The Decline and Fall of Civilisations

by Kerry Bolton

  If we more specifically allude in human terms to races and ethnoi, and to history and collective experiences shared over generations, and reinforced by customs, legends, ethics, institutions and religions, which we collectively call “culture”, a theory of race-formation through epigenetics and formative causation emerges. These theories converge also with Jungian psychology of the collective unconscious. Sheldrake comments on the application of his theory to Jung’s:

  “Jung thought of the collective unconscious as a collective memory, the collective memory of humanity. He thought that people would be more tuned into members of their own family and race and social and cultural group, but that nevertheless there would be a background resonance from all humanity: a pooled or averaged experience of basic things that all people experience (e.g., maternal behaviour and various social patterns and structures of experience and thought). It would not be a memory from particular persons in the past so much as an average of the basic forms of memory structures; these are the archetypes. Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious makes extremely good sense in the context of the general approach that I am putting forward. Morphic resonance theory would lead to a radical reaffirmation of Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious…”149

  Soil and Race Formation

  Race formation and landscape are linked through diet. The changes via what is eaten are conveyed epigenetically. A population cluster attached its ecological niche, to use Gumilev’s term, is formed over generations epigenetically through what grows in the soil on which one lives, cultivates and harvests or gathers. Because of the generations that are born and die, invest their labour and often their blood for the soil, there is a spiritual connection that shapes an ethnos.

  A race that has not been rendered soulless by materialism will be deeply attached to the soil; to one’s native land; the land of one’s ancestors and of one’s descendants. Such an outlook will build up as morphic resonance and be passed along to generations epigenetically. Such hitherto mystical concepts as race-soul and archetype might now be explained with empirical evidence.

  Eminent Japanese soil scientist Katsuyuki Minami, of Kitasato University, considers the importance of soil on the moulding of culture and ethnos, in reference to the way which the health of soil is being destroyed. He makes an interesting point in giving the etymology for the word “culture” as originally meaning “cultivating the soil and raising crops”:

  “Culture is therefore inseparable from soil. Over time, the concept became more abstract and began to include both the physical, intellectual and spiritual products derived from altering nature. Therefore, culture includes not only food, clothing and shelter, but also technology, academia, art, morality, religion, politics, and other livelihood-shaping modes”.150

  Professor Minami, coming from a civilisation that has retained some health, as distinct from Western rationalist academics, recognises the bond between a people and the land, including the “spirits of the land”. Minami states that “Every ethnic group or region has its own characteristics and great ‘spirits of the land’. When people are totally colored by these land spirits, it is proof that they are indigenous to that place”.151

  The Japanese write this as tsuchi, chi meaning “spirit”, and tsu meaning “place”, hence the Japanese conception of the “genius loci”. Tsuchi in Japanese tradition signifies something spiritual in the soil. Chi also means “blood”,152 indicating the connexion between blood, soil, and spirit. Rites continue to be performed to the spirits of the land by Shinto.

  A vestige of the bond between man and soil is alluded to in Genesis, when man was formed from soil by God and God’s spirit was breathed into him. Here again the etymology of words is instructive: “human” derives from “humus” (soil), and when the human organism dies it returns to the soil, “for dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return”.153

  Minami cites the scientist Tukuyaki Fujiwara on the connexion between soil and civilisation, which he calls “cultural soil science”; Minami explaining “that the different types of soil distributed throughout the world have fostered different cultures”. Minami quotes Fujiwara’s book Soil and Ancient Japanese Culture: In Search of the Roots of Japanese Culture — An Exploratory Discussion on Cultural Soil Science: “Because soil is the embodiment of the environment, I believe that cultures come into being with soil as the underlying factor”. Fujiwara classifies cultures according to their manner of land cultivation: “rice paddy soil cultures” (China, Japan, India, Thailand); loess cultures (Han Chinese – barley, wheat millet); “oasis soil cultures” (fruit trees, vegetables); grassland soil cultures (Mongols – livestock); “coral limestone soil cultures” (coconut palms, breadfruit trees, banana trees); “laterite soil cultures” (tropical rain forests, savannahs: taro, yams); “red-yellow soil cultures” (slash-and-burn, South East Asia, dry rice, millet, mulberries); “brown forest soil cultures “volcanic ash soil cultures” (slash-and-burn, south East Asia); “podsol cultures” (sub-polar, Siberian ethnoi such as Buryats).154

  Soil degradation has been a factor in the decay of numerous civilisations. Plato wrote in Critia of the deforestation of Attica: “as in the case of small islands, all the richer and softer parts of the soil having fallen away, and the mere skeleton of the land being left”. The megalithic culture on Easter Island collapsed through deforestation, tree trunks having been used to roll into place the Maoi statues. The Mayans decimated the hill side forests causing erosion.155 Today we should add the deforestation of the Amazon and other environments through the Western economic imperative; likewise with China, and the destruction of soil nutrients through chemical contamination. The careless treatment of the soil returns us to our thesis: the destruction of soil has frequently occurred when a civilisation has reached its cycle of decay when civilisation is disconnected from the cosmic order. Minami comments: “Modern Western society and societies that have adopted its philosophy are consuming precious plant nutrients from the soil at a tremendous rate … in North America, in Asia’s river basins, in the broad expanse of Russia, and in almost every other place in the world, the soil is being lost”.156 This crisis of Western civilisation is alluded to by Minami:

  “Because of the many processes and tools used in the real world of agriculture of which most of us are unaware, we have become alienated from the soil and the land. People no longer have a living relationship with the soil and land that produced us. Many of us think of the land as nothing more than a space between the cities that produces crops”.157

  Zoological interpretations of race classified by skull measurements, bone density, and genetic clusters, are insufficient to understand the character of race. Such classification is the product of 19th century materialism, and is a reflection of the Zeitgeist of which Britain was the primary harbinger. Measuring and weighing displaced the prior conceptions of race as soul and spirit of the German Idealists such as Herder, Goethe, and Fichte. Ironically Hitlerian racism was influenced more by British and French than by German conceptions. Creativity began to be measured by tests devised by Alfred Binet, for France, and championed by Francis Galton, father of eugenics, in Britain.

  The insufficiency of materialistic criteria for the determination of race can be discerned from the agonising statistical work that took place for years in an effort to identify “Kennewick man”, originally thought to have been a Caucasoid, and eventually found to be Ainu/proto-Polynesian.158 Indeed, both Ainu and Polynesian were long regarded as “archaic Caucasians” on the basis of statistical analyses. The disparity between the facial angles of Negroids and Caucasians is still regarded as a measure of evolutionary disparity. However, Polynesians have a facial angle that is vertical,159 which by such criterion would define them as superior to the Caucasian in a zoological hierarchy.

  Physical anthropology fails to sustain racial-materialism as a viable doctrine for studying culture and history. The recourse to Dr. Carleton S. Coon, who stated in his Origin of Races that there is an evolutionary l
ag of 200,000 years between Caucasians and Africans, fails, even when cited by a writer as erudite as Carleton Putnam.160 Coon, president of the Amercian Association of Physical Anthropologists, saw races as adaptations to changing environments in a series of “phases” of history. He regarded Western technology as having transcended the need for geographical adaptation, thereby making “race” redundant as a survival mechanism. He wrote of the present “phase four” that mankind “is starting to become a single cultural community…”161 What Coon saw was “a vision of paradise”, as he entitled his final chapter, pre-empting Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history”. He envisaged a world order. The much-maligned “Communist-Jew”, Franz Boas, with his cultural studies, is of more value to an appreciation of ethnos than Carleton Coon’s physical anthropology.

  * * *

  1 Evola, “On the Secret of Degeneration”.

  2 Patrul Rinpoche, 40.

  3 Ibid., 46.

  4 Evola, The Elements of Racial Education, 60-63.

  5 “Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism”, Ayn Rand, “Racism”, (1963), Ayn Rand Lexicon, http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/racism.html

  6 Metises: interbreeding.

  7 Lev Gumilev, Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere, Chapter II, “The Properties of an Ethnos”.

  8 Ibid.

  9 Ibid.

  10 Gumielv was referring to what he regarded as the influence of cosmic rays from the biosphere on the rhythms of ethnoi, causing their energy levels to rise and fall.

  11 Gumilev, Ethnogenesis, Chapter II.

  12 Ibid.

  13 For the life and influence of Gumilev on both the USSR and post-Soviet Russia, see: Charles Clover, 92-148.

  14 V. A. Michurin, “Glossary of terms, and concepts in the theory of Ethnogenesis of L. M. Gumilev”.

  15 Erich Voegelin, Race and State, 1933.

  16 Houston Stewart Chamberlain, 1911.

  17 Voegelin, 1933, 113.

  18 Voegelin, The History of the Race Idea, 22.

  19 Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century. The first chapter is entailed “Race and Race Soul”, and refers to different race “spirits”, such as the “Nordic spirit”, predicated on “blood” inheritance; i.e., genes. Spengler became persona non grata in National Socialist Germany. See Bolton, “Spengler: A Philosopher for all Seasons”.

  20 Paul Carus, 1907, 1.

  21 A primary example being Hitlerism. Also the popularity of the late 19th century polemic by Ragnar Redbeard among today’s Right.

  22 Bolton, Nietzsche Contra Darwin, 5-19, passim.

  23 Nietzsche, Untimely Meditiations, V.

  24 Ibid., 8.

  25 Ibid., 2.

  26 Ibid., 11.

  27 Ibid., 12.

  28 Ibid., 78.

  29 Ibid., 79.

  30 “Maori Waka:” http://www.arawai.co.nz/Maori_waka.html

  31 Spengler, The Decline…, op. cit., Vol. II, Chapter V, “Cities and Peoples: (B) People, Races, Tongues”, 113.

  32 Ibid., Vol. I, “Introduction”, 5.

  33 Oswald Spengler to Hans Klöres, 1 September 1918; Oswald Spengler, Spengler Letters 1913-1936 , 67.

  34 Spengler, The Decline…, op. cit. Vol. II, 119, “Peoples, Races, Tongues”.

  35 Ibid.

  36 Ibid.

  37 Ibid., 120.

  38 C. G. Jung, 1930.

  39 Ibid.

  40 Ibid.

  41 Ibid.

  42 C. G. Jung, “Mind and Earth,” 1931.

  43 Spengler, The Decline…, Vol. I, 209-214, 228.

  44 C. G. Jung, Letters, Vol. I, 40.

  45 Spengler, op. cit.

  46 G. Keith Parker, 19.

  47 C. G. Jung, 1964, 93.

  48 Ibid., 94.

  49 Ibid., 95.

  50 Ibid., 95.

  51 Ibid., 98, 99.

  52 Ibid., 101.

  53 Ibid., 101.

  54 Ibid., 102.

  55 Ibid., 103.

  56 Daniel Elazar, 73.

  57 William McDougall, 125-27, quoted by Jay Sherry, 60-61.

  58 Hermann Keyserling, 399; quoted by Sherry, 69.

  59 Quoted by Sherry, 117.

  60 G.W.F. Hegel, 96-97.

  61 Ibid., 105-106.

  62 Ibid., 108.

  63 Ibid.

  64 Ibid.

  65 Ibid., 193.

  66 D. H. Lawrence, The Spirit of Place, Chapter I.

  67 D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent.

  68 D. H. Lawrence, The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories .

  69 D. H. Lawrence, The Spirit of Place.

  70 Karl Marx, “Preface”, 1859.

  71 F. V. Konstantinov, Istoricheskii materialism 32, 34; cited by Mark Bassin, 119.

  72 Stalin, Marksizm i voprosy iazykoznaniia cited by Bassin, 119.

  73 Mark Bassin, 121-122.

  74 Gumilev, “Pomni o Vavilone”, cited by Bassin, 127.

  75 Bassin, Ibid., passim.

  76 Jung referred to “psychological entropy”.

  77 Phenotype: outward, physical manifestation of the organism. Anything that is part of the observable structure, function or behaviour of a living organism.

  78 Spengler, The Decline …, Vol. II, 119, “Peoples, Races, Tongues”.

  79 Franz Boas, “Changes in Bodily Form of Descendents of Immigrants”, 530–562.

  80 J. H. Baxter, 1875. B. A. Gould, 1869.

  81 Franz Boas, “Changes in Bodily Form”, 554.

  82 Ibid.,, 562.

  83 Loren Graham, 15-100.

  84 Ibid., 20.

  85 William Ridegway, Vol. II, 293.

  86 Franz Boas, The Instability of Human Types, 1912, 99–103.

  87 Ibid.

  88 That is, in Sicilians the heads form shorter, in the Jews the heads form longer, suggesting a convergence to an “American” head-form.

  89 Boas, “Changes in the bodily form”, 530.

  90 Corey Sparks and Richard Jantz , 14636–14639.

  91 Boas, “Changes in the bodily form”, 533.

  92 Clarence C. Gravlee, H. Russell Bernard, William R. Leonard, 123–136. For a discussion of this see: Gravlee, Bernard, Leonard, “Boas’s Changes in Bodily Form: The Immigrant Study, Cranial Plasticity, and Boas’s Physical Anthropology”, American Anthropologist , 105: 2, Jun 4 2003, 326–332; http://nersp.osg.ufl.edu/~ufruss/documents/boas.paperII.pdf

  93 Zhores A. Medvedev, 155-157.

  94 Gravlee, et al., 330.

  95 Boas, Race, Language, and Culture , 35.

  96 Boas, Changes in Bodily Form …, 5.

  97 Gravlee, et al., 331.

  98 William Ridgeway, 291.

  99 M. Jahanshahi, “Ethnicity and Facial Anthropometry”, 2535-2542, in Victor R. Preedy, 2012.

  100 Wee Bin Lian, “Anthropometry in Ethnic Groups and Cultural and Geographical Diversity: Auricular Anthropometry of Newborns: Ethnic Variations”, in Preedy, 2523-2533.

  101 H. L. Shapiro and Frederick Seymour Hulse, 1939.

  102 M. Goldstein, 1943.

  103 Boas, Changes in Bodily Form, 553.

  104 Kathryn Phillips, 2006.

  105 Ibid., i.

  106 Ibid., , ii.

  107 Genotype: The inherited genetic code.

  108 C. H. Waddington, 1953, 118-126.

  109 Chris Faulk, “Lamarck, Lysenko, and Modern Day Epigenetics”, School of Public Health, 2013.

  110 Totipotent stem cells have the potential to develop into any cell found in the human body.

  111 C. W. Kuzawa and E. Sweet, 2008, 4-5.

  112 Ibid., 6.

  113 Ibid.

  114 Ibid., 10.

  115 Joshua M. Galanter, et al., 2017.

  116 Ibid.

  117 Ibid.

  118 Raphael Patai, The Jewish Mind. Studies by L. Srole indicated that the rate of neuroses and character disorders among Jews is “three times as high” as that of Protestants and Catholics. (416).

  119 Galanter, et al.

  120
Ibid.

  121 CpG sites: regions of DNA nucleotide sequences, changes of which result in epigenetics.

  122 Galanter, et al.

  123 “Culture etched on our DNA more than previously known, research suggests”, CBS News 11 January 2017; http://www.cbsnews.com/news/culture-etched-onto-our-dna-more-than-previously-known-research-says/

  124 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (264), 184.

  125 Ibid. (268), 186.

  126 Kipling, The Stanger.

  127 Becky Mansfield, 2017.

  128 Ibid.

  129 Ibid.

  130 Maurizio Meloni, 2016.

  131 Dan Hurley, 2013;

  132 Ibid.

  133 Rachel Yahuda et al., 372–38.

  134 Ibid.

  135 http://www.sheldrake.org/about-rupert-sheldrake

  136 “Sheldrake’s response to Michael Shermer”, http://www.thebestschools.org/sheldrake-shermer-materialism-science-responses/

  137 Rupert Sheldrake, “An Experimental Test of the Hypothesis of Formative Causation”, Rivista di Biologia - Biology Forum 86 (3/4), 1992, 431-44; 86 (3/4), 431-44, (1992); http://www.sheldrake.org/research/morphic-resonance/an-experimental-test-of-the-hypothesis-of-formative-causation

  138 Sheldrake, “Epigenetics and Soviet biology”, http://www.sheldrake.org/about-rupert-sheldrake/blog/epigenetics-and-soviet-biology

  139 “Sheldrake’s response to Michael Shermer”.

  140 Rupert Sheldrake , 1981, Part III: Organicism, 308-309.

  141 Rupert Sheldrake, 1987, 9-25.

  142 Ibid.

  143 Ibid.

  144 “Plato’s Theory of Forms”, Saint Anselm College, http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/platform.htm

  145 “Some main points of Aristotle’s thought”, Saint Anselm College; http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/arist.htm

  146 Sheldrake, “Morphic resonance: introduction”, http://www.sheldrake.org/research/morphic-resonance/introduction