” which means we should abandon our Cultural unity, is prolonging the crisis and division of the West. One result of the coming warfare for the liberation of the West and the creation of the Empire of the West will be the creation — in the long and desperate fight — of a new race, the Western race, which will embrace the populations which made up the 19th century nations or England, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia. Those populations of the West which have the least impaired racial bodies and racial instincts will respond most intensely to the demands of the coming century of warfare, and will play the largest formative role in this greatest of all struggles, but the new race will be a unity, not a collection of dead races, but a

316 new and grander creation from the human streams now existing. The races of 19th century Europe are, as such, dead. Policy starts from this. Provincial patriotism of the 19th century type can evoke no response. The unity of the West which the barbarian has always recognized is recognized at the last hour by the West itself. The barbarian is astride the prostrate West. This is not the end, but the beginning of Western unity.

317 People The creation of a race by History is clear. It is an example of the biological following the spiritual. For this process to reach its highest potential a certain time is necessary — two or three generations are needed for the type of the racial ideal to fasten on to a population-stream and give it its own distinct outer look, corresponding to its inner unique superpersonal soul. People is a word on a different plane of thinking from this. We are familiar with its polemical use by the democratic mob to deny existence to qualitative elements and assert pure and simple quantity as “the People.” We seek, however, facts. What is a people? What is its articulation? Two French thinkers contributed to the 19th century valuable insight into the nature of all human groups whatever. Gustave le Bon and René Worms both saw and set forth with Cartesian clarity the organic nature of human groups, the superpersonal unity which was the custodian of the Destiny of the group. Worms applied it upward — to the State. Le Bon applied it downwards — to the crowd. Their presentation was not entirely

318 free of materialistic tendencies — “Truth belongs to the individual, Error belongs to the Age,” said Goethe — but they gave to the West a glimpse along the path of History. Their contribution was ignored by the Age of Rationalism. The pure materialism of William Paley was preferred: a people is “only a collection of the citizens who compose it.” Again: “The happiness of a people is made up of the happiness of single persons.” This stupid anti-factual picture could not be refuted, for it was a faith. The picture reflected the Spirit of the Age, and could only pass away with the expiration of that spirit. It was a picture that sprang from a certain soul, and even though it denied the soul, yet it was tied to the existence of that one certain soul. The new age is one of Resurgence of Authority, both spiritual and political. This Age bases its political formula on facts, on the actualizing of the possible. It does not dream up an ideal picture, and then try to change the vocabulary of the world-of-action. It does not wish to delude itself into thinking that changing words will transform fact. It wishes to orient itself to facts, and above all to the repository of facts, History, and the driving force of facts, Destiny. To understand what a people is, one must begin with the smallest human group, the crowd. It strikes one immediately that there are two types of crowds. There is the crowd assembled on an intellectual basis — the attendance at a lecture, at a drama, at a social function. Then there is the crowd assembled on a spiritual basis — a political meeting, a religious agitation, a protest, a riot. The first type is a mere collection. The individuals repel one another, figuratively and literally. These crowds have as many viewpoints as there are individuals in them. They are not unities, but only potential unities. The outbreak of fire in a theater immediately turns such a collection of independent individuals

319 into one soul, with one thought, a thought directed downwards, it is true, but it is a unity. The unity of panic is a fact which political and military leaders must know how to exploit. It is one way of inspiriting when other methods may fail. The second type is not a collection, but a unity. The first is unarticulated — all the human atoms are on the same level. The second is articulated — it has a leader. If there is no leader, there is no unity, and a few mounted police may disperse it. No individual will risk anything for a mere gathering, because his individuality is uppermost. The unity of the crowd submerges the personalities of the components; the unity is a super-personal soul. The unity must be on the basis of an idea, a wordless feeling strong enough to cause individuality to subside. When this idea is present, the human beings present become mere cells, as it were, of the higher organic unity. Men of strong intelligence who have been in crowds united for action have described how their own faculties were transformed and how the detachment that intelligence gives was suddenly in abeyance, overcome by a force as mystic in its power as in its origin. This crowd is a people. It is a higher organism, it is informed by a superpersonal soul. The individuals will sacrifice themselves in the process of this higher soul actualizing itself, what they would never do alone. The technique of this process is quite invisible, mystical, but its results are just as visible. Not only do crowds arise by themselves in conditions of great super-personal excitement when a leader appears, as Camille Desmoulins did to the gathering in the Palais Royal in 1789, to activate the mere sum into a unity — but they can be created. Thus, anyone so situated as to be able to bring a mass into one place can transform the mass into a unity by leadership.

320 As far as the individuals are concerned, the crowd is an attitude of mind. The man in a crowd would not dream of thinking for himself — the results of thinking are presented to him by the leader, and thenceforth these thoughts are his. With this emerges a very important fact about crowd unity. It only reached expression with the results of the new propaganda technics of the First World War. It is this: Through constant, unremitting propaganda of all possible types, and with unbroken continuity, the unity of the crowd can be maintained even though the members are physically separated. Mass propaganda converts the population of a continent into a crowd. Individual thought occurs very rarely under such conditions. Constant bombardment with cinema, press and radio-wireless removes all individuality from the units of vast populations. The crowd thus presents the articulation of leader-led. This is existential: without it there is no unity, with it any gathering becomes a unity. But the decisive part of the articulation is the leader, and not the led. All understanding is transferred to him. All decision is with him. This is totally independent of any theory or ideal in the name of which the crowd may be mobilized, even the theory of individualism. The crowd is a higher unity; the leader represents it. Where a High Culture is present, any crowd whatever is affected by it, even though only negatively. By that is meant that even a protest against Culture, such as the Peasant’s Wars, Jack Cade’s rebellion, Marxian class-war, and the like, only gain their unity from their desire to annihilate Culture. Whether the crowd is in the service of Culture or not depends on the leadership. Crowds as masses are neutral. Leadership is decisive: creative leaders like Napoleon lead a crowd upward and forward; leaders of the negative and devious type, like Roosevelt, lead a crowd downward and backward.

321 The crowd is a soul-unit. Its significance and potentialities belong to its articulation, its leader. This is true both of street-crowds within the range of one eye and one voice, and also to crowds on a continental scale, like America. The leader has a dual significance: he is part of the crowd, he must also be against the crowd. It has no individuality save his; if he also becomes lost in the crowd mind, there is no individuality present, no will, no brain. He is part of the superpersonal unity as the brain is part of the body. The brain serves the soul, the body serves the brain. This smallest superpersonal unit, the crowd, shows the polarity of instinct and intellect that extends up through all ascendant organisms to the highest, High Culture. Instinct is the content of the Life, Intellect is the technic of actualizing it. Instinct tells what, Intellect tells how. Instinct says: Preserve! Multiply! Increase power! Intellect seeks methods of preserving Life and increasing power. Intellect is charged with the mission of actualizing Life, of expressing the instinctive imperatives of Life. They can only be understood in relation to one another. Their separation is distortion and illness. They increase together in healthy man. That is why the intellectuals in Late Civilizations exhibit such egregious stupidity — they have attenuated instincts, and hence no intellects. Instinct is the ship bound for a destination, intellect is the rudder that steers it; another figure: instinct is the passengers who are to be transported, intellect is the master of the vessel, who must deliver them. Their relationship can be formulated from the negative side: Instinct furnishes the will-to-power, but must not decide the moment for attack. Instinct cannot decide on the policy by which Life is to actualize its inner imperative. It is blind — it always counsels attack. Thus General Hood threw away the

322 Army of Tennessee in the American War of Secession. Intellect must decide between the posture of defense and the movement of attack. Instinct may succumb to defeat, Intellect can still discern the elements of hope. Instinct sees everything else and everyone else as enemy, Intellect coldly decides from the situation who is the enemy, and seeks to make all the others friends. Instinct is subject to intoxication, the function of Intelligence is to remain sober. Instinct loves and hates, Intellect, neither. In Gothic times, the Empire and Papacy were formulated as the two perfect bodies. Each was supposed to exhibit absolute balance and harmony in its inner unity, as distinct from Man, who is imperfect and contains the inner struggle of Instinct and Intellect. In those times, the problem for the man of action seeking to actualize a great idea was to keep instinct within its bounds. Thus Henry the Lion acted instinctively in his defection from Barbarossa and destroyed the Hohenstaufen Empire, from which destruction the West has suffered ever since. In this time of transition, the problem is the reverse: now it is intellect which must be firmly held in place. In the pride of Rationalism, Intellect announced that it was Life — all else was retrograde, aberrant. The result of Western Intellect denying Western Instinct was the division of the World between Washington and Moscow. II The crowd has been seen to be a submerging of individual souls into a superpersonal soul. It is the creation of a unity out of a sum. In the process intellect moves out of the components and becomes vested in the articulation, the leader. The street-crowd is the smallest people. A people is a unity for action. Whenever, in its great rhythmic swirls, History pulls

323 a group into its vortex, the group immediately articulates itself as a people, or disappears. The group may be religious in origin, economic in origin, cultural in origin. But when it becomes an object of happening, it must respond by constituting itself as a people, or simply vanish from the pages of history. Peoples may be tiny, or they may be vast. The population living in the area between the Adige and the Kurisches Haff felt itself a people at the dawn of our Culture. This vastness of landscape at its origin was unique to the Western Culture. The same feeling was abroad then that in its maturity, in the custody ofSpain, made the whole world into the object of Western politics. Or a people may be tiny — the Mormons in America, a mere group of converts to a religionist, asserted themselves strongly and were opposed from without. They responded by becoming a people. Their unity persisted until their leadership decided in favor of Intellect and compromised the doctrines of the religion, whereupon the Mormon people disappeared. What is it that creates a people? It is first a difference between a group and its human environment, and secondly a tension worked up by this difference. A tension is a frontier. The frontier sharpens the feelings on both sides, and results in a new action-unit, a People. Just as this tension may arise out of religion, economics, culture, race, so may the new unit contain all kinds of people, if the population affected is heterogeneous. Language is no bar to the formation of a people; in fact all existing Western languages came after the formation of their respective peoples. A People is a spiritual unit. It is created by History, and if it is able to survive its first tests, it becomes a unit which carries History further. Just as the excited street-crowd only becomes a unit by virtue of the leader-led articulation, so a people is only such by virtue of leadership.

324 The distinction between crowd and people is only one of duration and magnitude, and not one of kind. Thus one man can exercise, for the few hours necessary, the entire leadership functions of a crowd. A people is more elaborately articulated than a crowd, has a more complex existence, a larger Life-task, and hence, a stratum of leaders. Any absolute monarchy or dictatorship also has a leader- stratum. A people may be weak, or it may be strong. During the recent centuries of Western history, since the Peace of Westphalia, a handful of weak peoples have managed to maintain a nominal independence, politically speaking, by virtue of the tense situation between larger powers. But weak peoples, like weak individuals, cannot create great deeds or great thoughts. A strong people, by the intensity of its imperative, maintains the frontier between it and other populations, refuses to compromise its unique idea. By frontier is meant here of course, spiritual frontier. Whether this develops into a territorial frontier is for events to show, and is also a matter of what Culture we are talking about. Thus, in neither the Arabian Culture, nor the Classical Culture, was the idea of a people bound up with a land area. In neither of these Cultures was it repugnant to the spiritual feeling of unity of a people to have a strange people living in the same area, having its own government and laws. Imperial Rome administered foreign laws in cases involving foreigners. In the Arabian Culture, the independence was even more marked. Thus Nestorians, Muslims, and Jews lived side by side, but belonged to different nations, and did not intermarry. Foreign meant: of a different belief. These peoples and nations would have regarded the Western doctrine of the Reformation-times cuius regio, eius religio as the most Satanic possible inversion of the natural order. To make belief dependent upon the

325 land of residence would have seemed monstrous to them. The Jew brought this feeling with him from this alien Culture. He regarded his next-door Western neighbor as foreign. The public life of his Western host-nation was a matter of indifference to him, and he had his own public-life, unnoticed by the West. Their laws were not his, nor their religion, nor their ethics, customs, thoughts, or habits, and above all, their political life did not touch him with its ideas of Fatherland, patriotism, military service, self-sacrifice. In Turkey and China it was not felt as a humiliation that by the “Capitulations” Westerners were under the jurisdiction of their own consular representatives, and not under local courts. Thus the relation of a people to other peoples is a matter determined by the symbolic inner-life of the High Culture in which it may arise. This is not to say that a People can only arise in a High Culture. For phenomena like Tamerlane and Gengis Khan are also people-creating. As concepts, Race and People are quite separate; in life they are not so separate. We have seen the formation of a Race. It begins with the formation of a People. Every people with a strong idea and good leadership will develop also into a racial unity if it lasts long enough. The converse is also true: a race — using the word now with its maximum of anatomical content, e.g., the Negro — may be the focus of happenings that will force it to assume the form of a people. A People is a unit of the soul. Wherever there is a soul-unity gestating, a people is forming. The entire 20th century West can now see what Nietzsche discerned in the 80’s of the 19th century — the arising of a Western People. His expression “We good Europeans” was understood by few of his time. They were too busy with their petty games: in the Cabinets they were playing national-atomism; in the salons they were talking social-atomism

326 and “happiness”; in the cellars they were plotting in class-atomism. The strength and health of a People depends upon the definiteness of its articulation. We have seen how in a street-crowd, all will and intellect mystically devolve upon the leader. If this breaks up, through mistakes by the leader, or crushing by external force, the crowd is dead, and reverts to a sum of individuals. The decentralization of will and intellect in the West generally is thus seen to be a grave Cultural sickness. The Authority and Unity of the West was gradually undermined for centuries by the slow increase of the intellectual content of the Culture. Nevertheless this Culture preserved its unity before the world, generally speaking, until the cataclysm of 1789, which Napoleon, and after him the Vienna Congress, were unable permanently to undo. The Concert of Europe was replaced by a progressing Discord of Europe. The more will and intellect that passed downwards and outwards in the Culture, the greater was the decline in the Cultural health. Nationalism was the disease of the Culture; Class War was the disease of the Nation; Parliamentarism was the disease of the State; the Rule of Money was the disease of Society; sterile Pleasure was the disease of the Race; the new selfishness was the disease of the Family; Divorce was the disease of Marriage. Every Culture has gone through this terrible crisis, and each has stood where the West now stands in 1948. This means, of course, inwardly, for never before at the height of its crisis has an entire Culture been occupied by barbarians and distorters. The previous seven Cultures surmounted this critical time: the creative forces of Instinct and Intellect, working in harmony brought about the Resurgence of Authority, and formed, in each case, the Empire of the Culture.

327 The beginning of this resurgence of synthesis and creation after the long orgy of Intellect-run-wild manifests itself in diverse phenomena. Nietzsche and Carlyle were symbols of the resurgence. Characteristically both were Europeans, and despised the petty-statism of their times. Their lives and ideas were an expression of organic necessity. Both were heralds of the next Age. The appearance of a spate of cultural histories was another sign. The appearance of State-Socialism was another. The biological theories of de Vries and Driesch, the abandonment of the materialistic cliches by a whole group of physicists was another. For political purposes, the most important was the beginning of the formation of a People of the West.

328 Nation The word People describes a group which has become a soul-unit, through an idea and the presence of the polarity of leader and led. The word is neutral as to the duration of such a group, its inner strength, its intensity, or the magnitude of its mission in life. A nation is a people — and something more. It is more highly articulated. A people can arise outside of a Culture; a nation cannot. A people may be a unit of short duration, or inwardly weak. A nation has a life span and belongs to the strongest organic unities within a Culture. With the word Culture, we touch upon the hall-mark of the Nation: a nation is a people containing a Cultural Idea. When a High Culture is born into a landscape, after a gestation period of several generations, it works with mysterious effect upon the populations in its area. Previous names and groupings vanish into new spiritual unities. In the West, around 1000 A.D., the names Swabian, Frank, Lombard, Visigoth, Saxon, become dead terms for practical purposes, and men begin to feel themselves as Germans, Italians, Frenchmen,

329 and Spaniards. Each of these groups is an Idea — it is the vehicle of a certain part of the soul of the Culture, it is a plane of existence, an aspect of the Culture-spirit. This is the basis of their differences. Their similarity is that they are the creations of the same Culture. Their differences beget different racial rhythms and styles of thinking and doing. A different inner accent shapes the same general linguistic material into various tongues, each one the expression of a different soul. The separate souls react in distinct fashions to similar outer experiences, and thus events also contribute their part to shaping the character of the nations that arise. To understand what a nation is, one must first entirely dissociate in his mind the connection — so self-evident to the 19th century — between nation, political unity, and language. To the era of Rationalism and Capitalism, these units were the very primordial material of history. But these nations were only expressions of a certain stage of the Nation-Idea in Western history. In the dawn of our Culture, language had no relation to nation, nor had politics. A Nation in those days was a spiritual unity which expressed itself as such in the Spirit of the Age. That Spirit was one of religious feeling, Scholastic philosophy, Gothic architecture, Imperial-Papal politics, Crusades. There was a sharp and distinct feeling of the foreigner, but the word did not relate exclusively to politics, or language. In the 11th and 12th centuries, English, German, French methods of thinking appear in the various Scholastics. Varying honor-imperatives, varying moral-feelings, different ways of manifesting religious feelings, variations in the Gothic cathedrals, degrees of attachment to Empire or Pope — all show the different national ideas.

330 Vis-à-vis the foreigner — the Moor, the Slav, the Turk, the Saracen — these nations unconsciously, self-evidently, were one People. However strong their feelings of separation toward one another, instinct welded them into a unity for assertion against the Cultural alien. Thus when the Crusaders established a Western State in the Levant, it was not English, French, German — but simply Western. The instinct of the Culture is strong, its rhythms compel virtually, its superpersonal unity is felt in the blood, and hence recognized by the intellect. All Cultures express themselves in the form of nations, as well as art-forms, religions, languages, technics, knowledge-systems and the other Culture-forms. Just as all the other forms are distinct within each Culture, so is the style of the Nation. In the Arabian Culture, just as its conception of History was the actualization of a World-Plan by God beginning with a Creation and ending with a Cataclysm, so the Nation-style was one of belief. Members of a belief were constituted as nations. The notion of territory, Fatherland, was not present. The nation had a spiritual, and not a physical, extent. This Nation-idea created in this alien Culture the Jewish nation, which in that Culture was one among others of a similar structure. In our Culture, it was so completely alien that no one realized what its essence was until we reached our period of Late Civilization with its historical sensitivity. In the Classical Culture, the Nation-idea was expressed in the form of a City-state. The Nation was not an area, but only the City and its population. Any further territorial control was negative in origin; e.g., to control was to deny possession of the area to a potential enemy in war. To these nations, our idea of a Fatherland with distant frontiers that one never sees during his whole life would have been a fantastic and repellent hallucination.

331 II The Nation is an Idea. Its material manifestations are the actualizations of this Idea as it fulfills itself. We can, for purposes of understanding, divide the Nation into three strata. On top is the Idea itself. It is incapable of expression in words, for it is not an abstraction, not a concept, but is a soul. It can only be expressed in lives, deeds, thoughts, events. Under it is the minority which embodies the Idea at high potential, the nation-bearing stratum. It represents the Idea in History. For practical purposes it is the nation. It is, as actuality, what the mass of the population, the body of the nation, is as possibility. The lowest stratum is the mass. It widens out toward the base, becoming ever less differentiated as one goes down. Finally one reaches the level where an eternal stratum is reached, that takes no part whatever in the national Idea, which does not experience the History which is playing its drama higher up on top. Just as, in a crowd, the leader is the decisive part of the unity, so is the nation-bearing minority in the national unity. Both minority and mass are in the service of the Idea, just as both leader and led are of the crowd-idea. If the leader is killed or removed, another will arise, if the idea is strong. Similarly in a nation, the mass contains, in most of its individuals, a spark of the national feeling. Those who are more moved by this inner quality than others are a part of the minority, the nation-bearing stratum. Dissociate nation-bearing stratum and mere political leadership. In organic health the political leadership contains only members of the nation-bearing stratum — but not all of them,

332 by any means, for nation-bearing stratum is much wider than political administration. But the political leadership may contain, owing to weakness of the national idea and aggressiveness of an inner alien group, few or even no members of the nation-bearing stratum. The members of the nation-bearing stratum are those who by the strength of their national feelings and their willingness to sacrifice for this Idea are the custodians of the Idea before the world and against inner alien and anti-national elements. If this stratum were to be removed from a healthy nation with a future, after a period of spiritual chaos in the body of the nation, a new one would arise from the mass. If the mass were totally devoid of national feelings, the minority could not accomplish the Idea. That there is nothing whatever abstract about this is shown by the case of Russia. There the Romanov dynasty and its upper stratum tried to make Russia into a Western people, a Western nation. But the mass was quite devoid of possibilities in this direction. They did succeed in making Russia into a Western nation, for appearances, and for political purposes, and this shows that the minority is decisive. But when the Bolsheviks exterminated or drove out this entire minority, there was nothing to replace it, for the mass did not even contain a spark of this idea. Thus from the standpoint of History, the nation serves the Culture, the minority serves the nation, the mass serves the minority. The quaint transposition of thought known as Rationalism saw it otherwise: there is no Idea, there is only mass, anything else must serve the mass. But Rationalism only affected terminology in this matter, for even those nations most heavily undermined by Rationalism still appeared in History in the custody of a minority, and the mass was only called upon to

333 obey, to think a certain way, to vote a certain way. It is important in the 20th century to know that denying facts does not remove them, nor does changing their names change their nature. In the 19th century the Nation was still an Idea, even though it was supposed to be merely a huge collection of individuals. It was an Idea that infected even the most rationalistic of the Rationalists, the Communists. Thus French Communism was entirely different from German Communism — the difference between Paris in 1871 and Berlin in 1918. They may have read from the same book, but the pulse in the blood was different.

334 Nation and History A nation is an organic part of a Culture, it expresses by its life and development a certain inner possibility of the Culture-soul. It is never independent of the Culture, and this condition of dependence is shown by the expression Spirit of the Age. It has long been recognized by thinkers and men of action that there are certain things which simply must be done, others which simply cannot be done, during a certain age. One may, or may not, agree with these things with his intellect, but he must observe them. The Spirit of the Age is the phase of development of the Culture. It subjects all nations to it. Since each nation has its own character, and since each Age has its own stamp, it follows that one nation may be more adapted to one given Age than another. This is the explanation of why we have the Age of “The Holy Roman Empire, German by nation,” 1050–1250, the Spanish Age, 1500–1650, the French Rococo, 1650–1750, the English Age, 1750–1900. Within this framework of its own subjection to the Culture, the Nation-Idea compels everything in its realm to submit to its force. Thus each Western nation had its own type of social

335 behavior, its own articulation of society, sharp and clear in England, Prussia, Spain, vague and nebulous in France and Italy. The religiousness of England differed from that of Spain, both from Germany. The orientation to economics is different in each place, strongest in England. Even in the field of erotic, the nations are differentiated, and France is the nation that developed the most elaborate culture of sexual love. Literature is distinctly national, so is drama, so is architecture, so is even music. Philosophy did not escape nationalization: the two greatest Western schools are the English Sensualist school, 1600–1900, and the German Idealist school, 1650–1950. Orientation to religious doctrines is different: Spain has been the stronghold of Catholicity, England of Protestantism. The great men that have arisen in the various nations have expressed national qualities at high potential: Think of Richelieu, Cromwell, Alva, Wallenstein. An oil painting discloses the nationality of its painter during the great era of Western painting, 1550–1850. It is thus easy to understand how Materialism could convince itself that nations were the creators of Culture, instead of seeing the fact that it is the reverse. A Culture begins in Faith and Mysticism, with its thought-world and its action-world both subject to self-evident order and authority. It develops along the path of increasing intellectuality until it reaches the caesura of Rationalism, when intellect frees itself entirely from faith and instinct, analyzes, disintegrates, and mobilizes everything. In its very last stage, that of Late Civilization, it gathers itself once more together, asserts its unity by impressing all forms of its life with a final form which returns once more to the symbolic Authority and Mysticism of its origins. This biography of the Culture is traceable in every life-form, including its nations.

336 The Culture created its nations through dynasties. The idea of a dynasty is repulsive to the Classical Culture, unknown to the Arabian. But Western nations, imbued with the unique force and intensity of expression of the Western Culture are dynastic, even when they abolish a dynasty. They either want another dynasty, or else they wish the dynastic feeling to be freed from the personality of the sovereign. Dynasty is the affirmation of political continuity from Past to Future. The political history of the West from its origins is the history of dynasties. The diverse tribes of Swabians, Franks, Saxons, Bavarians, and Thüringians became united into the German nation through the dynastic Empire-Idea, the creation of Karl der Grosse. Similarly the French people and nation were formed by dynasties. Out of diverse Frankish and Visigothic elements, the Capetian dynasty created a nation and a language. If Dynasty had followed speech, there would have been two Frances: Frankish-Romance France in the North, Provencal France in the South. The Dynasties created the nations, by focusing these mystic feelings onto a passionate symbol. The nations created Race and Language. The Italian written language is attributable chiefly to Frederick II of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, a German Emperor who preferred the South, and caused this language to be used officially and socially in the Empire. The Portugese people and language are the result of the fact that Alfonso VI of Castile gave that territory as the marriage portion of his daughter to Henry of Besancon in 1095. To this creation of a dynasty is due the fact that Brazil speaks Portugese to-day. The House and kingdom of Lorraine came to an end with the childlessness of Lothar II in the 9th century. Had his dynasty continued, there probably had been a nation, people, language,

337 kingdom and State of Lotharingen in Western history. The English people, nation and language are all the result of the Norman Conquest with its founding of the House of Normandy which continues to this time. The Prussian nation is the creation of the Hohenzollern dynasty, and the Austrian was that of the Hapsburg. The form of Western politics was always dynastic, and increasingly so as the Culture attained to greater heights. The rhythmic cycles of great wars took a dynastic form: a vacant throne somewhere called forth a Succession-War. Even in 1870 the pretext which Napoleon III adopted for his war against Prussia was a dynastic one. And the great Napoleon too, was brought down by a millennium of dynastic tradition that he roused against him by driving out old dynasties and putting his brothers and Marshals on thrones as new dynasts. In this stage of Western history the idea of the dynasty is only apparently gone. A thousand-year Empire is itself a dynastic idea. The genealogical continuity of the ruling house is merely a powerful symbol of continuity. This symbol satisfies instinct. Western intellect demands this same continuity during its reign, 1750-1950, but merely changes the symbol: instead of a blood-stream of a royal House, it puts up a piece of paper, a Constitution. Readers in 2050 can see about them the final form of the expression of Western dynastic feeling. In Rationalist times the symbol of the Royal House became unsatisfactory, and was merely tolerated, if not abolished altogether. The piece of paper was much more real to a Rationalist. Now the piece of paper has become unsatisfactory, as History quietly submerges Rationalism. We stand at the next epoch, that of Resurgence of Authority.

338 Nation and Rationalism The national style of a High Culture is so strong that it pulls even neighboring populations into its form. Examples of outer populations that adopted the Western national style because of their geographical proximity are the Balkans, Poland, Bohemia and Russia. This adoption is quite enough to deceive certain elements in the Culture that these border-streams are within the Culture-organism. This is strongly reinforced in the minds of superficial people if, for instance, one or two highly gifted men from beyond the border come under the spirit of the Culture and produce works of thought, or deeds, in the Culture-style. The year 2050 will hardly believe that Russia was referred to as a Western nation as late as the middle of the 20th century. This mistake was merely one of the results of the impact of Rationalism on the Nation-style of the Culture. Reason is the form of thought adopted to solving mechanical problems, and cannot be applied to organic things, in its free, rootless form. Thus to every organism there is a birth, and a death. For what reason? The question is senseless from the

339 organic standpoint. Why must an organism die? No one can give a reason. This refers, of course, to emancipated, inorganic, reason. Religion employs reason, but within the framework of Faith. Emancipated reason — Rationalism — recognizes no superior discipline, neither that of organic regularities, nor beyond them, of Faith or Religion. But yet, the organism dies, even though Rationalism loudly insists that it is not necessary. The human life span of 70 years represents no logical necessity. It would not offend logic if organisms were perpetual. This same unadaptability of logic and reason to organic rhythms affects fundamentally the Nation-Idea during the period of Rationalism. The laboratory-logic which denied God and the human soul was certainly not going to allow the Nation-Idea. The most it was willing to concede was the existence of a great number of individuals. Actually this pose was impossible for even the most intransigent rationalists to maintain, and in their writings, they continually slip into figures of speech which betray that they are thinking in terms of a higher Idea which is imminent in each of these individuals. Thus to Rationalism, Nation means — Mass. There must be no articulation — no nobility, no clergy, no monarch, no group raised above the others by virtue of its higher Idea-content. There is also no Idea which forms all the individuals, even though there is the mechanico-logical concept of the totality. The concept of Nation-as-Mass is coeval with Democracy and Class War. The three notions are merely different aspects of Rationalism. If the nation is the mass, there should be no social stratification, and if the old-traditional structure does not give way, one must make class-war against it. Rationalism is born at the same time also as the decisive turn of Culture toward Civilization, the fulfillment of the inner

340 form-world, and the unequivocal turning to activity as the prime content of Life. This means the vast increase in the public power available to political leaders, larger wars, more intense economics, more physical energy, enormous development of technics. No Western thinker ever had a better technical brain than Roger Bacon, or Leonardo da Vinci, but the technical works of these men came in an age of inner activity, which regarded technics as a branch of knowledge, not as a form of unleashing power for industrial and war purposes. The Civilization expanded in power and in extent. Anything opposing this organic rhythm was doomed to frustration and defeat. The old traditions could only survive if they would take up the new tendencies and lead them onward. This was done in England, but the feat was not so remarkable as has been generally supposed, for the English national-Idea was actually the vehicle of this change of direction from Culture to Civilization. The Rationalist Idea was born in England. English Sensualist philosophers enunciated its basic doctrines, English parliamentarians applied them to theory of government, English technicians invented the new power-unleashing machines, English merchants created the forms of 19th century Capitalism, English thinkers first announced the idea that the nation was the mass. The French Encyclopedists were all under English influence, and many of them lived for years in England. Thus there were plenty of persons in high places who were in contact with the new ideas and felt the necessity of adopting them verbally. The doom of Napoleon symbolizes the deep fact that he was both representing and opposing this idea at the same time. Rationalism could only say: the nation is the mass; it only denied the articulation of the Nation. These nations were not yet dead, and could not be denied. The emphasis passed to the external differences between the nations, which means, political

341 differences. Nation becomes for the first time in Western history, primarily a political idea. The word “nationalism” acquires an exclusively political meaning. Nation had not been, even in Frederick the Great’s Wars, a purely political thing. Under Frederick had fought Russians against Russia, Frenchmen against France, Swedes against Sweden, Saxons fought both for and against him. An early acquaintance of Frederick tendered to him his military services. Frederick offered him a majority. Reluctantly the man took service with an enemy army, because a colonelcy was available there. Such conduct was not considered monstrous at that time. 19th century interpretation of history — ignoring the soul and following the surface continuity of names — merely took current politics and applied it backwards. The foreigner was not liked during previous Western history, but politics was not oriented to this one fact alone. Politics was a thing of dynasty — or as in the case of the microscopic nations, revolt against dynasty. German condottieri like Froberger, and English like Sir John Hawkwood led foreign mercenaries in the wars in Italy. The German Emperor Frederick II was more Italian than German, and found no difficulty in being both politically. Allegiance was not a thing of geography of birthplace, but of attachment, common destiny, oath, honor. Thus, treason in those days did not refer to birthplace, but to obligation of honor. Not until allegiance was given was honor involved. The great Emperor Charles V had a German father, a Spanish mother, grew up in the Netherlands, was educated by a Flemish churchman, whom he later appointed Pope Adrian VI, spoke French as a native tongue, was King of Spain, and Holy Roman Emperor. Spaniards had dukedoms in England, an English queen was married to the King of Spain, the English King was Elector of Hanover. Armies consisted of men of mixed nationality,

342 and commands changed often among generals of different nationality. It suffices to mention Maurice de Saxe, Prinz Eugen, Marshal Conde, Montecuculi. Dynastic-politics cut straight across nations, just as nationalistic politics cut clean across dynasties. But the old spiritual significance of Western nations was replaced by a purely political one after the triumph of Rationalism. The linkage in those days between the new idea of the nation-as-mass and nation-as-political instead of dynastic, caused nationalism to be looked on in 1815 as Communism was in 1915 — the height of radical destruction. Napoleon represented both ideas to Europe. He was anti-dynastic, and thus unlocked everywhere the new feeling of political nationalism. But to countries occupied by French armies, political nationalism meant revolt, and it was the Prussian rising of 1813 that destroyed Napoleon. Rationalism saw a nation thus as a political mass. But why just this mass and not another? There had to be some visible, mechanical, determinant of nationality. This was found in — Language. If a man spoke French, he was French; Italian, Italian. What determines this? Where he was born. It does, or it should. Allegiance became something owed to a language and a piece of ground, not to an Idea or the dynastic symbol of the Idea. This concept triumphed, publicly and privately. It determined a man’s national feelings, and changed the nature of wars. Instead of the Succession-Wars, which arose from dynastic-politics, came now wars for a territory and population which one could assimilate by language policy in the schools. The populations of the Balkan countries were a reflection of the school-policies of the preceding generation. It reached a grotesque height when it was employed in theory at the Versailles

343 conference, 1919. Language was supposed to be the indication of the presence of a nation. The principle was of course only used where it suited the political purpose, but nevertheless everyone paid lip-service to this materialistic stupidity. This concept of the Nation-Idea had many important consequences. The Italian Wars of linguistic Unification created what never had existed before, a political unit Italy. The Austrian nation was annihilated by this concept, and the attempt by extra-European forces to resurrect it as a nation after the Second World War as a part of the general plan to Balkanize Europe was doubly ludicrous, for a new Nation-Idea was coming. The linguistic idea of Nation also enabled England to bring about the entry of America into the First World War on its side, because the written language was more or less common to both. Suppose that — as narrowly missed by vote — the American Constitutional Convention in 1787 had adopted the resolution to make German the official language of America. Western history, 1914–1918 had been quite different. Instead of Europe controlling in 1950 no part of the globe, not even its own area, it would have controlled — the entire globe. But the Nation is always an Idea, it can be nothing other. Only one’s concept of the Nation can change, but the Idea is something in the blood and soul, and not merely in the mind. It permeates a man’s way of understanding what a Nation is, and what everything else is. Even though, say, French and English Rationalists had agreed precisely on what the Nation is, each would have behaved in his distinct national way. Rationalism looked at the nation from within and said: it is mass. It looked at it from without and said: it is language. Both were materialistic stupidities. Nation is, first, the Idea; second, the nation-bearing stratum; lastly, the mass who are the object, the mere body of the Nation. From without, the Nation

344 is a different soul from other souls. It is contact with the foreign that develops the sense of the proper. Rationalism liberated the Nation-Idea from the Dynasty-Idea. Dynasties changed their names to try and cover up their connections with other nations. In most countries the dynasty was dethroned as being anti-national, since nation was mass, and Dynasty was symbol. Above all, Rationalism accomplished the identification of nation and politics. Nationalism became primarily a political term. II The Dynasties reacted as a group to the new concept of the nation, both in its politicization of the Idea, and its identification of Nation and Mass. The making of Nation into the unit of politics was an attack on every dynasty. Dynasties hitherto had exercised a monopoly of politics — were they now to be supplanted by mob-leaders who wished to tear up everything and set it in motion? At the Vienna Congress, 1815, and in the Holy Alliance, the Dynastic Idea of Politics gained its last great victory on the surface. But only on the surface, for repression of the Spirit of the Age only dams it up, as it were, and a dam cannot be built against Destiny. This is the tragedy of every aging woman, and of every effete, backward-looking, ruling class. Talleyrand — alone at the Congress in his political superiority — was however working with the 19th century Nation-Idea, and not that of the 18th century, like the Kings. He stimulated their conservatism, and brought out of a total French military defeat a stronger France. Boundaries were secondary to the Dynasts, primary to Talleyrand. Readers in the 20th century find it difficult, those in the 21st century more difficult, to believe that even in the 50’s of the

345 19th century nationalism was considered a radically destructive force by the traditionary elements in European Nations. In Germany, it took a man of political genius, Bismarck, to transform the idea of nationalism from a destructive, class-war idea into a conserving, creating idea, serviceable to Tradition and forward development. This changing of the meaning of the word nationalism from destructive and leveling to creative-conservative and hierarchical showed that despite their surface-victory, the Dynasts at Vienna had lost their contest against Destiny. Whether or not they continued, the dynasties were politically dead. They became, more in some places than elsewhere, mere pageantry. The force of the dynastic idea — the passionate affirmation of eternal duration — was transferred on to the Nation. The dynasty became merely a part of the general public property of the Nation — like the public buildings, and the national museums. At one time the monarch owned the nation — in the 19th century the nation owned the monarch. If the monarch did take part in politics, he was subject to the same inner limitations as any Premier. The question will be asked: how did nationalism change its significance from Tradition-destroying to Tradition-conserving? It was another development of the Rationalist stock of ideas that brought this about, namely the transference of class-war from the political-social sphere to the economic sphere. Nationalism had done its work on the destructive side: it had destroyed Dynasty and Estates. Now its place in the center of History was challenged by Economics. Economics — Money — is hostile to politics generally, whether dynastic or nationalistic. Authority is the prime enemy of Money. Authority means responsibility, and Money means irresponsibility. Authority means Public; Money means Private.

346 The Master of Money is the second of the class-warriors. First was the ideologue on the barricade with a copy of Contrat Social in his hand. He cleared the stage for the Master of Money. The third in this succession of Culture-termites is the Master of Labor. Vis-à-visall three of them, any form of political nationalism is conservative, and contains possibilities of creativeness if the responsible stratum has sufficient vision and energy. But it takes Genius to see the obvious, and a Bismarck was necessary to show the conserving value of nationalism, and its creative possibilities. Metternich stood with his feet in the old Europe of Dynasty, and had thus seen the struggle of Nationalism against Dynasty as one of Chaos against Order. The year of his passing, 1848, was the epoch of Nationalism from its old meaning to its new one. Had he lived to see the economic class war of the forces of Money and Proletariat against Politics, he also would have chosen nationalism as the alternative. In the field of politics, Rationalism accentuated the differences between the nations. In the field of economics its effect was even more disintegrating. It wished to break up the nation into classes, and the classes into individuals. Liberals, financiers, Communists, Anarchists were the coalition against the remnants of Authority embodied in the nationalistic State. In its first century, Rationalism affirmed the nations as the ultimate units of history and warred against the subjection of the nations to the dynasts. In its second, more radical, century, Rationalism denies the nations altogether. The professors and “political economists” conceived of the nation as a mere economic convenience in a world-wide “division of labor.” Thus one nation could grow crops, another could make machines. It was to be solely economic differentiation. This idea was the darling of the financier, for in the flow of trade in such a world — there must

347 be no autarchy — he would be the great gainer, for it would all flow through him. On the other side, the Communists said that nations were only a capitalist trick to separate the “workers of the world.” Only classes were real — all else is illusion — and there are only two of them, bourgeois and proletaire. These two world-pictures point to total chaos, the dissolution of the Civilization, and submission to the barbarian. Hence Nationalism, from having been destructive became conservative, and even, in the right hands, creative.

348 Nation in the 20th Century Each age passes into the succeeding Age gradually in the depths. On the surface the transition may be gradual, or it may be sudden. This is only another way of saying that there is struggle between Young and Old. The old try to preserve that which is familiar to them, the young wish to actualize the new which is beating in the pulse. A tradition bridges the gap and maintains surface gradualness corresponding to the gradualness beneath. If the tradition has decayed — France, 1789 — the break opens, and becomes a front for fighting. England was ready sooner than France — the Wilkes agitation contained the possibility of a Terror in London in the 60’s — but the ruling class was not decadent and knew what to take over and when to be firm. The 20th century Nation-Idea can be understood by applying the Hegelian-Fichtean Triadic Law of Thought. The thesis of Nation as Dynastic-Unit, and the antithesis of Nation-as-Linguistic-Unit are both submerged into the creator of them both, and become Nation-as-Culture-Unit, the gigantic synthesis

349 whose irresistible actualization is the inner motive force of History in this century. We who live in the middle of the 20th century cannot understand the excitement of 1848, for we only know the hither side of it. Those in 2050, living in the Western Nation-Idea of the 20th century style, will not be able to understand how anyone could have opposed the obvious Destiny of the Western Nation-Idea. Yet the opposition was as effective as that of Metternich and the Fürstenbund was to the entry of the 19th century Nation-Idea. One great difference exists however. The Russia that the Western Nations called in to help against Napoleon and the new Nation-Idea he represented considered itself a Western Nation, and so conducted itself. The Russia that the party-politicians called in against the 20th century Nation-Idea was the primitive barbarian in all his vigor and will-to-annihilate. The America that intervened in Western politics was entirely in the grip of Culture-distorters, and thus removed by such a regime temporarily from the areas of Western influence. The only difference between them to the Europe they divided after the Second World War, 1939–1945, was that no Western possibilities existed in Russia, and America did present a possibility — in the future — of a revolution which would restore America to the West. Both were completely alien, both could only destroy. The 20th century sees the end of Rationalism. Even now — 1948 — it is pale and emaciated. Scientists and philosophers are falling away. Mysticism is reappearing, both in its authoritative-religious form, and in the form of theosophistic fads. Mechanism in biology has yielded to Vitalism. Materialism fights desperately, hopelessly against the resurgence of the Soul of Culture-Man. Relativity has placed the determination of phenomena with man, precisely where German Idealistic philosophy

350 had put it in the 18th century. Even matter has been liberated from Causality — we now allow the “electrons” and their relatives to dance freely about, no longer in subjection to the strict Culture-physics of Western tradition. That which would have been regarded with horror a generation before quietly asserts itself in defiance of Rationalism — clairvoyancy, disguised as “extra-sensory perception.” The Psyche intrudes even into physiology. But in this year 1948 the world of action remains, chained by its stupidity, in the dead past. Synthesis replaces analysis in Western thought, but Western action remains disintegratory: classes, tiny “nations,” division of powers, economic obsessions, parties, trade-unions, “rights,” parliaments, elections, frontiers every few miles in Europe, opposition, hatred of authority, lack of respect and dignity, mutual economic strangulation by customs boundaries. This while the extra-European world agglomerates itself into great, world-embracing masses of territory and population. The Cultural impetus of Imperialism is carried forward by the non-Culture peoples, the barbarians, while the sick, backward-looking West thinks in ever-smaller space-terms. While the barbarians build empires, Europe abandons old conquests. While the barbarians proclaim their superiority, voices in Europe are raised saying that Western Imperialism — that mighty inner imperative of the most passionate, intense High Culture the world has yet seen — only existed in order to prepare the under-races of the world for “self-government.” They continue to say it as the extra-Europeans divide the Mother-soil of European Culture between them, and loot and starve European populations on a mass-scale. It might be thought that the 20th century Idea of the Nation is disintegration, when one hears fools in Bavaria announce

351 that the solution for them is to constitute themselves a “little Switzerland.” One wonders that is it possible for extra-Europeans to find such people down below the Western Culture. But this atomizing of the Soul of the West is not the 20th century Idea. These voices of submission to the barbarian, and abandonment of Culture, of disintegration into ever-smaller particles of territory and population are the illness of the West, not its Future, its crisis, not its health. They are the pseudo-victory of 18th and 19th century Rationalism over the Resurgence of Authority of the 20th and 21st centuries. They are the extrapolation of the Rationalistic twins, finance-Capitalism and snarling Communism, the desire to extend into the Future old diseases of the European will, to perpetuate feelings that are dead and can no longer inspirit the soul of the West. It is known however that the life of a Culture has its own rhythm, its own inner law of development, its own imperative. This cannot be changed by the will or rationalistic ideal of human beings. These ideals are themselves the expression of a great Culture-crisis, and with the disappearance of the crisis, the ideals are suddenly entirely empty. No one is willing to die for them. The crisis is now coming to an end, as is manifest by the developments in other Culture-directions. The history of previous Cultures shows the duration of this great crisis, through which they all had to go, and from their history, we know at what point we stand. That point is the transition to the new idea of the Nation, the Nation as Empire, Nation as Culture-unit. The tests of race, people, and language have no validity, for the 20th century will shape its own race and people exactly as the 19th century races, peoples, and nations were the products of History. It sounds much more fantastic to 1950 ears than to the ears of 2150 to say that the creation of a new language by the 20th century Nation

352 in process of arising is not impossible. It may be one of the old languages, modified by the new spirit; it may be a new language, containing elements of pre-existing languages. The Second World War represented the surface victory of the Past over the Future. Metternich, Burke, Wellington, would have read this situation correctly, but would have cast in their lot with the Future, for the Future is Order, and the Rationalistic Past is Chaos and Disintegration. They fought Rationalism in its inception, and their heirs who fight it to-day fight a Rationalism stricken with rigor mortis, for which no one will mount the barricade, and which only sits leering upon its throne by virtue of its serviceability to the Barbarian. It divides Europe, and Europe divided is Europe conquered. The fight against the Past is thus seen to be the fight against the extra-European forces, for it is they who are perpetuating the atomizing of Europe, the Balkanization of a Culture, the Switzerland of the West. It is characteristic of any phase of development of a Culture that it is historically necessary. It is precisely the same force that causes one Culture phase to succeed to another that makes the youth inevitably into a man. To attempt to interfere with the one process is the same as interfering with the other. So far no way has been discovered to stop the development of an organism, except killing it. The caterpillar must become a butterfly, the bud must become a flower, the youth must become a man, the man must express his mature possibilities. This force which impels this forward development is called Destiny. It is operative at every moment from conception to death in every organism. It is the hall-mark of the organic which distinguishes it from the inorganic, the permanent, the historyless. Every organism has its own life-task, and the fulfillment of this task is inwardly necessary. The extent to which an outer force can affect

353 the process is different for various organisms. The phenomena of outer forces attempting to warp a High Culture from its Life-path come under the heading of Culture-distortion. The subject of the State must precede a treatment of Culture-distortion. Race, People, Nation, State are manifestations of Cultural health. Distortion is the illness of the Culture.

354 State With the state we come to the first purely political Idea in the life of the High Culture. Race, People, Nation have all of them political potentialities, deep connections with politics, but State is a political term. It is a word whose content changes quite completely during the development of a Culture. The States which philosophers, scholars, and theoreticians project are not States for the purposes of this work. These things belong to literature, whereas this is concerned with the actualized and the possible. Plato and Campanella, More and Fourier, Rousseau and Marx, all designed Utopias which should exist, and it is this moral imperative, this should, which shows that the center of gravity of these States lies in thought and not in action. The State as an actuality is a manifestation of the development of a High Culture. Outside of a High Culture there is no State, but only leadership of more or less permanence. The content of the State-Idea is a reflection of the stage of development of the High Culture, and thus the State can only be comprehended organically. It cannot be made the object of logical

355 operations, for being living, it is irrational, unamenable to logic. If such attempts reach the level of politics, of actuality, they throw the State into crisis, since the State, like every phase of the Culture, can only be itself, or be sick and distorted. The State is the form of a nation for action. The content of this form changes, and each change is a crisis in the Culture-development. In the earliest time of the Culture, the time of the Crusades, of the conflict of Empire and Papacy, from 1000 to 1300, the Culture-unity is so strong that the Culture itself is constituted more or less as a nation, with all the lesser sovereigns holding of the Emperor. Vis-à-visthe barbarian, all Westerners are of one nation, and are welded into one State. The first social articulation of the Culture is into Estates. The two Estates, Nobility and Priesthood, represent the two aspects of the Culture-soul with the highest possible symbolic purity. Nobility represents war, politics, law, race. Priesthood represents religion, knowledge, science, philosophy, the world of thought. The rest of the population is just that — the rest. Seen from above, it has only an economic function. Out of it develop the beginnings of trade-organization, free cities, and merchant-princes. The meaningful idea of life is, however, represented by the Estates and the symbols of Empire and Papacy. This political form is known as the feudal-State, the first State-idea of the West. The first great political form-crisis of the West occurs when this idea loses its self-evident power, and there appears in the feelings of men the idea that there is something higher, to which even the noble blood and the feudal organization is subordinate. It is the dim beginning of the State-idea. The dissolution of the feudal State occurs in the 13th and 14th centuries. It takes the form of breaking down the overlordship of

356 the highest lords, the Pope, Emperor, Kings. The Papacy, on the temporal side, was organized as a feudal hierarchy, with the great spiritual dignitaries holding their investitures of the Pope as overlord. After the death of Innocent III, under whom for a short time, the whole Western Culture had acknowledged the feudal supremacy of the Pope, the great archbishops and bishops forced through representative institutions for themselves, and reduced the temporal power of the Papacy gradually to a mere shadow power by 1400. The greater German Princes made the Imperial throne dependent upon them as Electors, and this idea was formally constituted in the Golden Bull of 1356, although actually long before that. Magna Charta, 1215, the General Privilege of Saragossa, 1283, the Estates-General, 1302, have corresponding significance in England, Spain and France. In each case it is the breakup of the feudal concept of the State, and the arising of the pure State-Idea. It is the beginning of the Dynasty-Idea. The highest feeling heretofore was that of Life as deriving its significance from noble blood, but henceforth the idea is one of a task, a labor for the Future. The Dynasty is the symbol of this new idea. From this crisis, we in the 20th century learn first of all that State-crises in a High Culture are not things of a few years duration, but of a century or more. We learn further that the surface of History does not reflect at once the underlying idea-forces at work which provide the impetus of History. The end of the crisis finds the State-idea established everywhere in Europe. Even though everywhere the State remained entirely aristocratic, nevertheless Sovereignty did not reside with the Estates, but with the higher idea, the State. The word treason changes its meaning and becomes more absolute, more heinous. Henry the Lion had received but mild punishment for

357 his defiance of the feudal Emperor. The Emperor was after all but primus inter pares, and the relationship between him and his vassals was personal. With the triumph of the State-idea, the obligation of loyalty to the State becomes superpersonal, once it is undertaken. It is loyalty to an Idea, not to the person of the monarch. The State progresses in its development from the aristocratic State to the Absolute State. Absolute means: independent of any other form. As applied to the State, this means independent of the Estates who had everywhere asserted their independence of the dying feudal power of Emperor and Kings. This development brings forth the second great State-crisis of the West, the transition to the Absolute State. It lasts a century in its severest form and dominates all political events from 1550 to 1660. Feudal politics had been the struggle for power among families, lords and vassals, factions. The dynasties had to rely on their political talent, for none of them rested so strongly that it could not be challenged by a powerful duke with a claim to kingship. It was the time of Lancaster and York, of the German Princes, of Renaissance city-politics and condottieri. But the Absolute State-Idea was at work in the depths, and by about 1500 it becomes articulate, and engages everywhere in a struggle with the idea of the aristocratic State. Two ideas of the State are at war: the aristocratic State and the Absolute State. Since the Absolute State is the one which attained in history to identify with the State generally, we may call this second State-crisis of the West the battle of State against Estate, for, indeed, the form of this crisis was a defensive fight by the Nobility against the encroachments of Absolutism. The new idea is the State, it represents the Future in 1500, and therefore it prevails. The generic name of the wars entailed by this crisis

358 is the Wars of the Fronde. The Fronde is the collective name of the noble Estates. This crisis lasts a century, and ends in France and Spain in the victory of the State over the Estates. The great names associated with this historical development are Richelieu and Olivarez. In England the State was represented by Charles, the Fronde by Cromwell. The defeat of the State-Idea was final in 1688, and thereafter England had no State in the sense of the State of Louis XIV, of the Spanish Phillips, of the Saxon, Würtembergian, Bavarian, or Prussian Kings. The aristocratic Parliament was the Nation, not the State. In the Empire, the greater Princes overcame the State-idea in the Thirty-Years War. The name Wallenstein and its tragedy symbolize the defeat of the Imperial State-idea by the German Princes. After the Thirty Years War, Germany developed a whole collection of petty States, each modeled on the Versailles State. The defeat of the State-idea in Germany meant that Germany was out of condition for the great political contest. II The experience of England and of Germany in the Wars of the Fronde is of high importance for the surface of subsequent European history and must be examined. The Absolute State idea represented the Future. It was a centralizing of politics, and therewith of power. It enlarged the arena of politics, and increased the amount of public power, and meant consequently that powers not adopting the new idea would drop out of the great combinations and become mere battlefields, objects of the great politics of the States. This is precisely what happened to Germany. Since there were 300 Germanies, there was no Germany, and the other powers

359 fought their wars in German territory. Only Austria was a power, and it was constituted as a State. The other German States were too small to be able to play an independent role in Western politics, and thus were not true political units. England is the only power in which the Fronde triumphed but which nevertheless was able to stay in condition for the greater political battles introduced by the State-idea. This was owing solely to England’s island situation. The geopolitical security conferred on England by its insular existence enabled it to dispense with the strict centralization of inner power demanded by the State-idea, without at the same time ceasing to exist as a political unit, as did Germany. When Wallenstein and the Imperial State-idea lost, all was lost for Germany for two centuries. But Cromwell’s victory, which destroyed the State-Idea in England, substituting for it the Idea of “Society,” did not spell ruin for England, simply because other better-organized States were not able to invade it as long as it maintained an adequate naval establishment. To keep up a sufficiently large fleet did not require political centralization, and thus England survived the era of Absolutism without an Absolute State. England, because of this island situation, did not become acquainted with the Slavic border-barbarian. It experienced, for instance, no Hussite Wars as did Germany. For 16 years, 1420-1436, the Hussite armies, first under the blind Ziska, and later divided, flooded over half Germany, burning, ravaging, killing. This destruction was vandalism, unconnected with any constructive political idea. It was 15th century Bolshevism — annihilation of everything Western. The situation of Germany, on the border against Asia, was one of constant danger of invasion by barbarian Slavic, Turkish, Mongolian and Tartaric armies. Fighting against these armies

360 was not colonial warfare, in the meaning of one-sided warfare that the expression acquired in the later centuries. These border barbarians were in contact with the West and adopted its purposefulness, its higher organization, and its centralized will. While Germany in the East, and Spain in the South, were protecting the body of the Western Culture from the Barbarian, England was forming a national feeling based purely on contrast with other Western nations, and without feeling for the deep, total contrast between the Culture-peoples and the Barbarian. This exaggerated national feeling was to have fateful consequences for the entire West, including England, in the era of World Wars. III The great formula for the transition from the feudal union to the aristocratic State is that in the former the State existed only with reference to the Estates, and in the latter the Estates exist only with reference to the State. The slow externalizing of the Western soul — shown by things like gunpowder and printing, voyages of exploration, increasing elaboration of the economic life, demise of Scholastic philosophy through the triumph of Nominalism, growth of cities, growing strength of the idea of the Nation — progressively weakens the States, and the Wars of the Fronde were their last great assertion against the growing power of the Absolute State. But the Absolute State represented the Future, and the Estates went down. In the main body of the West, after 1650, the State rules in politics. Its expression is dynastic, but the monarch derives his significance from the fact that he is the prime symbol of the State. When his entourage arrived at the formula that Louis XIV was the State, they were clothing him

361 with the highest formula to which their thought could attain. In England, where there was no Absolute State, the substitute idea of the Nation was the leading idea, and the noble order ceased gradually to be an aristocracy, and finally even a nobility, and became finally the Peerage, a stratum whose significance was purely social. Its political possibilities were greater by reason of its social ascendancy, but it was still politically subordinate, and not sovereign as in the days of Magna Charta. The political form-world of the Culture moves onward, and the next great political form-crisis is that of the transition from the Absolute State to Democracy. The crisis begins around 1750 and lasts a century in intense form. It broke out violently in France in 1789, and rapidly progressed to the Terror of 1793. The Rationalistic provenance of the ideas of the democrats showed that the Democracy-Idea is only politically-applied Rationalism. The Absolute State-versus-Democracy crisis is different from the others in several ways. The decisive externalization of the soul of the West, brought about by the epochal change of Culture into Civilization, generated an amount of power for political purposes that dwarfed anything previous. Armies are numbered no longer in thousands or tens of thousands, but within decades pass to hundreds of thousands, and their numbers on both sides total millions. Instead of decisions being made by a few ambassadors or ministers, new leaders appear with the might of mobs at their backs. The form of the Absolute State had been unquestioned for more than a century, and now suddenly the new idea is in the air that Reason will examine all things anew and re-form the world. Since it is an organic fact that living things must obey their own inner laws or become sick, the attempt to subject the world of action to Reason could never succeed in its aim. Success merely meant the putting of

362 the State out of condition. But actually Reason simply turned into a political weapon, and political leaders obeyed the dictates of the situation without regard to Reason. The pretense of logic had to be maintained, and the extreme divergence between conduct and principle equates Democracy with Hypocrisy. The type of the party-politician is of necessity a charlatan-type. Lincoln, the American party-leader masquerading as a saint, is the new idea of a politician. His pretense was humanitarianism, his result was unlimited finance-capitalism ova a continent, his technic was the spoils-system. Reason is a product of Life, and the attempt to turn the tables and make Life into a creature of Reason was doomed in practice. In theory, however, it lasts two centuries in all High Cultures. The sole effect is to destroy. It destroys culture, in the narrower sense of art forms and literature, it destroys traditions of service, dignity, loyalty, honor. It destroys the State-idea as embodied in its last refined form, the Absolute State. It lays the Civilization waste from within, politically speaking. Having leveled all the political and social powers, Rationalism can now look upon the monster of its own creation, the absolute power of Money. This new power is unformulated, anonymous, irresponsible. The most powerful money-magnates are not well-known to the masses, nor do they wish to be. Fame, responsibility, and sanctions go together. The Master of Money desires no limelight, no risk of life, but only money and ever more money. Party politicians exist only to protect him and his operations. The courts are there to enforce his usury. The remnants of the State are there to do him service. Armies march when his trade system is challenged. He is subject to nothing, he is the new Sovereign. He is above nations, and his banking operations transcend national laws. It is during his tenure of power over the Western Civilization that the phrase “power behind the

363 throne” acquires its sinister and private meaning. His is action without risk. To him a hero is a fool, a patriot an idiot. They may bleed, but he will profit. If his system is threatened, he mobilizes the masses of continents, supplementing nationalistic slogans with universal conscription which is more effective than the slogans. This new creation shows what the great catchword “Freedom” means. Freedom was attractive to two great groups, the intellectuals and the trading-class. To both of them, the State was a burden. For its one pulse, one imperative, which impressed the life of everyone with its majesty, the pavement-intellectuals wish to substitute universal criticism, and the traders introduce universal trade without any restriction whatever. These two new orders are the old nobility and priesthood in caricature. The intellectual with his atheist pamphlet and the trader in his counting-house are respectively the masters in the democratic world of thought and action. IV For the purpose of recapitulating with the utmost clarity the biography of the State-Idea in the Western Culture, I append here a paradigm. The dates given must of course be taken as approximate. The exact year given is arbitrary. Historical transitions are gradual in their depths. An idea is born, slowly grows, finally enters the field of action, where its ultimate success may be delayed for many decades. Crises are perceptible, but the beginnings of the slow developments toward, and away from, a crisis, can have no exact date assigned them. Even in the life of a man, there is no date at which he becomes mature, nevertheless 21 has been selected as the ideal age of this transition.

364 Form of the State-Idea       Duration of Form Duration of Crisis in Transition to Next Form       Feudal State             1000–1300             1200–1300       Aristocratic State             1250–1660             1550–1660       Absolute State             1600–1815             1750–1850       Democracy             1750–1950             1900–19—— The table shows the State-forms overlapping one another, and the crises overlapping the forms, because the facts do exhibit this phenomenon in actuality. In one place the idea has already triumphed, in another this does not occur for fifty years. Or the new idea may appear and lose on the surface of history, and decades may be necessary before it again contends for power. We living in the middle of the 20th century know well what a transition period means. The old idea is quite dead, but party-leaders continue to repeat the old catch-words, like senseless parrots doing something for its own sake. The last entry in the paradigm has been left blank. Succeeding the Democracy-idea of the State comes the last State-form of the Culture. The old traditions of the Culture and their highest political expression, the Absolute State, have been swept away by two centuries of destruction under pressure from below. The class-war of mob-leading doctrinaires attacked and defeated the old social powers in the first century of Rationalism, 1750-1850, and finance-capitalists and labor-leaders defeated the productive economic leaders in its second century, 1850-1950, dissolving the whole collective life into a miserable, soulless, endless battle for money. The entire population of the Western Culture is weary to death of this vile scramble, of this chaotic lack of leadership,

365 of authority, or a strong, commanding voice. A deep yearning is going through the Western world to be free from the dirt and uncleanness of party-politics, class-war, financial usury, and complete absence of the heroic spirit. This yearning is the current form — 1948 — of the State-idea of the Future. It has already expressed itself in the body of Europe. Its form for the immediate Future is the Resurgence of Authority. It attains finally to Caesarism, in which authority is free from all defensiveness and is once more self-evident, as in the pre-Rationalist millennium. In its first stages the new State-idea is anti-democratic, anti-Rationalistic, but the further these ideas sink into the past, the less is it concerned with them. The new State-form, corresponding to the slowly rising European race, European nation, European people, and European language, is also universal. It is a State whose home-soil is co-terminous with the boundaries of the West: Scandinavia, England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain. The details of whether this State in its first phase drags along some of the outdated Rationalistic forms with it — such as written pieces of constitution paper purporting to have something to do with government, parliaments, elections — are unimportant to its great inner meaning. This State ends the inner anarchy of the West, which has become self-evident from long usage. Public power can no longer be held by individuals; public enterprises pass under public control and ownership; the money-monopoly of the few individuals is transferred to the State. Capitalism vanishes, in both of its aspects, the finance-capitalism of the supra-national usurer, and the capitalism of the labor-dictator. The emphasis on inner-politics passes away with the undertaking of the greatest wars the world has ever seen against the Barbarian for the survival of the Western Civilization. The heroic spirit replaces

366 the spirit of profiteering. Honor replaces cant, and the trader gives way to the soldier. Unlimited Imperialism is the task of this State, not the Crusading Imperialism which vanished with feudalism, nor the Ultramontane Imperialism of Spain in its glory, nor the economic Imperialism of England, 1600-1900, but a new, total, political, organizatory, authoritarian Imperialism, which will plant the Western banner on the highest peaks and the most remote peninsulas. The new State will not have the party-leader’s horizon of the next election but will think in centuries, and will build for a millennium. It will dissolve the selfishness of individualism in a new Socialism, not the old-fashioned class-war Socialism of “rights,” but a stern Socialism oriented to the outer danger. The old attempts to tamper with Reality by means of theories are forgotten in the new unity of Culture, Nation, People, Race, State. Since the new State negates Rationalism, the enemy of the soul of Culture-man, it has an affirmative attitude toward the spiritual development, the Rebirth of Religion, which accompanies the arising of the new State. The last entry on the paradigm illustrating the biography of the State-idea in the Western Culture thus is: — Authoritarian State 1900-2 — None, final Western State-form