The Decline and Fall of Civilisations
Page 18
German eugenics scientists measuring facial features.
“I return now to my main subject, which is to show that fanaticism,26 luxury, corruption of morals,27 and irreligion do not necessarily bring about the ruin of nations …All these phenomena have been found in a highly developed state, either in isolation or together, among peoples which were actually the better for them – or at any rate not the worse”.28
Hence, de Gobineau rejected the hitherto moral explanations for the decline and fall of civilisations, despite the recent example in his own country of the French Revolution as the product of moral decay. The racial doctrine was popularised in Germany by an Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who already had a significant influence on Wilhelmian Germany with his Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. Hitlerian National Socialism was an uneasy mixture of 18th century German Idealism (Fichte, Herder) and of 19th century English Darwinism, brought to Germany by Ernst Haeckel, and Sir Francis Galton’s eugenics.29 In the USA books opposing miscegenation on eugenic grounds, such as Lothrop Stoddard’s Revolt Against Civilization30 became best-sellers. Specifically, Stoddard, Madison Grant31 and other race theorists claimed that the Nordics – “the best of all human breeds”,32 as Stoddard put it - were the primary culture-creators, who are in danger of being genetically swamped as much by non-Nordic Europeans as by Blacks and Asians.33 Biological racism is primarily an English world-view of the 19th century, which was used to justify capitalism in an economic survival of the fittest, known as Social Darwinism. Karl Marx just turned the same theories upside-down and claimed them for the “proletariat,” the uprooted and urbanised former rural class, which had hitherto been secure with cottage, village and Church.
Modernist Versus Traditional Interpretations of History
Dr. Caleb Saleeby, a British physician and prominent public health advocate, was a leading exponent of eugenics who warned against the impact of alcohol, narcotics and lead poisoning on the racial “germ-plasm”. His primary concern was however the purity of the racial stock. Saleeby was a genetic determinist who rejected the possibility of the fall of civilisations so long as the racial gene pool remains uncontaminated. Saleeby’s comments are worth quoting at length because they summarise the opinion of zoological materialists who reject culture is an organism subject to the same morphological life-cycles as other organisms:
“Nations, races, civilisations rise, we shall all agree, because to inherent virtue of breed they add sound customs and laws, acquirements of discipline and knowledge. But, these acquirements made, power established, and crescent from year to year—why do they then fall? If they can make a place for themselves, how much easier should it not be to maintain it?”34
Saleeby advocated the widespread perception that gained scientific credibility through the application of Darwinian evolution, Mendelian genetics , and Galtonian eugenics that the rise of civilisations is based on superior races, and the fall of those civilisations is caused by genetic pollution with inferior races. Saleeby rejected the prior theory that the decline and fall of civilisations and nations had been caused by moral decadence, writing: “Two explanations, each falsely asserting itself to be rooted in biological fact, have long been cited and are still cited in order to account for these supreme tragedies of history”.35 What he called “racial senility” Saleeby traced back to the Greek philosophers:
“The fallacy of racial senility.—The first may claim Plato and Aristotle as its founders, and consists of an argument from analogy. Races may be conceived in similar terms to individuals. There are many resemblances between a society - a ‘social organism,’ to use Herbert Spencer’s phrase - and an individual organism. Just, then, as the individual is mortal, so is the race. Each has its birth, its period of youth and growth, its maturity, and, finally, its decadence, senility and death. So runs the common argument”.36
This will be recognised as the historical-morphology of Spengler writing a decade after Saleeby.
Saleeby believed that the “germ-plasm” (genes) is immortal. However, much more is known about genetics than in Saleeby’s time. Life ends through cellular degeneration, just as cultures end by the degeneration of the cellular constitutes of the social organism. Human DNA is degenerating, and every individual contains many harmful mutations that are inheritable. Genetically related diseases are increasing. Dr. John C. Stanford, a geneticist of prominence,37 contends that from a geneticist’s viewpoint, humans are devolving via what he calls “genetic entropy”.38 Interestingly, as we have seen, tradition related for millennia that humankind is devolving from a primordial Golden Age.
Saleeby was typical of the 19th century intelligentsia who assumed that industry and science would assure the immorality of Western civilisation, and English commerce in particular. He drew on the young sciences of heredity and evolution to prove his optimism in regard to the immortality of the race:
“We must reply, however, that biology, so far from confirming it, declares as the capital fact which contrasts the individual and the race that, whilst the individual is doomed to die from inherent causes, the race is naturally immortal. The tendency of life is not to die but to live. If individuals die, that is doubtless because, as I believe, more life and fuller is thus attained than if life bodied itself in immortal forms: but the germ-plasm is immortal; it has no inherent tendency either to degenerate or to die. Species exist and flourish now which are millions of years older than mankind. ‘The individual withers, the race is more and more”.39
Saleeby states that it is not races that die but empires and civilisations. This is accurate, but the races that persist after the demise of their civilisations are a reflection of the historical and cultural exhaustion of the civilisations and empires that have been exhausted of creative energy. These races are what Spengler referred to as fellaheen. As will be shown below, contrary to the assumptions of those who state that civilisations fall through miscegenation, the North African Moslems who created the splendid Islamic civilisation; the Hindu Indians; and the American Indians whose ancestors created the Olmec, Aztec, Incan, exhausted their historical and cultural possibilities. They are genetically the same race as their ancestors. The Chinese, having gone through many “dynastic cycles” within the context of an enduring Chinese Civilisation, are reanimated not be a renaissance of Chinese culture, whose possibilities seem exhausted, but through the adaption of Western technics. As Saleeby states, the Jews have persisted, but they have done so by grafting on many races, maintaining their ethnos not through the purity of the gene pool, but through the strength of their religious and mythic tradition. Saleeby is also correct in pointing out that British (and other white) babies still come into the world physically healthy. He correctly lamented that pollutants such as alcohol and tobacco were poisoning the gene pool. He stated that the assumption of “racial senility” is in particular disproved by the continuing healthy birth and fertility rates, yet if Saleeby were alive today he would note that the white races have indeed become increasingly infertile. The statistics for abortion provide a more accurate view of the senility of a civilisation than statistics for mixed marriages. Saleeby had written of these matters:
“It may be added that, in historical instances, civilisations have, on the one hand, persisted, and, on the other, fallen, despite change, and even substitution, in the races which created them: and, on the other hand, the most conspicuously persistent of all races in the historic epoch, the Jews, have survived one Empire after another of their oppressors, but have never had an Empire of their own. Thus, so far as the historian is concerned, it is not races at all that die, but civilisations and Empires. Plato’s argument from the individual to the race is therefore irrelevant, as well as untrue. The fatalistic conception to which it tempts us, saying that races must die, just as individuals must, and that therefore it is idle to repine or oppose, is utterly unwarrantable and extremely unhealthy. To take our own case, despite the talk about our own racial decadence, nearly all our babies still come into the wor
ld fit and strong and healthy - the racial poisons apart. We kill them in scores of thousands every year, but this infant mortality is not a sign that the race is dying, but a sign that even the most splendid living material can be killed or damaged if you try hard enough. The babies do not die because races are mortal, but because individuals are, and we kill them. The babies drink poison, eat poison, and breathe poison, and in due course die. The theory of racial senility, inapplicable everywhere because untrue, is most of all inapplicable here.
If a race became sterile, Plato and Aristotle would be right. There is no such instance in history, apart from well-defined external, not inherent, causes, as in the case of the Tasmanians. Dismissing this analogy, we may also dismiss, as based upon nothing better, the idea that the great tragedies of history were necessary events at all. We must look elsewhere than amongst the inherent and necessary factors of racial life for the causes which determine these tragedies; and we shall be entitled to assume as conceivable the proposition that, notwithstanding the consistent fall of all our predecessors, the causes are not inevitable, but, being external and environmental, may possibly be controlled: man being not only creature but creator also”.40
Precisely what Saleeby is assuming to have been disproven by genetics in his time, in our time is beign reaffirmed by epigenetics:
“The Lamarckian explanation of decadence. - The second of the two false interpretations of history in terms of biology is still, and always has been, widely credited. When historians have paid any attention to the breed of a people as determining its destiny, they have invariably added to the fallacy of racial senility this no less fecund error. It is that, in consequence of success, a people become idle, thoughtless, unenterprising, luxurious, and that these acquired characters are transmitted to succeeding generations so that, finally, there is produced a degenerate people unable to bear the burden of Empire - and then the crash comes. The historian usually introduces the idea already dismissed by saying that a ‘young and vigorous race’ invaded the Imperial territories - and so forth. The terms ‘young’ and ‘old,’ applied to human races, usually mean nothing at all.
“The reader will recognise, of course, in this doctrine of the transmission to children of characters acquired by their parents, the explanation of organic evolution advanced by Lamarck rather more than a century ago. It is employed by historians for the explanation of both the processes they record, progress and retrogression. Thus they suppose that for many generations a race is disciplined, and so at last there is produced a race with discipline in its very bone; or for many generations a nation finds it necessary to make adventure upon the sea, and so at last there is produced a generation of predestined sailors with blue water in its blood. And in similar terms moral and physical retrogression or degeneration are explained.
“Let us consider the contrast between the interpretation which accepts the Lamarckian theory of the transmission of acquired characters and that which does not. Consider the babies of a new generation. According to Lamarck, these have in their blood and brain the consequences of the habits of their ancestors. If these have been idle and luxurious, the new babies are predestined to be idle and luxurious too. This, in short, is a ‘dying nation.’ But, if acquired characters are not transmitted, the new generation is, on the whole, not much better, not much worse, than its predecessors - so far as this supposed factor of change is concerned. Each generation makes a fresh start, as we see in the babies of our slums to-day. It does not begin where the last left off - whether that means beginning at a higher or at a lower level than that at which the last started: but it makes a fresh start where the last did.
“Now, in general, we have seen that Lamarck’s theory is discredited. The view of Mr. Galton is accepted, that acquired characters are not transmitted, either for good or for evil. If there are no other factors of racial degeneration or racial advance, then races do not degenerate or advance, but make a fresh start every generation: and Empires rise and fall without any relation to the breed of the Imperial people - an incredible proposition”.41
Races do indeed “degenerate or advance”, as is our thesis, but they do so not in accordance with eugenics or dysgenics, but from being subjected to the life-cycles of social organisms, if not already having succumbed to environmental changes or invasions. As we now know through the comparatively new revolutionary science of epigenetics, acquired characteristics can be inherited, although not in the terms assumed by Lamarck or his Soviet counterpart Lysenko. Epigenetics does not repudiate genetics but explains an added dimension to inheritance, as we have seen. Contrary to Saleeby, each generation does not make a “fresh start,” and does indeed inherit the experiences of its forebears.
Saleeby follows with the eugenicist argument that only genetic degeneration, whether through miscegenation, or the proliferation of the worst among the same race, can cause the permanent fall of a race:
“Some historical instances. - In the face of certain facts of contemporary history I do not for a moment assert that there are no other causes of Imperial failure than the arrest or reversal of selection. But I do assert that if this is not the cause, then, in the absence of the transmission of acquired characters, the race has not degenerated, and is capable of reasserting itself. Only by the arrest or reversal of selection can a race degenerate - apart from the racial poisons [alcohol, tobacco, etc.]. If, then, a civilisation or Empire has fallen through causes altogether non-biological - through carelessness, or neglect of motherhood or alteration of ideals - the changes in character so produced are not transmitted to the children, and the race is not degenerate but merely deteriorated in each generation. For instance, we have been brought up to believe that there is no possible future for Spain; it is a dying nation, a senile individual, a people of degenerates; it has had its day, which can never return. The historian explains this by the false analogy between a race and an individual, and by the false Lamarckian theory of heredity. To these the biologist retorts with comments upon their falsity, and with the conviction that since Spain, even allowing for the anti-eugenic labours of the Inquisition, has not been subjected to the only process which can ensure real degeneration—viz., the consistent and stringent selection of the worst—she is yet capable of regeneration. Regeneration is not really the word, because there has been little real degeneration, but only the successive deterioration of successive and undegenerate generations. The new generation is found to be potentially little worse and little better than its predecessors of the sixteenth century. There has been no national or racial degeneration. The environment is modified for the better, i.e., so as to choose the better, and Spain, as they say in misleading phrase, ‘takes on a new lease of life.’ The historian of the present day, knowing as a historian what qualities of blood have been in the Spanish people, and basing his theories upon sound biology, must confidently assert that that blood, incapable, as he knows, of degeneration by any Lamarckian process, may still retain its ancient quality and will yet make history”.42
Again the assumption, legitimate for Saleeby’s time, and until quite recently, that acquired characteristics cannot be passed on to subsequent generations, is the basis for the dogma that so long as the gene pool remains healthy there is no reason that a race that has undergone societal or national collapse cannot regenerate. As will be seen below it has been argued, incorrectly, that Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, Greeks and other whites did collapse through miscegenation. Likewise, as Evola, pointed out, Swedes remain Nordic genetically, but show no sign of reviving former greatness, because they fulfilled their national-mission as allotted to them within a specific historical era.
Other than Britain, the home of the eugenics movement, where industrialism provided the British with an optimism for the assumption of never-ending progress, the USA provided a large share of racial theorists of the early 20th century, whose conception of the rise and fall of civilisations was based on zoology, and in particular on the superiority of the Nordic not only above non-white races,
but above all sub-races of the white, such as the Dinaric, Mediterranean and Alpine.
Senator Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi wrote a book championing the cause of segregation, and more so, the “back-to-Africa” movement, stating that miscegenation with the Negro will result in the fall of white civilisation. He briefly examined some major civilisations. Bilbo wrote that Egyptian civilisation was mongrelised over centuries, “until a mulatto inherited the throne of the Pharaohs in the Twenty-fifth dynasty. This mongrel prince, Taharka, ruled over a Negroid people whose religion had fallen from an ethical test for the life after death to a form of animal worship”. This should be “sufficient warning to white America!”43 Because Sen. Bilbo had started from an assumption, his history was flawed. As will be shown below, it was Taharka and the Nubian dynasty that renewed Egypt’s decaying culture, which had degenerated under the white Libyan dynasties. Sen. Bilbo proceeded with similar examinations of Carthage, Greece, and Rome.
Another gentleman of the Old South tradition, Lt. Colonel Earnest S. Cox, after travelling the world and studying race relations, wrote a popular book defending racial separatism, published in 1923, White America.44 Cox, like Senator Bilbo, and others of the Old South, had a paternalistic attitude towards Blacks, not one of hatred or contempt. They regarded total geographic racial separation – not just segregation – as necessary, and deplored the exploitation that pitted Black labour against White. Hence like Bilbo, Cox worked with Black nationalists such as Marcus Garvey, and supported the “Back-to-Africa” movement among the Blacks. Nonetheless, Cox, like Bilbo and others, predicated their race doctrines on dogmatic assumptions around the mixing of blood (miscegenation). Cox stated the basis of this:
“Scientific research has done much toward establishing the following propositions:
The white race has founded all civilizations.