Cultural Vitalism

369 Culture Pathology All of the four forms of life — plant, animal, man, High Culture — exhibit the organic regularities of birth, growth, maturity, fulfillment, death. Each form contains within it the essence of the less elaborate, less articulate forms and the new soul is a superstructure, as it were, on the general foundation. Thus the plant exhibits a close connection with the cosmic rhythms, the animal has geographic distribution over a certain landscape, large or small, and shows also immediacy of instinct coming from its close connections with cosmic rhythms. Man has attachment to the soil, both spiritually and materially, possesses beast-of-prey instincts, and shows in his rhythm of sleep and waking the alternating supremacy of the tensionless plant-element in him. A High-Culture is plantlike in its attachment to its original soil, which lasts from its beginning to its latest period; animal-like in its ruthless devouring of other life-forms; man-like in its spirituality, and original in its power to transform human life, its great life span, and the forcefulness of its destiny.

370 To everything living belongs sickness as well as health. In his classification of the sciences, Bacon provided a place for the science of deviations, and after him D’Alembert, in his classification for the Encyclopédie listed “Prodigies, or deviations from the usual course of Nature.” Life is regular in its phenomena, and when it deviates, it is regular in its deviations. Illness of whatever sort, exopathic or autopathic, comes under Pathology. Plants have their pathology, as have animals and man. High Cultures also have their pathology, which is only being realized for the first time by the new Age, with its incorruptible eye for facts, and its freedom from the prejudice of Materialism. Pathology follows the organism, and thus plants cannot suffer from liver trouble, nor dogs from psychosis. But the process works upward, just as the planes of life are stratified, one above the other, as life increases in complexity. Thus parasitism, a form of plant pathology, exists as well for all the higher life-forms. The growth of a plant can be thwarted by unfavorable conditions, just as the development of an animal can be stunted by outside interference. Weaker human organisms can be spiritually retarded and stultified by complete domination of their souls by stronger-willed humans. Human pathology is a science of the becoming, not a science of the become, like physics. It can never succeed in its program of organizing the field of life-deviations, for Life defies all classification whatever. The invisible components dominate the visible. The soul, the will, the intellect, the emotions, are all uncanny in their effects, and cannot be treated in the systematic fashion appropriate to the data of physics or geology. The pathology of High Cultures was naturally a blank to a scientific method which asserted as a basic dogma that Life was mechanics, man was soulless, that there must be a chemical formula for consciousness. To this outlook which denied God

371 and Soul, High Culture was an abstract name for the collective efforts of single men. A nation was a collection of individuals with only mechanical connections, economics and “happiness” were the entire content of Life, everything which put spiritual content or meaning into Life was the prime enemy. This view simply could not understand Life. It produced a psychology hardly complex enough even for animals, and called it human psychology. It placed the barren intelligence in the center of the inner world, and denied the mystical nature of human creativeness. This viewpoint was itself a product of a certain Age, the Age of Rationalism, and with the passing of this prejudice, we stand before a whole new world of soul-relationships, entry into which was forbidden during the last two centuries. We are liberated from the oppressive drabness of Materialism, free to step forth once more into the multi-colored and infinitely varied realm of the Soul. In its final phase, the Age of Rationalism turned its knife on itself: with its refusal to recognize psychic phenomena proved by its own methods, it showed its own nature as a Faith, an irrationality, and moved into History’s collection of temples, legends, and memories. Materialism approached Life from its under side. In actuality, the Soul uses the material as the vehicle of its expression. Materialism, seeing only the results, and not the invisible Destiny which was bringing them about, said that the results were primary, the Soul a null. Failing to grasp the invisible Necessity which rules the organic and its relationship to the Cosmos, it reached the conclusion from a hundred different directions that Life is an accident. Not to catalogue these interesting reasons, take for example, the presence of dust in the air. The laboratory-thinkers discovered that if dust were not present in the air, all Life would be impossible. It never occurred to

372 them that Life and all the other phenomena were connected by mystical necessity. By treating everything separately, by ever-finer analysis of ever-smaller things, they lost all connection with Reality, and were surprised when connections among things did appear. It could only be an accident, said these profound thinkers. II The conditions of Life form a starting point for us. Not the conditions of all Life, but only that particular form of Life called High Culture. Each variety of life-form has its own ideal conditions. Some plants require much water, others little. Some grow in salt water, others need fresh water. Animals have a habitat, each species has its own area or areas which furnish the conditions of its health and survival. Human beings as a whole have certain areas, and various types of human beings have their respective landscapes which further their life-needs. Corresponding to the ideal life-conditions of the various life-forms, each form of life, and each organism, possesses power of adaptation. A plant can continue to live — at a lower potential — if given less than the ideal amount of water. But a point is reached at which the amount of water is minimal, and if less is given, life ceases entirely. This is the limit of adaptation. Both animals and man have adaptivity and a limit thereto. Men can live in the dense air of valleys and in the rare air of high mountains. The human body adapts itself to mountain conditions by increasing the size of the chest and the lung-surface. But this ability to adapt is not indefinite, and a rarity of air is reached to which men cannot become adapted because of inherent bounds of the human life-form.

373 The treatment of this subject in this work is not meant to be anything more than the minimum presentation of fundamentals necessary to understanding the nature of Culture-phenomena generally, as the basis for action. This is politics, not philosophy of history, nor yet natural philosophy of organisms. The whole subject of Culture-pathology is comparatively new. What in 2100 will be a completed discipline is now only an outline, and this is even less than an outline. But politics cannot be separated from Culture, and any effort which lights its necessary path forward for Western politics at this critical juncture is justified culturally and historically. A High Culture is different from other organisms in that it actualizes its material manifestations through lower organisms, namely through Culture-man. Its body is a huge aggregate of many millions of human bodies in a certain landscape. The question of whether the prime symbol of the Culture is spiritually adapted to the particular landscape is outside our scope. It is apparent that the question of physical adaptation does not exist for a Culture. Its only adaptation is spiritual. Nor can it have a physical disease like men can. Disease to a Culture can only be a spiritual phenomenon. Life itself is a mystery, that is, something which is not fully understandable. Perhaps this is because the faculty of understanding is only one manifestation of one type of Life, in other words a part of a part, and is thus unadapted to assimilating the Whole. Every manifestation of Life is a mystery, including disease. Some men, when brought in contact with certain microorganisms, develop a definite disease. Other men do not react at all to these micro-organisms. The serum that may be beneficial to one man may kill another. It is possible to discuss disease-phenomena like these in terms of adaptation and inability to adapt. The last reason why a species, or an individual,

374 finds its limits of adaptability precisely here and not at a further point, will always be unknown. And so with Cultures. Just why the soul of a Culture retains its purity and individuality is hidden. Nevertheless inwardly it follows its own life-course, and cannot follow the life course that an alien life-feeling, deriving its motivation from extra-Cultural sources, might wish to have it. Just why Destiny impels an organism to actualize its possibilities, compels continuous transition from one phase into the next, is also a mystery. Nevertheless it does. The materialistic 19th century, having completely lost touch with the real world of the spirit in its obsession with the sub-real world of the material, felt in consequence a nameless terror of death, and rationalistic medicine announced its intention of doing away with Death. This sort of thing reflects credit on the intellectual courage of the rationalists, but shows their rootless intelligence to be synonymous with stupidity. We cannot do away with Destiny, since even our protest against it is a phase of development. The entire subject of Culture-pathology is too wide to be treated here, and it will be the subject of many volumes in the coming centuries. All that is necessary for the 20th century action-outlook is to understand three phenomena within this larger field of Culture-pathology, namely, Culture-parasitism, Culture-Retardation, and Culture-distortion. All of these Culture-illnesses exist in the West in the middle of the 20th century, and have existed for some time. It is only this sick condition of the Western Civilization that makes the current grotesque world-situation possible. Current refers to the first two World Wars and their hideous aftermath. The home soil of the Western Civilization is the site of the strongest brains and characters, the most intense moral force, the highest technical

375 creativeness, the only positive high Destiny, in the world, but yet despite the fact that all these spell the world’s greatest power-concentration, the Western Civilization today is simply an object of world-politics. It is spoils, booty, for marauding powers from without. This situation did not come about by military means, but by critical Culture-disease.

376 Culture Parasitism In the chapter on the outlook on politics, the condition in which persons thinking privately affect public affairs was called parasite-politics. The example was given of La Pompadour throwing France into a war against the great Frederick because he had dubbed her with an uncomplimentary name before all Europe. In this war, France lost its overseas empire to England, because it was fighting in Europe, and devoting less effort to the great imperial war than to the local European war. This is the usual result of parasite-politics. A nation is an Idea, but it is a mere part of the greater Idea of the Culture which creates it in the process of its own actualization. But precisely as a nation can be the host to groups and powerful individuals who think in complete independence of the fulfillment of the national Idea, so can a Culture. Everyone is familiar with parasite politics in a nation, and everyone understands it when he becomes aware of it. When the Greek Capodistria was Secretary for Foreign Affairs in Russia, he was not expected to execute an anti-Greek policy. During the Boxer Rebellion in China, no Western power

377 thought of giving a command to a Chinese general. In the American war against Japan, 1941-1945, the Americans did not use their Japanese conscripts, just as Europe discovered in the first two World Wars that it could not use Slavic Bohemians against Russia. American generals would not dare to use their Mexicans against Mexico, or their Negroes against Abyssinia. Nor in a period of war preparation against Russia would a known Russian sympathizer be given public power in America. Much less would the Americans turn over the entire government to known Russian immigrants. Phenomena of this type reflect the general fact that a man or group remains what it is even though taken into another group unless assimilated. Assimilation is the demise of a group qua group. The blood-stream of the individuals comprising it continues, but the group is gone. As long as it was a group, it was foreign. In our examination of race we saw that physical differences are no barrier to assimilation, but that a Cultural barrier is. Examples are the Baltic Germans and the Volga Germans, cut off in primitive Russia, Chinese and Japanese in America, Negroes in America and in South Africa, the British in India, the Parsees in India, the Jews in the Western Civilization and in Russia, the Hindus in Natal. Culture-parasitism arises in the same way that parasitism arises in politics. A parasite is simply a life-form which lives in or on the body of another life-form at its expense. It involves thus the direction of part of the energy of the host into a direction alien to its interest. This is quite inevitable: if the energy of an organism is being spent for something other than its own development, it is being wasted. Parasitism is inevitably harmful to the host. The harm increases in proportion to the growth and spreading of the parasite.

378 Any group which takes no part in the Culture-feeling, but which lives within the Culture-body, necessarily involves a loss to the Culture. Such groups form areas of anesthetic tissue, as it were, in the Culture body. Such a group, by standing outside the historical necessity, the Destiny of the Culture, inevitably militates against that Destiny. This phenomenon is in no way dependent on human will. The parasite is spiritually without, but physically within. The effects on the host-organism are deleterious both physically and spiritually. The first physical effect of non-participating groups within the body of a Culture is that the numbers of the Culture-population are thereby reduced. The members of the alien group take the place of individuals belonging to the Culture, who thus never come to be born. It reduces artificially the numbers of the Culture-populations by the numbers of the parasitic group. In animal and human parasitism, one of the numerous effects on the host is the loss of nourishment, and Cultural parasitism is analogous. By reducing the numbers of Culture individuals, a Culture-parasite is depriving the Cultural Idea of the only form of physical nourishment it needs — a constant supply of human material adequate to its life-task. It is only in the light of recent studies of population trends that this anti-reproductive effect of immigrating groups is established. Thus from comparative study of American population trends, it emerged that the 40,000,000 immigrants to America from other continents from 1790 up to now — did not serve to increase the population of America at all, but only to change the quality of it. A superpersonal Idea, clothed as it is with the force of Destiny, must fulfill its life-task, and if this involves populations of a certain size, increasing at a certain rate, these externals will come into existence. Materialism found itself with the data of population trends

379 on its hands but no explanation for them. These data showed for the Western nations gradual increases, rising rapidly to a peak, and then a stabilizing and slow falling off. The curve that describes this population movement of nations — it is the same curve, roughly speaking, in each case — will be found also to describe the population movement of a High Culture. At the stage where a High Culture passes over into Civilization — the stage marked for us by Napoleon — the increase of numbers is rapid and rises to figures which dwarf anything previous. The same Spirit of the Age which externalized the whole energy of the Culture into massive industrialism and technics, great revolutions, gigantic wars, and unlimited Imperialism, also called these numbers into being. The life-task of the Western Civilization is the mightiest the world has ever seen, and it needs these numbers in order to accomplish it. Culturally parasitical groups are not available to the Idea. They use the energy of the Culture inwards and downwards. Such groups constitute weak spots in the body of the Culture. The danger of this internal weakness increases in direct proportion as the Culture is threatened from without. In the 16th century when the existence of the West was threatened by the Turks, it would have been perfectly evident to every Westerner that large inner groups of Turks — had there been such — were a serious menace. A second way that Culture-parasitism wastes the substance of the Culture is through the inner friction that their presence necessarily creates. In the body of the Arabian Culture around the time of Christ, a large number of Romans was present. Their cultural-stage was that of Late Civilization, complete externalization, and the cultural stage of the Aramaean population which was there at home was that of the earliest Culture. The tension which was naturally engendered — racial, national

380 and cultural, finally culminated in the massacre, in 88 B.C., of 80,000 Romans. This brought on the Mithradatic Wars, in which more hundreds of thousands perished in 22 years of fighting. Another phenomenon closer to our times is that of the Chinese in California. The racial tension between the white and Chinese populations there during the 19th and 20th centuries resulted in mutual persecution, hatred, riots, and bloody excesses. The Negro population both in America and South Africa has been the occasion of similar outbreaks of hatred and violence on both sides. All these incidents are manifestations of Culture-parasitism, the presence of a group which is outside the Culture totally. These phenomena have no connection whatever, as the analytic approach of Rationalism thought, with hatred or malice on either side. Rationalism always looks downward: it saw merely a group of individuals on both sides. If these individuals were massacring one another, it was the desire of these particular individuals at this particular time to kill one another. Rationalism did not understand even the simple organic phenomenon of a crowd, much less the higher forms of people, race, nation, Culture. It never occurred to the Liberals that since these tensions throughout 5,000 years of history had always manifested themselves thus, that there was any necessity at work. Liberals could not understand instinct, cosmic rhythm, racial beat. To them a race riot was a manifestation of lack of “education,” of “tolerance.” A bird flying over a street-disturbance would understand it better than the materialists, for they voluntarily adopted the viewpoint of the earthworm and held to it with determination. So far from these excesses being the result of malice or hatred, the contrary is true — demonstrations of good-will and

381 “tolerance” actually increase the tension between totally alien groups, and render it more deadly. Focusing attention onto the differences between utterly alien groups works these differences up into contrasts, and hastens outbreaks. The closer the two groups are brought into contact, the more insidious and dangerous grows the mutual hatred. Theoretically it sounds perfect to say that if each individual is “educated” to “tolerance” there can be no racial or cultural tension. But — individuals are not the units of this type of happening; individuals do not bring these things about, higher organic unities do this, and impel the mere individuals. The process has nothing to do with consciousness, intellect, will, or even emotions, in its inception. All these come into play only as a manifestation of defense on the part of the Culture against the alien life-form. Hatred does not begin the process, nor does “tolerance” stop it. This sort of talk is applying the logic of the billiard table to superpersonal organisms. But logic is out of place here. Life is irrational, and so is every one of its manifestations: birth, growth, illness, resistance, self-expression, Destiny, History, Death. If we wish to keep the word logic we must distinguish inorganic logic from organic logic. Inorganic logic is causality thinking; organic logic is destiny-thinking. The first is aware, illuminated, conscious; the second is rhythmic and unconscious. The first is the laboratory-logic of physical experimentation; the second is the living-logic of the human beings who carry on this activity, and who are in no way amenable, in their lives, to the logic which they apply in their workshops. II The most tragic example of Culture-parasitism for the West has been the presence of a part of a nation from the Arabian

382 Culture scattered through the entire body of the West. We have already seen the entirely different content of the nation-idea in that other Culture — nations there were State, Church, and People all in one. The idea of a territorial home was unknown. Home was wherever the believers were. Belonger and believer were interchangeable ideas. This Culture had attained to its Late Civilization phase while our Gothic West was barely emerging from the primitive. Into the tiny hamlets — there were no cities — of the awakening West, these finished cosmopolitans built their ghettos. Money-thinking, which seemed evil to the deeply religious West, was the forte of this highly civilized alien people. Interest-taking was forbidden by the Church to Christians, and this conferred a monopoly of money on the strangers. The Judengasse was a millennium ahead in Cultural development of its surroundings. The legend of the Wandering Jew arose at this time, expressing the feeling of uncanniness that the Westerner felt in the presence of this landless stranger who was everywhere at home, although it seemed to the West that he was nowhere at home. The West understood as little of his Torah, Mishnah, Talmud, Kabbalism, and Yesirah, as he of its Christianity and Scholastic philosophy. This mutual inability to understand generated feelings of alienness, fear and hatred. The hatred of the Westerner for the Jew was of religious motivation, not racial. The Jew was the heathen, and with his civilized and intellectualized life, he seemed Mephistophelean, Satanic to the Westerner. The chronicles of the time record the horrors which the contact of these two utterly alien groups begot. Jews were massacred in London on the day of coronation of Richard I in 1189. The next year 500 Jews were besieged in York castle by a mob, and to avoid its fury, resorted to cutting

383 each other’s throats. King John had Jews imprisoned, their eyes or teeth plucked out, and hundreds butchered in 1204. When a Jew in London forced a Christian to pay him more than 2s. a week on a loan of 20s., mob action killed 700 Jews. Crusaders, for centuries, massacred whole Jewish populations of towns, when they stopped on their way to the wars in Asia Minor. In 1278, 267 Jews were hanged in London, accused of clipping coins. The outbreak, in 1348, of the Black Death, was attributed to the Jews, and massacres were the result all over Europe. For 370 years, the Jews were banished from England, until readmitted by Cromwell. Although the motivation of these excesses was not racial, it was race-creating. What did not destroy the Jews made them stronger, and separated them further than ever from the host-peoples, physically and spiritually. During the centuries of our Western history, the problems and developments which roused fundamentalexcitement in the West did not touch the problemless Jew, whose inner life had passed into fixity with the completion of the Culture which created this Jewish Church-State-People-Nation. Empty for him were the conflict of Empire and Papacy, the Reformation, the Age of Discovery. He looked upon them purely as a spectator. His only question was what they might mean to him. The idea of his taking part in them, or making sacrifices for one side or another, never came up. The British in India looked upon disturbances among the indigenous populations with the same eye. In his ghettos distributed over Europe, all was uniform: the food-prohibitions, the Talmudic dualistic ethics, one for the goyim and another for the Jew, the legal system, the runes, the phylacteries, the ritual, the feeling. His Sufism, his Hasidim sect, his Kabbalism, his religious leaders like Baal Shem, his

384 Zaddikism, are equally unintelligible to Westerners. Not only unintelligible, but uninteresting. The Westerner was absorbed in the intense conflicts of his own Culture, and did not observe, except in relation to himself, the life of the Jew in his midst. Not until the externalized, fact-sensitive 20th century, did the Western Culture notice the Jew as a Cultural phenomenon. In Gothic times, until the Reformation, it saw him as a heathen and usurer, in the Counter-Reformation as a shrewd businessman, in the Enlightenment as a civilized man of the world, in the Age of Rationalism as a fighter in the van of intellectual liberation from the bonds of the Culture and its traditions. The 20th century saw for the first time that he had his own public life, his own world down to the details. It realized that the comprehensiveness of his outlook was the equivalent of its own in breadth and depth, and therefore alien in a total sense which was never before suspected. In its previous centuries, the viewpoint of the West toward the Jew was limited by its stage of development at the time, but with the 20th century and its universal outlook, the entirety of what has been called “the Jewish problem” is seen for the first time. Not race, not religion, not ethics, not nationality, not political allegiance — but something which includes them all, separates the Jew from the West — Culture. Culture embraces the totality of world-outlook: science, art, philosophy, religion, technics, economics, erotic, law, society, politics. In every branch of the Western Culture, the Jew has developed his own taste and preference, and when he intervenes in the public life of the Western peoples, he conducts himself in a distinct fashion, namely in the style of the public life of the Jewish Church-State-Nation-People-Race. This public life was invisible to the inward West until the 20th century.

385 Like all nations at the end of their Civilization, e.g., Hindus, Chinese, Arabs, the Jewish nation passed into a caste system. The Brahmins in India, the Mandarins in China, the Rabbinate in Jewry, are three corresponding phenomena. The Rabbinate were the custodians of the Destiny of the Jewish unity. When freethinkers appeared among the Jews, it was the duty of the local Rabbinate to prevent a schism. In the case of Uriel da Costa, a freethinking Jew of Amsterdam, the local Synagogue had him imprisoned, and subjected him to such persecution that he finally took his own life. Spinoza was excommunicated by the same Synagogue, and an unsuccessful attempt was made on his life. Large bribes were offered him to return to Judaism, and when he refused he was cursed and pronounced anathema. In 1799, the Hasidim leader in Eastern Jewry, Senior Salman, was handed over by the Rabbinate to the Romanov Government after a trial by his own people, much as the Western Inquisition turned over convicted heretics to the State for disposal. The contemporary West did not even see these phenomena, and would not have understood them if it had. It looked at everything Jewish with its own preconceptions, just as the Jews looked at the West in terms of its advanced outlook. The Parsee in India is another fragment of the Arabian Culture strewn abroad among aliens. The Parsee possessed vis-à-vis his human surroundings the same superior business acumen as the Jew in the early West. His inner life was entirely apart from the aliens around him. His interests were different in every way. In the disturbances and revolts during the centuries of the British Raj, the Parsee took no part. In the same way, the Thirty Years’ War, the Succession Wars, the conflict of Bourbon and Hapsburg, did not in any way touch the Jew. Difference of Culture-phase creates complete spiritual insulation. The attitude of the Jew toward Western

386 tensions was that of Pilate at the trial of Jesus. To Pilate the religious issue there involved was utterly hidden — he belonged to a Civilization in its last phase, a thousand years away from the religious excitement of his own Culture. With the stirrings of Rationalism in the West, however, a caesura is marked in the collective life of that part of Jewry cut off in the Western Culture. III Around 1750, new spiritual currents begin to move in the West. English Sensualist philosophy assumes the ascendancy over the European soul. Reason, empiricism, analysis, induction — this is the new spirit. But everything becomes folly when examined in the light of reason unleavened by faith and instinct — Erasmus had demonstrated in his malicious work In Praise of Folly that everything is folly, not only greed, ambition, pride, and war, but Church, State, marriage, child-bearing and philosophy. The supremacy of Reason is hostile to Life, and brings about a crisis in any organism which succumbs to it. The Culture-crisis of Rationalism was a part of the Destiny of the West. All previous Cultures have gone through it. It marks the turning-point from the inwardness of Culture to the externalized soul-life of Civilization. The focal idea of Rationalism is liberty — which means liberty from the bonds of Culture. Napoleon liberated war from the style of Fontenoy, 1745, where each side courteously invited the other to fire the first shot. Beethoven liberated music from the form-perfection of Bach and Mozart. The Terror of ‘93 liberated the West from the idea of the sacredness of Dynasty. Materialistic philosophy liberated it from the spirit of religion, and ultra-Rationalism then proceeded to liberate science from philosophy. Waves of

387 revolution liberated the Civilization from the dignity of the State and its high traditions into the dirt of party-politics. Class war was liberation from social order and hierarchy. The new idea of “humanity” and “The Rights of Man” liberated the Culture from its old pride of exclusiveness and feeling of unconscious superiority. Feminism liberated women from the natural dignity of their sex and turned them into inferior men. Anacharsis Cloots organized a deputation of “representatives of the human race” which presented its respects to the Revolutionary Terror in France. There were pig-tailed Chinamen, black Ethiopians, Turks, Jews, Greeks, Tartars, Mongols, Indians, bearded Chaldeans. Actually however, they were Parisians in disguise. This parade had thus at the very beginning of Rationalism a double symbolic significance. First, it symbolized the idea of the West that it now wished to embrace all “humanity,” and secondly, the fact these were disguised Westerners showed the exact amount of success that this intellectualizing enthusiasm would have. The Jew had of course seen these things coming. Persecution does not diminish intelligence and awareness of one’s surroundings. As early as 1723 the Jews had acquired the right to possess land in England, and in 1753 they acquired English citizenship, only to have it revoked the next year on the petition of all the cities. In 1791 they were emancipated in France, and in 1806 the Great Sanhedrin was summoned by the Emperor Napoleon, thus giving official recognition to the existence within the West of the Jewish Nation-State-People. Only one thing prevented the new situation from being as idyllic as the new liberal sentiment would have it. Eight hundred years, of robbery, hatred, massacre, and persecution on both sides had roused within the Jew traditions of hatred of the West even stronger than the old Western hatred of the

388 Jew. In its new outburst of generosity and forgiveness, the West renounced its old feelings, but the Jew was unable to reciprocate. Eight hundred years of resentment were not to be removed by a New Year’s Resolution on the part of the alien West. Superpersonal organic unities were here opposed, and these higher unities do not share with human beings things like reason and sentiment. Their life-task is hard and colossal, and excludes feelings of “tolerance” except as a symptom of crisis. In a great battle of this kind, human beings are in the last analysis mere spectators, even though they play an active role. Human malice and desire for revenge play only the smallest, most superficial part in such conflicts, and when they appear, they are the mere expression in the individual of the higher incompatibility, deep and total, between the superpersonal Ideas. The new movements — capitalism, industrial revolution, democracy, materialism — all were tremendously exciting to the Jew. In the middle of the 18th century already, he had sensed their potentialities and had fostered their growth in every way. His position as the outsider forced him to act secretly, and the secret societies of the Illuminati and its offspring were his creations, as their Kabbalistic terminology and ritualistic equipment show. More than two thirds of the Estates-General which paved the way to the French Revolution in 1789 consisted of members of these secret societies, committed to undermine the authority of the State and introduce the idea of Democracy. The Jew responded to the invitation of the West to participate in his public life, but it was impossible for him to lose his identity overnight, and so he had from now on two public lives, one before the West and one before his own Nation-State-People-Church-Race. With the crumbling of the old Western traditions before the

389 onslaught of the new ideas, the Jew forged ahead. The Rothschilds became — what would have been simply fantastic to both sides a century before — barons of the Austrian empire in 1822. Jews penetrated the English bar in 1833, and a Jew was knighted by the Queen — the first one — in 1837. The West acceded to the duality of the Jew and a statute of Victoria relieved Jews elected to municipal office from taking oaths. Jewish Members of Parliament appeared from the forties onward, and a Jew became Lord Mayor of London in 1855. All of these things were resisted by traditionary elements of the West, and on each occasion the Jew gained a triumph. The experiment of “tolerance” was visibly failing on both sides. The amount of power and importance the Jew was gaining was shown by the incident of the boy Mortara. This child was forcibly taken from his Jewish parents, ordinary private persons, by the archbishop of Bologna in 1858, on the plea that he had been baptized by a serving maid. In the same year the French government officially urged restoration of the boy to its parents. The next year, the Archbishop of Canterbury, bishops, noblemen and gentlemen of England signed a petition presented by Lord John Russell asking return of custody of the child. The persecution continued — there were outbreaks in Bucharest, 1866, Rome, 1864, Berlin, 1880, Russia through the whole century and into the 20th century. This persecution in Russia was an index of the strength of the Jew in the Western nations. Protests, petitions, committees, sought to alleviate the lot of the Jews in Russia and to obstruct the government of Russia. The pogrom in the Ukraine after the Russo-Japanese War, 1905, caused the American government to break off diplomatic relations with Russia. Hatred or intolerance in no wise explains the numerous unfortunate

390 results attendant upon the Jewish dispersion through the Western nations. The hatred on both sides was a mere result. The more tolerance was talked about, the more attention was focused onto the differences, sharpening them into contrasts. The contrasts led to opposition and action, either covert or open, on both sides. Nor is it an explanation to blame the Jew for failing to assimilate. This is blaming a man for being himself, and the notion of ethics does not extend to what one is, but only to what one does. The “Jewish problem” is not to be explained ethically, racially, nationally, religiously, socially — but only totally, culturally. From having seen at each phase only that aspect of the Jew which his own development permitted him to, Western man now sees the whole relationship, for his own Cultural unity is uppermost in Western man. In Gothic times, he saw the Jew as different only in religion, because the West was then in a religious phase. In the Enlightenment with its ideas of “humanity,” the Jew was seen merely to be socially different. In the materialistic 19th century with its vertical racism, the Jew was regarded as merely racially different. In this century, with the West passing into a unit of Culture, nation, race, society, economics, State, the Jew appears clearly in his own total unity, a complete inner stranger to the soul of the West. IV The materialistic 19th century saw this phenomenon of Culture-parasitism only as nation-parasitism, and thus it was misunderstood in each nation as merely a local condition. For this reason, the phenomenon in each country called anti-Semitism was only a partial reaction to what was a Cultural, and not merely a national, condition.

391 Anti-Semitism is precisely analogous in Culture pathology to the formation of anti-bodies in the bloodstream in human pathology. In both cases, the organism is resisting the alien life. Both are inevitable, organically necessary, expressions of Destiny. In fulfilling the proper, Destiny combats the alien. It cannot be said too often that hatred and malice, tolerance and goodwill, have nothing whatever to do with this fundamental process. A Culture is an organism, an organism of a different class from man, just as man is an organism of a different class from animals. But the fundamental regularities of organic life are present in all organisms, of whatever class, plant, animal, man, Culture. This hierarchy of organisms is obviously part of the divine plan, and it cannot be changed by a process of propaganda, no matter how continuous, “tolerance,” no matter how self-renouncing, or self-deception, no matter how complete. A treatment of anti-Semitism raises questions which belong with Culture-distortion, rather than Culture-parasitism, and so it may suffice to say here that anti-Semitism — again, precisely like the human pathological phenomenon of formation of antibodies in the blood — is the other side of the existence of Culture-parasitism, and is only to be understood as one of its effects. Anti-Semitism is completely organic and irrational, just as is reaction to human disease. Culture-parasitism is the phenomenon of the totally alien in co-existence with a host, and is also entirely irrational. There is no reason for Culture-parasitism. On the contrary, Reason would seem to dictate that the alien group dissolve and flow into the surrounding life. This would end all the bitter persecution, the sterile hatred, the wasted fighting. But Life is irrational, also during the Age of Rationalism. In fact the only way Rationalism can come onto the stage is in the form of a religion, a Faith, an Irrationality.

392 The phenomenon of Culture-parasitism is not confined in a High Culture, to the mother-soil of the Culture. This is well shown by the history of America. America originated as a colony of the Western Culture. This one sentence contains the whole Fate of America. It sets in advance the limit to the potentialities of America. The idea of the Colony must be examined. What is a Colony? It is a creation of a Culture, it is a work, by its mere successful plantation it is something spiritually completed. This is another way of saying it has no inner necessity, no mission. It is thus dependent for its spiritual nourishment on the Mother-Culture. This is as true of America in the Western Culture as it was of Syracuse and Alexandria in the Classical, of Granada and Seville in the Arabian. While fruitful impulses can, albeit rarely, come from the periphery of the Cultural Body, they find their significance in their development in the Culture-center. This spiritual dependence of colonies is weakness. This weakness is expressed by lack of resistance to the Culturally alien, and one would expect to find less organic resistance to the Culturally alien in a colony, for the sense of Cultural mission is not generally present at all, but exists only in isolated individuals or tiny groups at best. The history of Colonies shows us — Syracuse is one example — that Culture-crises, even autopathic ones like the appearance of Rationalism, produce greater effects in them. A colony can be more easily disintegrated, because it lacks the articulation that the Culture has. There is not, cannot be, a Culture-bearing stratum in a Colony. This stratum is an organ of the land-bound High Culture. The Culture cannot be transplanted, even though its populations migrate and remain in contact with the body of the Culture. Colonies are products of a Culture, and represent Life at a less complex and articulate level than the creating Culture.

393 The comprehension of this elementary fact has always been unconsciously quite complete in America, and in the 20th century has been just as vehemently consciously denied. American men of letters in the 19th century, assimilated Western Culture inwardly, and were assimilated by it. The phenomenon of Edgar Poe has always generated wonder by reason of his complete mastery of Culture-thinking and total independence of his colonial environment. In its higher branches, American belles-lettres has figured as a part of English literature, and quite correctly, as regards most of it. The poverty and meagerness of American letters is attributable to the colonial fate, while its few great names are expressions of Western Culture. Americans of all callings through the past two centuries, insofar as they were, or wished to be, men of significance, have had their center of gravity in Europe — Irving, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whistler, Frank Harris, Henry James, the finance-plutocracy, Wilson, Ezra Pound. A tradition in America makes a European tour a part of education. Europe continued to possess spiritually those American elements with Culture feelings or Culture ambitions. In every generalization of organic subject matter, it is sought only to state the great regularity. The deviations always exist in living matter, but find their place only with respect to the larger rhythms. Rationalist thought attempted to disintegrate organic thinking by concentrating on the deviating incidents, in the attempt to destroy the great, sweeping, organic rhythm. It had not even the depth sufficient to grasp the wisdom contained in the saw “the exception proves the rule.” Even though it became the fashion in America, after its appearance as a world-power, following the Spanish war, 1898-1899, to deny its spiritual dependence upon Europe, the fact continued to exist. By this time we are not surprised when a

394 Culture-fact shows its disregard of human wishes, intentions, demands, statements. America is a subject that needs to be treated separately, as the Culture-disease of the West has given it a new significance in world-politics. In this place, the presence of Culture-parasitism in America is the only aspect under consideration. V From the early 17th century onward, continuing to the early 19th century, slave-trading brought millions of African aboriginies to America. These formed, during the 18th and first half of the 19th century, a large, prolific, and totally alien parasitic body. It is a good example of the Cultural meaning of the term parasite that it has no reference to work, in the economic sense. Thus the Africans in America were economically important, and, after an economy was built on them, necessary, in a practical sense. Class-war made it the mode to refer to all persons other than manual workers as “parasites.” This was a polemical term, and has no community of any kind with the phenomenon of Culture-parasitism. The Negro in America was the expression of Culture-parasitism despite economic utility. The first result of the presence of such a Culture-parasitic body is known. He displaced unborn white men in America. By performing part of the life task, he made unborn millions unnecessary, and therefore this great mass of Africans has reduced the population of America by ten per cent, for at the present moment — 1948 — the African makes up 14,000,000 out of a total of 140,000,000. The fashionable, materialistic way of explaining this displacement in America is to say that white people will not bring children into the world to compete economically

395 with the blacks and their lower living-standard. Naturally economic obsession explains everything economically, but the facts of population trends show that the population of an organic unity follows a life-path that may even be described mathematically. It is entirely independent of immigration, of the wishes of individuals, and of non-organic explanations given for it. The displacement is Cultural, i.e., total, and is not to be fully explained by economics. The Colonial mentality, more thoroughly disintegrated by the Rationalist crisis, has been able to oppose no effective defense to the increasing displacement of the white population, the vehicle of America’s attachment to the West, by the African. With equal inability either to comprehend, or to oppose, America has not resisted while the rear-guard of the Arabian Culture, which was strewn throughout the West even at its Cultural origins, has assumed larger numerical proportions and a vastly larger role than it ever had in Europe. Beginning around 1880, the Jews embarked upon what Hilaire Belloc aptly termed an invasion of the United States. The numbers alone would justify the figure. While they cannot be exactly given, because of the fact that American immigration statistics reflect only legal origins, i.e., nation of legal allegiance, nevertheless they can be approximated from a study of current American population figures, and study of the Jewish birth-rate. How typical this is, of the total incongruence between two different Cultures, that a mass movement of the members of one can occur within the other Culture, and leave no statistical trace. The immigrant was asked where he was born. This was determining of everything for 19th century materialism. It was supposed to fix his language, which then was supposed to govern his nationality. And nationality was supposed to pre-ordain everything else. Such things as petrifacts

396 of dead Cultures — India, China, Islam, Jewry — were regarded as “nations” in the Western sense of the word. In form, Rationalism was definitely a religion, but a bloodless, materialistic caricature of true religion. Religion is properly directed toward the great, higher, things of man’s spirituality, but Rationalism tried to turn things like economics, State, society, nation, into the object of its own religious concern. America began its independent political existence as a creature of Rationalism. Its politicians agreed to the proposition — externally — that “all men are created equal,” and even said this was “self-evident.” To call it self-evident, and thus dispense with proof, was easier, and perhaps wiser, than to prove it. Proof would have spoiled what is actually a tenet of a Faith, and thus above Reason. The religion of Rationalism dominated America in a way that it was never able to dominate Europe. Europe always had resistance against Rationalism — based on tradition until the middle of the 19th century, and after that based on anticipation of the coming anti-rationalist spirit of the 20th century — as exemplified in Carlyle and Nietzsche. But America did not possess the first because it had no tradition, and had not the second, because Cultural impulses and Culture-forwarding phenomena come from the Mother-soil and are thence radiated outward, as the Rationalistic religion of America came from England, through France. America acquired even its section of Jewry from Europe, whence it had acquired its materialistic philosophy, to both of which it succumbed. This was no coincidence. The word spread rapidly through the Jewish population of Europe that anti-Semitism was less of a threat in America, and that other opportunities, such as the economic, were equal to those Europe offered to the Jew. This was perfectly sound, and was a tribute to the collective Jewish instinct. America did undoubtedly

397 represent in the late 19th century a country with the greatest possibilities for the Jew. From 1880 to 1950, approximately — remember, no exact figures exist — five to seven million Jews arrived in America. They came mostly from the Eastern, or Askkenazic, section of Jewry. At the present time, the Jews in America number approximately eight to twelve millions. An exact figure cannot be given, because the number is not reflected in any statistics, but must be approximated from religious statistics and study of the birth-rate. At any rate, it is a considerable number, and displaces its own number of Americans from existence. The American writer, Madison Grant, in 1916, described how the American of the old stock was being driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Jews. He calls them “Polish” Jews, as the older custom was to give the Jews a Western nationality. Westerners thus used to differentiate between English Jews, German Jews, and so forth. It was a compulsion of the Western Civilization at that stage to see all other people outside the Civilization in its own image. America, as the country most completely disintegrated by Rationalism, exhibited the least understanding of the nature of the Jew, while there were always some people in Europe — for instance, Carlyle — even during the 19th century who realized the total, and not merely political, alienness of the Jew. But in America, with its complete lack of tradition, there were no Carlyles, no de Lagardes. Thus America decided, in the middle of the 19th century, that a Chinaman born in the United States thereby acquired exactly the same American citizenship as the white native population of European derivation. Characteristically, the decision was not made in a responsible fashion, but as the result of a lawsuit. This was in pursuance of an American custom of deciding political questions in a pseudo-legal

398 form. Obviously a regime which did not differentiate between Chinese and native American would oppose no political barrier to the Jew. And so, by 1928, the French writer on historical and world-political topics, Andre Siegfried, could say that New York City had a Semitic countenance. By the middle of the 20th century, this development had gone further, and New York City, the largest city in America, perhaps in the world, was almost half Jewish in population. VI America, with its total lack of spiritual resistance, springing from the inherent soul-weakness of a Colony, became the host to other large Culturally-parasitic groups. The period of dense immigration which had begun before the turn of the 20th century, and in which the Jews came, brought in also many millions of Balkan Slavs. Between 1900 and 1915 alone, 15,000,000 immigrants came to America from Asia, Africa and Europe. They came mostly from Russia, the Levant, and the Balkan countries. From the Western Civilization came a fair number of Italians, but the rest of the human material was from outside the West. These millions, by their very numbers, created phenomena of Culture-parasitism. On the edge of each group, individuals passed into the American feeling, but the groups continued to exist as such. This was shown by the existence of a newspaper-press for each group in its own language, unity of the groups for political purposes, geographical centralization of the various groups, and social exclusiveness of the groups. In examining the nature of race, we saw that Slavs could be, and have been, assimilated by European Culture-populations. Two features distinguish the American relationship to the Slav, and explain why the Slavs have retained their group existence,

399 even though surrounded by an American population under the influence of Western Civilization. First, the fact of its colonial style of existence meant that America could not transmit to entering populations the forceful impress of the Cultural idea that the Western nations on the Mother-soil could. Secondly, the enormous masses, numbering many millions, created, by their mere bulk a pathological condition in the American organism. Even if these millions had been of Western antecedents, such as French, or Spanish, they would have created a politically parasitic group. Naturally such a group would have dissolved eventually, but in the process it would have had a distorting effect on policy in America. Slavic groups, on the other hand, in masses of millions, whose leaders are allowed facilities of welding the group into a firm unity, will only slowly, if ever, dissolve into the American host population, under such conditions. America has other smaller parasitic groups, each of which displaces unborn Americans, and calls forth the unfortunate displays of hatred and bitterness which waste and twist the superpersonal life. There is a Japanese group, various Levantine groups, and the Russian group. Superficially it might seem that the case of America militates against the 20th century view of Race, set forth above, but actually it does not. The American example is no criterion for Europe, for being a colony, it is an area of low Cultural sensitivity, with correspondingly less Cultural force and assimilative power. In other words, its power of adaptation is slighter than that of the Mother-soil. The case of America is not a case of assimilating too much — it is a case of not assimilating enough. Alien groups — whether merely politically alien, such as a Western group in another Western nation, or totally alien, like the Jew in a Western

400 host — are parasitic only so long as they are groups. When they dissolve, the totality of the assimilating population has increased. The fact that this has come from immigration rather than from increase by birth-surpluses of the native population is not important. The mere fact that they could assimilate shows that they were not alien in a parasitic sense. Nor must this be ignored in examining Culture-parasitism in America: this American population during the 19th century assimilated many millions of Germans, Irish, English and Scandinavians into its own bloodstream. The 20th century immigration did not come mainly from these European countries, but to the extent that it did, complete assimilation occurred. In the case of the immigrant Germans and Irish, the Yankee armies in the War of Secession employed them in great numbers, and with good success — what never could have been done with Culturally alien groups, e.g., Jews, or Slavs. America has been called a melting-pot. This it is not, for the massive groups of Culturally-alien provenance have not “melted,” but have remained distinct. Groups not Culturally alien have assimilated at once — which means, in one generation — and thus the 20th century view of Race applies also to the facts of the American scene. These unassimilated groups in America comprise between one-third and one-half of the population of America. The Slavic groups are apparently slowly being assimilated, but even if they disappeared entirely, the remaining Culturally-parasitic groups would comprise a pathological condition of the utmost seriousness for America. The old-fashioned view of vertical racism can derive no instruction from the case of America, for what we see there is not the mixture of races, but their non-mixture. All of the parasitic groups have been torn loose from old landscapes, but

401 have no new spiritual connections. Only the landless Jew, who carries Nation, Church, State, People, Race and Culture within him, has preserved his ancient roots. The phenomenon of Culture-parasitism, even though divorced from ethics, is not outside the realm of policy. It does no good whatever to talk about Culturally alien groups in terms of praise and blame, hatred or “tolerance.” Wars, riots, massacres, destruction, the entire waste of senseless domestic conflict — all the phenomena which inevitably rise when a host entertains a Culture-parasite, remain as long as the pathological condition lasts. Culture-parasitism, by calling forth resistant phenomena, has a doubly injurious effect on the body of the Culture and its nations. A fever is a sign of resistance to a disease in a human, but this does not confer a positive health-value on the fever. Its sole value is negative, and the fever itself is a part of the disease, even though the saving part. Resistant phenomena like the anti-Japaneseism and anti-semitism and anti-Negroism of America are as undesirable as the conditions they are combating. Similarly, European anti-semitism has no positive value and moreover it can, if exaggerated, easily develop into another type of Culture-pathology, that aggravated condition which may proceed also from Culture-parasitism under certain conditions, namely, Culture-distortion.

402 Culture-Distortion The mighty destiny of a High Culture has the same power over the Culture organism as the plant-destiny over the plant, the human-destiny over a human being. This power, vast and inwardly undeniable though it be, nevertheless is not absolute. It is organic, and an organism is a relationship of an inner to an outer, a microcosm to a macrocosm. While no inner force can prevail against the destiny of the organism, outer forces sometimes can — on all planes of Life — bring about disease and death of the organism. The micro-organisms that penetrate into the body of a man bring about illness by reason of the fact that their life-conditions are entirely different from those of the man. Their welfare means his doom. They are an outer force, even though they are working from the inside of the human organism. Outer is thus seen to be a spiritual, and not a spatial term. That is outside which has separate existence, no matter how it may happen to be physically. Everything with one Destiny is one; anything with another Destiny is other. It is not geography which determines, but spirituality. In war a traitor

403 within the fortress may be as valuable to the besieging army as half of its numbers. He is outer, even though he is within. Life is the process of actualizing the possible. But Life is multiform, and organisms, by actualizing their own possibilities, destroy other organisms. Animals devour plants, plants destroy one another, human beings lay waste entire species and slaughter millions of animals. High Cultures by their existence evoke negative impulses from outside populations. Those who do not share this Culture-feeling, which confers such unquestioned superiority on its possessors, instinctively determine to annihilate it. The more powerful the pressure of the High Culture on the outer populations, the more nihilistic is the negative feeling which forms in the under-populations. The more extensive the Culture-expansion geographically, the wider is spread through the world the external will-to-annihilate among the extra-Cultural peoples. Life forms are hostile to one another; the fulfillment of one is the demise of a thousand others. This is another way of saying that Life is war. A High Culture is no exception to this great Life-regularity. Its existence destroys other forms, and on the other hand, throughout its entire existence, it is engaged in an existential battle against the outsider. On this high plane of contemplation, the attempt to distinguish between offensive and defensive, aggressive and resisting, is seen dearly to be nonsense. It is a pseudo-legal trick of Rationalist conjurers, lost in hyper-intellectualism, and hostile to Life. Defense is aggression, aggression is defense. The question of who strikes first in a war is on the same level as who strikes first in a boxing contest. The 20th century leaves all this cant, stupidity, hypocrisy, and legalistic legerdemain behind it as it strides forward to a century of warfare, the most powerful and unrelenting of all wars hitherto.

404 But as it faces its most trying period, the period that will demand every fiber of its spiritual reserves, and every atom of its physical resources — it is gravely ill. It is suffering from Culture-distortion. Culture-distortion is the condition in which outer life-forms are warping the Culture from its true Life-path. Just as a human illness may render a man hors de combat so may a Culture illness, and this is precisely what happened to the West, after the turn of the 20th century. Culture-distortion must be clearly understood by the Western Civilization. It has already been seen that the word outer does not have a geographic meaning when used in the domain of the organic. The phenomenon of Culture-distortion is the result of outer forces at work within the body of the Culture, participating in its public life and policy, directing its energies to problems that have no relation to its inner task, turning its forces, physical and spiritual, to alien problems. A moment’s thought shows the impossibility of such a Culture-illness arising during the time of the strict Culture, before the turn of Civilization. During those days, the forms of the Culture — in all directions of Life — were so highly developed that they not only required highly gifted souls to master them, but they mastered these souls in the same process. No European thinker, artist, or man of action, could, in the 17th century, have tried to focus European energy onto Asiatic thought, art, or action-forms. Such a thing might have existed as an imaginative possibility, but it is doubtful whether it was possible in actuality. At any rate, it did not occur for 800 years in the West, except in its rudimentary beginnings. We cannot see Cromwell, Oxenstierna, or Oldenbarneveldt concerning himself with the restoration of the Abassid dynasty in Asia Minor, or the driving out of the usurping Manchus from the ruins of the

405 Chinese petrifact. But if a European statesman had successfully directed Western energy into such a totally alien, sterile enterprise, it would have been Culture-distortion. If an artist had managed to turn Western oil-painting into the style of Egyptian linear painting, or of Classical sculpture, that would also have been Culture-distortion. Future volumes of Western history-philosophy in the 20th and 21st centuries will trace out fully the superficially distorting effects in architecture, literature, and economic theorizing, of the Classicist mania introduced by Wincklemann in the 18th century. They will also list the innumerable distortions arising from Culture-parasitism, during the Rationalist period 1750–1950, of the various life-aspects of the West, artistic, religious, philosophical, scientific, and in the realm of action. This work is concerned with actions, and directs itself mainly to the phenomena of distortion of the Present and the immediate Future, that is the next hundred years. In the presentation of the articulation of a High Culture, it was seen that not all of the population in the Culture area is available to the Idea. This is quite exclusive of parasitic phenomena. The higher, psychically more sensitive stratum which bears the Culture-Idea, and translates it into progressive actuality, is completely available to the Idea, but the availability is progressively less as one moves downward in the body of the Culture. Downward means, of course, not economically or socially, but spiritually. Thus a man from the lowest possible spiritual stratum may be found in a high position, like the monster Marat. Such individuals belong to no other Culture, even a dead one of the past, and apparently are members of the Culture, but in their souls they wish to destroy all formative Life. Their motives do not matter, for their orientation is obvious. Such individuals — who make up a whole, large stratum during

406 these centuries — are simply below the Culture. They are only physically within the body of the Culture. They expressed themselves in England in the phenomena of the order of Wat Tyler’s Rebellion and Jack Cade’s Rebellion; in the 16th century Peasant’s Wars in Germany; in the French Terror of 1793 and the Commune of 1871. When Germany existed as a 19th century nation, this stratum below the Culture was known as der deutsche Michel. Phenomena of this type must not be confused with Culture-parasitism. Things like the Michel element — which exists all through Europe, and not alone in the former German nation — are simply below, but they are not per se alien. They are an organic part of every Culture, but parasitism occurs only fortuitously, and not with necessity. The Michel element of a Culture is not a pathology, and is not a Cultural menace in itself. Its sole danger is that it is serviceable to the will-to-annihilate, whether this springs up autopathically, as in Liberalism, democracy, Communism, or exopathically as in the case of the extra-European forces which brought about, during the Age of World Wars, the nadir of the Western Civilization. In that very situation, the European Michel showed its potentialities for destruction. One section of it worshiped the primitivity of Russian vandalism, the other the spiritually-putrefying disease of Hollywoodism. It was solely by virtue of this European Michel-stratum that the extra-European forces were able to split Europe between them, physically and spiritually. This European Michel, with its attachment to the formless, brought Europe down before the Barbarian and the distorter. In its supreme hatred of grandeur and creativeness, it even allowed itself to be formed into military movements within Europe to sabotage Europe and work for the military victory of the barbarian during the Second World War. After the War, it learned that its fate was after all bound up with the creative forces of the Culture, for this element was

407 starved, frozen, and looted along with the collective body of Europe in the gruesome aftermath of the victory of the barbarians and distorters. II The Destiny of a living organism must not be confused with the entirely opposite idea of predestination. The latter is a causal idea, both in its religious form of Calvinism, or in its materialist form of mechanism and determinism. Destiny is not causal, but organic, necessity. Causality is a form of thought, but Destiny is the form of the living. Causality claims absolute necessity, but Destiny is only inner necessity, and every child who is accidentally killed at play shows that Destiny is subject to outer incident. Destiny merely says: if it is to be, it will be this way, and no other. Every man is destined to grow old, but many will not fulfill this destiny. Let no one claim to understand the Destiny-idea if he regards it as a sort of hidden causality, a form of predestination. At the beginning of this treatment of the subject of Cultural Vitalism, it was said that if the extra-Cultural forces had succeeded after the Second World War in destroying the entire Culture-bearing stratum of Europe, this stratum would have once again been present in thirty to sixty years. The statement was of course, hypothetical, for this did not occur. The mere fact that someone is writing and someone is reading this is proof that they did not succeed. The basis of that statement was the tremendous, ever-youthful, vigor of a High Culture. The West has a Future, and this Future must be inwardly fulfilled. Inwardly is distinguished from outwardly, for whether or not the West fulfills its outward potentialities is as much a matter of Incident as it is of Destiny.

408 The inner Future of the West contains many necessary developments, such as the Rebirth of Religion, the attainment of new heights in technics and chemistry, perfection of legal and administrative thinking, and others. These could all be fulfilled under a permanent occupation by barbarians from other continents. The grandest, mightiest side of Life, that of action, of war and politics, would express itself in such a regime in inexorable, continuing, bitter revolt against the Barbarian. Instead of planting the flag of the West at the antipodes, it would be reduced to trying to free the sacred soil of the West from the heel of the primitive. It was therefore no causal-predestination thought when it was said that the Culture-bearing stratum would reconstitute itself even though every one of its contemporary members were entirely wiped out by scaffold-trials. Contained in that statement was this: either the West will fulfill its tremendous, world-embracing Destiny of unlimited, Absolute Imperialism, or else — all this energy will go into warfare on European soil against the alien, and whatever European elements he finds serviceable to him. As is true of all wars, hatred is dissociated from the necessity of this process. Wars do not come from hatred, but from organic rhythms. The choice is not between War and Peace, but between a Culture-forwarding war, or a Culture-distorting war. If Europe remains under the outer forces, they will be sending their soldiers into a graveyard, for the might of the West is not to be annulled by a mountain of propaganda, mass-armies of occupying “soldiers,” nor by millions of traitors in the Michel stratum. For two centuries the streams of blood will flow, irrespective of the wish of any human being. It is the nature of superpersonal organisms to express their possibilities. If it cannot be done in one way, it will be done in another. This

409 idea conscripts men, and it discharges them only by their individual deaths. It has no legal hold on them, no formal allegiance, no threat of court-martial: its claim on them is total. It is a selective conscription: the higher a man’s gifts, the stronger is the bond which the Idea lays on him. What have the barbarians and distorters to oppose this? Against their murderous Russian slaves, their savage Negroes, their hapless, go-home conscripts from North America, Europe pits its unconquerable superpersonal superiority. Europe stands at the beginning of a world-historical process; the end is not in sight. When — or even whether — complete success will come is not visible. Perhaps before it is over, the outer forces will have mobilized the swarming, pullulating masses of China and India against the body of the Western Civilization. This kind of thing does not affect the continuation of the conflict, but only its size. It is absolutely necessary to the continuance of the subjugation of Europe that the outsiders have large numbers — whole societies, groups, strata, remnants of dead 19th century nations — of domestic European populations available for their purposes. Against a united Europe, they could never have made their way in, and only against a divided Europe can they maintain themselves. Split! divide! distinguish! — this is the technique of conquest. Resurrect old ideas, old slogans, now quite dead, in the battle to turn European against European. But work always with the weak, Culture-less stratum against the strong bearers and appreciators of Culture. These must be “tried” and hanged. This availability of the under-strata of the Culture to outside forces is one type, and the most dangerous, of that form of Culture-pathology called Culture-distortion. It is closely related however to another type called Culture-retardation.

410 Culture Retardation as a Form of Culture Distortion In the study of the articulation of a Culture, the ceaseless battle between Tradition and Innovation appeared. This is normal and accompanies the Culture from the feudal union to Caesarism, from Gothic cathedral to skyscraper, from Anselm to the philosopher of this age, from Schütz to Wagner. The unending struggle takes place within the form of the Culture and is thus not a disease-form, for even the conflict itself in each case is strictly cast in the Culture-mold. It occurred to no one during the period 1000-1800 when engaged in a battle against another Western idea that he must prevent it from realization even at the cost of destruction of the Culture. To be specific, no European power and no European statesman would have delivered all Europe to the Barbarian merely in order to defeat another power or statesman. On the contrary, when the Barbarian appeared at the gates, all Europe opposed him, as it finally united against the Turk at the moment of greatest danger. After the defeat of the European army at Nicopolis at the turn of the 15th century, the Osmanli Sultan Bayazid swore

411 an oath that he would not rest until he had turned St. Peter’s into a stable for his horse. At that period of Western history that was not to be. This total domination of the West by the outer forces of annihilation had to wait until almost the middle of the 20th century. It only came about because certain elements in the West preferred to ruin all Europe rather than allow Europe to pass into the next Cultural stage, the Resurgence of Authority. Any such historical phenomenon as this does not appear in a moment. The beginnings of this terrible division of the West are found in the origins of Rationalism. Even in the Wars of the Austrian Succession, there is a new ferocity which presaged the coming split. In that war, the Allies actually planned completely to partition the territory of the Culture-nation of Prussia. Participating were to be Sweden, Austria, France — and Russia. It is true that during the Romanov regime, from the 17th to the 20th centuries, Russia figured as a State and Nation of the Western style. Nevertheless, there were open misgivings on both sides, and there was a difference between partitioning of Asiatic border-land like Poland between Western powers and Russia, and the sharing of the Mother-soil of Europe with Russia. In the battle of the Dynasts and Traditionalists against Napoleon, the tendency went further, and in 1815 at the Vienna Congress, the Tsar with his troops occupying half Europe — a fact of which he frequently reminded the European monarchs — was able to pose as the savior of the West. Thus the Fürstenbund and England were actually on the verge of the Culturally pathological when they pushed their battle against a Western sovereign, Napoleon, to the point where they admitted Russian troops to European capitals. It is however quite certain that the Western veneer of Russia was determining in

412 the matter: the Fürstenbund and Pitt’s England would not have admitted a nihilistic Russia or the Turk to Europe as a means of defeating Napoleon and therewith themselves. But the tendency did not stop there — in the First World War, between the two European nations, both in 19th century style, England and Germany, England again embraced Russia as an ally, and painted the Romanov despotism as a “democracy” before Europe and America. Fortunately for the West there was a counter-tendency, and when the Bolshevik started his westward march after the war, he was thrown back by a Western coalition before Warsaw in 1920. In the armies against Bolshevism were Germans, French, English, but yesterday enemies, today united against the barbarian. Even the Americans sent two expeditions against the Bolshevik, one to Archangel, and one to Eastern Siberia. During the period of preparation of the Second World War, 1919–1939, it appeared at several moments as though the coming war could take the form of a struggle by certain of the powers of the West — for the West was still divided at that time into a collection of tiny States — against Russia, while others of these petty States would remain neutral, giving economic assistance. Such a moment occurred in June, 1936, when the leading four among these petty States signed a protocol embodying a general understanding among themselves. This protocol was never ratified. No less than twenty separate efforts were made between 1933 and 1939 by the bearers of the 20th century Idea to effect a general understanding with those of the petty States still in the grip of the 19th century Idea, which was already by then manifesting rigor mortis. Naturally, the leading elements of the Culture-bearing stratum in these latter petty States were in contact with the new Idea, but certain elements were opposed by reason of their spiritual insensitivity, their

413 materialistic shallowness, their negativistic jealousy, their firm roots in the Past, and — to put the most important reason last — by reason of their material interests in the perpetuation of the 19th century type of international and domestic economy, from which they alone were profiting, and from which the entire Western Civilization was suffering. These latter elements decided to allow the division of Europe between Asia and America rather than to embrace the Future of the West. When the struggle between Tradition and Innovation, the Old and the New, natural and normal in every Culture, reaches this degree, it is Culture-pathology. This form of Culture-pathology is definable by the intensity of the hatred of the Future of the Culture it shows. It reaches the point of self-destruction rather than giving up the rigid Past to the vigorous Future. When the conservative elements come to hate the creative elements so intensely that they will do anything to encompass their military defeat, including self-destruction, it becomes Culture-treason, and is classified as an acute form of Culture-pathology. The hallmark of this Culture-disease is solely the question of degree. Every new Idea in the Culture has been opposed — in architecture, music, literature, economics, war, and statecraft. But until this horrible outbreak of Culture-sickness in the 20th century, the opposition to the creative had never attained to a totality that can only be adequately described as maniacal. Culture-pathological also was the base and servile buckling throughout the Second World War of this sub-Western element to the parasitic forces and barbarian forces to which it had voluntarily submitted in its hatred of Europe and its Future. With unforgettable dishonor it threw millions of Western soldiers to the Russian savages, to disappear forever into

414 the unmarked graves of Siberia. This Michel element cooperated with and aided the Barbarian enthusiastically, and naively gave him all its secrets, but this same Barbarian accepted all the aid without thanks and returned for it suspicion, sabotage, and hatred. The Michel element of the West went down with the defeat of the West and its passing under the Barbarian and the distorter. The pathology of Culture-retardation had in this case tragic consequences for the representatives of the Past as well as for those of the Future. Actually they are more tragic, for in the battle of the Past against the Future, the Past is doomed. Eventually the Idea of the Future will triumph inwardly even if its external Destiny is frustrated. Mechanism in politics will give way to the Future just as mechanism in biology has long since yielded. The idea of individuals having power over the gigantic economies of superpersonal organisms is doomed, and this is one of the things the sub-Western, Future-hating elements wished to save for themselves. Materialism, their world-outlook, has given way almost everywhere in the West to historical skepticism, which will make way for mysticism and the Rebirth of Religion. The most they have salvaged from the general destruction is an accumulation of small personal advantages for themselves. To show their appreciation, the Barbarian and the distorter have appointed them their deputies in Europe. How symbolic it was that the puppets who were placed in the formerly important positions in Europe after the Second World War were old men! They were even old, biologically speaking, but spiritually they were two centuries old, rooted in the dead parliamentaristic past. It did not matter to the new rulers of Europe that these superannuated appointees lacked vigor and creativeness — that is in fact precisely why they were chosen. Anyone with vigor of any sort was carefully scrutinized

415 by the new rulers. Lethargy coupled with oratory was preferred to the will-to-accomplishment sans the stream of 19th century patriotic verbiage. This is the result of Culture-Retardation. Without it, the outer forces could never have succeeded in grinding the flower of Western Culture under the heel of their primitivity and stupidity. It played, however, only a subordinate role. The study of pathology of other organic life-forms, plant, animal, and human, offer numerous examples of simultaneity of disease, in which the damage done by one promotes the spread of another. The simultaneity of pneumonia and tuberculosis in the human organism is but one case. The more serious disease which was running its course contemporaneously with the Culture-retardation illness, and which was promoted by the latter condition was an aggravation of Culture-parasitism, which becomes Culture-distorting when the parasite takes an active part in the life of the Culture.

416 Culture Distortion Arising from Parasitic Activity The elementary effects on the Culture-body of Culture-parasitism have already been seen: reduction of the Culture-population by displacement, loss of Culture-energy in friction. These effects arise from the mere existence of the parasite, however passive it may be. Far more deadly to the healthy realization of the Culture is the mingling in the Cultural life of parasitic elements, the activity of the Culture-parasite, his participation in creation and formation of Culture-tasks, ideas, and policy. The activity of the parasite generates at a higher level of intensity the repetition of the frictional phenomena which accompany the passive presence of the parasite. In California, every accretion of economic strength, every public display of collective energy on the part of the Chinese called forth new outbreaks of anti-Chinese activity among the Americans. The same applied to the Japanese group. The worst riots have been those attendant on the progressive advance of the Negro into American public life. As long as the Negro was passive, there was a minimum of bitterness between the races. The year 1865

417 marked the beginning of a transition from passivity of the Negro to his activity. It was naturally not spontaneous; white Rationalist elements, Liberals, “tolerance” enthusiasts; Communists, created the movement to ignore the distinction between the races, and under their direction it grew to dimensions where recurrent race riots caused temporary cessation of public life in the largest cities of America . Tulsa, Beaumont, Jersey City, Chicago, Detroit, New York — these are only a few of the scenes of mass riots during the past quarter of a century. Each riot is preceded by a deluge of “tolerance” propaganda and sentimentalizing, and afterwards a public investigation is held which decides that the cause was lack of “tolerance” and “education.” During the American occupation of England, 1942–1946, several large race battles occurred, with both sides using automatic weapons, between American troops and Negro troops, both of whom were there on a mission against England and Europe . The limited utility of Culturally-parasitic groups for purposes of military conscription is shown by this example. Actually, these Negro troops were a part of an American command engaged in the destruction of Europe, but a slight social incident in a public-house was enough to cause a flaming-up of the racial hatred developed by the sharing of the same life by parasite and host. Troops from parasitic groups have little value if they are always two steps away from a race riot, and the Rationalists and Liberals discovered this by experimentation, rather than by looking at the chronicles of 5,000 years of the history of High Cultures. These Negro troops showed their willingness to destroy America as well as Europe. These examples of heightened tension between host and parasite are but the simpler form of the disease of Culture-distortion arising from parasitic activity. They differ only in degree from the

418 resistance to Culture-parasitism. Much more serious is that form in which the parasite moves squarely into the public life of the Culture, or the Culture-nations, and directs their policy into his own channels. Neither in America nor in South Africa has the Negro attained to this significance. Nor yet have the Japanese, Chinese, Levantine, or Indian groups in America . One group, however, has brought about a major Culture-distortion throughout the entire Western Civilization and its colonies on every continent, and that is the rear-guard in the West of the fulfilled Arabian Culture, the Church-State-Nation-People-Race of the Jew. From the Arabian Culture, which was inwardly fulfilled by about 1100 A.D., the Jew derived his world-outlook, his religion, State-form, Nation-Idea, People-feeling, and unity. From the West however he has derived his race and his Life-mission. We saw the developing of this race in the ghetto-existence during the first 800 years of our Western Culture. As Rationalism became more articulate — from 1750 on — and the Jew sensed the wider possibilities for him of the new Life-phase of the West, he began to agitate against the ghetto which he had created for himself in the early days as symbol of his unity, spiritual and physical. This race had a different ideal type from the Western, and this influenced the material which passed into the collective blood-stream of the ghetto-race. In the middle of the 20th century one sees Jews with Nordic pigmentation, but the racial purity has adapted the new material to the old racial look. To 19th century vertical racism, these phenomena were uncanny, but the 20th century has seen the primacy of the spiritual in race-formation. When it is said, therefore, that the Jew derived his race from the West, it is not meant that he drew entirely on the stock of the Western peoples to recruit his own — although this did, and does, go on to some extent — but that by

419 serving, through its own Cultural imperative, as a totally alien mass around the Jew, the West prevented the dilution and disappearance of the Jewish unity. For, it must be said, that while contact with the foreign is harmful to an organism when the foreign is within the organism, it is the opposite when the foreign is without — such contact strengthens the organism. That generates war, and war is strengthening to an organism. The Crusades, the birth-cry of the West, made the new organism firm, proved its viability. The wars of Castile and Aragon war against the Barbarian gave Spain the inner strength to bear its grand Ultramontane mission. England’s victories on colonial battlefields all over the world gave it the compelling sense of a mission. Rome’s wars in its national infancy gave it the inner firmness which enabled it to undertake the Punic Wars which gave it mastery of the Classical Civilization at last. Thus it is obvious that the mutual contact of the West and the Jew had an opposite signification for the two organisms. To the Jew, it was a source of strength, and informing; to the West it was a drain of strength, and deforming. The Jew was within the West, but the West was not within him. Persecution strengthens, if it stops short of extermination. The quotation which stands at the beginning of this work is as true for the West now as it was for the Jew in the early days. When the subject of persecution is touched upon, the source of the Life-mission of the Jew has been named. A millennium of massacres, robbery, cheating, burning, insults, mistreatments, expulsions, exploitation — these were the gift of the West to the Jew. They not only strengthened him, made him race-hard, but gave him a mission, the mission of revenge and destruction. The Western peoples and monarchs were storing up explosives in the soul of the alien in their midst.

420 The great organic regularity of war governs Life: even primitive tribes in Africa engage in war, when they have, as far as a Culture-people can see, nothing whatever to fight about. The appearance of a High Culture on the earth, and the concentration of power which its high organization and articulation give to it, bring about in the human surroundings a counter-will to destroy, balancing the will-to-create of the High Culture. In Life, not-to-belong is the same as to oppose. The opposition may be in abeyance long or forever because of other, stronger oppositions, but it remains, latent and potential. The contact of two superpersonal organisms can only engender opposition and war. The West and the Jewish organism were engaged during the millennium of their contact in constant, unremitting war. It was not the warfare of the battlefield, of the clash of ships-of-the-line, but a different form of war. The total alien-ness of the Jew made him politically invisible to the West. It did not regard him as a nation, for he had no dynasty, no territory. He spoke the prevailing language of whatever landscape he was in. He had no visible State in the Western style. It seemed that Jewry was simply a religion, and as such not a political unit, for even in the Thirty Years’ War, 1618–1648, religion played a subordinate role to dynastic politics, and Fronde politics. Therefore, even though the West itself had given the Jew his political mission of revenge and destruction, it could not see him as a political unit. And so the war between the Western Culture and the Jew was a subterranean one. The Jew could not emerge in his unity and fight the West openly, for the reason of the odds involved. The West would at once have united against an open Jewish attack, and destroyed him utterly. The Jew had perforce to carry on his politics by the method of penetrating the conflicts among Western forces, ideas, States, and trying to influence the outcome

421 in his favor. He favored always the side pointing toward materialism, triumph of economics, opposition to absolutism, opposition to the religious unity of the West, freedom of trade and usury. The tactics of this Jewish warfare was employment of money. His dispersion, his materialism, his finished cosmopolitanism, all precluded him from taking part in the heroic form of combat on the field, and he was thus confined to the war of lending, or refusing to lend, of bribing, of gaining legally enforcible power over important individuals. Since the early days when the Western Popes had forbade Christians to take interest, the Jew had enjoyed a favored economic position. Cromwell brought them back to England when he decided there was “not enough money in the land.” Theirs were the largest banking houses in the West in the 17th century. The Bank of England itself was founded on concessions granted to Ali-ben-Israel by Cromwell. This bank proceeded to give 4½ per cent on deposits and re-lent to the Government at 8 per cent. This tactic had not been freely available to him before the middle of the millennium. Scholastic philosophy, the laws of the Church, the Spirit of the Age, the power of the feudal barons to rob him — all were against the Jew. St. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, in the 13th century, taught that trade was to be despised, as being the creature of desire for gain, which tends to become measureless, that the taking of interest was injustice, that the Jews should be deprived of the money they had taken through usury, and forced to work and give up their lust for gain. Various Popes directed bulls against the economic practices, the materialism, the rising influence, of the Jew. But the Soul of the West itself was slowly externalizing. The decisive turning-point of 1789 was prepared for by centuries of slow changes. The old inwardness of the West, which gave to

422 the feudal centuries their self-evident spiritual cohesion, gradually was undermined by new conflicts especially those of town versus country, of trade-nobility versus land-nobility, of materialism against the spirit of religion. The Reformation was a schism in the whole soul of the West. In it appeared as a symbol of the coming triumph of materialism the system of Calvinism. Calvin taught the sanctity of economic activity; he sanctioned usury; he interpreted wealth as a sign of Election to salvation. This spirit was abroad; Henry VIII legalized usury in England in 1545. The old Western doctrine of the sinfulness of usury was rejected. This represented liberation for the Jew, accessibility to power, even if disguised, invisible power. In the Reformation time, the Jew was found everywhere fighting against the Church, and, as between Luther and Calvin, supporting Calvin, for Luther also rejected usury. The victory of Puritanism in England, an adaptation of Calvinism, gave the Jew favorable conditions. The Puritan writer Baxter even recognized a religious duty to choose the more gainful of two economic choices. To choose the less gainful was to disregard the will of God. This atmosphere protected and increased the Jew in his possessions, so that none of the old robbery by monarchs and barons could occur again. II From the beginning of the 17th century, an undercurrent appears in Western history, a twist, a distortion. It had its greatest effect in England, and there in the economic life. Many of the most rapacious aspects of the ascendancy of usury and finance-capitalism were not English at all, but ascribable to the rising influence of the Jew. Again, these effects do not redound to the blame of the Jew. The religious side of the Jewish unity

423 permitted the taking of interest, and prescribed a different ethic as between Jews and goyim from that between Jews. It was meritorious according to the religion of the Jew to inflict injury on the goy. This religious tenet might have remained a dead letter, but for the life-mission of the Jew, whose formation in the centuries of persecution has been seen. The Jew was merely being himself, but his influence was not Western, and was a distortion of Western Culture. Even in the 19th century, after this sanctification of greed had been firmly established, Carlyle, a high representative of the Western soul, cried out in horror at the spectacle of universal thievery and throat-cutting with cunning economico-legal weapons, at the utter lack of social conscience which sacrificed whole strata of nations to want and misery. The distorting effects of the presence of the Jew on Western economic life from the very beginning have been comprehensively set forth by the outstanding European economic thinker Werner Sombart in his Jews and Modern Capitalism. After the awakening within the Western soul of a stronger interest in the material world, the Jew became more secure, more indispensable, and more powerful. Even if he had wished to go into callings other than usury, they were closed to him, for the Western guilds admitted only Christians. His original economic superiority was thus maintained, and highly-placed Westerners in many cases became dependent on him. They in turn could not attack him, for the new commercial laws, reflecting the growing spirit of trade, protected him in his possessions, his bonds, and his contracts. The story of Shylock shows the dual picture of the Jew — socially cringing on the Rialto, but emerging as a lion in the courtroom. It was the West that cast him into these two roles. It expected him to play a purely subordinate part, and at the same time it gave him a path to a leading part.

424 The more materialistic the Culture became, the more it approached the Jew, and the greater was his advantage. The West gradually abandoned its exclusiveness, but he retained his, invisible to the West. The epoch is the appearance of Rationalism, the radical affirmation of Materialism. Around 1750, the new ideas are ascendant in the West: “freedom,” “humanity,” Deism, opposition to religion and to absolutism, “democracy,” enthusiasm for “the people,” belief in the goodness of human nature, “Return to Nature.” Reason challenges tradition, and slowly the old, highly-refined Western structures of thought and statecraft go down. Lessing, in this period, put the Jew into a leading role in his play Nathan der Weise, what a century before would have been ridiculous. The intellectuals became enthusiastic for the ghetto man with his highly refined caste system, his private religion existing side by side with his external materialism. He was the cosmopolitan and, as such, seemed to the Western intellectuals to be pointing toward the Western future. For the first and last time, Westerners and Jews worked together on Cultural tasks — the spreading of the new ideas. The Cultural distortion now spread to the political life. The form of the French Revolution was due to Culture-distortion. The particular epoch that this great episode marks is, of course, an organic Western development. The distortion is manifest in these particular facts, occurring in this particular way, in this particular time and place. Otherwise put — the distortion occurred on the surface of history, not in its depths, for there distortion cannot occur. A human analogy is offered in incarceration: it distorts the surface of a man’s life, by changing all the facts of it, but it does not touch his inner development, physical or spiritual. Distortion is twisting, warping, frustration; it is not killing, nor can it kill. It is a chronic illness, a

425 running sore, a waste, an impurity in the Cultural life-stream. The philosopher has treated in full outline the best known example of Culture-distortion in the Arabian Culture. There it was the old, civilized, Romans who permeated the new upspringing life of the Aramaean world. This new Culture had to force its way through the entire corpus of life-forms of the Roman world in order to express itself. Its early centuries are a progressive emancipation from Culture-distortion, a fight against Culture-distortion. The Mithradatic Wars are an early outbreak of this fight. The Romans were the “Jews” of that world, i.e., the finished economic thinkers, with complete Cultural unity, in the midst of an area of awakening religion. The distortion extended into every direction of Life — law, philosophy, economics, politics, literature, war. Its occurrence was at the very inception of the Culture, which slowly freed itself from the completely alien world of the Roman. But the inmost soul of this new Culture was not touched by the distortion — it was its actualization, its surface, its expression, its facts, that were distorted. Similarly, it is only the facts of the period 1775–1815, the period of the French Revolution, that were distorted. The great transition which was symbolized by this horrible event — the change of direction of the soul of the West from Culture to Civilization — could have happened in innumerable other ways. It was the policy of the distorters to make the French public finance dependent on debts and interests, as they had long since made the English government. An absolute monarchy, however, with its centralization of power, militates against the subservience of the State to the power of Money. Therefore the idea was to introduce constitutional monarchy into France, and for this purpose, the distorters and their instrument, Necker, forced the summoning of the Estates-General. Its membership

426 was also determined by the distorters to a large extent, and a constitutional monarchy was instituted. Necker immediately tried to raise two large loans, without success. A solution of the financial crisis was suggested by Talleyrand in the form of confiscation of the real property of the Church. Mirabeau supported this and further suggested the issue of currency against the confiscated property. Necker refused, since such money, non-interest bearing and unconnected with debt, would not serve the distorters. In the financial crisis, Necker was exiled, and Mirabeau became dictator. He immediately issued land-money to save the country from the panic the distorters were trying to bring about. But outside France, Necker, representing the power of Money and the distorters, then launched a continental war against France, exciting it from both within and without. The idea was that a war would necessitate large foreign purchases by France in England, Spain, and elsewhere; that the land-money, the assignats, would be refused by the Money powers outside of France, and that France would be forced to succumb to the gold-monopolists. From this war a straight line led to the Terror. At the very beginning of the Civilization we see the same gigantic conflict between Authority and Money that lasts for generations into the Future. It is the battle of Napoleon against six coalitions. Napoleon has been painted by a distorted history-writing as a mere conqueror; his State-philosophy is ignored. But his autarchic economic ideas were dearly outlined by him to Las Casas and to Caulaincourt. He saw economy as production, not trade, and based primarily on agriculture, secondarily on industry, and lastly on foreign trade. He was opposed to interest-bearing money. The battle of the distorters against these ideas contributes

427 much to the form of the facts of Western history from Napoleon’s assumption of the Consulate to 1815. Regardless of what these facts would have been otherwise, it was a distortion of Western history that a Culture-parasite engaged actively and decisively in the expression of the Western soul. In the battle between Western forces, the outcome of which is organically shaped by the progressive development of our Culture-soul, the casting of totally foreign power into the balance is a warping and frustration. We do not know what Western history had otherwise been, but it is quite obvious that the power of Money never would have enjoyed its absolute sway during the 19th century if it had not been for the disease of Culture-distortion. There would have been two poles in the Western soul — reaching down into every individual — the pole of money-thinking, and the pole of authority and tradition. The absolute triumph of Money exacted a horrible toll of Western lives and health. It sacrificed the agricultural class of whole countries to the selfish interest of Trade. It let loose wars for private interests with the blood of patriots. The Opium War is enough to name — a war in which English soldiers and sailors had to die in order to force upon the Chinese Emperor recognition and protection of the opium monopoly enjoyed by distorters based in the Western Civilization. The debt system was forced onto every European State. Prussia borrowed from Nathan Rothschild in 1818. Russia, Austria, Spain, Portugal, followed in order. But the shallow materialistic Spirit of the Age, hostile as it was to deep thinking and probing beneath the surface remained blind, Philosophy, which had produced Berkeley and Leibnitz, was contented now with Mill and Spencer. Economic thinking was satisfied with Adam Smith, who taught — in the face of the ruin and

428 destitution of millions — that the pursuit of his own selfish economic interests by each man would advance the collective life. When amazing propositions like these were accepted generally, it is not surprising that but few Westerners were conscious of the distortion of the Cultural life of the West. Byron was one of these few, as The Age of Bronze, and lines in Don Juan and other poems, show us. Charles Lamb and Carlyle were also aware, but for the most part Westerners were bent upon execution of the command of Louis-Phillipe: Enrichissez-vous! III The economic life, although influenced in its forms by Culture, is really only the raw material of Culture, a preliminary condition of the higher life. The role of economy in a High Culture is precisely analogous to its part in the life of a creative man, like Cervantes, Dante, or Goethe. For such a man to be tied to a bench is a distortion of his life. Every High Culture is creative — its whole life is a continuous superpersonal creating. Thus to place the economic life in the center, and to say that it is Life, and all else is secondary, is a distortion of Culture. But that was the effect of the distorters from two sides. The masters of money worked solely for the spread of the Sovereignty of Money over the old traditions of the West. From the under side, the distortion of Marxism denied everything else in the world except economics, and said that the proletariat must exploit the Western Civilization for its own benefit. From the examination of the articulation of a High Culture, the Cultural importance of the “proletariat” is known. In one word, it is — nihil. This is a plain fact, not an expression of an ideology, and because it is a fact, the distorter Marx, with his abysmal, snarling hatred of the Western Civilization, chose it as

429 an instrument of destruction. From above and below, the distorters sought to employ the only techniques they understood, economic ones, in an instinctive attempt to destroy the body of the hated West. This, it cannot be said too often, is outside praise and blame: the distorters were acting from compulsion, their conduct was irrational, unconscious, springing from organic necessity. The idea of Money, and the idea of class-war on an economic basis, both appear in other Cultures at a corresponding time. The distortion of our life was not manifest in the mere existence of these phenomena, but in their universality, their absolute form, and the bitterness with which they confused and divided the entire West. The presence of the distorter, a sort of organic catalyst, is interwoven into all these disintegrating, shattering ideas and developments. The West only succumbed to this Culture-distortion because of its own externalization. Once the West began to dabble with Materialism, the distorters aggravated it. The breaking down of some barriers led the distorter to work for the removal of all distinctions. He turned Deism into atheism — but kept his own runes and phylacteries. In the battle of Rationalism against Tradition, he enhanced the division of the West by ever more absolute demands. The very status of the distorter was the occasion of bitter discord in the Western nations. In England, public life was distorted over the question, which continually came up, of Jewish status. This question had nothing whatever to do with the English organism, but in battle after battle, Englishmen wasted themselves fighting for or against things like Jewish citizenship, membership in Parliament, in the Bar, the professions, government offices. Similar struggles divided Western society every where. The result of the steady financialization of the economic

430 life, substituting the idea of Money for the idea of goods, was the steady ruination of the material and spiritual life of the working people and farmers in all the Western lands. The death of millions through the 19th and 20th centuries from conditions of dirt, malnutrition and sub-human living conditions, through typhus, hunger, and tuberculosis, is traceable to the transformation of the economy of production into a battlefield of the Master of Money against the entrepreneur and the industrialist. The Master of Money was the one who brought about the triumph of the corporate form of business ownership. This forced every business owner into interest servitude to the Master of Money, for it was the latter who bought the shares and then proceeded to grind the employees of the enterprises by turning the proceeds of the industry entirely into dividends. To a banker, wages paid to living human beings as the economic basis of their lives are merely a “cost of production.” To lower this “cost” was to increase his own profits. It did not matter whether rachitic children, starvation of families, debased national life, was the result — the aim was Profit. The ideology was that each working-man could, if he wished, become a Master of Money. If he did not, it was his own fault. The Money Masters owed no duty to anyone, for they had made themselves. Not the converse, however, for if their foreign holdings were attacked, it was the patriotic duty of the starvelings to rescue the Money Masters. The terrible results of the ascendancy of Money in throwing whole sections of the population into existence on the margin of starvation, had, as was to be expected, a counter-effect. The resultant seething discontent of these masses was also rendered into an instrument of the policy of the distorters. In between was the enemy — the body of the Western Civilization. Above was the financial technique of mastery over this

431 body. Below was the trade-union technique. The millions of the others were the spoils of this war on two fronts. The role of the distorter was to increase the division, render it sharper, make it work for his advantage. No historian has ever presented the policy and effect of the Culture-distorters better than Baruch Levy presented it in his famous letter to Marx: “The Jewish people, taken collectively, will be its own Messiah. It will attain to mastery of the world through the union of all other human races, through abolition of boundaries and monarchies,