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 proces