Race and Culture

Arnold Gehlen, 1904 - 1976

When members of our pro-white community hear the word “culture,” many are wont to react in the way Hermann Göring allegedly did — by reaching for their revolver.

There is good reason for this.  No concept in the twentieth century has so often been used to deny racial difference and relativize the white man’s values as the anthropological notion of culture — a notion, I nevertheless hold, that is of foremost relevance to the white-nationalist project.

What is Culture?

Let’s begin with a definition of terms.  “Race” in the zoological sense denotes a distinct population distinguished by genetically transmitted physical characteristics.  Except to our enemies, little in this is problematical.

“Culture” is the more difficult term to define, being one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language, with a long, complex etymology.

The word comes from the Latin cultura, meaning “to till.”  It was originally used to define that which undergoes a process of tending or cultivation — like a crop or domesticated herds — and was for long associated with agriculture.

By the eighteenth century, the French had begun using the term as a synonym for “civilization.”  However, the early Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment and to the French Revolution of 1789 tended to associate culture with the spiritual heritage of a material civilization — and thus with the process of becoming civilized, specifically as it relates to human development (i.e., as Bildung or éducation).  It was in this sense that Matthew Arnold defined culture as the perfection of mind through “the best that has been thought and said.”

Throughout much of the nineteenth century, culture nevertheless lacked not just the anthropological definition it would acquire in the twentieth century, its usage was still not current in English.

It was only with the publication of E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture in 1871 that the way was opened for the word’s subsequent evolution into an anthropological term to denote “socially patterned human thought and behavior.”

Boas’ Culturalism

This gets us to Franz Boas, who, in the late 1880s, launched his life-long assault on the idea that race was the primary source for the different mental or social capacities of different human groups.  His argument rested on the supposition that all peoples and races are basically of the same mental capacity.

As such, he severed all ties between biology and culture, seeing the latter (mind, in effect) as an artificial creation of particular men in particular circumstances, as if men were “blank tablets on which the environment inscribes culture.”

For Boas (following the Lockean tradition), human differences are the product of different histories, different experiences, different circumstances, different stages of development and belief, as these differences are encoded in different cultures, but they are not the achievement of specific blood lines and races.

The larger point here is that Boas’s anthropological concept of culture held that human nature was essentially a unity, however diverse its various cultural expressions. (See Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991].)

American Liberalism

Boas’s culturalism, which soon spread to other social science disciplines, was, of course, arrived at not through a disinterested, scientific inquiry, but through a belief in liberalism’s blank-slate ideology (which emphasizes the primacy of learning and environment).

It would be mistaken, though, to assume that this Jewish anthropologist (however dishonest and conniving) somehow single-handedly undermined the racial foundations of American life.

Boas’s culturalist assault on the then existing racial hierarchy was waged in the spirit of liberal modernity and was, relatedly, linked with the “new social sciences,” the Social Gospel, and Progressivism.

For integral to the American project (especially after the War of Secession) was the will to create a more rational social order based on individual achievement rather than on natural ascriptions.  This was inherent in the liberal creedal principles of individualism and equality undergirding Lincoln’s new constitutional order — an order which Jews and other new immigrants were especially active in upholding against the country’s powerful nativist heritage, which understood liberal democracy as something that only whites could practice.

Despite a history of slavery and the persistence of a rigid racial hierarchy, biological/racial determinism was seen by many progressives as jeopardizing the environmentalist principles of America’s postbellum liberal enterprise.

For if pathological behavior, poverty, and ignorance were due solely to racial or hereditarian factors, then there could be no hope of reform and progress: You simply could not change the unchangeable.

But if, as progressives claimed, it’s culture not hereditary — nurture not nature — that’s the source of human difference, then race is incidental to existing social inequities.  Reform and change are thus possible, which makes modification of educational and environmental factors the key to social development.

Biological Determinism

Boas’s culturalism rejects race theory on the basis of an unproven assumption: That mental processes are roughly equal in all people, that the body is not a factor affecting the mind, and that culture, not biology, is primary in determining human differences.

If culturalism assumes there’s no relationship between mind and body, racial/biological determinism, occupying the pendulum opposite of the argument, simply inverses the assumption, seeing mind as a facet of the body, with the latter determining the mind’s character — insofar as mental properties are identified with neuro-physical correlates or else with conditioned behavior.

Though there’s more evidence for this assumption, it is no less disputable, especially in that man is a composite not merely of biological matter, but also of those nebulously named non-bodily (i.e., “non-substantial”) substances like intellect, reason, mind, soul, consciousness.

A plant or animal may thus be understood simply in terms of its animated matter (i.e., biologically), but in human beings matter is linked with sentiment and intelligence, and, though in ways not often clear, it is the latter more than the body that plays the leading role in directing its course.

By reducing man’s spirit to his animal nature (in the sense of making culture not merely dependent on, but synonymous with the disposition for intelligence and creativity bequeathed by genetics), the biological or “scientific” idea of race becomes arguably objectionable in the same way that Marxism’s materialist/rabbinic reduction of society and religion to the “superstructure” of the economic “base” is objectionable.

Biological determinists and cultural anthropologists, in my view, are quite alike in being unqualified to speak on the relationship between culture and race, or on what might be called a variant of the historic mind-body question — a question Schopenhauer called “the world knot,” being, as it was, a puzzle nearly impossible to solve.

Philosophical Anthropology

If both natural science and cultural anthropology are inadequate to the study of the mind-body relationship, this doesn’t mean that such a “knot” does not exist or cannot be untangled.

The thinkers most qualified to examine this relationship between mind and body, which has occupied Western philosophical thought in one form or another since Descartes (who posited separated domains of material bodies and immaterial minds), are, I believe, those belonging to that rarefied, mainly German, disciple known as “philosophical anthropology” — a discipline developed in the 1920s largely by Max Scheler, Helmut Plessner, and certain phenomenological and hermeneutic thinkers who sought to bridge the different realms of physical, cultural, and theoretical anthropology in order to develop “a coherent idea of human being” — a coherent idea that encompasses man’s nature, body, psyche, culture, and social forms.

From the perspective of philosophical anthropology, it is scientifically legitimate to biologically classify man into “anatomical characteristics produced by hereditary” (i.e., racial genotypes), but in itself this discloses nothing (or at least nothing substantial) about the mind’s relationship to its animal body.

Arnold Gehlen (1904 – 1976)

The greatest of the philosophical anthropologist to speak to the mind-body relationship, Arnold Gehlen, spent much of his career as a social psychologist investigating culture’s complex physiological sources and the way the body affects the cultural expressions of the mind. (See Arnold Gehlen, Man, trans. C. McMillan and K. Pillemer [New York: Columbia University Press, 1988] and Christian Thies, Gehlen zur Einführung [Hamburg: Janius, 2000].)

Gehlen rejected the dualism of mind and body, just as he rejected the materialistic determinism that reduces mind to body.

Instead, culture in his view served to compensate for man’s “instinctual deficiency” — i.e., it compensated for the lack of powerful instincts to guide and dictate man’s behavior in the world.

Birds, Gehlen pointed out, have no need to think or plan how to build a nest, fly south for the winter, or ruffle their feathers to woo a mate.  It’s instinctually programmed.

Man, on the other hand, is a “deficient being” (Mängelwesen) and lacks such specialized drives.

Under the unsheltered sky 40,000 years ago, it was thus necessary that he rely on his culture — on the learned responses and principles that came from his past, that were continually modified in his encounter with the world, and that ultimately took institutional form and became “quasi-automatic habits of thought, feeling, judgement and action” — to cope with the stimulations, impressions, and challenges coming from his environment.

Culture arose and developed in Gehlen’s view as man’s “second nature” — as something to compensate for his instinctual deficiency and his lack of “environmental specialization.”

Somewhat like, but different from his genetic heritage, man’s second nature is also transmittable, so that the achievements of one generation are passed on to the next.

This transmission of blood and spirit makes culture a community of thought and achievement, a community of history and tradition, and a community of blood and kin.  All these “communities” go into the unique formation of a culture, and to stress just one, say body or thought, is reductionist.

Culture for Gehlen is accordingly bound up with man’s physical nature, but is nevertheless “world open,” able to evolve and adapt and become self-conscious in its own terms.

It is thus man’s second nature, his culture, that enables him “to anticipate himself, fall back upon himself, adjust and reverse his movements, plan — all in order to enhance his survivability.”

As such, man’s being is caught in an endless exchange between interior forces (intelligence, will, imagination, etc.) and exterior ones (the environment), as the exterior is assimilated into the interior and the interior is manifested in the exterior.

Different races of men, with different vitalities and different experiences, give rise, in this way, to different cultures that can be seen, to use a term that Gehlen didn’t, as “extended phenotypes.” (See Louis R. Browning, “Bioculture: A New Paradigm for the Evolution of Western Populations,” The Occidental Quarterly vol. 4, no. 1 [Spring 2004].).

Mind, and the culture it creates, are not, then, the automatic reflections of the body, though they are inseparable from it.

It is thus more through mind and culture than through instinct or genetic disposition that a specific genotype responds to and affects its larger environment.

Race and Culture

What then is the relationship between race and culture?

Race and culture, blood and heritage, arose in tandem and served to complement one another.  As such, an implicit synergy governs race and culture.  The impairment of one accordingly impairs the other.

This, I think, is key to understanding the relationship between race and culture.  For as man’s second nature, culture entails not just all those things that are tied up in a people’s way of life, but also in life itself — in the form of man’s animal body.

This relationship is not the simple one-way process that certain nineteenth-century racialists and some contemporary sociobiologists assume — but it nevertheless accepts that a specific genotype (race) gives rise to a specific extended phenotype (culture).

As such, man is neither totally a product of race nor of culture, but a biocultural organism whose blood and spirit are inextricably mixed (see Browning).

Instead, then, of being understood as distinct groupings based exclusively on DNA, human races must also be seen, given that man is a composite, in terms of his unity of being — in terms, that is, of the inner principles, as well as the outer physical characteristics, that pervades his component and cohering parts.

From this perspective it can be claimed that human races come into existence and develop not just according to strict biological law, but also under the influence of mind.

This is not to say that mind determines genotype, but rather that the mind’s social-cultural exteriorization affects a people’s racial history and identity — indeed, it affects whether or not it is to have such a history — and thus determines if a particular genotype will sustain itself or not.

There is, as a result, no distinct racial or national type without a correspondingly distinct cultural type.

I am not proposing a “culturalist” notion of race.

The race I defend is the European race — that specific gene pool, genetic cluster, breeding population, stock, or whatever term is appropriate to speak of race in the zoological sense.  Our genetic heritage is primary and cannot be compromised.

But race as a biological category applied to human beings refers only to man’s animal nature, not to his whole being.  His animal nature may provide the disposition or capacity for specific European life forms and therefore cannot be dispensed with, but the European’s distinct genetic heritage is only a facet of his life, inseparable from everything else that contributes to it.

Thus, however much race in the biological sense is requisite to everything else, in itself it has little explanatory power — because man’s being, even in the physical sense, is largely shaped by his culture.  (As a negative example of this, think of our whiggers.)

To take one’s stand simply in the animal sphere, then, not only confuses the part with the whole, it leaves us defenseless in those higher realms where human life is culturally manifested and sustained.

A purely “scientific” (better said, “scientistic”) defense of race cannot, as a result, but leave all the other ramparts supporting our specific expression of human life undefended — and it is at these other ramparts (call them culture, society, religion, etc.) where the enemy has been most successful in destroying the basis of white life.

Thus, once the white man’s culture is destroyed, the significance and purpose of white life are also inevitably destroyed — first ontologically, then physically.

Note: This essay is taken from a larger piece, “Race, Culture, and Anarchy,” that is to appear in The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 2 (Summer 2009).