“The classic thing white students say when you ask them to talk about who they are is, ‘I don’t have a culture.’”

— University sociologist

A culture is the achievement of a particular blood line.

As such, “culture wars” may be seen ultimately as blood wars between competing conceptions of race and ethnicity.

The culture war in the university between those advocating a “culturally diverse” curriculum and those advocating a curriculum based on the “Great Books” is, for example, essentially a debate about the future of American nationhood — will it be “Western” (i.e., white) or will it be “culturally” (racially) inclusive.

In the West, these sorts of wars have raged for nearly two centuries now.  Many still fought in the United States are, in fact, but continuations of ones begun long ago in the old country.

This seems especially the case with the culture wars of Victorian England — in which the “progressive” or “liberal” forces, allied with “low-church” Protestants, challenged the traditional authority of the Church of England.

Since its establishment in the 16th century, the Church of England had rested on the social prominence of the landed aristocracy and gentry, and, more generally, on the organization of rural society, all of which began to decay with the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th century.  As the numbers and prominence of the Protestant dissenters (responsible for much of the invention and entrepreneurialism that made Britain the world’s dominant economic power) grew in the course of the 19th century, especially after the Second Reform Bill of 1867 made them a majority of the expanded electorate, they more and more challenged the religious and cultural hegemony of the landed interests — the “Old Corruption,” so called.

The dissenters’ demands for religious disestablishment were frequently raised in reference to the United States, cited as a vibrant, successful nation without a state church.

It was in the context of this culture war between the landed interests and “the rising bourgeoisie” that the poet and critic Matthew Arnold intervened to rebuff the anti-traditionalists.

He argued that “All America Hebraises” and that England risked becoming Hebraic if it should follow the dissenters’ council, separate church from state, and let themselves fall into the “anarchy” that would come with disestablishment.

Having a not insignificant impact on subsequent American developments (especially in the university)[1], Arnold’s argument speaks to us still in addressing the origins of our own culturally troubled age, particularly as it relates to our people’s identity.

The Blood of the Isles

Arnold was steeped in the racial thought of his era, though his racialism tended toward the unsystematic and unorthodox.  He had little patience with “rabbis,” men of a school or system who singlemindedly applied their fixed “truths” as if they were Holy Scripture.[2]

In his writings, particularly Culture and Anarchy (1869) and On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), Arnold often framed his arguments about cultural developments in ethnological and racial terms.

All races, he believed, “have some one peculiar characteristic by which they are known.”

Race in this view denotes not just inherited physiological or genotypical differences but spiritual, psychological, and cultural ones that constitute “the soul of a race” and shape its history and civilization.  A race’s soul or character, then, is just as fixed as is its anatomic properties.  Indeed, race so defined often served in this period as a rough synonym for what we today call “culture.”

Arnold’s method, accordingly, was to ascertain the pre-eminent or representative characteristic of a race (or nation) and then seek evidence for it in fields where the race (or nation) exerted itself.

One representative example of his method is evident in his use of these lines from an old Irish verse:

For acuteness and valor, the Greeks;
For excessive pride, the Romans;

For dullness, the creeping Saxons;
For beauty and amorousness, the Gaels.

Despite the Irish boast in this, Arnold thought it captured a certain truth about his people’s character.

A morally earnest race, the English, he believed, lacked the lively, creative spirit of the Celts.  This didn’t make them inferior, for dull as they allegedly were, the English were nevertheless the world’s foremost people: Ernest, energetic, morally serious, and world-creating.  Everything else, he held, rested on these “sterling” qualities.

But Arnold also believed the “Saxons’” moral earnestness, especially in orienting them to money-making and individual salvation, had a tendency to make them one-dimensional — dull — and that this dullness was starting to take a toll on English national life.

Such reflections on national character were not atypical of Arnold’s age.  The third quarter of the 19th century (Arnold was 37 in 1859 when Darwin published his Origin of the Species) was a flourishing era of racial thought, particularly in its “Teutomania” (which, inspired by Tacitus’ flattering description of the early Germans, held that the most vital and regenerative elements in the West were Germanic in origins).  Englishmen, Germans, Americans, and other North European peoples were all touched by it; (Manifest Destiny, Anglo-Saxonism, and Turner’s powerful frontier thesis were some of its more notable expressions in the US).

Among Victorian England’s leading lights, it was everywhere assumed that the English were the purest of the Teutonic peoples, having been fathered by the Angle, Saxon, Jute, and Frisian invaders of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries and later by the Vikings and their descendants in French Normandy, while the Germans (the people who bore the name) were a Mischvolk, a product of different European stocks, and thus less “Germanic” than the English.

The Celts, the Irish especially, were, by contrast, seen as the near antithesis of the Teutons, foreign “in blood, belief, and religion.”  Arnold’s own father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, claimed the distance between the English and the Irish was greater than that between “any other race in the world.”[3]  The good doctor, like his son (born of a Cornish mother), had, revealingly, a good deal of Irish blood in his veins.  Typically, Benjamin Disraeli described the history of “this wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain, and superstitious race” as “an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.”[4]  Such sentiments would inspire Ralph Waldo Emerson to argue in English Traits that “race avails much” and “all Celts were Catholic and believers in authoritarian government, while all Saxons were Protestants and believers in the representative principle.”[5]

Arnold’s methodology was analogous in describing peoples or nations as collective personalities defined by their dominant traits.  But, unlike most of his contemporaries, he was critical of the reigning Teutomania and lacked the religious biases of his day (whose anti-Celticism was usually a surrogate anti-Catholicism).

He was also informed by the latest racial research and saw how culturally distorting these biases were.

This was particularly evident, he thought, in the disproportionate way the English treated Irishmen and Jews.  The latter, he pointed out, especially after Puritanism, “seemed a thousand times nearer than the Celt to us.”  As a result, “a steady, middle-class Anglo-Saxon much more imagined himself Enud’s cousin than Ossian’s.”[6]  The English, in a word, were more inclined to identify with alien Semites than with their closest blood cousins, the Irish.

What especially set Arnold apart from the classically trained Englishmen of his day was his familiarity with French and German thought, especially the pioneering Indo-European and Celtic studies that Ernst Renan and Amédée Thierry were carrying out in France.

From their studies, Arnold had learned that Saxons and Celts were closely related Indo-European peoples and that much of the existing archeological and historical evidence contradicted the prevailing belief that the earlier Germanic invaders had either exterminated the indigenous Celtic Britons or else driven them to the island’s mountainous extremities in the west and north.  He thus suspected that: “The Englishman who thinks himself sprung from the Saxons or the Normans is often in reality the descendent of the Britons” (i.e., the Celts).[7]

Indeed, Arnold believed it was the Celts’ gift for style — and “their vehement reaction against the despotism of fact” — that had saved England from “the Philistine vulgarity” he found offensive in North Germany.[8]

He thus celebrated the kinship of blood and spirit that had never before been imagined to exist between Celt and Saxon, courageously doing so in a period when Fenian political violence had aroused a good deal of anti-Irish sentiment in Britain.[9]

In this context, Arnold coined the term “Hebraises” to characterize the moralizing tendency of various “Teutonic” peoples influenced by Calvinism’s strict biblical standards.

Hebraism versus Hellenism

Following Renan, who was instrumental in presenting Judaism as the counter-phenomenon of “Aryanism,” Arnold believed Indo-European peoples had been responsible for the world’s great intellectual, political, and cultural movements, while the Semitic race was responsible for the great religious movements of monotheism.

Yet, if the Hebrews’ glory was their elevated morality, outside religion, their achievement, it seemed, was largely negative.

Englishmen Hebraised in an evangelical Protestantism may therefore have been morally resistant to the reputed “lubricity” of Continentals, something every earnest Victorian prized, but they were also, Arnold saw, “narrow, harsh, unintelligent and unattractive.”  The prevailing coarseness and vulgarity of the evangelicals reflected, moreover, a deeper ailment associated with Jewish self-righteousness: Der Engländer, as Goethe put it, ist eigentlich ohne Intelligenz.[10]

“Unintelligence” here denotes not “stupidity,” but rather the inability to grasp a thing’s relation to its larger context or value because a cramped conviction had closed off a broader, more accurate view.  As a result, Arnold argued that the Jew’s biblical “unintelligence” tended to make nonconformists Philistine, “vulgar on the side of beauty and grace, coarse on the side of mind, spirit, and intelligence.”[11]

As such, the nonconformists (“Quakers, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Unitarians, and Baptists”) treated biblical moral standards as if they were the unum necessarium (the one thing needful) and, worse, were satisfied with a “very crude conception” of what these moral standards implied.

Given that no unum necessarium frees human being from the obligation of thinking what to do in life’s multiple realms, this “one thing needful” was wont to justify the “vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence” of its deformed spirit.[12]  To see things as they are, on the other hand, requires a larger conception of human nature — a conception that those of the unum necessarium felt little need of.

For Arnold, then, “to Hebraise” meant to sacrifice “all sides of our being to the religious side” — at the expense not only of a fuller understanding, but of a more balanced or complete life.[13]

As embodied in the Puritan middle class, the morally earnest Hebrew was responsible for what Arnold called the increasingly “humdrum, plain, ugly, and ignoble” character of English national life.[14]

The growing influence of this “stiff-necked and perverse” stratum, Arnold feared, meant that industrializing England risked a terrible deculturation, if the materialism and individualism of this class should become hegemonic and if the old traditions and established creeds, with their emphasis on beauty, harmony, and balance, were forced to retreat before a market-based culture in which all that mattered was commerce and industry.

Like the Continental bourgeoisie, the English middle class had tended to stand apart from the main currents of European society, (for both Ancient and Medieval civilizations held the merchant in low repute).  When this class assumed greater social weight in the industrial 19th century, it quite naturally retained something of its hostility to the traditional order, rebuking not just its political tenets, but its larger heritage.  In practical terms, Arnold feared this was leading to the loss of English unity, of community, of a common system of value and belief, and, ultimately, of a shared sense of meaning and beauty.

Arnold was no enemy of the nonconformists and always stressed that they had contributed much of what was “strongest and most serious” in the English nation.  He may have been unusually even-handed as a Victorian in dealing with Catholicism, but he was decisively on the Protestant side, for the latter’s individual conscience allegedly made Protestants more religiously serious than Catholics and thus less prone to the “dissolute” life.[15]  For all his love of the Hellenic cultural tradition, Arnold still felt, as one critic put it, “the powerful appeal of the Old Testament conception of righteousness.”[16]

He nevertheless criticized nonconformists for having “not enough added to their care for walking staunchly by the best light they have, . . . [for developing] one side of their humanity at the expense of all others, and [for becoming] incomplete and mutilated men in consequence.”[17]

The victory of “bourgeois civilization” in England and the development of a market society based on Hebraic principles may have made England a rich, powerful country, but, Arnold warned, it also threatened the older traditions of beauty, knowledge, and purpose, without which a people lacks a sense of direction or meaning.[18]

Given Its narrow horizons and “mechanical” mental habits, the dissenting middle class seemed, in effect, to be divesting itself of the heritage native to Indo-European peoples, cutting itself off from “the best which has been thought and said in the world.”

More immediately, this Hebraic tendency to dismiss every criteria but economic and individualistic ones, the nationalist-minded Arnold feared, meant that Continental peoples, with less energy than the English, but greater intelligence, would soon encroach on their supremacy — a rather bold and prescient idea in this age of British world supremacy.

Worse still, he feared that low-church Philistinism would make the English complacent about the factories and slums, the iconoclastic chapels and gin palaces, which were disfiguring English society.

Against the Philistines and the spiritual impoverishment they served, Arnold took up the cause of “culture” and what he called “Hellenism.”  For if the Puritan Reformation had, in Christopher Dawson phrase, “rebuilt the Jewish temple,” recasting Englishmen in a Hebraic mold, the Renaissance, against which the Reformation revolted, had “replanted the groves of Academus.”[19]

The Renaissance awakening of the larger Greco-European heritage that Arnold called “Hellenism” had the potential, he thought, to return “humanity to nature and to seeing things as they are,” unsmudged by the soot and smoke of a petty Hebraic conscience.[20]  (In this spirit, the Renaissance Pope, Leo X, had professed a greater love of Plato than of Christ).

As the antithesis of Hebraism, Hellenism meant comprehending “things in their essence and beauty.”  Arnold thought it might even further the moral designs of Hebraism, for its Puritan distillation had made a gross caricature of grace, faith, election, and righteousness.  “No man, who knows nothing else,” Arnold professed, “knows even his Bible.”[21]

In awakening the creative impulse of its repressed Celtic heritage and imbuing the middle class with “the sweetness and light” of Europe’s Hellenic tradition, Arnold hoped to turn “the practical, utilitarian mentality” of the middle class toward higher, more noble aspirations.

Arnold’s Concept of Culture

When members of our racially conscious community hear the word “culture,” many react in the way Hermann Göring allegedly did — by reaching for their holster.[22]

No concept, in fact, has so often been used in the 20th century 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.

When Arnold took up the cause of “culture” as a remedy to the threat of “anarchy,” the term did not quite mean what it currently does.  In Keywords, Raymond Williams points out that “culture” is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language, with a long, complex etymology.[23]  It was originally used to define that which undergoes a process of tending or cultivation — like a crop or domesticated herds — and was thus initially associated with agriculture.  During the 18th century, the French began to use the term as a synonym for “civilization,” but the early Romantic reaction to the Revolution of 1789 (particularly in the German-speaking lands) associated Kultur 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).

In the late 1860s, when Arnold took up the cause of “culture,” it lacked not just the anthropological definition it would acquire in the 20th century, it was still not widely used in English.  Among those Englishmen conversant with it, the term was associated with the “frivolous and unedifying curiosity” of self-occupied Frenchmen and Germans and thus used disapprovingly.[24]

Only with the publication of E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture in 1871 was the way opened for the word’s subsequent evolution into an anthropological term to denote “socially patterned human thought and behavior” — though it ought to be added that Tylor, like Arnold and like the viewpoint expressed herein, associated culture with race.[25]

For Arnold, culture is “the pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.”[26]

Culture in this sense is self-culture: That is, it’s the self-cultivation of man’s being through a formation in the finest achievements of his civilization.  Hence, the definition found in older editions of the OED: “The training, development, refinement of mind, tastes, and manners.”

For Arnold the striving to improve and enhance oneself (“perfection”) was the ideal state of the mind, just as health was the ideal state of the body.

Culture here is more a state of mind than a body of knowledge.  For the mind’s love of perfection implies a process of becoming rather than of obtaining, designating an inward condition higher or greater than the outward materialism.  In submitting to “the sweetness and light” (the beauty and intelligence) of the great poetry and literature of the Western heritage, the individual imbues his mind with a balance, clarity, and fullness of thought, which Hebraisim — in its stern reaction to the moral indifference of Renaissance Hellenism — closes off.

Culture, as such, preserves an openness as it strives for the best, fostering in the process “human wholeness” and “social health.”

“Culture,” then, is essentially two things for Arnold: Primarily, it’s a general process of “intellectual, spiritual, and artistic development” in the individual and, secondly, it’s a body of works and practices representing the best in European artistic and intellectual achievement.

This notion of culture as the harmonious development of human nature through the individual’s cultivation of his mind has been subject to numerous criticisms.  For example, it has been criticized for being too individualist and too bookish, for favoring “high” culture over folk culture, for treating culture as the preserve of a narrow minority and thus associating it with a standoffish sense of superiority and refinement, for being too abstract and having no reality in contemporary society, and nowadays for being exclusive and exclusionary, etc.

Whatever the justice of these criticisms, Arnold’s notion of culture (which is, admittedly, dated) must ultimately be valued not as an unconcealing truth, but as a valiant rearguard defence of the Western tradition — waged in an age when the West had begun to war on its own culture.  (The white man, to be sure, didn’t have to await the Jews’ “culture of critique” to start assailing his heritage: It had already started in Arnold’s day, having grown out of the liberal modernist impulses of his industrial society).[27]

The Rise of “Culturalism”

Arnold’s conception of “culture” may no longer be defensible, but his concern for the larger heritage and his notion of culture’s intimate relationship to national behavior, I think, retain a certain relevance.

The Arnoldian concept of culture, however, is held by few today.  By the Cultural Revolution of the Sixties, the anthropological notion of culture that began supplanting the Arnoldian notion in the late 19th century had almost everywhere become dominant.

As early as 1949, T.S. Eliot, who succeeded Arnold as the foremost anglophone defender of the European tradition, had accepted the anthropological concept that defines “culture” as a particular people’s way of life, encompassing all the genres and modes of a people’s experience.  In a famous sentence, Eliot stressed the wide compass culture embraces.  “It includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelve of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wenleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar.”[28]  All these things added up not to culture, however, only its multiple elements.

“Just as man is more than the sum of his body parts, culture is more than the assemblage of its arts, customs, and religious beliefs.  All these parts act on one another and to fully understand one you have to understand them all.”[29]

Culture for Eliot is evidently not the cultivation of the individual mind, or even the canon of its great achievements, as Arnold held, but a common way of life embodied in social institutions, involving moral standards and practices with a tradition behind them.

His notion of culture is nevertheless something more than the anthropologist’s “way of life” — because it’s something entirely its own, something which Eliot associated with the religious incarnation of a people’s particular spirit.[30]

The strictly anthropological concept, by contrast, severs all ties between human biology and culture, seeing the latter as an artificial creation of generalized men in generalized circumstances, as if men were “blank tablets on which the environment inscribes culture.”

Beginning in the late 1880s, when Franz Boas “embarked on his life-long assault on the idea that race was the primary source of the differences in mental or social capacities of different human groups,” he premised his argument on the supposition that all peoples and races are mentally equal.[31]  He extended, in effect, the democratic principle from politics to culture and then from culture to race.

From this allegedly impartial perspective, different peoples, different societies, different forms of social organization, belief, and value are seen as the product of different histories, different experiences, different circumstances, different stages of development, but not the achievement of specific blood lines and races.  In a word, group differences were reconceived as cultural rather than biological differences

In Max Weber’s eloquent formulation, man is an animal suspended in webs of significance [i.e., culture] which he himself has spun.[32]  This makes culture sui generis — explainable solely in terms of itself.

Hence, Boas’ contention that cultural and social factors alone, rather than biological or innate ones, explain differences in human behavior.  Hence also the anarchistic tendency inherent in the ensuing relativism, where no standard is allowed to judge human behavior except cultural ones, which are self-referential and thus self-legitimating.  Hence, finally, the tendency to consider all cultures as inherently equal, as if the “culture” of New Guinea headhunters is comparable to that of the higher civilized cultures, which are products of history and the complex intertwined social worlds they create.  Perversely, not a few 20th-century anthropologists (Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict preeminently) have used their select knowledge of primitive peoples to highlight the failures of modern society and to challenge conservative moral standards — not for the sake of their own culture, but for that of liberal reform and the nonwhites of whom they are so enamored.

The larger point here is that the anthropological concept of culture, as the historian Carl Degler puts it, “made the idea of a hierarchy of human societies based on innate differences . . . no longer tenable; human nature was now a unity, however diverse its expressions.”[33]

Boas’s concept, 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 naive, 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 of the American political tradition.  Boas’ efforts were indeed linked with the “new social sciences,” the Social Gospel, and Progressivism.  For integral to the country’s pragmatic spirit (especially after the War of Secession) was a will to reform society, expand opportunity, and create a more rational social order based on individual achievement rather than on natural ascriptions.[34] 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 equally powerful nativist heritage.

Despite the previous existence of slavery and the persistence of a rigid racial hierarchy, biological or Darwinian determinism jeopardized 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 for reform and progress: You simply could not change the unchangeable.

But if it’s culture not hereditary — nurture not nature — that is the source of human difference, then race is incidental to existing social inequities.[35]  Reform and change are thus possible, which makes modification of educational and environmental factors the key to social development.

Culturalism, as such, rejects race theory on the basis of an unproven assumption: That mental processes are roughly equal in all people and therefore that the body is not a factor affecting the mind.  But if culturalism assumes that there is no relationship between mind and body, then racial/biological determinism, occupying the pendulum opposite of the argument, assumes that the mind is simply another facet of the body, with the body determining the mind (not just in shaping its capacity but also its substance).

Philosophical Anthropology

Though there’s more evidence for this materialist 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 substances like intellect, reason, mind, and soul.[36]

A plant or animal may thus be understood simply in terms of animated matter and instinct (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 — at least to the degree that the spirit achieves a certain sovereignty.[37]  The biological or “scientific” idea of race, 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),[38] is arguably objectionable in the same way that Marxism’s reduction of society and religion to the “superstructure” of the economic “base” is objectionable.[39]

Biological determinists and cultural anthropologists are quite alike, then, in being equally unqualified to speak on the relationship between culture and race, or on what might be called a variant of the historic mind-body question.

But though natural science is inadequate to the study of this relationship, it doesn’t mean it’s nonexistent.  The thinkers most qualified to examine this relationship, which has occupied Western philosophical thought in one form or another since Aristotle, are those belonging to that rarefied, mainly German, disciple known as “philosophical anthropology” — a discipline which aims at bridging the different realms of physical, cultural, and theoretical anthropology in order to develop “a coherent idea of human being.”[40]

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

The greatest of the philosophical anthropologist to speak to this relationship, Arnold Gehlen, spent much of his career investigating culture’s complex physiological sources and the way the body is linked to the cultural expressions of the mind.  This is not the place to repeat what I have said of Gehlen’s work elsewhere.[41]  Suffice it to mention that Gehlen did not reduce mind to body, but instead saw culture (mind’s spiritual compendium) as a means of compensating for man’s “instinctual deficiency.”

Animals, Gehlen argued, 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.  The “not yet determined animal” man, on the other hand, lacks such instincts and had, under the unsheltered sky 40,000 years ago, to 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.[42]

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.”  And somewhat like his genetic heritage, culture, as a “shaping template” of behavior, is transmittable to the next generation, so that the achievements of one era can be passed on to the next.  This 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 formation of a culture, and to stress just one, say body or thought, is reductionist.

Culture, in this view, is bound up with man’s physical nature, but is nevertheless “world open,” able to evolve and adapt and become self-conscious.  It is this second nature that enables man “to anticipate himself, fall back upon himself, adjust and reverse his movements, plan — all in order to enhance his survivability.”[43]  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.  Mind — and the culture it creates — are not, then, the automatic reflect of the body, though they are inseparable from it.

It is thus through mind (and culture) that a specific genotype responds to and influences its larger environment.

Race, in this way, gives rise to a culture that can be seen, to use a term that Gehlen didn’t, as “an extended phenotype.”  For if a spider’s web is the extended phenotype of the spider’s genotype, culture in a similar way can be seen as the extended phenotype of a specific human life form.  In Louis R. Browning’s formulation: “The ability of persons to deal with, and manipulate, their environments, their interactions with other people, their schooling, their career: all such capabilities that can influence the fitness of a person can be considered part of the individual’s [extended] phenotype.”[44]

Racial behavior in this perspective needs to be seen in terms of tendencies that enhance “fitness,” not fixed inevitabilities, like instincts, for the different cultures that different races create do not actually dictate behavior per se, so much as they provide an orientation that shapes its contours and does so across history’s longue durée, as the generations of the dead impose their hard-won truths on the living.  Ultimately, this works to enhance a people’s survivability, as well as its vitality.

In this vein, one of our great anti-liberal historians defines a healthy culture as one which recovers the sources of life.  “Why,” he asks, “is a stockbroker less beautiful than a Homeric warrior . . .?  Because he is less incorporated with life, he is not inevitable, but accidental, almost parasitic.  When a culture has proved its real needs, and organized its vital functions, every office becomes beautiful.”[45]

What then is the relationship between race and culture?  Arnold’s notion that every people or race has a distinct personality that can be grasped through a few designated characteristics is probably too simplistic to be of more than literary value.  Indeed, every great people (from a historicist rather than a relativist perspective) is probably best viewed in terms of its own standards rather than those of another.  Arnold, however, got the most important thing right — that people and culture, blood and heritage, are ultimately one.  He thus posited a distinct relationship between race and culture, just as he suspected that the impairment of one would have a negative impact on the other.

This, I think, is key to understanding the relationship between race and culture.  But it’s not until we get to Gehlen that we see how culture entails not just all those things that are tied up in a 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 19th-century racialists or contemporary sociobiologists assume — but it nevertheless accepts that a specific genotype (race) gives rise to a corresponding phenotype (culture).

Because culture is the second — the spiritual — nature of man, it no more determines the behavior of man’s animal body than the body controls a people’s culture.  Rather than “determine,” the word should probably be “express” — for man’s second nature is unlike instinct in being “world open.”

Think of the cultural diversity among peoples of the same stock. Though there are profound similarities between, say, Irish Catholics and Scots-Irish Presbyterians (such as their profoundly conservative morality, the “epigrammatic concision” of their speech, or the intransigence of their nationalism), the sharp differences dividing these long-warring communities, despite their identical DNA, demonstrate that culture is not a mere organic offshoot of the body.  History, circumstance, and experience are evidently crucial factors in its production.

Culture and biology, though, are irreparably linked, as Gehlen indicates, and linked in ways that almost always sustain one another.  A white man born into Chinese culture may conceivably become Chinese in language, behavior, even spirit — which means he ceases to be a white man in any way except genotypically — but at the same time he can never become Chinese in blood, which is not the case of Irish Catholics and Presbyterians vis-à-vis each others’ culture.[46]  The spirit of a Chinese-enculturated white man would consequently always be at odds with his body and this would inevitably distort his place in the world.  Said differently, his genotype acquires an “unfit” or incongruent phenotype.

Behavior, it follows, cannot replace biology, culture cannot be separated from its racial source, one cannot become what one is not.

The link between race and culture may therefore be a supple one, but in the last instance it cannot be eliminated without risking a mongrelizing adulteration — based on a callous disregard of man’s specific nature.  For though blood inheritance is of paramount importance in determining man’s nature, the spirit that guides his nature, even with the help of contemporary behavioral genetics, cannot be understood outside the culture that situates it.[47]

The body that forms a community or a nation is not, then, the body of biology, the animal body, but rather the mind-permeated body of closely related cultural beings.

When a community or nation defines itself in bodily or racial terms, even then its idea of the body is shaped by the mind and its specific culture.  For if an individual or a community is essentially grounded in a body, this body-idea shares in the given social or political reality (as the idea of dynasty, blood lineage, ethnonation, or race) and, as such, is always the product of a particular cultural heritage rather than an unmediated reflect of the body.  (At the same time, the opposite also holds, for man is never a completely self-enclosed, autonomous individual, either physically or culturally: Hereditary capabilities develop only in certain environments, just as their development depends on a genetic predisposition).  Man, in other words, is neither totally a product of race nor of culture, but a biocultural organism whose blood and spirit are inextricably bound.

It seems no accident that the starting point of most systems of human racial classification begin not with the “natural” or “pure” races found in primitive societies, but with “historical races” — entities pertaining as much to mind (history) as to nature.  Instead, then, of being understood as distinct groupings based exclusively on physical traits, 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 principle that pervades his component parts.[48]

From this perspective it can be claimed that races come into existence and develop not according to strict biological laws, but under the influence of the mind.[49]  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 arise 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 based on a specific gene pool, genetic cluster, breeding population, stock, or whatever term you want to use 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 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 established by the mind.  To take one’s stand simply in the animal sphere, then, not only confuses the part with the whole, it leaves us defenseless in all those higher realms where our life is manifested and sustained.  A purely “scientific” (better said, “scientistic”) notion 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.  For once the white man’s culture is destroyed, then the significance and purpose of white life is also destroyed — first ontologically, then physically.  It’s imperative for this reason to take our stand not in natural science alone, but in all the multiple realms of human being.

There are several roots to the idea I’m suggesting here.  Its trunk root stems from the idea that (I think) was first developed by Friedrich von Schelling — the idea that a people emerges from its myths insofar as the “community of consciousness” a shared myth forges is what grounds and unites a people as a people.[50]  Every understanding of the ethnogenic process that creates races and nations starts, I believe, from this idea.

Race, Culture, and America

The American case is the preeminent example of this sort of relationship.  When transplanted Englishmen in 17th-century Virginia began identifying themselves as “white,” in opposition to their black slaves, who were seen as more beast than man, they made “white skin” the basis of what later became the core of the American’s national identity.  “White” here wasn’t just a biological marker that put whites at the high end of the human chain of being, it also implied all those things associated with their racial kinsmen in Europe (such as their cultural heritage, religious beliefs, standards of beauty, etc.).  Other European whites (Scots-Irish, Dutchmen, Swedes, Germans, Frenchmen, etc.) would consequently be accepted as Americans on the basis of their cultural and biological kinship with the larger European family of nations.  Entry into American society was based thus largely on ethnic invisibility and racial origin — which made white skin color the “most important single determinant in their human relations.”

With the arrival of the Irish in the 1830s and ’40s, the religious (Protestant) and social (bourgeois) components of America’s white identity were culturally challenged by the Catholic, tribal character of “the mud-splattered, shillelagh-wielding salpeen” with the imputed simian features.[51]  In time, though, as the Irish were acculturated and Americans became more religiously indifferent, they were gradually accepted as Americans on the basis of their racial kinship with the native Anglo-Protestants (though it should be added that Irish-Americans, however loyal to their new homeland, “had no intention of abandoning their religion, disguising their ancestry, or detaching themselves from the struggles of their native land.”[52]  Indeed, it was from their fierce devotion to Mother Eire that came their equally unyielding devotion to America.  The Irish, as such, were acculturated into American culture, which they also helped shape — but they were not “melted” into a mongrel mass).

The “assimilation” of Irish and other Europeans ethnics, however, could never happen with blacks, for implicit in the American way of life was the understanding that race — not just white skin, but all that was associated with their Old World origins — was primary.  Their European origins, in fact, were requisite to everything that made the American an American.  The assumption here was not just that black skin belonged to another physical type of man than those with white skin, but that the black spirit — culture, soul, essence — was a different order of spirit than the white man’s.  These differences were not accomodatable because they were fundamentally alien to one another, as alien as the drum-beating percussions of the African jungle were to the counterpoint of Bach’s Kunst der Fuge.  An Irishman could change his religion, lose his brogue, or embrace American norms, but nothing could turn black into white.

Then as now, blue-nose reformers would insist that race was no more an obstacle to assimilation than religion, social rank, or national origin.   But no matter how deficient Americans may have been in their high cultural accomplishment, they nevertheless retained their identity as Europeans — as whites — whose singularity was defined in opposition to non-Europeans.  Cultural assimilation, in a word, was based on and conditioned by racial criteria.[53]

Only after 1945, under assault from the new National Security State and a largely Jewish-controlled “culture industry,” would the racial basis of American identity (and hence culture) be subverted and refounded on the basis of purely creedal/ideological criteria.  Accordingly, the new nonracial identity of the postwar era led directly to a multiracial atomization destructive of the American’s former racial identity — as his expanded phenotype more and more divulged from his genotype, to the point where the former is now, arguably, no longer an extension but an adulteration of the latter.

A backhanded affirmation of the inherent link between race and culture is particularly evident today in the ideology of multiculturalism.  At the root of this liberal pluralistic dogma is the “anti-racist” contention that the biological entities once commonly referred to as “races” do not exist — but are rather mere “social constructs.”  This makes “race” a totally subjective category based on an allegedly flawed, bigoted, or self-interested perception.  But if race as a biological fact is a matter of perception and if all perception of biological (racial) differences is an expression of racism, as multiculturalists hold, this doesn’t mean that the socially constructed fact of race is to be ignored, for it has supposedly become pivotal to the dominant system of social control.  Thus, no sooner do anti-racists deny race as a biological essence than they turn around and call for measures favoring the so-called nonwhite “social construct” — and, just as contradictory, they advocate not assimilation into the larger (white) American culture but a recognition and validation of their nonwhite cultures.

As one egalitarian critic of multiculturalism explains: “Treating race as a social fact amounts to nothing more than acknowledging that we were mistaken to think of it as a biological fact and then insisting that we ought to keep making the mistake.”[54]

Culture in this multiculturalist optic becomes a surrogate for the biological notion of race and the celebration of cultural differences (“diversity”) becomes a celebration of racial differences.  Multiculturalism serves in this way as the proxy of multiracialism.  This doesn’t mean, of course, that race and culture are equivalent terms — only that among anti-racists there is a certain assumption about the inherent relationship between race and culture.

And on this one point I think these enemies of our people get it right.

Culture and Post-American Anarchy

In Arnold’s most famous poem, “Dover Beach” (1867), he depicted England’s troubled culture in all its deep-seated spiritual anarchy:

. . . for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams . . .
[Is but] a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

This is the England of Culture and Anarchy, whose disordering chaos lay not just in increased incidents of social violence and political agitation, but in the country’s “hideous sprawling industrial cities, its loud-voice assertion of personal liberty, its dismal, stuffy, and cantankerous forms of Christianity, its worship of size and numbers and wealth and machinery generally, its state-blindness, and its belief in collision (collision of parties, of sects, of firms) as the only way to salvation.”[55]

Arnold thought the root of this growing anarchy was cultural.  As a child of the Reformation, England had been home to that “Dissidence of Dissent and [that] Protestantism of the Protestant religion” called Puritanism.[56]  Puritanism, Arnold granted, may have been necessary to develop “the moral fiber of the English race . . ., to break the yoke of ecclesiastical domination over men’s minds, and to prepare the way for freedom of thought.”[57]  But its notion of moral perfection had nothing to do with spiritual perfection and its narrow, individualistic spirit was a threat to the nation’s unity.

Given that the chief bearer of Puritan dissent was the English middle class and that this class was dominant not only in the economy, but increasingly in society, Arnold feared its Hebraising effects would rent the nation’s communal fabric.  For the Puritan’s highly developed individual conscience posited that every man was on his own in matters of religion, as well as in matters of business and personal conduct.  The norms embodied in the established church were thus ignored, as was the cultural heritage that once animated the English people.  Like Jacobinism, utilitarianism, and liberalism, Puritanism had no patience with the legacy of the past and was disposed to radical schemes subversive of established hierarchies.  In its opposition to the Church of England, it proposed, for example, “placing all good men alike in a condition of religious equality.”  Arnold called this the solution of the “tailless foxes,” who advocated that all foxes cut off their tail.[58]

The dissenters were also wont to dissent among themselves, setting off endless cycles of sectarian strife that isolated their mitotic churches in “holes and corners,” further fragmenting the nation.  By rejecting any corporate or collective authority that might compromise their conscience and insisting that every Englishmen had the right to do whatever he pleased, the dissenters’ individualism, Arnold feared, was leading, quite literally, to anarchy.

This is why he championed the cause of culture, which he called “the most resolute enemy of anarchy.”[59]  If the whole nation would learn self-discipline through a unified culture of “right reason, ideas, and light,” it might, he thought, be possible “to cure the narrowness of Puritanism” and bring it “into the main current of national life.”  A man reared in the “totality” of the established church had no need, he claimed, to struggle to find a private form of self-expression: Imbued with “a sense of the historical life of the human spirit, outside and beyond [his] own fancies and feelings,” he could take that which the larger culture commended, leaving himself free to develop his other sides.  A national culture centered in an established church offered thus innumerably more avenues for self-development and realization, suggesting “new sides and sympathies in us to cultivate; and, by saving us from having to invent and fight for our own forms of religion, gives us the leisure and calm to steady out our view of religion itself.”[60]

“In a serious people, where everyone has to chose and strive for his own order and discipline of religion, the contention about these non-essentials occupies his [whole] mind.”[61]  Relatedly, all the great works of art, literature, and science “came not from nonconformists, but from men of the Establishment — or at least men trained by the Establishment.”  The greatest Puritans — Milton, Baxter, Wesley — had, accordingly, been formed within the Establishment’s pale.  “A generation or two outside the Establishment and Puritanism produces men of national mark no more.”[62]  Against the Puritans’ deforming morality, Arnold defended the sweetness and light that came from the Anglo-European heritage.

Arnold’s cultural antidote to the centrifugal forces of modern liberal society pertained, though, not just to Victorian England, but to the Anglo-Protestant culture of the United States.

The America Arnold knew was very different from the America that began to emerge at the end of the 19th century, just as the latter would qualitatively differ from the America of the late 20th century.  Nevertheless, much of what he said about this new country retains its significance in illuminating the country’s subsequent cultural trajectory.  Basic to his view is the contention that America was essentially “a province of England,” with roughly the same admixture of Saxons and Celts.  Yet unlike England, America had a small reading class, few men of letters, no intellectual center, and a people oriented more to materialist than cultural matters.  Also, unlike England, America lacked both an aristocracy and a peasantry, which meant it was almost entirely a middle-class country, affected by the same Philistine and Hebraising tendencies he criticized in the English middle class.[63]

Influenced by the sectarianism of its evangelical Protestantism (“without great men and without furtherance for the higher life of humanity”),[64] American energy was funneled into money-making or, when it took spiritual form, into doctrines of moral uplift, such as those promoted by the reforming mania of the Social Gospel.

In Arnold’s view, the “unintelligence” of English nonconformists almost totally dominated the United States.  He rhetorically asked in one of his articles: “Do not tell me only . . . of the magnitude of your industry and commerce; of the beneficence of your institutions, your freedom, your equality . . . tell me also if your civilization — which is the grand name you give to all this development — tell me if your civilization is interesting.“[65]  And he answered himself in the negative, for America in his eyes lacked distinction, having, despite its vast economic achievement, failed to develop “the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, the power of social life and manners, as well as the great power of conduct and religion.”[66]

Like many European critics of America’s low-church, plebeian civilization, Arnold was overly quick in applying his European standards to American life, failing to grasp many of its defining features (such as the cult of republicanism and producerism inscribed in the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian-Populist tradition, which in some ways served as a national “church,” or the personal trust and mutual interest that bound these ostensively atomized individuals to one another).  The result is a picture not quite as balanced as it could have been.  Arnold also didn’t fully understand that a totally middle-class country, based on an idea of “personal aggrandizement” and having no Church, nobility, or army to anchor its established values, was a country dominated not just by individualist market principles, but by state and social structures indifferent, if not hostile to nation and culture.

Nevertheless, his basic point — that America’s Philistine, middle-class culture, with its materialist and individualist slant, was corrosive of community and thus a force of anarchy — retains, I think, a certain pertinence, even if he failed to see what it implied in terms of larger structural or institutional developments.

More generally, the postbellum America Arnold knew was in the process of succumbing to forces that exacerbated the atomistic tendencies of its middle-class culture, as the country fell into the hands of a rapacious plutocracy indifferent to its diverse population and incapable of developing a national culture around which to assimilate its different European stocks.

The divisive, potentially anarchistic tendencies that have since colonized its culture with the prerogatives of the market have not merely continued into the present, but have been accelerated by other, more centrifugal forces.

In the late 19th century the country’s massive industrialization began to overwhelm the small town, rural character of American life, replacing it with sprawling, smoke-stacked metropolises that radically transformed the social-scape, as the earlier agrarian America gave way to a new business civilization dominated by giant corporate entities.[67]  The peasant masses from Eastern and Southern European who came to fill the new factories helped undermine the largely British/North-European character of the population.  Linguistic, cultural, and ethnic identities became more complex and conflictual, just as local and regional cultures surrendered to urbanizing, commercial, and technological forces that drew America’s increasingly deracinated masses into a “culture industry” based on newspapers, vaudeville, touring theater companies, and then, in the 20th century, on automobiles, urban night life, professional sports, movies, radio, TV, and other mass entertainments lacking the “sweetness and light” characteristic of traditional European culture.  Worse, this consumer-driven, commercial culture, instead of rejecting the outward materialism, fully succumbed to it.  Not the best that had been thought and said, this mass culture appealed to what Henry James called “the new, the simple, the common, the commercial, the immediate, and, all too often, the ugly.”[68]

The late 20th century, then, introduced forces that were qualitatively more anarchistic.  The most radical of these, of course, was Third-World immigration, which is changing not just the ethnic but the racial character of the population, breaking down the country’s last remaining European remnant.

It seems hardly fortuitous that America’s present Affenkultur is tied to the racially alien forces of hip-hop and Hollywood — and to a spirit, institutionalized in Marxisant cultural studies departments, which treats all forms of discrimination, taste, and value judgement as illegitimate.

This cultural process of ethnoracial dissolution has been compounded by a communication and digital revolution, whose programmed images create a “virtual reality” unmoored from the realities it represents and whose representations are both medium and message;[69] by a globalization of economic exchanges in which national imperatives give way to world market interests and those of the global “superclass”;[70] by a “new class” elite increasingly nonwhite, “counter-cultural,” and indifferent to all former standards of social distinction and taste;[71] by “entertainment values” and visual media that corrupt the way we think;[72] and by an educational system, which has produced what is arguably the dumbest and most infantile generation of students in American history.[73]

Behind these developments that have become integral parts of America’s consumer society and that seek to turn Americans into a faceless mass of coffee-colored consumers lies the destruction of all that connects genotype and extended phenotype, as the organic ties linking America’s European race and its nativist variant of the larger European culture are severed.

Once white American identity is no longer defined by the symbols, beliefs, and destiny dictated by its past and by its regulative tradition, but by the programmed contrivances of an alien culture industry, Americans cease to exist as a people.  For without the memories and myths that make a people a people, white Americans are only “so many politically bounded” people.[74]

Conclusion

To the extent that the white-nationalist project endeavors to raise the consciousness of the country’s European-descended population, it is largely a cultural project seeking to heighten white identity by anchoring it in a body of beliefs and practices — a culture — whose consciousness defies the racial anarchy presently threatening whites.  It thus consciously or unconsciously accepts that culture is neither the democratic smorgasbord for all tastes that multiculturalists claim nor is it something fixed in an academic canon for all time, as our Jewish-trained conservatives would have it.  Rather, as suggested above, it is the spirit engendered by the blood that created the European life world and the people who inhabit it — it is the extended phenotype of the white genotype.

Culture as such is an organic growth, inseparable from the people who live it and make it grow.  At the highest level it is indistinguishable from race and nation, being the spiritual manifestation of a people’s distinct life form.  To separate race and culture — not just through the introduction of Hebraising practices, but through a concerted assault on the institutional relationship between whites and their heritage — is to destroy, then, both race and culture, for one cannot exist without the other.

The Occidental Quarterly 9:2 (Summer 2009)

There are several ways to examine the claim that race is a social construct. A method popular in our community is to prove by genetics or biology that racial differences are real or immutable; this research has been carried out by numerous scholars whose work is well-known and whose names need not be repeated here. They oppose the theories of Ashley Montagu, Margaret Mead, and other inheritors of Franz Boas’s legacy. Yet there is another strain of social construction theory that has not been so thoroughly addressed by those in our community. The academic left, much of it whose power resides not in the sciences but in the humanities, propagates a parallel “race is a social construct” thesis from departments of English, philosophy, history, communication, and allied fields. These arguments, which stand largely unopposed, have less to do with human evolution than with language, stereotypes, and social interaction.

Regardless of what evidence exists for race’s biological reality, “race,” because it is a linguistic phenomenon – a word, an utterance – becomes a social construct when it enters the world of discourse, which it must do, of course, in order for us to communicate about it. I hope to show that understanding how language functions socially is vital when developing a robust, meaningful, and comprehensive argument for the reality and importance of race.

To illustrate, I would like to analyze two texts that defend this strange position. Ian F. Haney Lopez, Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, has written extensively on racism and racial constructs in the American legal system. His classic essay, “The Social Construction of Race,” argues that race “must be viewed as a social construction. Human interaction rather than natural differentiation must be seen as the source and the continued basis for racial categorization.” ¹ In other words, to that author race is a social construction because we, as social beings, interact about it and therefore constantly construct its abstract significance. To Haney Lopez, because race’s definition has varied widely over time, and because it continues to evolve today at both the individual and societal levels, one should not consider “race” to be a meaningful category by which to classify people.²

Haney Lopez proceeds anecdotally, recounting his experience growing up biracial, the son of an Irish father and a Salvadoran mother. (Though, as one might expect, he explicitly writes this chapter “as a Latino.”³) While Haney Lopez’s brother identified more closely with his father’s white family, leading him to understand and present himself as “unraced,” Haney Lopez himself identified more closely with his mother’s family and considered himself a Latino. From this, he concludes that, “in my experience race reveals itself as plastic, inconstant, and to some extent volitional.”⁴ Haney Lopez, of course, proves very little with his quaint tale, but Critical Race Studies has never required much in the way of academic rigor: its democratic orientation lends itself to evidence based upon feelings and personal convictions. Nevertheless, Haney Lopez’s point is well taken: though he and his brother were born of the same parents and can claim the same genetic heritage, they have constructed their racial identities differently. Hence he concludes that race is not biological; it is a set of behavioral expectations chosen and performed by its bearer. It is a social construction.

Obviously, Haney Lopez’s biological biraciality, though it is of primary importance to his own refutation of race, is of no consequence to us: the existence of the Labradoodle does not refute the existence of the Labrador. But perhaps this issue of biracial identity does complicate our discussion of race. Haney Lopez’s story introduces the important point that a person can “choose” – or construct – his racial identity not only on a census form, but also, more notably, in the wardrobe, in the classroom, and on the streets of American cities. And, as we all known, biracial individuals are not the only ones who must construct their race in this way: a black man must perform whiteness when interviewing for a corporate job, for example, just a white kid in an urban public school must perform blackness when changing in the locker room for gym class.

I think the issue of performable racial identity is vital to explore, for it establishes that there are two forms of useful racial classifications: one that is biological and one that is social – one we are born with and one that is “volitional” (inasmuch as social behaviors can be described as volitional). This second category, the one that is socially dependent, is, according to Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s influential Racial Formation in the United States, “a matter of both social structure and cultural representation.” They protest that

Too often, the attempt is made to understand race simply or primarily in terms of only one of these two analytic dimensions. For example, efforts to explain racial inequality as a purely social phenomenon are unable to account for the origins, patterning, and transformation of racial difference. Conversely, many examinations of racial difference – understood as a matter of cultural attributes, a la ethnicity theory, or a society-wide signification system, a la some post structuralist accounts – cannot comprehend such structural phenomenon as racial stratification in the labor market or patterns of racial segregation.

⁵

Here the authors identify and hope to synthesize two distinct, popular understandings of race based upon social constructionism: one that centers upon the oppression of biased social systems, and another which maintains and marginalizes various race-specific behavior patterns through institutionalized discourse structures. My intent is, like that of Omi and Winant, to synthesize disparate concepts within race theory in order to suggest a more suitable and realistic concept of race – one that seeks to make use of both biological and social race, which, together, comprise our identity as a people.

Hilton and MacDonald’s Social Constructionism

In this regard, there is much to say about Anthony Hilton and Kevin MacDonald’s Occidental Observer article “Race as a Social Construct? No – and Yes!” The authors admit to “a modest role for social constructs” in the race debate. However this concession is less generous than it might at first seem, because it allows for only a very limited and weak social constructionism – one in which our unconscious minds are influenced by “images of black criminality and poor academic performance,” while our conscious minds are molded by what “the mainstream media like the New York Times tell us we should believe.” Seemingly inherent in this proposed duality is an omnipresent empirical reality, one in which we all directly observe and “unconsciously” internalize images of black criminality and substandard performance. In addition to this “implicit” comprehension of race and racial differences there exists and “explicit” conditioning by the mainstream media that persuades us to consciously accept the socially constructed party line. Then not only do we accept the product of our explicit conditioning, but many of us also participate, sometimes enthusiastically, in its maintenance at the societal level.⁶

First, I submit that very few whites actually internalize, consciously or unconsciously, unmediated black criminality. For the most part, we might see blacks “act black” and perform poorly in school, and we might even occasionally see blacks commit various petty crimes, but very rarely do we personally experience the widespread lack of civilization which characterizes our individual understandings of black performance in Western societies. In lieu of personal observation, which we must have in order to directly internalize images of black criminality, this understanding comes to us through published statistics, interpersonal communications, and various media (including motion pictures, newscasts, novels, the New York Times, and articles written by writers like Professor Hilton and MacDonald). These media, of course, contribute to a socially constructed notion of how race functions in our culture. The simple fact that most of us derive our racial biases, prejudices, and stereotypes largely, though not exclusively, via mediation, rather than via isolated personal experience (which, I argue, would still leave significant room for social construction), indicates that our individual conception of race are, at their root, socially constructed.

I want to commend Hilton and MacDonald for addressing the relationship between race and social construction within our discourse community for it is a topic we should seriously explore. Yet I would like to go a step further than Hilton and MacDonald and argue that race is a social construct in vastly more ways than they recognize in their article. In order to make my argument, I want to briefly explore the roots of social constructionism and suggest a few ways in which its application might be of use to us as race theorists.

Social Constructionism As Theory

Of course, social construction theory did not begin with Haney Lopez or Omi and Winant; they are only a few of the most widely cited scholars who have related that theory to race. The notion of a socially negotiated reality, as constructed through discourse, dates back to classical antiquity. Cratylus, Socrates, and Hermogenes debate the matter in Plato’s Cratyles. Socrates concludes the dialogue by stating

Nor can we reasonably say, Cratylus, that this is knowledge at all, if everything is in a state of transition and there is nothing abiding; for knowledge too cannot continue to be knowledge unless continuing always to abide and exist. But if the very nature of knowledge changes, at the time when the chance occurs there will be no knowledge, and, according to this view, there will be no one to know and nothing to be known: but if that which knows and that which is known exists ever, and the beautiful and the good and every other thing also exist, then I do not think that they can resemble a process or flux, as we were just now supposing. Whether there is this eternal nature in things, or whether the truth is what Heracleitus and his followers and many others say, is a question hard to determine; and no man of sense will like to put himself or the education of his mind in the power of names: neither will he so far trust names or the givers of names as to be confident in any knowledge which condemns himself and other existences to an unhealthy state of unreality.

⁷

The participants in this dialogue attempt to find a correlation between words and the concepts they signify; Hermogenes finds the relationship to be essentially arbitrary, while Cratylus maintains that words and names naturally reflect the essence of that for which they stand.⁸ As can be seen above, Socrates concludes the matter ambiguously; the matters of transitory knowledge and arbitrary signifiers are a bit of a mystery even to him. But his verdict is clear: one who relies upon a thing’s name (i.e., one who relies upon something as socially contingent as a mere word) to establish transcendent meaning or stable essence might find himself in an “unhealthy state of reality.”

Countless philosophers, linguists, and language theorists have continued this debate since the stalemate between Socrates, Cratylus, and Hermogenes in the fifth century B.C. Yet because of nineteenth- and twentieth-century breakthroughs in structuralist and poststructuralist linguistics, the “conventionalists” – those who find the relationship between signifier and signified to be conventional and arbitrary – seem to have taken the prize. So for our purposes, the implications of their position are worth revisiting: if a word (or other signifier) does not flawlessly and directly communicate the concept it signifies – in other words, if there is not an inherent relationship between signifiers and their referents – at least a certain degree of social construction of meaning must take place between a communicator and his audience. Naturally, this is true even when the conversation is about race or other matters that have a certain empirical basis.

Some modern theorists of social constructionism have latched upon the ambiguous relationship between words and concepts and have then attempted to induce from it a vision of the world in which reality exists only via mediation and construction. This “strong” social constructionism, which gained popularity after the Second World War and which was particularly influential in the 1960s and 1970s, can be exemplified by Richard Vatz, who claims that

Fortunately or unfortunately meaning is not intrinsic in events, facts, people, or “situations,” nor are facts “publicly observable.” Except for those situations which directly confront our own empirical reality, we learn of facts and events through someone’s communicating them to us. This involves a two-part process. First, there is a choice of events to communicate . . . The second step in communicating “situations” is the translation of the chosen information into meaning.

⁹

Readers of The Occidental Quarterly can likely appreciate Vatz’s recognition that reality is frequently crafted for individuals by mediating forces; in fact, this journal exists only as a response to popularly propagated myths which obfuscate or invent (socially construct) “truths” about race and other related issues. If these myths were not “the truth” to the masses of the American public, we in the TOQ community would have little to discuss. Yet Vatz goes further in his theory of social construction, deferentially quoting American political scientist Murray Edelman: “language does not mirror an objective ‘reality’ but rather creates it by organizing meaningful perceptions abstracted from a complex, bewildering world.”¹⁰ This dismissal of any “objective reality” is the core of strong social construction theory.

In quoting, Edelman, Vatz aligns himself with an entire tradition of postmodern thinkers from this era – Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty are among the most notable – who endorse a position of more or less total social construction: they posit a view of the world – or, more accurately, a view of six and a half billion worlds – that exist only in the minds of their beholders. According to them, a person’s linguistic experience constructs for him an unstable and indescribable reality that will inevitably differ from that of all other individuals, each of whom possess his own little symbolic reality. According to this postmodernists, we are therefore only able to use language as a system of symbols that problematically communicate the concepts between our quite incompatible individuals worlds. So to them and their twenty-first century acolytes, race, as an utterance, is meaningless, insomuch as “meaning” implies a social negotiation of fluid, faultless understanding. This extreme brand of social constructionism departs notably from the one suggested by Hermogenes in the Cratylus, and it is one which, in my opinion, fails to realistically address the complex relationship between material reality and social interaction.

Today many others also find this “strong” social constructionism untenable. In the introduction to his The Construction of Social Reality, philosopher John Searle addresses the theories of the “strong” constructionists: “We live in exactly one world, not two or three or seventeen … But the existence of phenomena which are not in any obvious way physical or chemical gives rise to puzzlement.”¹¹ To Searle, language does prevent people from living on the same planet. There is room within social construction theory for a realist vision of a shared world, and though language complicates the matter, it does not totally imprison us isolated within its grasp.

Searle distinguishes between things that can be considered socially constructed and those that cannot. He explains that there is a difference between those two types of reality: first, there is the reality in which the value of a $5 bill is socially constructed, and second and there is the reality that hydrogen atoms have one electron.¹² Our society has constructed a system of exchange in which $5 bills, despite their intrinsic worthlessness, are accepted as legal tender and are differentiated from lesser and greater bills only by the ink patterns printed upon them (to Searle, an “institutional” or “social” fact¹³). On the other hand, that hydrogen atoms have one electron is an empirical fact (or a “brute” fact) that would still exist without human observation or agreement.¹⁴

After exploring the significance of these differences, Searle commends many twentieth-century sociologists for attempting to solve the problems of social construction, but suggests that their research perspective was restricted; as scientists, they were unequipped to tackle the problems posed by language and negotiated, contextually constructed meaning. Their tradition of inquiry, while certainly intertwined with that of the humanities, was not accustomed to exploring the relationship between words, signification, and producers of discourse. While they could theorize about the nature of truth and the effects of individual constructs, their disciplinary research narratives did not include Plato, Leibniz, Kant, and the other western philosophers who have contributed over the centuries to our understanding of reality. And if we, as modern day race theorists, are truly interested in understanding the social construction of race, we would be remiss to ignore such a rich tradition.

To constructionists of the above “soft” variety, truth is largely social: often it can only be discovered through discourse, through interaction with other people. For example: we learned that Barack Obama was elected president not by counting votes ourselves, but by watching post-election television coverage. We “know” we has elected only in a very indirect and trusting way; i.e., we “know” it because other people told us so. It is the exact same process by which our peers come to “know” that Nobel Laurete Menachim Begin was a man of peace and that, without George Washington Carver, we certainly wouldn’t have peanut butter today. These “truths” are socially derived, and, according to social constructionists, this process by which we negotiate truth can be applied not only to mass mediated reality, but also to local and more individualized realms of discourse: when we talk with friends, listen to lectures, and read novels, articles, and poetry. They argue that in every social situation there is, to a certain degree, an amount of social construction and negotiation of meaning and reality.

Conclusion

So how does all of this help us, as theorists of race? We can agree, I argue, that to a certain degree race is a social construct. If we accept Searle’s distinction, we can consider race both a brute and a social fact. On at least one level, it is a set of social conventions, including fashion, art, dialects, mannerisms, and even occupations and pastimes. It can be performed in certain cases, such as the one cited by Haney Lopez. (And I have to point out that we’ve all bemoaned the sight of those sixteen-year-old white kids at the mall who “talk,” “dress,” or “act black,” not to mention the respectable blacks among us who, as we insist, “act white.”) In addition, I posit it will benefit us to develop a more critical understanding of how society does in fact construct race in cultural artifacts, political discourse, and news reporting, for our people are frequently the victims of a vicious perpetuation of negative stereotypes – what some might call the social construction of the white race.

Moreover, we must recognize that, even among ourselves – even as a community with common goals and values – we will disagree about the boundaries of race and the definition of whiteness. We as individuals do not scientifically test people we meet in order to judge whether or not they are white. We make that decision based upon how we individually define whiteness, and that definition doesn’t come from some universally understood essence or an acknowledged set of criteria. It comes from our social interactions with other humans, from our contrastive experiences with whites and non-whites, which have led us to our own subjective and socially constructed definitions of whiteness.

Let us remember that, when Searle and other modern proponents of social construction developed their theories, they were standing on the shoulders of giants – the giants, in fact, of the entire western tradition. So regardless of what I might think of the excesses of strong social constructionism and its lingering, though dissipating, impact upon humanistic thought today, I believe it will be beneficial for our community to consider the traditions from which these theories evolved. I believe it will be beneficial for us to adopt a rational and well-defined theory of socially constructed race, alongside our traditional theories of biological race, in order to come to a comprehensive definition of who we are, what we stand for, and what we want to preserve.

The appropriate way to rebut Haney Lopez and his humanist colleagues is not to compare skull sizes, establish ancestral migration patterns, or cite criminal statistics (regardless of whatever undeniable merit these projects do possess). Instead, we should consider (1) how certain institutions have manipulated negative social constructs in their attempts to marginalize entire classes of academic research and pathologize certain behaviors and concepts among our people; (2) how revisiting our people’s traditional mores, ideals, and worldviews can help us reconstruct an ideal of who we are and what we want as a people; and, perhaps most importantly, (3) how our circles’ traditional aversion to modern theories of social construction impedes our ability to participate in these reasonable discussions of the issue which we, as readers of and contributors to The Occidental Quarterly, find most essential: race.

John Howard is the pen name of an American author and critic.

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¹ Ian F. Haney Lopez, “The Social Construction of Race,” in Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, ed. Richard Del Gado and Jean Stefancic (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000(, 163-75.
² To put it crassly: the use of the word “race” has different connotations in the bleachers at the Daytona 500 than it does in Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), though most TOQ readers will likely find both uses to be of equal intellectual consequence. Simply put, the term “race” derives its significance from the context in which it is written, spoken, read, or heard, and from its relationship to the chain of signifiers that precede and follow it. See Kenneth Burke’s discussion of “contextual definition” in A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 24-26.
³ Haney Lopez, “The Social Construction of Race,” 165.
⁴ Haney Lopez, “The Social Construction of Race,” 166
⁵ Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1994), 56.
⁶ Anthony Hilton and Kevin MacDonald, Race as a social construct – No – and Yes!” The Occidental Observer, December, 9, 2008.
⁷ Plato, “Cratylus,” The Collected Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 474.
^8
9 Richard E. Vatz, “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 6 (1973): 156-57.
¹⁰ Murray Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action (Chicago: Markham, 1971), 33-34.
¹¹ John Searle, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1995), xi.
¹² Searle, The Social Construction of Reality, 2.
¹³ John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 50-53.
¹⁴ Searle, The Social Construction of Reality, 190-94.

The Roots of Biohistory

The intellectual roots of biohistory go back to the development of evolutionary biology in the late nineteenth century. Its antecedents can be found in human geography, the Annales School, environmental history, and sociobiology. Traditional nineteenth-century historiography was concerned chiefly with the doings of kings, popes, and generals. But by the early twentieth century, evolutionary theory was influencing the work of many historians, geographers, and social scientists. In 1901 the president of the American Historical Association, Charles Francis Adams (brother of Henry who also served as president of the AHA), declared that knowledge of Darwin’s theory “was the dividing line between us [contemporary historians] and the historians of the old school.”² Geographers such as Ellsworth Huntington developed ideas on racial and environmental determinism that were later dismissed but never disproved.³ A year after Huntington published Civilization and Climate, Madison Grant came out with his racial history of Europe.⁴ Yet, in the following years the nascent field of biohistory was strangled in the cradle by Boasian anthropology and other intellectual and political forces such as the Frankfurt School.⁵

One anti-liberal counterforce was the Annales School, developed in France during the interwar years. Led by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, the Annalistes sought to write what they termed  ”total history.”⁶ To accomplish this they adopted an interdisciplinary approach that incorporated geography and the social and physical sciences into their work. This was especially true for Fernand Braudel, a student of Febvre, who led the second generation of Annalistes after the war. Braudel believed it was necessary for historians to consider humans as living organisms, and not to lose sight of “the biological reality of man.”⁷

Beginning in the 1970s and 80s environmental history grew into a major subfield within the discipline. This helped place historical man within the context of the natural world, and established the environment, both natural and man-made, as an agent of history. At first glance it might appear that environmental historians would likely fall on the environmental side of the environment versus heredity debate. Some have, such as Jared Diamond discussed below. But because the environment is one large factor in the evolutionary equation, it is logical for environmental historians to be receptive to Darwinian theory. As Alfred Crosby, the dean of American environmental historians puts it, “The ideology of environmental history is, at its root, biological.”⁸ Still, many historians worry about the dreaded label of “biological determinism.” In January, 2001 Edward O. Wilson, founder of sociobiology, addressed the 115th annual conference of the American Historical Association in Boston. He caused quite a stir when he predicted that the next generation of historians would use biological science to answer many of history’s most important questions.⁹

Exactly 100 years (1901-2001) separate the pronouncements of Adams and Wilson, both predicted that biology would revolutionize the study of history. Yet progress has been slow. It will come as no surprise to readers of this journal that the reluctance of historians to challenge the ideological orthodoxy of egalitarianism has been an obstacle to integrating biology, especially the study of human variation, into historiography.

Biohistory Without Race

Most of the historians who have incorporated biology into their work have also striven to separate the concept of race from the idea of humans as biological entities. One such contortionist is Robert McElvaine, a professor of history at Millsap College.¹⁰ According to McElvaine, “biohistory seeks to illuminate aspects of history through a better understanding of human nature – the fundamental traits and predispositions that all humans share and that make us alike.”¹¹ McElvaine limits his consideration to characteristics that all people share. But are not differences at least as interesting and relevant as similarities? If a historian wrote an economic history of the world he might begin by noting characteristics that all economic systems share, but surely this would only serve as a point of departure for a study of how the systems differentiate themselves.

Another truncated version of biohistory can be seen in the work of Jared Diamond. Diamond, a Jewish academic non-historian, writes about historic agency and is critical of academic historiography. His criticism is justified to the extent that many academic historians neglect causation in their research.  In Guns, Germs, and Steel Diamond sets out an egalitarian explanation for Western ascendancy based on environmental determinism.¹² He is concerned that the racist theories that explain Western dominance, though officially discredited, retain their hold of the popular imagination, so that “Westerners continue to accept racist explanations, privately or subconsciously.”¹³ Diamond finds such explanations “loathsome,” but in the past he was unable to offer a satisfactory rebuttal. “Until we have some convincing, detailed, agreed-upon explanation for the broad patterns of history, most people will continue to suspect that the racist biological explanation is correct after all. That seems to me the strongest argument for writing this book.”¹⁴ Having presented his arguments, Diamond concludes Guns, Germs, and Steel with a suggestion for a major change in historiographic methodology. He calls for the development of “human history as a science, on par with acknowledged historical sciences such as astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology.”¹⁵

Privately, many academic historians bristle at Diamond’s criticism that their discipline lacks scientific rigor; others dismiss his comments as those of a dilettante who does not understand their field. He is, however, not so easily ignored. His two most recent books on environmental biohistory have become bestsellers. They are advertised in historical journals and sold at history conferences. He is now a public intellectual interviewed on NPR and the like. Ironically, the science that Diamond urges historians to embrace could end up undermining his race-denying ideology.

In his second book, Collapse,¹⁶ Diamond devotes several chapters to the rise and fall of the Greenland Norse, Scandinavians who colonized the island in the late tenth century. For half a millennium they eked out a living on that remote outpost of Western civilization. By the time of Columbus’s voyages the Greenland Norse had vanished. There is no written record of what happened to them, but historians and archaeologists agree that the Little Ice Age (circa 1300-1750) played a role in their demise. Greenland was settled during the Medieval Warm Period (800-1250). The Norse built an economy based on herding, hunting, and trade principally with Iceland and Norway. Once the climate grew colder, raising livestock was no longer possible, and ice choked the shipping lanes, hampering trade. The Norse settlements slowly died out and were replaced by Inuit people (Eskimos). Diamond writes that if the Norse had been flexible enough to adopt the culture of the Inuit, including a diet of fish plus sea mammals, they could have survived. More than anything else, it was the stubborn refusal of the Norse to abandon herding that led to their downfall. If the Norse had integrated physically and culturally with the Inuit, as Diamond proposed, they would have, of course, ceased to be Norse. Apart from this obvious fact, there are strong doubts that such a path was open to them.

The Relevance of Race

Environmental historians now realize that the demographic expansions and contractions of peoples throughout history have often been shaped by biological and environmental factors.¹⁷ If Diamond had consulted Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism before writing Collapse he might have come to a different conclusion about the Greenland Norse. Crosby coins the term neo-Europeans to describe European-descended peoples who settled outside their Old World homelands. He suggests that neo-Europeans could not demographically dominate new territory unless and until they were able to modify the physical environment to meet their bio-cultural requirements. To thrive, neo-Europeans needed to establish a mixed agricultural regime. To survive, they needed to at least provide for their domesticated animals. Crosby writes: “Neo-Europeans were descendants, culturally and often genetically, of Indo-Europeans . . . a people who were practicing mixed farming with a heavy emphasis on herding 4500 years before Columbus.¹⁸ From the beginning Indo-European societies have been pastoral. It is probable that after 2000 generations, European societies could not meet their nutritional needs without their domestic animals.¹⁹ In an earlier book, Crosby noted that even impoverished Irish peasant needed “a bit of milk,” in addition to potatoes, “to keep a family hearty.”²⁰

Crosby’s contention that Europeans needed their animals to survive is in line with the discovery of the lactose tolerance mutation that permits most Europeans to digest milk as adults, unlike most Asians, Africans, and Amerindians. The mutation arose at approximately the same time that Indo-European culture began on the steppes of southeastern Europe. This is an example of what sociobiologists call gene/culture co-evolution. The availability of dairy products coupled with limited alternative sources of nutrition evolved into the ability to digest milk throughout life. Given the lack of variety in the Greenland Norse diet, dairy products might have become a nutritional imperative. By not even considering the possibility that the Norse could not meet their nutritional requirements without domestic animals, Diamond reveals an analytical blind spot produced by his rigidly egalitarian ideology. Only by ignoring genetic differences between ethnies could Diamond have advocated that the Norse adopt the Inuit’s dairy-free diet.

So what became of the Greenland Norse? It is unlikely that they simply starved to death. It is probable that as conditions deteriorated, the younger and more energetic Norse emigrated back to Iceland and Norway, and the last of the old and decrepit remnant population died out. About 200 years after they abandoned the island, the Norse returned in the form of Danish colonizers. Thus the lesson of the Greenland Norse is not the one Diamond would have us learn (i.e., the benefits of racial/cultural assimilation), but rather that in times of extreme social stress a strategic retreat and in-gathering could be the best course for survival.²¹

Race and Slavery in the Americas

Alfred Crosby’s work is one example of how genetically-linked biohistory has, over the last several decades, trickled into mainstream historiography. There are other examples.  Immunity and resistance to diseases have also been a major topic in biohistory. These played a large role in the establishment of African slavery in America. Historians have been particularly interested in how chattel slavery became established in the British colonies many centuries after the institution had died out in the home isles.

During the early seventeenth century the English began colonizing the Caribbean and southern North American mainland. Initially the planters used English and Irish indentured labor on their estates. These laborers were not free, but neither were they chattel slaves. For example, during the 1630s pioneer planter Sir Henry Colt used English laborers to establish his plantations in St. Christopher (now St. Kitts). In 1631 he wrote home requesting “forty more servants” to expand his fields.²² Presumably, if he wanted more English laborers, the ones already present were at least adequate to the task of clearing tropical forests for planting – heavy labor in broiling heat. Yet within fifty years of Colt’s letter, the labor force of St. Christopher had been transformed from white to black. In part this was due to a relative scarcity of white labor and the availability of black slaves.²³ There were also, however, biological factors involved in this change.

When Europeans conquered and settled the New World, they found lands rich in resources with relatively low population densities.²⁴ Great wealth could be produced if labor could be found. In tropical and subtropical regions, the laborers were often African slaves. Explanations for this choice have changed over time. In the seventeenth century, Europeans considered Negroes as heathen savages in need of Christian civilization and especially suited for menial labor. By the twentieth century, Marxist historians saw Europeans as particularly bigoted and greedy people who exploited vulnerable Africans. This view was implicit in Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution, a history of American slavery written at the height of the “race is only skin-deep” mindset. According to Stamp, “Negroes are, after all, only white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less.”²⁵ Less than a decade after Stampp’s Peculiar Institution historian Philip Curtain documented that epidemiological factors were involved in selection of African slave labor.²⁶ By the 1980s at least some historians recognized that the physiological, epidemiological, and nutritional characteristics of blacks from West Africa gave them an adaptive advantage as laborers in the tropics. In a considerable shift from Stampp’s pronouncement African American historian Kenneth Kiple argued that, “Blacks and whites in fact do differ innately in many important respects,” and that scientifically, “race continues to be a viable concept.”²⁷

It is now widely accepted that physical characteristics such as dark skin, large numbers of sweat glands, and other “Negroid traits” are adaptations for physical activity in hot, humid, and sunny environments.²⁸ In addition, disease inexorably selected the black for labor in the tropics.”²⁹ The two main pathogens peculiar to the Old South were yellow fever and falciparum malaria. Two lesser afflictions were yaws and hookworms. These infections are of African origin and disproportionately affected Europeans and Amerindians.³⁰ Thus, once African slaves and African diseases had been introduced into the Americas, the latter reinforced the decision to use the former.

Another racial factor that favored the use of African slaves was their lower nutritional requirements. Domestic livestock usually does not thrive in the tropics. This is particularly true for dairy cattle.³¹ This is of little consequence for people of West African descent because after childhood they lack the ability to digest milk due to lactose intolerance.³² In fact, West Africans have traditionally subsisted on a diet very low in protein. Thus, “even the miserable diet of slaves in the Americas was superior to (or at least more protein ladden  than) that of their African cousins.”³³ The Africans’ ability to survive on a low-protein diet devoid of dairy products helped them to subsist where indentured white laborers could not. In time, “plantation America became an extension of Africa’s disease and nutritional environments.”³⁴ Because West Africa is “the home of man’s most dangerous diseases and one of the world’s most nutritionally impoverished areas,” West Africans had the physical adaptations to survive the searing heat along with the “nutritional and epidemiological rigors awaiting them” on American plantations.³⁵

In summary, the process that established African slavery in English-American colonies began with a shortage of white labor that led some planters to import African slaves. These slaves brought with them African diseases that had a disproportionate impact on whites and Indians who had not been previously exposed to them. The West African labor was also able to subsist with less food and clothing than white laborers. In addition, white laborers were loath to toil alongside black slaves. Whites became rebellious and unproductive in mixed labor gangs. Thus, once some planters made the decision to import black labor, environmental, genetic, cultural, and economic factors led to the replacement of whites with blacks as field laborers on English colonial plantations.

Prospects for Biohistory

The agency of genetically based epidemiological, nutritional, and other physiological characteristics of ethnies has long been at least partially, though reluctantly, accepted by mainstream historiography. But what about psychological characteristics, including intelligence? In Understanding Human History Michael Hart interprets the past in terms of just these characteristics.³⁶ His work has not yet attracted much attention, much less acceptance, from academic historians. But though academic historians have avoided the issue of average group intelligence, a recent book by Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms, suggests that differences in genetically-based behavior can explain the Industrial Revolution that helped increase the knowledge, wealth, and power of the West.³⁷

For Clark, a Scottish-born professor of economics at the University of California, Davis, the Industrial Revolution was the watershed event in human history. All pre-industrial societies were caught in a Malthusian trap in which any gain in productive capacity led to an increase in population that negated the increase in wealth. So while the human population increased, the standard of living for the majority, measured by such indicators as the number of calories consumed, did not rise. With the coming of industrialization, productivity rose much faster than population, thus raising the standard of living for nearly everyone in society. Interestingly, in his preface Clark compares his book to Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Both are big histories that seek to explain the ascendancy of the West (referred to by Clark and others as the “Great Divergence”). While asking somewhat similar questions, Clark and Diamond arrive at very different answers. In contrast to Diamond’s environmental/geographical explanation, Clark brings social Darwinism into the twenty-first century with the use of cliometrics.³⁸

Historians have long questioned why the Industrial Revolution began when and where it did: late eighteenth- and early nineteenth century England. Clark believes that centuries of economic and political stability as well as slow population growth coupled whit “the extraordinary fecundity of the rich and economically successful” led to “the embedding of bourgeois values into the culture and perhaps even the genetics of England.”³⁹ In relatively stable and peacefully pre-industrial England the hardworking and educated tended to prosper and have large families. Economic opportunities, however, were so limited that most children of the wealthy were downwardly mobile. As a result they extended their cultural and genetic traits into the lower classes. The establishment of a bourgeois society in England is another example of gene/culture co-evolution. In Early Modern England the “characteristics of the population were changing through Darwinian selection.” The result was that “middle-class culture spread throughout society through biological mechanisms.”⁴⁰ While Clark does not claim that the English were more intelligent than other peoples, he does not believe that genetically-based values and behaviors were at the heart of the Industrial Revolution and Western ascendancy. In the popular mind evolution is something that occurred in the distant past, took millennia to complete, and was accomplished by the forces of nature. Clark’s research points out that human evolution has continued to occur during historic times, that significant change can take centuries rather than eons, and evolution can be driven by the cultural as well as the natural environment.

In The 10,000 Year Explosion, University of Utah anthropologists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending have adapted some of Clark’s ideas to a global context, and a timeline that spans the entire history of Homo sapiens.⁴¹ The authors find that various population groups have evolved genetic differences during historical time. Some of these genetic differences have given competitive advantages to the groups that possess them. Thus human “biological change has been a key factor driving history.”⁴² Perhaps Cochran and Harpending’s most interesting thesis is that rather than ending human evolution, modern civilization has actually quickened its pace.

Concepts such as “social Darwinism” and “biological determinism” have been used to censure those who have applied biological theories to history and the social sciences. For decades hostility from the Left has discouraged, obstructed, or obscured scholarly inquiry into what we now call biohistory. Yet with the work of scholars such as Clark, Cochran, and Harpending we may finally be seeing the advances in historiography predicted by Adams and Wilson. It is becoming increasingly clear that the path to greater understanding of our past and present must include the study of human biological diversity.

Eric Paulson holds a doctorate in history. He writes from the upper Midwest.

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¹ A more formal definition of biohistory is: “An approach to human ecology which stresses the interplay between biophysical and cultural processes. Its starting point is the study of the history of life on earth; and the basic principles of evolution, ecology, and physiology, and the sensitivities of humans, the emergence of the human aptitude for culture, and its biological significance. It is particularly concerned with the interplay between cultural processes and biophysical systems such as ecosystems and human populations.” Susan Mayhew, “Biohistory,” A Dictionary of Geography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 56.

² Charles Francis Adams, “The Sifted Grain and the Grain Sifters,” American Historical Review 6 (1901), 199.

³ Ellsworth Huntington, Civilization and Climate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1915). One of Huntington’s theories was that over time tropical and subtropical climes have an enervating effect on those he called “Teutons.”

⁴ Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916).

⁵ “The triumph of the Boasian school of anthropology over Darwinism in the early years of the 20th century was a watershed event in intellectual history of the West – in effect more or less obliterating what had been a thriving Darwinian intellectual milieu.” Kevin MacDonald, “Ben Stein’s Expelled: Was Darwinism a Necessary Condition for the Holocaust?,” The Occidental Observer, December 1, 2008, http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-BenStein.html.

⁶ Bloch was a Jew who many have had ambivalent feelings about his co-religionists. Many considered him a French patriot. Bloch fled to Vichy territory in 1940 where, as a noted scholar, he continued to teach unmolested. He and his family had opportunities to relocate both to the United States and the French West Indies. He decided to stay in France and in 1943 joined the underground. In 1944 he was captured by the Germans and shot.

⁷ Fernand Braudel, On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 105-6. Braudel also participated in World War II. With the fall of France in 1940 Braudel, then a French army officer, became a prisoner of war and spent five years in German captivity. During this time, without notes or reference materials, he wrote his dissertation on the Mediterranean region.

⁸ Alfred W. Crosby, “The Past and Present of Environmental History,” American Historical Review 100 (1995), 1189.

⁹ Gareth Cook, “Wilson Rattles Historians with ‘Bio-History’ Theories,” Boston Globe, January 16, 2001, F3.

¹⁰ McElvaine’s major contribution to biohistory is Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History (New York: McGraw Hill, 2001), a world history from a feminist perspective.

¹¹ Robert S. McElvaine, “The Relevance of Biohistory,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 49, October 18, 2002, B11.

¹² Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1997).

¹³ Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 19.

¹⁴ Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 25.

¹⁵ Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 408.

¹⁶ Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking-Penguin, 2005).

¹⁷ For a global study see Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). For a case study of the same phenomenon in New England see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).

¹⁸ Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 172.

¹⁹ Ward H. Goodenough, “The Evolution of Pastoralism and Indo-European Origins,” George Cardona, Henry Hoenigswald, and Alfred Senn, eds., Indo-Europeans and Indo-European Origins (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970), 252-65.

²⁰ Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003), 183.

²¹ Diamond’s conclusions about the Greenland Norse echo the arguments of Thomas McGovern who wrote, “We can criticize the Norse for maintaining a conservative, stratified, Eurocentric outlook . . . . [that chose] the preservation of ethnic purity at the expense of survival.” “The Demise of Norse Greenland,” in William Fitzhugh and Elisabeth Ward, eds., Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga) Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), 338.

²² Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 9. Although he does not emphasize biological factors, Dunn documents the switch from white laborers to black slaves in the English Caribbean.

²³ The agricultural areas of West Africa had a slave-based economy and an extensive slave trade that predated European exploration. Beginning in the fifteenth century, Europeans plugged into this African slave trade. See John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

²⁴ The number of pre-contact Amerindians is in dispute. Whatever that number, the population was greatly reduced by the introduction of Old World diseases into the Americas.

²⁵ Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), vii.

²⁶ Philip D. Curtin, “Epidemiology and the Slave Trade,” Political Science Quarterly 82 (1967): 190-216. For centuries it was known that blacks were less susceptible to certain diseases than whites. The reason for this could not be explained until the advent of modern medicine and genetics.

²⁷ Kenneth F. Kiple and Virginia Himmelsteib King, Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora: Diet Disease, and Racism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), xii, xiv.

²⁸ Kiple, Another Dimension, 5.

²⁹ Kenneth F. Kiple, The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (Cambridge University Press, 1984), 4.

³⁰ Albert E. Cowdrey, This Land, The South: An Environmental History, rev. ed. (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), 83. Kiple, Caribbean Slave, 7.

³¹ Cowdrey, This Land, This South, 77.

³² “[A] high frequency of lactose intolerance . . . characterizes West Africans and their descendants, leaving them unable to consume much milk” – Kiple, Another Dimension, 11.

³³ Kiple, The Caribbean Slave, 23.

³⁴ Kenneth Kiple, “A Survey of Recent Literature on the Biological Past of the Black,” in Kenneth Kiple, ed., The African Exchange: Toward a Biological History of Black People (Durham: Duke University Press, 1988), 8.

³⁵ Kiple, The Caribbean Slave, 5.

³⁶ Michael Hart, Understanding Human History: An Analysis Including the Effects of Geography and Differential Evolution (Augusta, GA.: Washington Summit Publishers, 2007) was reviewed in TOQ vol.7, no.4.

³⁷ Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

³⁸ After making a passing criticism of social Darwinism, Clark goes on to write that “Darwin’s insight that as long as population was regulated by Malthusian mechanisms, mankind would be subject to natural selection was profoundly correct” (A Farewell to Alms, 122). Cliometrics, broadly defined, is the use of statistics in historical research.

³⁹ Clark, A Farewell to Alms, 11.

⁴⁰ Clark, A Farewell to Alms, 259.

⁴¹ Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 2009). Among other findings, Cochran and Harpending supply evidence supporting Crosby’s belief, expressed 25 years earlier, that domestic livestock especially dairying, playing an integral role in Indo-European expansion.

⁴² Cochran and Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion, 67.

Simon Downer is a thug. He plunged a knife into the stomach of a girlfriend and got six years in prison. Whilst there he met another woman, Tracey, a single mother in her late 30s.

Tracey fell head over heels in love, married the violent criminal on his release and brought him home to live with her 8-year-old daughter. The married couple were very happy together.

Until they had an argument one night, just three months after their marriage. Simon Downer shoved aside his stepdaughter, stabbed his new wife fatally in the heart telling her “that’s what happens if you push it with me.”

Most women would not have married the thug. Even so, there has been a spate of reports in recent times of women, sometimes quite respectable professional women, choosing to have relationships with violent criminals.

One thing this tells us is that the ruling idea of human nature in Western societies is mistaken. John Kekes describes this ruling idea as follows:

The view of human nature at the core of the liberal faith is thus that human beings are by their nature free, equal, rational, and morally good.

If you accept this view of human nature as adequate, then you will think it not only possible but desirable to leave each individual to arrive at their own moral view. The ideal will be a society of free, equal and morally elevated individuals, untouched by any external restraints on their choices.

But the liberal view of human nature hasn’t brought us closer to a society of independent, high-minded gentlemen and women who freely, and therefore most virtuously, choose to discipline their lives to some morally elevated purpose.

Look what happens, for instance, when the “no rules” principle is applied to women like Tracey Downer. Her sexuality is liberated from the influence of traditional morals, which then unleashes a destructive attraction to violent, dangerous men. The result is disastrous.

The problem is that we are not equal in our natures. Not everyone has the same level of moral conscience, prudence and self-discipline. Nor are we entirely rational in our natures. We are moved too by passions and loves, which for both better and worse define the human experience in important ways.

Liberals worry that if a society sets a moral standard, or if we are influenced by the culture we live in to be good, that we are acting like automatons, and losing the virtue of freely choosing the good. A liberal wants to feel morally elevated because of his own autonomous character.

I think this fear is mistaken. There will always be the possibility of acting badly, no matter how great the influence of society. Our moral free will to choose for the better or the worse will always be there. All that a society can do is to bolster the voice of moral conscience and encourage prudence.

Second, it can be argued that it’s the liberal view which undercuts the need for character and moral will. After all, if people are naturally and equally good, then doing the good will come easily. It’s only if you think that human nature is fallen, with each individual struggling to follow the better part of his nature, that our acts of goodness become achievements of character.

From Oz Conservative, February 24, 2010

Original news article.

Author’s Note: The following excerpt is from a longer, footnoted article titled “Freedom’s Racial Imperative: A Heideggerian Argument for the Self-Assertion of Peoples of European Descent” that appeared in the fall 2006 issue of The Occidental Quarterly. Minor changes have been made for the sake of this format. Thanks to Dave Cooper for the idea.

Since the Cold War’s end, Heidegger has been the target of an on-going campaign of stigmatization and quarantine, for it’s now clear that he was not only an ardent supporter of the National Revolution of 1933, but a convinced (though idiosyncratic) National Socialist.

Surprisingly, though, the inquisitors deconstructing the suspect forces animating Heidegger’s thought stress that there’s “no spoor of biological racism” (George Steiner) in his published works.

It is, in fact, a matter of record that Heidegger opposed what Julius Evola and Francis Parker Yockey, along with Leon Trotsky, called the “zoological materialism” associated with “Nazi racism.”

Like the Italian and American prophets of Europe’s imperium, Heidegger believed the philistine, positivist, even liberal modernist character of so-called “scientific racism” was symptomatic of all the Conservative Revolution of the 1920s (of which National Socialism was an offshoot) had fought against.

Is it contradictory, then, to argue that the Heideggerian concept of freedom has a racial imperative?

Against a good deal of contemporary commentary, it must be insisted that Heidegger’s “anti-biologism” was not that of a nationalist indifferent to race, but rather that of one who subsumed the nation’s spiritual and demographic aspects within a single notion of being — a notion that may have privileged the former at the latter’s expense, but nevertheless one that presupposed the spirit’s manifestation within a specific biocultural community or Volk.

Emphasizing the history, destiny, and line of descent that makes a people a nation, the nationalism latent in Heidegger’s thought is reminiscent of what Walker Connor calls “nationalism in its pristine sense,” in that it designates “a people who believe they are ancestrally [i.e., biologically] related.”

Though a man’s body is subjectable to a purely biological analysis, Heidegger argues that it is never simply biological, but “something essentially other than an animal organism.”

This “other” belongs to man’s Dasein [i.e., to his quality as a situated expression of Being in a particular world at a particular moment in time] and thus has “a fundamentally different way of Being to that of nature.”

“Living, our body bodies forth as a wave in the stream of chaos — it is what comes to know, grasp, and take over the world.”

Biology in this way enters history and becomes historically significant.

Man’s body as such is not equivalent to a plant or animal organism, but part of man’s being-in-the-world, situated in that web of meanings, relationships, and histories which make up his world and which no science can successfully or adequately reduce to an empirical representation or valuation.

For the anti-scientistic Heidegger, the essence of a nation (or Volk) lies not in genetics, but in the destiny born of its collective experience of Being and time — or what in Contributions to Philosophy
he describes as that belongingness to a god who commands a people to go beyond itself to become the being inscribed in its destiny.

A people’s essence lies thus less in its organic manifestations (life) than in the being that makes it what it is (living): It lies in the being that forges blood and spirit into an identity defined by a specific destiny.

A purely biological construal, by contrast, reduces a “race” of men to one of Descartes’ abstract, becomingless objects — to something understandable factually or empirically, as if human races were analogous to those of the lower life forms.

Heidegger doesn’t say so explicitly, but the turn of his thought suggests that though a people’s blood may be basic to its biological formation, its determinants as a people, even genetically, reside elsewhere, outside of biology, in that Being whose inexplicable force molds a body of kindred human beings into a destining entity.

To contemporize a bit, one might say that for Heidegger man’s biological constitution (heredity) disposes him to certain cultural and other potentialities, but the latter are never mere offshoots of nature.

History, he argues, is not biology and culture is not applied zoology — except to a scientistic consciousness oblivious to all that distinguishes man from animal.

Edward Burne-Jones, "The Dream of Lancelot"

An analogy here might help.  One wouldn’t claim the essence of Breker’s The Torchbearer or Burne-Jones’ Dream of Lancelot is the material from which it was sculpted or painted.

The essence of the German Volk — or any of Europe’s nations — is likewise not the DNA constituent of its genotype.

Instead, it is the spirit animating it, making it a people with a history, an origin, and a destiny.

In compelling it to experience the world in a way all its own, this spirit is not the cultural superstructure familiar to the anthropologist or sociologist, but something akin to “the power that comes from preserving at the most profound level the forces that are rooted in the soil and blood of a Volk, the power to arouse most inwardly and to shake most extensively the Volk’s existence.”

It is this spirit that nourishes the soul of a people and infuses its blood with a will to destiny.

Heidegger’s ontological defense of European man may therefore reject the scientific racism of bourgeois materialism, with its abstract, deracinated concept of human being, but he’s hardly indifferent to Europe’s racial heritage, for though emphasizing a Volk’s spiritual or destining character, he also sees that this entails a specific bodily expression of being.

In the historical world of European man, human biology and human being are indeed one, with the biological, the ontic, subsumed to the ontological realm of self-assertion — like the material subsumed in the artist’s vision.

Together, they comprise the Dasein of man and Volk, the blood and heritage of a people. For like the “and” in Being and Time, the “and” in “blood and heritage” is not additive but unitary.  The two differ as terms, standing for different things, but there’s no heritage outside a specific blood group and no blood group without a heritage.

“Everything merely ‘organic’ is foreign to the law of history, as foreign as what is ‘logical’ in reason.”

Arno Breker, "The Great Torchbearer"

Human biology is consequently more ontological than zoological, more a product of Being than a facet of nature.

This is evident in such terms as “descent,” “lineage,” “heritage” — along with related notions of “breeding,” “upbringing,” “development,” “education,” “refinement,” and “culture” — terms evoking not animal instinct or even human consciousness, but rather a specific biocultural transmission of existence.

A people, in this Heideggerian sense, is not an autonomous, self-contained, ahistorical biological object, it’s not even specifically a gene pool, but a way of Being whose origin, history, and particular self-understanding is essential to what it is — even physiologically.

In order not to be misunderstood, let me stress that I’m not challenging the importance or even the primordiality of race as a zoological category, but rather subordinating our understanding of a race’s destining identity to philosophy’s larger ontological appreciation of its significance.

What Heidegger calls the “naturalist conception of human being” (i.e., the purely biological understanding of human race) has been integral to both liberal modernity and the history of the white man’s decline.

The roots of this conception are admittedly ancient.  Aristotle was the first to see man as a special kind of animal — the rational animal (zoon logikon). With the 18th-century Enlightenment and the advent of liberal modernity, when “reason attained its full metaphysical rank,” this “humanist” concept became hegemonic, introducing an era which confused man, a being-outside-himself, with something “present-at-hand” (i.e., with the decontextualized substance of a quantifying science indifferent to a being’s specific qualities).

Arno Breker, "Torchbearer"

As Being in this scientistic conceptualization withdraws from human being, the latter is depleted, reduced to a one-dimensional ontology fit for an animal that moves about on all fours — not for an upright assertion of Being capable of producing Homer, the Greek temples, or the invincible Hoplites.

It’s pertinent here to point out that “scientific racism,” especially its Darwinian distillation, originated as an offshoot of liberal thought and that the zoological “metaphysics” of this racism (in understanding human existence at the animal level) played a not insignificant role in getting us into the predicament that threatens us today.

In this sense, it seems hardly coincidental that the liberals’ understanding of the “highest animal” excludes any understanding that humans differ from animals not just in their reason or consciousness, but in their caring for the Being of their being.

Relatedly, natural science, the inspiration for scientific racism, treats the body abstractly, objectifying, decontextualizing, and uprooting it from human being — for the sake of abstraction and objectification.

Against the naturalist conception, Heidegger holds that the human body is not simply a vehicle of drives and instincts, but something linked to the human assertion of Being.

Science may have the power to manipulate the world’s physical properties, but for Heidegger it ignores man’s “peculiar transposedness into the encompassing contextual ring of living beings.”  It consequently misses what is most distinct and essential to him.

Accordingly, the Dasein of a Volk, like that of an individual, is not manifested in biology (at least not directly), but rather in the decisions it makes and the goals it sets for itself.

How it exists in the world in which it is thrown, how it appropriates the past it is bequeathed, the possibilities it pursues as it approaches the future, the call of destiny it heeds, the death it inevitably faces — these are what make a Volk what it is.

There is, moreover, nothing arbitrary or subjective in this.  Dasein is not only being-there, but being-with (Mitsein). For the most radical individualization of Dasein is always situated within a larger collective context — of history and culture, to be sure, but also of kin, community, and Volk.

“Each man,” Heidegger writes, “is in each instance in dialogue with his forebears and perhaps even more, and in a more hidden manner, with those who come after him.”

Because an individual’s fate, like a nation’s destiny, is shaped by its specific heritage, individual Dasein is invariably a co-happening with a community or people, even if it should rebel against the dominant social trends or disavow its beliefs.

Unlike the quantitative, atomizing impulse of liberal modernity, which separates “I” from “we” and treats the former as if it were a monadic ego shorn of the history and heritage situating and defining it as a distinct way of Being, Heidegger’s approach dissolves individual boundaries.

The individualization of an individual consequently becomes a co-historicizing with a people.

Though potentially a force for conformity, Mitsein is a necessary condition for Dasein’s authentic realization.

Man and nation, Dasein and Mitsein, it follows, are free only to the degree they open themselves to what is inherent in their common heritage — to what constitutes the history of their related experience of Being — to what forms their destiny.

If a Volk exists as a Volk, then blood group, history, and destiny are one, for ontologically they constitute a single, encompassing experience of time and Being.

In this sense, a people’s essence transcends the purely “organic,” as it asserts its Dasein as a distinct destiny.

Otherwise, it ceases “to be” in any meaningful sense.

The microevolution/macroevolution distinction is important in dealing with most practical issues involving race in an evolutionary context. For a random example of how racial issues that concern us are essentially microevolutionary in nature, glance at Book Review, “Migration and Colonization in Human Microevolution,” Heredity 84 (2000): 619-20. (Book’s Table of Contents and sample pages here.) Another book that tentatively crosses the line into the microevolutionary realm, though not focused on race (possible rapid evolution among Ashkenazi Jews is discussed in one chapter, however) is The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending (New York: Basic Books, 2009), which was well-reviewed in The Occidental Quarterly.[1]

Macroevolution versus Microevolution

The following definition of macroevolution is from the glossary of a publisher’s website dedicated to a leading undergraduate anthology textbook by University of Oxford zoologist Mark Ridley, Evolution, 3rd ed. (University of Oxford Press, 2003):

Macroevolution is evolution on the grand scale: the term refers to events above the species level; the origin of a new higher group, such as the mammals, would be an example of a macroevolutionary event.

Macroevolution has mainly been studied morphologically, because we have more taxonomic and fossil evidence than for other kinds of characters, such as physiology or chromosomes.

According to the neo-Darwinian theory of macroevolution, major evolutionary transitions such as the origin of mammals from reptiles — well documented in the fossil record — occur in gradual adaptive stages. However, macroevolution may proceed by developmental macromutations as well as by gradual adaptation.

Macroevolution can be contrasted with microevolution: evolutionary changes on the small scale, such as changes in gene frequencies within a population. A major issue relating to many controversies in evolutionary biology is the extent to which macroevolutionary changes can be explained by microevolutionary processes.

The American Heritage Science Dictionary defines microevolution as “Evolutionary change below the level of the species, resulting from relatively small genetic variations. Microevolution produces new strains of microorganisms, for example, or the rise of a new subspecies. The accumulation of many microevolutionary changes results in macroevolution.”

Most evolutionary narratives focus on macroevolutionary change. There is usually a paucity of information in mainstream evolutionary literature about biological change below the species level.

The primary mechanisms of microevolution include mutation, migration, gene flow, genetic drift, and natural selection. Artificial selection, too, which human beings have engaged in for thousands of years, and which still holds potentially rich insights into race processes (for example, how, by analogy, culture serves as a powerful selective mechanism in human populations), is a component of microevolution.

These processes constitute the subset of evolutionary mechanisms with which racial science is primarily concerned.

Race Creation and Destruction

Races are dynamic, not static or stationary entities. Therefore, time is an essential dimension in racial studies. Human populations form, thrive, disperse, hybridize, and become extinct. Differential reproduction means that, over time, some races wax while others wane. Even differential reproduction within a race can alter its genetic composition.

Jewish anthropologist Stanley Garn long ago observed:

Races do not remain constant. They change. Natural selection or directed genetic change and nondirected sources of genetic change are continually at work. Some local populations expand tremendously and others die out. Some populations change their genetic makeup rapidly, others at a slower pace. It is unlikely that any geographical race [i.e., large race] today closely resembles the collection of races in the same geographical area 500,000 or 50,000 or in some cases even 5,000 years ago. . . . We know that present frequencies of the sickle-cell gene in Africa are relatively recent. We know that they are changing now. We know that Northwest Europeans were relatively few in number 2,000 years ago, yet today [1971] they comprise the largest subgrouping of the European geographical race.[2]

Dog breeds are an example of race formation occurring with extreme rapidity in evolutionary terms. Similarly, Garn believed that selection has taken place even in hybrid “local races” (smaller populations than large “geographical races”) of recent origin—American Negroes, South African Cape Coloureds, “Ladinos” (Southern European-Amerindian crosses in Latin America), and “Neo-Hawaiians.” Such races (for so he regarded them) were already “moving toward new adaptive modes” and represented “ongoing human evolution on the march.” (p. 177.)

The same considerations apply with even greater force to race destruction. Ukrainian-American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote:

So long as populations can exchange genes, the genetic differences between them are subject to swamping and dissolution by hybridization. The races of man furnish some of the clearest illustrations of this—history records many examples of race fusion and of emergence of new hybrid races. It is possible at least to imagine a fusion of all human races into a single, greatly variable population.[3]

Dobzhansky expressed the view that “human races are relics of the precultural stage of evolution” because civilization causes race convergence (through gene exchange) to outrun race divergence—an idea also articulated by Italian-born population geneticist L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, Sir Julian Huxley, and others.

This, of course, is precisely the point at which human choice comes into play: whether to preserve or destroy the biological and cultural diversity of the Earth’s peoples. Contemporary elites have voted to destroy at least one major race of mankind—an action, ironically, which only a short time before they’d outlawed as “genocide.” They clearly do not intend to hold themselves legally accountable for their crime.

The Jewish proposal to sterilize the entire German population advanced by Theodore Kaufman in Germany Must Perish! (1941),[4] the murder of tens of millions of Eastern Europeans by Communist elites, and current policies of replacement migration, selective racial censorship and media control all signify biological destruction at a speed unparalleled on the macroevolutionary level with the exception of a few extinction events. Under present conditions, substantial hybridism conspicuous in every city and small town in the ex-First World destroys multiple white racial lines in a single generation. This is biological change at the speed of light. It is happening because there are no longer protective demographic, geographical, or cultural moats protecting the white gene pool from destruction.

The Creation—Evolution Debate

A final consequence of the microevolution/macroevolution distinction is that you don’t need to believe in the descent of man from ape-like creatures to study racial change from a microevolutionary perspective. Even intelligent design advocates admit that “There is abundant evidence that changes can occur within existing species, both domestic and wild, so microevolution is uncontroversial.”

Many establishment evolutionists are ideologically disturbed (here also) by the microevolution/macroevolution distinction, primarily, it seems, because such a large contingent of “creationists” concede the validity of microevolution while denying the possibility of macroevolution. Creationists are thoroughly detested by academic evolutionists, who invariably parade their supposed “superiority” over the former in condescending, pseudo-heroic Monkey Trial terms, as if they were a persecuted minority instead of a powerful, intolerant elite with the deck stacked heavily in their favor. Regardless of one’s opinions about evolution, there is no doubt as to the relative distribution of social power between evolutionists and anti-evolutionists.

True, most creationists and intelligent design advocates, like most Christians, will continue to exhibit indifference or hostility to the survival of the white race (but only the white race, which is what makes them unprincipled). Contemporary Judeo-Christians, left and right, believe they find warrant for white genocide and anti-white racism in their holy book or in politically correct theology. But for any Christian with a moral conscience, objection to racial science should not be grounded in hostility to evolution alone. Acceptance of macroevolutionary theory is not a precondition for the intelligent study of racial biology. It is perfectly possible to remain an unbeliever, skeptic, or agnostic about cosmology and “ape into man” but still acknowledge the objective existence of human races and oppose white genocide because it is evil.

[2] Stanley M. Garn, Human Races, 3rd ed. (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1971), 154-55.

[3] Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 185.

[4] According to Time magazine’s March 24, 1941 review, “The [book's] grisliness preceded the [arrival of the book itself]. One day [U.S. book] reviewers unwrapped a small, oblong parcel, found inside a miniature black cardboard coffin with a hinged lid. In it was a card reading, ‘Read Germany Must Perish! Tomorrow you will receive your copy.’” In 1939, as chairman of The American Federation of Peace, Kaufman had urged Congress “to sterilize all Americans so that their children might not become homicidal monsters. In step with the times, [by 1941] Sterilizer Kaufman had simply transferred his basic idea to the [German] enemy.”

This will never be completely understood if the biological conception of race is not integrated with that ‘racism of the second and of the third degree’ of which we have repeatedly spoken here. It is only if race is considered as existing not only in the body, but also in the soul and in the spirit, as a deep, meta-biological force which conditions both the physical and the psychical structures in the organic totality of the human entity – it is only if this eminently traditional point of view is assumed – that the mystery of the decline of races can be fathomed in all its aspects. One can then realize that, in a way analogous to the individual abdication and inner breakdown of the individual, where the loss of all moral tension and the attitude of passive abandonment can gradually find expression in a true physical collapse, or can paralyze natural organic resources far more efficiently than any threat to the body – so developments of the same nature can occur on the plane of those greater entities which are human races, on the greater scale in space and in time of their aggregate life spans. And what we have just pointed out about organic resources neutralized, when the inner – moral and spiritual – tension of an individual is lacking, can even allow us to consider less simplistically and less materialistically the matter of racial alterations due to mixing and contamination, as well.

This is quite similar to what happens in infections. It is known, in fact, that bacteria and microbes are not always the sole effective and unilateral causes of illness: for a disease to be acquired by contagion a certain more or less strong predisposition is necessary. The state of integrity or tonicity of the organism, in turn, conditions this predisposition, and this is greatly affected by the spiritual factor, the presence of the whole being to himself, and his state of inner intrepidity or anguish. In accordance to this analogy, we may believe that, for cross-breeding to have a really, fatally, inexorably degenerative outcome for a race, it is necessary without exception that this race already be damaged inwardly to a certain extent, and that the tension of its original will be lax as a result.

When a race has been reduced to a mere ensemble of atavistic automatisms, which have become the sole surviving vestiges of what once it was, then a collision, a lesion, a simple action from outside, is enough to make it fall, to disfigure it and to denature it. In such a case, it does not behave like an elastic body, ready to react and to resume its original shape after the collision (provided, that is, that the latter does not exceed certain limits and does not produce permanent actual damage), but, rather, it behaves like a rigid, inelastic body, which passively endures the imprint of external action.

On the basis of these considerations two practical tasks of racism can be distinguished. The first task could be said to be one of passive defense. This means sheltering the race from all external actions (crossings, unsuitable forms of life and culture, etc.) which could present the danger to it of a crisis, a mutation or a denaturation. The second task by contrast is that of active resistance, and consists in reducing to a minimum the predisposition of the race to degeneration, that is to say, the ground on which it can be exposed passively to external action. This means, essentially, ‘to exalt’ its inner race; to see to it that its intimate tension is never lacking; that, as counterpart of its physical integrity, within it there is something like an uncontrollable and irreducible fire, always yearning for new material to feed its blaze, in the form of new obstacles, which defy it and force it to reassert itself.

This second task is obviously more arduous than the first, because it can demand solutions which vary from individual to individual, and because external, general and material measures are of little use for it. It is a matter of overcoming the inertia of spirit, that force of gravity which is in force in human interiority no less than in the outer, physical world, and here finds expression precisely in the inclination to abandonment, to ‘take it easy’, to always follow the path of least resistance. But, unfortunately, for the individual as well as for the race, to overcome this danger it is necessary to have a support – for the ability to act directly, to always remain at the crest of the wave, to maintain an inner initiative which is always renewed, without the need for renewed stimuli, can only occur as the result of an exceptional endowment, and cannot reasonably be demanded as a matter of course. As we have said, for tension which has become latent to reawaken, before it is too late and the processes of the automatization of race follow, an obstacle, a test, almost a challenge, is necessary. It is then that the crisis and the decision occur: by their way of reacting, the deeper, meta-biological powers of the race then show whether they have remained stronger than the contingencies and the destinies of the given period of history. In the case of a positive reaction, new potentialities come, from deep inside, to saturate again the racial circuit. A new ascending cycle begins for that race.

Julius Evola, 1898 - 1974

In some cases, it is even possible that precisely cross-breeding – naturally kept within very stringent limits – carries out a function of that kind. This is well-known in zootechnics. The ‘pure breed’ in some animal species is the result both of the preservation of heredity and of judicious cross-breeding. We do not share the opinion of Chamberlain,[1] who was inclined to apply this kind of thinking to the ‘superior races’ of humanity. However, it is a well proven fact that in some aristocratic families, which, with their centuries-old blood law, have been the only experimental field for racism in history hitherto, some cross-breedings have had precisely the merit of preventing extinction of the line through inner degeneration. Here – let us stress – the cross-breeding has the function of an ordeal, not a rule – an ordeal, moreover, which can also present a dangerous challenge for the blood. But danger reawakens the spirit. Before the heterogeneous element introduced by cross-breeding the homogenous nucleus is called to reaffirm itself, to assimilate to himself what is alien, to act towards it in the capacity of the ‘dominant’ towards the ‘recessive’, in terms of  the laws of Mendel.[2] If the reaction is positive, the result is an awakening. The stock which seemed spent and exhausted reawakens. But if it has already fallen too much, or if the heterogeneity is excessive, the ordeal is failed and the decline is quick and definitive.

But the highest instrument of inner awakening of race is combat, and war is its highest expression. That pacifism and humanitarianism are phenomena closely linked to internationalism, democracy, cosmopolitanism and liberalism is perfectly logical – the same anti-racial instinct present in some, is reflected and confirmed in the others. The will towards sub-racial leveling inborn in internationalism finds its ally in pacifist humanitarianism, which has the function of preventing the heroic test from disrupting the game by galvanizing the surviving forces of any still not completely deracinated peoples. It is odd, however, and illustrates the errors to which a unilaterally biological formulation of the racial problem can lead, that the racial theory of ‘mis-selections’, as expressed for example by Vacher de Lapouge, partakes, to a certain extent, of the same incomprehension of the positive meaning of war for race – but here, in the face of full knowledge of the facts – as is found in internationalist democratism. To be specific, they suppose that every war turns into a progressive elimination of the best, of the exponents of the still pure race of the various peoples, facilitating thus an involution.

This is a partial view, because it only considers what is lost through the disappearance of some individuals, not what is aroused to a much greater extent in others by the experience of war, which otherwise would never have been aroused. This becomes even more obvious if we do not consider ancient wars which were largely fought by elites while the lower strata were spared by them, but rather modern wars which engage entire armed nations and which, moreover, in their character of totality, involve not only physical but also moral and spiritual forces of combatants and non-combatants alike. The Jew Ludwig[3] expressed fury about an article published in a German military review, which brought out the possibilities of selection related even to air bombardments, in which the test of sang-froid, the immediate, lucid reaction of instinct of direction as against brutal or confused impulse, cannot but turn out in a decisive discrimination for those who have the greatest probability of escaping and surviving.

The indignation of the humanitarian Jew Ludwig, who has notwithstanding become the bellicose propagator of the ‘new Holy Alliance’ against Fascism, is powerless against what is correct in considerations of this sort. If the next world war is a ‘total war’ it will mean also a ‘total test’ of the surviving racial forces of the modern world. Without doubt, some will collapse, whereas others will awake and rise. Nameless catastrophes could even be the hard but necessary price of heroic peaks and new liberations of primordial forces dulled through grey centuries. But such is the fatal condition for the creation of any new world – and it is a new world that we seek for the future.

What we have said here must be considered as a mere introduction to the  question  of the significance which war has, in general, for  race. Three fundamental points should be considered, in conclusion. First, since we proceed on the assumption of the fundamental difference of human races – a difference which, according to the doctrine of the three degrees of racism, is not restricted to corporeality but concerns also soul and spirit – it should be expected that the spiritual and physical behavior towards the experience or test of war varies as between the various races; it will therefore be both necessary and interesting to define the sense according to which, for each specific race, the aforementioned reaction will occur.

Second, it is necessary to consider the relationship of interdependence between what a well understood racial policy can do to promote the aims of war, and, conversely, what war, in the presupposition of a right spiritual attitude, can do to promote the aims of race. We can speak, in this respect, of a sort of germ, or primary nucleus, created initially or reawakened by racial policy, which brings out racial values in the consciousness of a people; a germ or nucleus which will bear fruit by giving the war a value, while conversely the experience of war, and the instincts and currents of deep forces which emerge through such an experience, give the racial sense a right, fecund direction.

And this leads us to the third and last point. People are accustomed to speaking too generally, and too romantically, about ‘heroism’, ‘heroic experience’ and the like. When they are done with such romantic assumptions, in modern times, there seem to remain only material ones, such that men who rise up and fight are considered simply as ‘human material’, and the heroism of the combatants is related to victory as mere means to an end, the end itself being nothing but the incrementation of the material and economic power and territory of a given State.

In view of the considerations which have been pointed out here, it is necessary to change these attitudes. From the ‘ordeal by fire’ of the primordial forces of race heroic experience, above all other experience, has been a means to an essentially spiritual and interior end. But there is more: heroic experience differentiates itself in its results not only according to the various races, but also according to the extent to which, within each race, a super-race has formed itself and come to power. The various degrees of this creative differentiation correspond to so many ways of being a hero and to so many forms of awakening through heroic experience. On the lowest plane hybrid, essentially vital, instinctive and collective forces emerge – this is somewhat similar to the awakening on a large scale of the ‘primordial horde’ with the solidarity, the unity of destiny and of holocaust which is peculiar to it. Gradually, this mostly naturalistic experience is purified, dignified, becomes luminous, until it reaches its highest form, which corresponds to the Aryan conception of war as ‘holy war’, and of victory and triumph as an apex, since its value is identical to those of holiness and initiation, and, finally, of death on the battlefield as mors triumphalis, as not rhetorical but effective overcoming of death.

Having indicated all these points in a basic but, we trust, sufficiently intelligible manner, we propose to tackle them one by one in writings which will follow the present one, which will specifically consider the varieties of heroic experience according to race and then the vision of war peculiar to the Nordic-Aryan and Ario-Roman tradition in particular.

[2] Gregor Johann Mendel (1822-1884) was a Czech-German scientist, and is often called “the father of modern genetics.”  Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance, based on his study of plants across several generations, attempted to define how specific characteristics are transmitted from parents to their offspring.

[3] Emil Ludwig (1881-1948) was primarily known at the time as the author of a number of popular biographies of historical figures, including Goethe, Bismarck, and Mussolini.

From Julius Evola, The Metaphysics of War: Battle, Victory, and Death in the World of Tradition (Aarhus, Denmark: Integral Tradition Publishing, 2007)

Steyn and Wilders deserve our praise for their brave iconoclasm. Nevertheless, their work, and the work of many other prominent “Islamophobes,” sets a dangerous precedent. The utility of attacking Islamic immigration specifically, rather than the broader subject of Third-World immigration, is obvious. The drawbacks of such a strategy are less apparent, but could ultimately undermine the immigration restrictionist movement. Hating the tenets of Islam is not going to save the West, and more white patriots must wake up to this fact.

Like many written works opposed to the Islamization of the West, Fitna made the tiresome “Muslims are like Nazis” argument by displaying anti-Semitic remarks made by Muslim leaders, and pro-Hitler signs carried by Muslim protesters. It also graphically depicted examples of Muslim terrorism, Muslim violence against women, and Muslim intolerance for homosexuality. None of this is news. Every image in Fitna has been shown before. Fitna demonstrates, however, why the nature of Islam has been an apparent boon for immigration opponents: much of Islamic doctrine is anathema to the “tolerant” and “progressive” contemporary West. Islam is, after all, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, “homophobic,” and at odds with most aspects of modernity. By focusing on the most backward elements of Islam, Western patriots are able to take a stand against Third-World immigration while skirting charges of “racism.” Given the terrible consequences that befall anyone who speaks honestly about race, this is understandable. I contend, nevertheless, that this approach is patently dishonest, and may not be as useful as many immigration restrictionists think it is.

There is presently no dearth of books and websites critical of mass Muslim immigration. Writers like Robert Spencer and Hugh Fitzgerald seemingly spend every waking minute sounding the anti-Islam alarm on websites such as Jihad Watch, Dhimmi Watch, and New English Review. The ever-irascible David Horowitz is now leading the charge on American campuses against “Islamofascism”—whatever that is. Like Steyn and Wilders, these writers and activists primarily emphasize the degree to which Islamic values are incompatible with Western values, and frequently add the caveat that this “isn’t about race.” My sincere hope is that the emphasis by most immigration restrictionists on religion, culture, and ideology, rather than on blood and soil, is based on necessity rather than true conviction. The rise of Islam is but one negative consequence of the Third World’s invasion and slow-motion conquest of the West, and Western patriots do themselves a great disservice by taking such a myopic view of the immigration issue.

In their failed efforts to stay in the good graces of our left-liberal managerial elites, many immigration restrictionists posthumously embraced libertine cultural-leftists like Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh, and furiously excoriated the conservative author Dinesh D’Souza for daring to suggest that Christians and traditional Muslims can find common ground on some cultural issues. In order to attack Islamic immigration in a politically-correct fashion, the restrictionists have been all too willing to declare their allegiance to the gay-rights and radical feminist movements. Are these really the Western values we are most keen on protecting? Is the West only worth defending because of its high level of tolerance for sexual deviants? I certainly do not think so, and I suspect most anti-Islamists do not either. Unfortunately, their dishonesty will not get them very far.

The “Islam-is-not-progressive-enough” approach to the immigration issue would be more acceptable if our willingness to recite leftist cant was bringing more leftists to our side. That, unfortunately, does not appear to be happening. When contemporary left-liberals are forced by circumstance to choose between their devotion to multiculturalism and their devotion to feminism, secularism, radical environmentalism, or any other fashionable “ism,” they always err on the side of multiculturalism. The leftist elites are not ever going to ally themselves with white patriots on the issue of immigration. That being the case, we should not waste our breath trying to appease them by feigning devotion to progressive pieties. Pandering to the left on cultural issues will lead only to the further deracination of white European culture; it forces immigration opponents to perpetually demonstrate that they are, in fact, more tolerant than the Muslims they wish to restrict from their continent, and ultimately undermines the perceived legitimacy of all forms of cultural conservatism.

The emphasis on Islam and Islamic culture may actually do us more harm than good. The implicit assumption of many of the anti-Islam writers is that if Islam is reformed, Islamic immigration will no longer be a problem, and we can go ahead and leave the floodgates open. Mark Steyn (who also incessantly repeats, “It not about race; it’s about culture”) is once again a case in point. He contends that all our problems will be solved by the Bush Doctrine, which will ostensibly change the nature of the Islamic world. For you see, once the more insidious effects of Islam have been ameliorated, and the Koran is reinterpreted to allow for free elections and women’s suffrage, all will be well and we can stop worrying about the Arab, Turkish, and South Asian exodus into Europe and America. This is dangerous nonsense. This type of “Islamophobia” not only does nothing about the immigration issue, but provides the impetus for further military incursions into the Middle East—which are doomed to fail and will only increase the emigration of Muslims from their homelands.

It is time for the anti-Islamists to face reality. Islam is not like Nazism, Communism, or any other homegrown Western ideology, nor does it make sense to treat it as such. In some important ways, Islam is far weaker and less threatening than either of those twentieth-century bogeymen. In other ways, however, it is much, much more dangerous. The danger, however, has nothing to do with Islamic doctrine.

When considering Islam’s weakness, it is important to note that the odds of an Islamic Revolution in an advanced European nation are all but nonexistent; there is no Muslim leader capable of pulling off such a revolution, nor would any European country long accept such a leader if he managed to take power. Nor is there much danger that sizable numbers of white Europeans will convert to Islam. There is furthermore no powerful Muslim army capable of conquering all or part of Europe or America by force—despite the nonsensical neoconservative blather about terrorists “following” us home from Iraq. At least in terms of the framework from which we viewed conflicts in the last century, Islam is weak, even pathetic.

That being said, Islam poses a threat to Europe far greater than Hitler or Stalin. The thing to remember about Nazism and Communism is that they were, in their essence, Western ideologies. They rose and fell in a Western context, and when the dust settled from the Second World War and the Cold War, Germany and Russia were still Western countries with majority Western populations. If Islam dominates Europe, it will be because Europe is no longer dominated by white Europeans. Muslims will not rule Europe unless traditional European majorities are displaced and replaced by Arabs, Turks, blacks, and Asians. If that happens, Western Civilization is finished. Forever. And it doesn’t matter how Islam reforms from that point on. Muslims could tear out every offensive page from the Koran, and this fact will remain. We do not have to hate the Mohammedan races, or waste our time proving we are better or more tolerant and enlightened than they. We do have to unequivocally declare that they will never be allowed to dominate any European country, no matter what they believe.

Although there are many aspects of Islam I find quite disagreeable, Europe would not be better off if it was being overrun by African Christians or Indian Hindus. Problems would manifest themselves in different ways, but they would be there nonetheless. The United States is a perfect example of this essential fact. Latin Americans are as Christian as they come, yet waves of Hispanics entering both legally and illegally are in the process of fundamentally changing the United States, in a negative way, forever. We are right to oppose this Völkerwanderung just as vehemently as we oppose the one presently destroying Europe, even though Islam is not a factor in the American case at all. Sometimes, it is about race.

There is nothing inherently wrong with pointing out the most dangerous aspects of Islam, and I commend those writers and activists who risk their careers, and in some cases, their lives, to do so. We should nevertheless not lose sight of the more important issue. The displacement of white Europeans by Third World immigrants is what should disturb us—no matter what their religion. It is considered impolite (and in some places, illegal) to speak frankly about race. Unfortunately, that is what the immigration debate is really about, and the utility of using religion as a rhetorical proxy for race has reached its limits.

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).

Julius Evola, 1898 - 1974

In its literal sense, this question is by no means a novel one. While contemplating the magnificent remains of cultures whose very name has not even come down to us, but which seem to have conveyed, even in their physical material, a greatness and power that is more than earthly, scarcely anyone has failed to ask themselves questions about the death of cultures, and sensed the inadequacy of the reasons that are usually given to explain it.

We can thank the Comte de Gobineau for the best and best-known summary of this problem, and also for a masterly criticism of the main hypotheses about it. His solution on the basis of racial thought and racial purity also has much truth in it, but it needs to be expanded by a few observations concerning a higher order of things. For there have been many cases in which a culture has collapsed even when its race has remained pure, as is especially clear in certain groups that have suffered slow, inexorable extinction despite remaining as racially isolated as if they were islands. An example quite close at hand is the case of the Swedes and the Dutch. These people are in the same racial condition today as they were two centuries ago, but there is little to be found now of the heroic disposition and the racial awareness that they once possessed. Other great cultures seem merely to have remained standing in the condition of mummies: they have long been inwardly dead, so that it takes only the slightest push to knock them down. This was the case, for example, with ancient Peru, that giant solar empire which was annihilated by a few adventurers drawn from the worst rabble of Europe.

If we look at the secret of degeneration from the exclusively traditional point of view, it becomes even harder to solve it completely. It is then a matter of the division of all cultures into two main types. On the one hand there are the traditional cultures, whose principle is identical and unchangeable, despite all the differences evident on the surface. The axis of these cultures and the summit of their hierarchical order consists of metaphysical, supra-individual powers and actions, which serve to inform and justify everything that is merely human, temporal, subject to becoming and to “history.” On the other hand there is “modern culture,” which is actually the anti-tradition and which exhausts itself in a construction of purely human and earthly conditions and in the total development of these, in pursuit of a life entirely detached from the “higher world.”

From the standpoint of the latter, the whole of history is degeneration, because it shows the universal decline of earlier cultures of the traditional type, and the decisive and violent rise of a new universal civilization of the “modern” type.

A double question arises from this.

First, how was it ever possible for this to come to pass? There is a logical error underlying the whole doctrine of evolution: it is impossible that the higher can emerge from the lower, and the greater from the less. But doesn’t a similar difficulty face us in the solution of the doctrine of involution? How is it ever possible for the higher to fall? If we could make do with simple analogies, it would be easy to deal with this question. A healthy man can become sick; a virtuous one can turn to vice. There is a natural law that everyone takes from granted: that every living being starts with birth, growth, and strength, then come old age, weakening, and disintegration. And so forth. But this is just making statements, not explaining, even if we allow that such analogies actually relate to the question posed here.

Secondly, it is not only a matter of explaining the possibility of the degeneration of a particular cultural world, but also the possibility that the degeneration of one cultural cycle may pass to other peoples and take them down with it. For example, we have not only to explain how the ancient Western reality collapsed, but also have to show the reason why it was possible for “modern” culture to conquer practically the whole world, and why it possessed the power to divert so many peoples from any other type of culture, and to hold sway even where states of a traditional kind seemed to be alive (one need only recall the Aryan East).

In this respect, it is not enough to say that we are dealing with a purely material and economic conquest. That view seems very superficial, for two reasons. In the first place, a land that is conquered on the material level also experiences, in the long run, influences of a higher kind corresponding to the cultural type of its conqueror. We can state, in fact, that European conquest almost everywhere sows the seeds of “Europeanization,” i.e., the “modern” rationalist, tradition-hostile, individualistic way of thinking. Secondly, the traditional conception of culture and the state is hierarchical, not dualistic. Its bearers could never subscribe, without severe reservations, to the principles of “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” and “My kingdom is not of this world.” For us, “Tradition” is the victorious and creative presence in the world of that which is “not of this world,” i.e., of the Spirit, understood as a power that is mightier than any merely human or material one.

This is a basic idea of the authentically traditional view of life, which does not permit us to speak with contempt of merely material conquests. On the contrary, the material conquest is the sign, if not of a spiritual victory, at least of a spiritual weakness or a kind of spiritual “retreat” in the cultures that are conquered and lose their independence. Everywhere that the Spirit, regarded as the stronger power, was truly present, it never lacked for means — visible or otherwise — to enable all the opponent’s technical and material superiority to be resisted. But this has not happened. It must be concluded, then, that degeneracy was lurking behind the traditional facade of every people that the “modern” world has been able to conquer. The West must then have been the culture in which a crisis that was already universal assumed its acutest form. There the degeneration amounted, so to speak, to a knockout blow, and as it took effect, it brought down with more or less ease other peoples in whom the involution had certainly not “progressed” as far, but whose tradition had already lost its original power, so that these peoples were no longer able to protect themselves from an outside assault.

With these considerations, the second aspect of our problem is traced back to the first one. It is mainly a question of explicating the meaning and the possibility of degeneracy, without reference to other circumstances.

For this we must be clear about one thing: it is an error to assume that the hierarchy of the traditional world is based on a tyranny of the upper classes. That is merely a “modern” conception, completely alien to the traditional way of thinking. The traditional doctrine in fact conceived of spiritual action as an “action without acting”; it spoke of the “unmoved mover”; everywhere it used the symbolism of the “pole,” the unalterable axis around which every ordered movement takes place (and elsewhere we have shown that this is the meaning of the swastika, the “arctic cross”); it always stressed the “Olympian,” spirituality, and genuine authority, as well as its way of acting directly on its subordinates, not through violence but through “presence”; finally, it used the simile of the magnet, wherein lies the key to our question, as we shall now see.

Only today could anyone imagine that the authentic bearers of the Spirit, or of Tradition, pursue people so as to seize them and put them in their places — in short, that they “manage” people, or have any personal interest in setting up and maintaining those hierarchical relationships by virtue of which they can appear visibly as the rulers. This would be ridiculous and senseless. It is much more the recognition on the part of the lower ones that is the true basis of any traditional ranking. It is not the higher that needs the lower, but the other way round. The essence of hierarchy is that there is something living as a reality in certain people, which in the rest is only present in the condition of an ideal, a premonition, an unfocused effort. Thus the latter are fatefully attracted to the former, and their lower condition is one of subordination less to something foreign, than to their own true “self.” Herein lies the secret, in the traditional world, of all readiness for sacrifice, all heroism, all loyalty; and, on the other side, of a prestige, an authority, and a calm power which the most heavily-armed tyrant can never count upon.

With these considerations, we have come very close to solving not only the problem of degeneration, but also the possibility of a particular fall. Are we perhaps not tired of hearing that the success of every revolution indicates the weakness and degeneracy of the previous rulers? An understanding of this kind is very one-sided. This would indeed be the case if wild dogs were tied up, and suddenly broke loose: that would be proof that the hands holding their leashes had become impotent or weak. But things are arranged very differently in the framework of spiritual ranking, whose real basis we have explained above. This hierarchy degenerates and is able to be overthrown in one case only: when the individual degenerates, when he uses his fundamental freedom to deny the Spirit, to cut his life loose from any higher reference-point, and to exist “only for himself.” Then the contacts are fatefully broken, the metaphysical tension, to which the traditional organism owes its unity, gives way, every force wavers in its path and finally breaks free. The peaks, of course, remain pure and inviolable in their heights, but the rest, which depended on them, now becomes an avalanche, a mass that has lost its equilibrium and falls, at first imperceptibly but with ever accelerating movement down to the depths and lowest levels of the valley. This is the secret of every degeneration and revolution. The European had first slain the hierarchy in himself by extirpating his own inner possibilities, to which corresponded the basis of the order that he would then destroy externally.

If Christian mythology attributes the Fall of Man and the Rebellion of the Angels to the freedom of the will, then it comes to much the same significance. It concerns the frightening potential that dwells in man of using freedom to destroy spiritually and to banish everything that could ensure him a supra-natural value. This is a metaphysical decision: the stream that traverses history in the most varied forms of the traditional-hating, revolutionary, individualistic, and humanistic spirit, or in short, the “modern” spirit. This decision is the only positive and decisive cause in the secret of degeneration, the destruction of Tradition.

If we understand this, we can perhaps also grasp the sense of those legends that speak of mysterious rulers who “always” exist and have never died (shades of the Emperor sleeping beneath the Kyffhäuser mountain!). Such rulers can be rediscovered only when one achieves spiritual completeness and awakens a quality in oneself like that of a metal that suddenly feels “the magnet,” finds the magnet and irresistibly orients itself and moves towards it. For now, we must restrict ourselves to this hint. A comprehensive explanation of legends of that sort, which come to us from the most ancient Aryan source, would take us too far. At another opportunity we will perhaps return to the secret of reconstruction, to the “magic” that is capable of restoring the fallen mass to the unalterable, lonely, and invisible peaks that are still there in the heights.

From Deutsches Volkstum, Nr. 11, 1938.

Contemporary popular culture is as jejune as contemporary politics: strangled by political correctness and by contempt for form and etiquette, it eats away like acid at what remains of courtesy and memory.  But the past of popular culture – in literature and the movies – has much nourishment to offer.  One of the most popular authors of the Twentieth Century, Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875 – 1950), had a keen intuition about the health of the body politic and the positive relation of a vital culture to its founding traditions.  The Author of Tarzan (1912) and its many sequels, the inventor of the extraterrestrial sword-and-sandals romance, ex-cavalryman, admirer of the Apache and the Sioux, anti-Communist, anti-Nazi, self-publishing millionaire entrepreneur, religious skeptic, “Big-Stick” patriot, Southern California real estate baron, sixty-year-old Pacific-Theater war correspondent, Burroughs has, with a few ups and downs, maintained an audience both from his authorial debut in 1912 to the present day, nearly sixty years after his death.  Burroughs has a place in the culture wars, standing as he does for the opposite of almost everything advocated by the elites of the new liberal-totalitarian order.  I offer, in what follows, a modest assessment of Burroughs’ work.

I recommend Burroughs, whose books saw translation in every European language, to parents of conservative temperament on the lookout for adolescent-appropriate reading matter to offer to their children, whether male or female it hardly matters.  If you are Latvian or Bulgarian, you may read Tarzan in your native tongue.  Please do…

I. A longtime teacher of Western Literature, Classics-in-Translation, and American Novel courses at the university level (in California, Michigan, and Upstate New York) and a professing paleoconservative, I am fiercely dedicated to high culture and the Great Books.  I confess, however, to a sneaking fondness for some of the outstanding – even some of the less-than-outstanding – popular literature of the first half of the Twentieth Century. . . . Read the whole article

Men Among the Ruins:
Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist

Baron Julius Evola (1899-1974) was an important Italian intellectual, although he despised the term. As poet and painter, he was the major Italian representative of Dadaism (1916-1922). Later he became the leading Italian exponent of the intellectually rigorous esotericism of René Guénon (1886-1951). He enjoyed an international reputation as the author of books on magic, alchemy and eastern religious traditions and won the respect of such important scholars as Mircea Eliade and Giuseppe Tucci. His book on early Buddhism, The Doctrine of Awakening,[1] which was translated in 1951, established his reputation among English-speaking esotericists. In 1983, Inner Traditions International, directed by Ehud Sperling, published Evola’s 1958 book, The Metaphysics of Sex, which it reprinted as Eros and the Mysteries of Love in 1992, the same year it published his 1949 book on Tantra, The Yoga of Power.[2]

The marketing appeal of the topic of sex is obvious. Both books, however, are serious studies, not sex manuals. Since then Inner Traditions has reprinted The Doctrine of Awakening and published many of Evola’s esoteric books, including studies of alchemy and magic,[3] and what Evola himself considered his most important exposition of his beliefs, Revolt Against the Modern World.[4]

In Europe Evola is known not only as an esotericist, but also as a brilliant and incisive right-wing thinker. During the 1980s most of his books, New Age and political, were translated into French under the aegis of Alain de Benoist, the leader of the French Nouvelle Droite.[5] Books and articles by Evola have been translated into German and published in every decade since the 1930s.[6]

Discussion of Evola’s politics reached North America slowly. In the 1980s political scientists Thomas Sheehan, Franco Ferraresi, and Richard Drake wrote about him unsympathetically, blaming him for Neo-Fascist terrorism.[7] In 1990 the esoteric journal, Gnosis, devoted part of an issue to Evola. Robin Waterfield, a classicist and author of a book on René Guénon, contributed a thoughtful appreciation of his work on the basis of French translations.[8] Italian esotericist Elémire Zolla discussed Evola’s development accurately but ungenerously.[9] The essay by Gnosis editor Jay Kinney was driven by an almost hysterical fear of the word “Fascist.” He did not appear to have read Evola’s books in any language, called the 1983 edition of The Metaphysics of Sex Evola’s “only book translated into English” and concluded “Evola’s esotericism appears to be well outside of the main currents of Western tradition. It remains to be seen whether his Hermetic virtues can be disentangled from his political sins. Meanwhile, he serves as a persuasive argument for the separation of esoteric ‘Church and State.’”[10]

With the publication of Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist,[11] English speakers can read Evola’s political views for themselves. They will find that the text, in Guido Stucco’s workman-like translation, edited by Michael Moynihan, is guarded by a double firewall. Joscelyn Godwin’s “Foreword” answers Jay Kinney’s hysterical diatribe of 1990. Godwin defends publishing Evola’s political writings by an appeal to “academic freedom,” which works “with the tools of rationality and scholarship, unsullied by emotionality or subjective references” and favors making all of Evola’s works available because “it would be academically dishonest to suppress anything.” Godwin’s high praise for The Doctrine of Awakening implicitly condemns Kinney’s ignorance. Evola’s books on esoteric topics reveal “one of the keenest minds in the field . . . The challenge to esotericists is that when Evola came down to earth, he was so ‘incorrect’ – by the received standards of our society. He was no fool; and he cannot possibly have been right . . . so what is one to make of it?”

Godwin’s “Preface” is followed by an introduction of more than 100 pages by Austrian esotericist H. T. Hansen on “Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors,” translated from the 1991 German version of Men Among the Ruins,[12] with additional notes and corrections (called “Preface to the American Edition”). Hansen’s introduction to Revolt Against the Modern World[13] is, with Robin Waterfield’s Gnosis essay, the best short introduction to Evola in English. His longer essay is essential for serious students, and Inner Traditions deserves warm thanks for publishing it. The major book on Evola is Christophe Boutin, Politique et Tradition: Julius Evola dans le siècle (1898-1974).[14]

Readers of books published by Inner Traditions might have guessed Evola’s politics. The Mystery of the Grail,[15] first published in 1937, praises the Holy Roman Empire as a great political force, led by Germans and Italians, which tried to unite Europe under the Nordic Ghibellines. Esotericists will probably guess that the title of Revolt Against the Modern World is an homage to Crisis of the Modern World,[16] the most accessible of René Guénon’s many books. The variation is also a challenge. Evola and Guénon see the modern world as the fulfillment of the Hindu Kali Yuga, or Dark Age, that will end one cosmic cycle and introduce another. For Guénon the modern world is to be endured, but Evola believed that real men are not passive. His praise of “The World of Tradition” with its warrior aristocracies and sacral kingship is peppered with contempt for democracy, but New Age writers often make such remarks, just as scientists do. If you believe you know the truth, it is hard not to be contemptuous of a system that determines matters by counting heads and ignores the distinction between the knowledgeable and the ignorant.

Visionary Among Italian Conservative Revolutionaries

Evola was not only an important figure in Guénon’s Integral Traditionalism, but also the leading Italian exponent of the Conservative Revolution in Germany, which included Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, Gottfried Benn, and Ernst Jünger.[17] From 1934-43, Evola was editor of what we would now call the “op-ed” page of a major Italian newspaper (Regime Fascista) and published Conservative Revolutionaries and other right-wing and traditionalist authors.[18] He corresponded with Schmitt,[19] translated Spengler’s Decline of the West and Jünger’s An der Zeitmauer (At the Time Barrier) into Italian and wrote the best introduction to Jünger’s Der Arbeiter (The Worker), “The Worker” in Ernst Jünger’s Thought.[20]

Spengler has been well served by translation into English, but other important figures of the Conservative Revolution had to wait a long time. Carl Schmitt’s major works have been translated only in the past few decades.[21] Jünger’s most important work of social criticism, Der Arbeiter, has never been translated.[22] The major scholarly book on the movement has never been translated, either.[23] It is a significant statement on the limits of expression in the United States that so many leftist mediocrities are published, while major European thinkers of the rank of Schmitt, Jünger, and Evola have to wait so long for translation, if the day ever comes. It is certainly intriguing that a New Age press has undertaken the translation and publishing of Evola’s books, with excellent introductions.

The divorced wife of a respected free market economist once remarked to me, “Yale used to say that conservatives were just old-fashioned liberals.”[24] People who accept that definition will be flabbergasted by Julius Evola. Like Georges Sorel, Oswald Spengler, Whittaker Chambers, and Régis Debray, Evola insists that liberals and communists are in fundamental agreement on basic principles. This agreement is significant, because for Evola politics is an expression of basic principles and he never tires of repeating his own. The transcendent is real. Man’s knowledge of his relationship to transcendence has been handed down from the beginning of human culture. This is Tradition, with a capital T. Human beings are tri-partite: body, soul, and spirit. State and society are hierarchical and the clearer the hierarchy, the healthier the society. The worst traits of the modern world are its denial of transcendence, reductionist vision of man and egalitarianism.

These traits come together in what Evola called “la daimonìa dell’economia,” translated by Stucco as “the demonic nature of the economy.”[25] Real men exist to attain knowledge of the transcendent and to strive and accomplish heroically. The economy is only a tool to provide the basis for such accomplishments and to sustain the kind of society that permits the best to attain sanctity and greatness. The modern world denies this vision.

In both individual and collective life the economic factor is the most important, real, and decisive one . . . An economic era is already by definition a fundamentally anarchical and anti-hierarchical era; it represents a subversion of the normal order . . . This subversive character is found in both Marxism and in its apparent nemesis, modern capitalism. Thus, it is absurd and deplorable for those who pretend to represent the political ‘Right’ to fail to leave the dark and small circle that is determined by the demonic power of the economy – a circle including capitalism, Marxism, and all the intermediate economic degrees. This should be firmly upheld by those today who are taking a stand against the forces of the Left. Nothing is more evident than that modern capitalism is just as subversive as Marxism. The materialistic view of life on which both systems are based is identical.[26]

Most conservatives do not like the leftist hegemony we live under, but they still want to cling to some aspect of modernity to preserve a toehold on respectability. Evola rejected the Enlightenment project lock, stock, and barrel, and had little use for the Renaissance and the Reformation. His books ask us to take seriously the attempt to imagine an intellectual and political world that radically rejects the leftist worldview. He insists that those really opposed to the leftist regime, the true Right, are not embarrassed to use words like reactionary and counter revolutionary. If you are afraid of these words, you do not have the courage to stand up to the modern world.

He also countenances the German expression, Conservative Revolution, if properly understood. Revolution is acceptable only if it is true re-volution, a turning back to origins. Conservatism is valid only when it preserves the true Tradition. So loyalty to the bourgeois order is a false conservatism, because on the level of principle, the bourgeoisie is an economic class, not a true aristocracy. That is one reason why at the end of his life, Evola was planning a right-wing journal to be called The Reactionary, in conscious opposition to the leading Italian conservative magazine, Il Borghese, “The Bourgeois.”

For Evola the state creates the nation, not the opposite. Although Evola maintained a critical distance from Fascism and never joined the Fascist Party,[27] here he was in substantial agreement with Mussolini and the famous article on “Fascism” in the Enciclopedia Italiana, authored by the philosopher and educator, Giovanni Gentile. He disagreed strongly with the official philosophy of 1930’s Germany. The Volk is not the basis of a true state, an imperium. Rather the state creates the people. Naturally, Evola rejected Locke’s notion of the Social Contract, where rational, utilitarian individuals come together to give up some of their natural rights in order to preserve the most important one, the right to property. Evola also disagreed with Aristotle’s idea that the state developed from the family. The state was created from Männerbünde, disciplined groups entered through initiation by men who were to become warriors and priests. The Männerbund, not the family, is the original basis of true political life.[28]

Evola saw his mission as finding men who could be initiated into a real warrior aristocracy, the Hindu kshatriya, to carry out Bismarck’s “Revolution from above,” what Joseph de Maistre called “not a counterrevolution, but the opposite of a revolution.” This was not a mass movement, nor did it depend on the support of the masses, by their nature incapable of great accomplishments. Hansen thinks these plans were utopian, but Evola was in touch with the latest political science. The study of elites and their role in every society, especially liberal democracies, was virtually an Italian monopoly in the first half of the Twentieth century, carried on by men like Roberto Michels, Gaetano Mosca, and Vilfredo Pareto. Evola saw that nothing can be accomplished without leadership. The modern world needs a true elite to rescue it from its involution into materialism, egalitarianism and its obsession with the economy and to restore a healthy regime of order, hierarchy and spiritual creativity. When that elite is educated and initiated, then (and only then) a true state can be created and the Dark Age will come to an end.

Egalitarianism, Fascism, Race, and Roman Catholicism

Despite his criticism of the demagogic and populist aspects of Fascism and National Socialism, Evola believed that under their aegis Italy and Germany had turned away from liberalism and communism and provided the basis for a return to aristocracy, the restoration of the castes and the renewal of a social order based on Tradition and the transcendent. Even after their defeat in World War II, Evola believed that the fight was not over, although he became increasingly discouraged and embittered in the decades after the war. (Pain from a crippling injury suffered in an air raid may have contributed to this feeling.)

Although Evola believed that the transcendent was essential for a true revival, he did not look to the Catholic Church for leadership. Men Among the Ruins was published in 1953, when the official position of the Church was still strongly anti-Communist and Evola had lived through the 1920s and 1930s when the Vatican signed the Concordat with Mussolini. So his analysis of the Church, modified but not changed for the second edition in 1967, is impressive as is his prediction that the Church would move to the left.

After the times of De Maistre, Bonald, Donoso Cortés, and the Syllabus have passed, Catholicism has been characterized by political maneuvering . . . Inevitably, the Church’s sympathies must gravitate toward a democratic-liberal political system. Moreover, Catholicism had for a long time espoused the theory of ‘natural right,’ which hardly agrees with the positive and differentiated right, on which a strong and hierarchical State can be built . . . Militant Catholics like Maritain had revived Bergson’s formula according to which ‘democracy is essentially evangelical’; they tried to demonstrate that the democratic impulse in history appears as a temporal manifestation of the authentic Christian and Catholic spirit . . . By now, the categorical condemnations of modernism and progressivism are a thing of the past . . . When today’s Catholics reject the ‘medieval residues’ of their tradition; when Vatican II and its implementations have pushed for debilitating forms of ‘bringing things up to date’; when popes uphold the United Nations (a ridiculous hybrid and illegitimate organization) practically as the prefiguration of a future Christian ecumene – this leaves no doubt in which direction the Church is being dragged. All things considered, Catholicism’s capability of providing an adequate support for a revolutionary-conservative and traditionalist movement must be resolutely denied.[29]

Although his 1967 analysis mentions Vatican II, Evola’s position on the Catholic Church went back to the 1920s, when after his early Dadaism he was developing a philosophy based on the traditions of India, the Far East and ancient Rome under the influence of Arturo Reghini (1878-1946).[30] Reghini introduced Evola to Guénon’s ideas on Tradition and his own thinking on Roman “Pagan Imperialism” as an alternative to the Twentieth Century’s democratic ideals and plutocratic reality. Working with a leading Fascist ideologue, Giuseppe Bottai (1895-1959), Evola wrote a series of articles in Bottai’s Critica Fascista in 1926-27, praising the Roman Empire as a synthesis of the sacred and the regal, an aristocratic and hierarchical system under a true leader. Evola rejected the Catholic Church as a source of religion and morality independent of the state, because he saw its universalistic claims as compatible with and tending toward liberal egalitarianism and humanitarianism, despite its anti-Communist rhetoric.

Evola’s articles enjoyed a national succès de scandale and he expanded them into a book, Imperialismo Pagano (1928), which provoked a heated debate involving many Fascist and Catholic intellectuals, including, significantly, Giovanni Battista Montini (1897-1978), who, when Evola published the second edition of Men Among the Ruins in 1967, had become the liberal Pope Paul VI. Meanwhile, Mussolini was negotiating with Pope Pius XI (1857-1939) for a reconciliation in which the Church would give its blessings to his regime in return for protection of its property and official recognition as the religion of Italy. Italy had been united by the Piedmontese conquest of Papal Rome in 1870, and the Popes had never recognized the new regime. So Evola wrote in 1928, “Every Italian and every Fascist should remember that the King of Italy is still considered a usurper by the Vatican.”[31] The signing of the Vatican Accords on February 11, 1929, ended that situation and the debate. Even Reghini and Bottai turned against Evola.[32]

Evola later regretted the tone of his polemic, but he also pointed out that the fact that this debate took place gave the lie direct to extreme assertions about lack of freedom of speech in Fascist Italy. Evola has been vindicated on the main point. The Catholic Church accepts liberal democracy and even defends it as the only legitimate regime. Notre Dame University is not the only Catholic university with a Jacques Maritain Center, but neither Notre Dame nor any other Catholic university in America has a Center named after Joseph de Maistre or Louis de Bonald or Juan Donoso Cortés. Pope Pius IX was beatified for proclaiming the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, not for his Syllabus Errorum, which denounced the idea of coming to terms with liberalism and modern civilization.

Those who want to distance Evola from Fascism emphasize the debate over Pagan Imperialism. For several years afterwards Fascist toughs harassed Evola, until he won the patronage of Roberto Farinacci, the Fascist boss of Cremona. Evola edited the opinion page of Farinacci’s newspaper, Regime Fascista, from 1934 to 1943 in an independent fashion. Although there are anecdotes about Mussolini’s fear of Evola, the documentary evidence points in the opposite direction. Yvon de Begnac’s talks with Mussolini, published in 1990, report Mussolini consistently speaking of Evola with respect. Il Duce had the following comments about the Pagan Imperialism debate:

Despite what is generally thought, I was not at all irritated by Doctor Julius Evola’s pronouncements made a few months before the Conciliation on the modification of relations between the Holy See and Italy. Anyhow, Doctor Evola’s attitude did not directly concern relations between Italy and the Holy See, but what seemed to him the long-term irreconcilability of the Roman tradition and the Catholic tradition. Since he identified Fascism with the Roman tradition, he had no choice but to reckon as its adversary any historical vision of a universalistic order.[33]

Mussolini’s strongest support for Evola came on the subject of race, which became an issue after Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia in 1936. Influenced by Nazi Germany, Italy passed Racial Laws in 1938. Evola was already writing on the racial views consistent with a Traditional vision of mankind in opposition to what he saw as the biological reductionism and materialism of Nazi racial thought. His writings infuriated Guido Landra, editor of the journal, La Difesa della Razza (Defense of the Race). Landra and other scientific racists were especially irritated by Evola’s article, “Scientific Racism’s Mistake.”[34] Mussolini, however, praised Evola’s writings as early as 1935 and permitted Evola’s Summary of Racial Doctrine to be translated into German as Compendium of Fascist Racial Doctrine to represent the official Fascist position.[35]

Evola accepts the Traditional division of man into body, soul, and spirit and argues that there are races of all three.

While in a ‘pure blood’ horse or cat the biological element constitutes the central one, and therefore racial considerations can be legitimately restricted to it, this is certainly not the case with man, or at least any man worthy of the name . . . Therefore racial treatment of man can not stop only at a biological level.[36]

Just as the state creates the people and the nation, so the spirit forms the races of body and soul. Evola had done considerable research on the history of racial studies and wrote a history of racial thought from Classical Antiquity to the 1930’s, The Blood Myth: The Genesis of Racism.[37] Evola knew that in addition to the tradition of scientific racism, represented by Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Alfred Rosenberg, and Landra was one that appreciated extra- or super-biological elements and whose adherents included Montaigne, Herder, Fichte, Gustave Le Bon, and Evola’s contemporary and friend, Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, a German biologist at the University of Berlin.[38]

Hansen has a thorough discussion of “Evola’s Attitude Toward the Jews.” Evola thought that the negative traits associated with Jews were spiritual, not physical. So a biological Jew might have an Aryan soul or spirit and biological Aryans might – and did – have a Semitic soul or spirit. As Landra saw, this was the end of any politically useful scientific racism. The greatest academic authority on Fascism, Renzo de Felice argued in The Jews in Fascist Italy that Evola’s theories are wrong, but that they have a distinguished intellectual ancestry, and Evola argued for them in an honorable way.[39] In recent years, Bill Clinton was proclaimed America’s first black president. This instinctive privileging of style over biology is in line with Evola’s views.

Hansen does not discuss Evola’s views on Negroes, to which Christophe Boutin devotes several pages of Politique et Tradition.[40] In his 1968 collection of essays, The Bow and the Club,[41] there is a chapter on “America Negrizzata,” which argues that, while there was relatively little miscegenation in the United States, the Telluric or Negro spirit has had considerable influence on the quality of American culture. The 1972 edition of Men Among the Ruins ends with an “Appendix on the Myths of our Time,” of which number IV is “Taboos of our Times.”[42] The two taboos discussed forbid a frank discussion of the “working class,” common in Europe, and of the Negro. Although written thirty years ago, it is up-to-date in its description of this subject and notices that the word “Negro” itself was becoming taboo as “offensive.”[43] La vera Destra, a real Right, will oppose this development. This appendix is not translated in the Inner Traditions or the 1991 German editions, confirming its accuracy.

At the end of Men Among the Ruins, instead of the Appendix of the 1972 edition, stands Evola’s 1951 Autodifesa, the speech he gave in his own defense when he was tried by the Italian democracy for “defending Fascism,” attempting to reconstitute the dissolved Fascist Party” and being the “master” and inspirer” of young Neo-Fascists.[44] Like Socrates, he was accused of not worshipping the gods of the democracy and of corrupting youth. When he asked in open court where in his published writings he had defended “ideas proper to Fascism,” the prosecutor, Dr. Sangiorgi, admitted that there were no such passages, but that the general spirit of his works promoted “ideas proper to Fascism,” such as monocracy, hierarchism, aristocracy or elitism. Evola responded.

I should say that if such are the terms of the accusation,[45] I would be honored to see, seated at the same bank of accusation, such people as Aristotle, Plato, the Dante of De Monarchia, and so on up to Metternich and Bismarck. In the same spirit as a Metternich, a Bismarck,[46] or the great Catholic philosophers of the principle of authority, De Maistre and Donoso Cortés, I reject all that which derives, directly or indirectly, from the French Revolution and which, in my opinion, has as its extreme consequence Bolshevism; to which I counterpose the ‘world of Tradition.’ . . . My principles are only those that, before the French Revolution, every well-born person considered sane and normal.[47]

Evola’s Autodifesa was more effective than Socrates’ Apology, since the jury found him “innocent” of the charges. (Italian juries may find a defendant “innocent,” “not guilty for lack of proof,” or “guilty.”) Evola noted in his speech, “Some like to depict Fascism as an ‘oblique tyranny.’[48] During that ‘tyranny’ I never had to undergo a situation like the present one.” Evola was no lackey of the Fascist regime. He attacked conciliation with the Vatican in the years before the 1929 Vatican Accords and developed an interpretation of race that directly contradicted the one favored by the German government and important currents within Fascism. His journal, La Torre (The Tower), was closed down in 1930 because of his criticism of Fascist toughs, gli squadristi. Evola, however, never had to face jail for his serious writings during the Fascist era. That had to wait for liberal democracy. Godwin and Hansen are absolutely correct to emphasize Evola’s consistency and coherence as an esoteric thinker and his independence from any party-line adherence to Fascism. On the other hand, Evola considered his politics a direct deduction from his beliefs about Tradition. He was a sympathetic critic of Fascism, but a remorseless opponent of liberal democracy.

Inner Traditions and the Holmes Publishing Group[49] have published translations of most of Evola’s esoteric writings and some important political books. Will they go on to publish the rest of his oeuvre? Joscelyn Godwin, after all, wrote, “It would be intellectually dishonest to suppress anything.” Evola’s book on Ernst Jünger might encourage a translation of Der Arbeiter. Riding the Tiger[50] explains how the “differentiated man” (uomo differenziato) can maintain his integrity in the Dark Age. It bears the same relation to Men Among the Ruins that Aristotle’s Ethics bears to his Politics and, although published later, was written at the same time.Riding the Tiger[51] There are brilliant essays in The Bow and the Club, but can a book be published in contemporary America with an essay entitled “America Negrizzata?” Pagan Imperialism is a young man’s book, vigorous and invigorating.

The most challenging book for readers who enjoy Men Among the Ruins is Fascism Seen from the Right, with its appendix, “Notes on the Third Reich,”Riding the Tiger[52] where Evola criticizes both regimes as not right-wing enough. A world respectful of communism and liberalism (and accustomed to using the word “Fascist” as an angry epithet) will find it hard to appreciate a book critical, but not disrespectful, of il Ventennio (the Twenty Years of Fascist rule). I would suggest beginning with the short pamphlet, Orientamenti (Orientations),[53] which Evola composed in 1950 as a summary of the doctrine of Men Among the Ruins.

Hansen quotes right-wing Italians who say that Evola’s influence discourages political action because his Tradition comes from an impossibly distant past and assumes an impossibly transcendent truth and a hopelessly pessimistic view of the present. Yet Evola confronts the modern world with an absolute challenge. Its materialism, egalitarianism, feminism, and economism are fundamentally wrong. The way out is through rejecting these mistakes and returning to spirit, transcendence and hierarchy, to the Männerbund and the Legionary Spirit. It may be discouraging to think that we are living in a Dark Age, but the Kali Yuga is also the end of a cosmic cycle. When the current age ends, a new one will begin. This is not Spengler’s biologistic vision, where our civilization is an individual, not linked to earlier ones and doomed to die without offspring, like all earlier ones.[54]

We are linked to the past by Tradition and when the Dark Age comes to an end, Tradition will light the way to new greatness and accomplishment. We may live to see that day. If not, what will survive is the legionary spirit Evola described in Orientamenti:

It is the attitude of a man who can choose the hardest road, fight even when he knows that the battle is materially lost and live up to the words of the ancient saga, ‘Loyalty is stronger than fire!’ Through him the traditional idea is asserted, that it is the sense of honor and of shame – not halfway measures drawn from middle class moralities – that creates a substantial, existential difference among beings, almost as great as between one race and another race. If anything positive can be accomplished today or tomorrow, it will not come from the skills of agitators and politicians, but from the natural prestige of men both of yesterday but also, and more so, from the new generation, who recognize what they can achieve and so vouch for their idea.[55]

This is the ideal of Oswald Spengler’s Roman soldier, who died at this post at Pompeii as the sky fell on him, because he had not been relieved. We do not need programs and marketing strategies, but men like that. “It is men, provided they are really men, who make and unmake history.”[56] Evola’s ideal continues to speak to the right person. “Keep your eye on just one thing: to remain on your feet in a world of ruins.”

End Notes

[1]. La dottrina del risveglio, Bari, 1943, revised in 1965.

[2]. Lo Yoga della potenza, Milan, 1949, revised in 1968, was a new edition of L’Uomo come Potenza, Rome, 1926; Metafisica del sesso, Rome, 1958, revised 1969.

[3]. Introduzione alla magia quale scienza del’Io, 3 volumes, Rome, 1927-29, revised 1971, Introduction to Magic: Rituals and Practical Techniques for the Magus, Rochester, VT: 2001; La tradizione hermetica (Bari, 1931), revised 1948, 1971; The Hermetic Tradition, Rochester, VT: 1995.

[4]. Rivolta contro il mondo moderno, Milan, 1934, revised 1951, 1969.

[5]. Robin Waterfield gives a useful bibliography at the end of his Gnosis essay (note 8, below) p. 17.

[6]. Karlheinz Weissman, “Bibliographie” in Menschen immitten von Ruinen, Tübingen, 1991, pp. 403-406, e.g., Heidnischer Imperialismus, Leipzig, 1933; Erhebung wider die moderne Welt, Stuttgart, 1935; Revolte gegen die moderne Welt, Berlin, 1982; Den Tiger Reiten, Vilsborg, 1997.

[7]. Thomas Sheehan, “Myth and Violence: The Fascism of Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist,” Social Research 48: 1981, pp. 45-73; Franco Ferraresi, “Julius Evola: tradition, reaction and the Radical Right,” Archives européennes de sociologie 28: 1987, pp. 107-151; Richard Drake, “Julius Evola and the Ideological Origins of the Radical Right in Contemporary Italy,” in Peter H. Merkl, (ed.), Political Violence and Terror: Motifs and Motivations, Berkeley, 1986, pp. 61-89; idem, The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy, Bloomington, 1989.

[8]. Robin Waterfield, “Baron Julius Evola and the Hermetic Tradition,” Gnosis 14:1989-90, pp. 12-17.

[9]. Elémire Zolla, “The Evolution of Julius Evola’s Thought,” Gnosis 14: 1989-90, pp. 18-20.

[10]. Jay Kinney, “Who’s Afraid of the Bogeyman? The Phantasm of Esoteric Terrorism,” Gnosis 14: 1989-90, pp. 21-24.

[11].. Gli uomini e le rovine, Rome, 1953, revised 1967, with a new appendix, 1972.

[12]. H. T. Hansen, “Julius Evolas politisches Wirken,” Menshen immitten von Ruinen (note 6, above) pp. 7-131.

[13]. H. T. Hansen, “A Short Introduction to Julius Evola” in Revolt Against the Modern World, Rochester, VT, 1995, ix-xxii, translated from Hansen’s article in Theosophical History 5, January 1994, pp. 11-22.

[14]. Christophe Boutin, Politique et Tradition: Julius Evola dans le siècle, 1898-1974; Paris, 1992.

[15]. Il mistero del Graal e la tradizione ghibellina dell’Impero, Bari, 1937, revised 1962, 1972; translated as The Mystery of the Grail: Initiation and Magic in the Quest for the Spirit, Rochester, Vt., 1997.

[16]. René Guénon, Crise du monde moderne (Paris, 1927) has been translated several times into English.

[17]. H. T. Hansen, “Julius Evola und die deutsche konservative Revolution,” Criticón 158 (April/Mai/June 1998) pp. 16-32.

[18]. Diorema: Antologia della pagina special di “Regime Fascista,” Marco Tarchi, (ed.) Rome, 1974.

[19]. Lettere di Julius Evola a Carl Schmitt, 1951-1963, Rome, 2000.

[20]. L”Operaio” nel pensiero di Ernst Jünger (Rome, 1960), revised 1974; reprinted with additions, 1998.

[21]. The Concept of the Political, New Brunswick, NJ, 1976; The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Cambridge, MA, 1985; Political Theology, Cambridge, MA, 1985; Political Romanticism, Cambridge, MA, 1986. Recent commentary includes Paul Gottfried, Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory, New York, 1990; Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, London, 2000.

[22]. Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt, Hamburg, 1932, was translated into Italian in 1985.

[23]. Armin Mohler, Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland, 1918-1932, Stuttgart, 1950, revised and expanded in 1972, 1989, 1994, 1999.

[24]. Panajotis Kondylis, Conservativismus: Geschichtlicher Gehalt und Untergang, Stuttgart, 1986, devotes 553 pages to this theme.

[25]. My impression is that daimonìa dell’economia implies “demonic possession by the economy.” In Orientamenti (see note 53, below), Evola writes of “l’allucinazione e la daimonìa dell’economia,” “hallucination and demonic possession.”

[26]. Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist, Rochester, VT, 2002, p. 166. “Absurd and deplorable” is for assurdo peggiore, literally, “the worst absurdity;” circolo buio e chiuso “dark and small circle,” literally “dark and closed circle.” Chiuso is used in weather reports for “overcast.”

[27]. Evola applied for membership in the Fascist Party in 1939 in order to enlist in the army as an officer, but in vain for reasons discussed by Hansen (note 26, above) xiii. The application was found by Dana Lloyd Thomas, “Quando Evola du degradato,” Il Borghese, March 29, 1999, pp. 10-13. Evola mentioned this in an interview with Gianfranco De Turris, I’Italiano 11, September, 1971, which can be found in some reprints of L’Orientamenti, e.g., Catania, 1981, 33 (See note 53, below).

[28]. Evola cites Heinrich Schurtz, Altersklassen und Männerbünde: Eine Darstellung der Grundformen der Gesellschaft, Berlin, 1902; A. van Gennep, Les rites du passage, Paris, 1909; The Rites of Passage, Chicago, 1960.

[29]. Men Among the Ruins (note 26, above) pp. 210-211; Gli uomini e le rovine (note 11, above) pp. 15-151. “A ridiculous hybrid and illegitimate organization” translates questa ridicola associazione ibrida e bastarda.

[30]. Elémire Zolla gives the essentials about Reghini’s influence on Evola in his Gnosis essay (note 9, above).

[31]. Imperialismo Pagano, Rome, 1928, p. 40.

[32]. Richard Drake, “Julius Evola, Radical Fascism, and the Lateran Accords,” Catholic Historical Review 74, 1988, pp. 403-319; E. Christian Kopff. “Italian Fascism and the Roman Empire,” Classical Bulletin 76: 2000, pp. 109-115.

[33]. Yvon de Begnac, Taccuini Mussoliniani, Francesco Perfetti, (ed.), Bologna, 1990, p. 647.

[34]. “L’Equivoco del razzismo scientifico,” Vita Italiana 30, September 1942.

[35]. Sintesi di dottrina della razza, Milan, 1941; Grundrisse der faschistischen Rassenlehre, Berlin, 1943.

[36]. Sintesi di dottrina della razza (note 35, above) p. 35. Since Hansen (note 26, above) 71 uses the German translation (note 12, above) 90, the last sentence reads “Fascist racial doctrine (Die faschistischen Rassenlehre) therefore holds a purely biological view of race to be inadequate.”

[37]. Il mito del sangue: Genesi del razzismo, Rome, 1937, revised 1942.

[38]. Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, Rasse und Seele. Eine Einführung in den Sinn der leiblichen Gestalt, Munich, 1937; Rasse ist Gestalt, Munich, 1937.

[39]. Renzo de Felice, The Jews in Fascist Italy: A History, New York, 2001, 378, translation of Storia degli Ebrei Italiani sotto il Fascismo, Turin, 1961, revised 1972, 1988, 1993. Evola is discussed on pp. 392-3.

[40]. Boutin (note 14, above) pp. 197-200.

[41]. L’Arco e la clava, Milan, 1968, revised 1971. The article is pp. 39-46 of the new edition, Rome, 1995.

[42]. Gli uomini e le rovine (note 11, above) Appendice sui miti del nostro tempo, pp. 255-282; Tabù dei nostri tempi, pp. 275-282.

[43]. Gli uomini e le rovine (note 11, above) p. 276: la tabuizzazione che porta fino ad evitare l’uso della designazione “negro,” per le sue implicazioni “offensive.”

[44]. J. Evola, Autodifesa (Quaderni di testi Evoliani, no. 2) (Rome, n.d.)

[45]. Banco degli accusati is what is called in England the “prisoner’s dock.”

[46]. At this point, according to Autodifesa (note 44, above) p. 4, Evola’s lawyer, Franceso Carnelutti, called out, “La polizia è andata in cerca anche di costoro.” (“The police have gone to look for them, too.”)

[47]. Men Among the Ruins (note 25, above) pp. 293-294; Autodifesa (note 44, above) pp. 10-11.

[48]. Bieca is literally “oblique,” but in this context means rather “grim, sinister.”

[49]. Holmes Publishing Group (Edwards, WA) has published shorter works by Evola edited by the Julius Evola Foundation in Rome, e.g. René Guénon: A Teacher for Modern Times; Taoism: The Magic of Mysticism; Zen: The Religion of the Samurai; The Path of Enlightenment in the Mithraic Mysteries.

[50]. Cavalcare la tigre, Rome, 1961, revised 1971.

[51]. Gianfranco de Turris, “Nota del Curatore,” Cavalcare la tigre , 5th edition: Rome, 1995, pp. 7-11.

[52]. Il Fascismo, Rome, 1964; Il Fascismo visto dalla Destra, con Note sul terzo Reich, Rome, 1970.

[53]. Orientamenti (Rome, 1951), with many reprints.

[54]. J. Evola, Spengler e “Il tramonto dell’Occidente” (Quaderni di testi Evoliani, no. 14) (Rome, 1981).

[55]. Orientamenti, (note [53]., above), p. 12; somewhat differently translated by Hansen (note 26, above) p. 101.

[56]. Orientamenti (note 53, above) p. 16. Hansen (note [26]., above) p. 93 translates “It is humans, as far as they are truly human, that make history or tear it down,” reflecting the German (note 12, above) p. 118: “Es sind die Menschen, sofern sie wahrhaft Menschen sind, die die Geschichte machen oder sie niederreissen.” The parallel sentence in Men Among the Ruins (note 11, above) p. 109: sono gli uomini, finché sono veramente tali, a fare o a disfare la storia, is translated by Stucco (note 26, above) p. 181: “It is men who make or undo history.” He omits finché sono veramente tali, but gets the meaning of uomini right.

Francis Parker Yockey, 1917 - 1960

Race, as has been shown, is not a unit of existence, but is an aspect of existence. Specifically it is the aspect of existence in which the relation of the human being to the great cosmic rhythms is revealed. It is thus the non-individual aspect of Life, whether it be the life of a plant, animal, or human being.

The plant exhibits — at least, not to us — no consciousness, i.e., no tension with its environment. The plant has thus only race, so to speak, for it is totally submerged in the cosmic flow. The animal exhibits tension, consciousness, individuality. Man has in addition self-consciousness and the ability and necessity of living a higher life in the realm of symbols. All men have this, but the difference in degree between primitive man and Culture-man in this respect is so vast that it seems almost a difference in kind.

It is the racial beat which informs primitive impulses, which informs action generally. Opposed to it is the illuminated part of the mind, the rootless reason, the intellect. The stronger these things are in relation to the racial plane, the more the existence bears an intellectual instead of a racial stamp.

Each individual, as well as each higher organic unit, has these two aspects. Race impels toward self-preservation, continuance of the cycle of generations, increase of power. Intellect decides the meaning of the Life, and the aim, and this may, for various reasons, deny one or all of these fundamental urges. The celibacy of the priest and the sterility of the libertine both come from intellect, but one of them is an expression of High Culture, and the other is the denial of Culture, an expression of total degeneracy. Intellect may thus be in the service of Culture, or opposed to it.

Race is, in the first instance — in its subjective sense — what a man feels. This influences, whether immediately or eventually, what he does. A man of race is not born to slavery. If his intellect counsel him to a temporary submission, rather than an heroic death, in the hope of future changes, it is a mere postponement of his breaking out. The man without race will submit permanently to any humiliation, any insult, any dishonor, so long as he is permitted to live. The continuance of breathing and digestion are Life to the man without race. To the man of race, Life itself represents no value, but only Life under the right conditions, affirmative Life, rich, expressive and growing.

Heroism can be motivated from either side of the soul: the martyr dies for the Truth which he knows, the fighting man who dies with weapons in his hands rather than submit to his enemies dies for the honor that he feels. But the man who dies for something higher shows that he has race, regardless of his intellectualized motives. For Race is the faculty of being true to one’s self. It is the placing of a beyond-value on one’s own individual soul.

In this subjective sense, Race is not the way one talks, looks, gestures, walks, it is not a matter of stock, color, anatomy, skeletal structure, or anything else objective. Men of Race are scattered through all populations everywhere, through all races, peoples, nations. In each unit they make up the warriors, the leaders of action, the creators in the sphere of politics and war.

Thus in the subjective sense, there is also a hierarchy of race. Above the men of race, below — those without race. The first are swept up into action and events by the great cosmic rhythm of motion, the second are passed over by History. The first are the materials of high History, the second have outlasted every Culture, and when the stillness resumes its sway over the landscape after the whirlwind of events, these are the great mass. The Chinese mothers counsel their children with the ancient admonition: “Make thy heart small.” This is the wisdom of the man without race, and of the race without will. The men of race are skimmed off every population that is caught up into the course of motion of a High Culture, and this process continues through the generations of History on the heights. What is left is the fellaheen.

Race in the subjective sense is thus seen to be a matter of instinct. The man with strong instincts has race, the man with weak or bad instincts has it not. Strength of intellect has nothing to do with the existence of race — it may merely, in some cases, such as that of the man who takes a vow of celibacy — influence the expression of a part of race. Strong intellect and strong instincts can co-exist — think of the Gothic bishops who led their flocks to war — they are merely opposed directions of thought and action, but it is the instincts that furnish the driving force for great intellectual accomplishments also. The center of gravity of ascendant Life is on the side of instinct, will, race, blood. Life which places rationalistic ideals of “individualism,” “happiness,” “freedom” before the perpetuation and increase of power is decadent. Decadent means — moving toward extinction, extinction of higher Life in particular, and finally even of the life of the race. The intellectual of the great city is the type of the man without race. In every Civilization, he has been the inner ally of the outer barbarian.

This quality of having race has, obviously, no connection with which race one feels community. Race in the objective sense is a creation of history. One’s destiny must express itself within a certain framework — the framework of Fate. Thus a man of race born in Kirghizia belongs by Fate to the barbarian world of Asia with its historical mission of destruction of the Western Civilization. Rare exceptions are of course possible — Life submits to no generalization entirely. Some Poles, Ukrainians, or even Russians, might be impelled by their souls to share the spirit of the West. If so, they belong to the Western race, and every healthy, ascendant race accepts recruits who come in on its terms and who have the proper feeling. In the same way, there are numerous intellectuals in the West who feel community with the outer idea of Asiatic Nihilism. How numerous they are is indicated by the journalism, novels and plays that live from them. But the converse would not be true of men without race — they are not even acceptable to the enemy. They have nothing to contribute to an organic group — they are the human grains of sand, atoms of intellect, without cohesion upwards or downwards.

Every race, no matter how transitory it may be contemplated from the viewpoint of History, expresses a certain idea, a certain plane of existence by its life, and its idea is bound to be attractive to some individuals outside it. Thus in Western life, we are not unfamiliar with the man who, after associating with Jews, reading their literature, and adopting their viewpoint, actually becomes a Jew in the fullest sense of the word. It is not necessary that he have “Jewish blood.” The converse is also known: many Jews have adopted Western feelings and rhythms, and have thereby acquired Western race. This process — contemptuously called “assimilation” by the Jewish leaders — threatened during the nineteenth century the very existence of the Jewish race by ultimate absorption of its total racial body into the Western races. To halt it, the leaders of the Jews evolved the program of Zionism, which was solely an expedient for maintaining the unity of the Jewish race, and maintaining its continued existence as such. For this reason they also recognized the value of anti-semitism of the social type. It was serving the same purpose of preserving the racial unity of the Jews.

II

The dying out of racial instincts means the same thing to an individual as it does to a race, people, nation, State, Culture: unfruitfulness, lack of will-to-power, lack of ability to believe in or follow great aims, lack of inner discipline, desire for a life of ease and pleasure.

The symptoms of this racial decadence in various parts of the Western Civilization are manifold. There is first the ghastly distortion of the sexual life arising from the complete dissociation of sexual love from reproduction. The great symbol of this in the Western Civilization is everything suggested by the name Hollywood. The message of Hollywood is the total significance of sexual love as an end in itself — the erotic without consequences. The sexual love of two grains of sand, two rootless individuals, not the primeval sexual love looking to the continuity of Life, the family of many children. One child is permitted, as being a more complicated toy than a dog, perhaps even two, one boy and one girl — but the family of many children is a subject for humor to this decadent outlook.

The instinct of decadence takes many forms in this realm: dissolution of Marriage by divorce laws, attempts to discard, through repeal or non-enforcement, the laws against abortion, preaching in the form of novel, drama, journalism, the identification of “happiness” with sexual love, holding it up as the great value, before which all honor, duty, patriotism, consecration of Life to a higher aim, must give way. An erotomania is abroad through our civilization, not indeed like the sexual obsession of the 13th century which was at least racially affirmative, in that it increased the Western Peoples, but always a purely rootless erotic-without-consequences. This spiritual disease is the suicide of the race.

The weakening of the will — Nietzsche called it “paralysis of will” — another symptom of dying out of racial instincts, leads to a total deterioration of public life in the afflicted races. Government leaders dare not offer a stern program to their masses of human grains of sand: they abdicate, but remain in office as private men. Government ceases; the only functions that continue are the ones that have always gone on, no new aim, no sacrifices. Keep the old going; no creation! No effort! That would be too hard. Keep the pleasures going, the panem et circenses. Never mind the necessities of life, we are willing to renounce them as long as we have the pleasures.

This weakening of the will leads to voluntary abandonment of empires conquered with the blood of millions over ten generations. It leads to abysmal hatred of whoever and whatever represents sternness, creation, the Future. One of its products is Pacifism, and the only way a racially-dissolving population can be driven to war is through conscription coupled with pacifist propaganda — “This is the last war — actually it is a war against war.” Only an intellectual could be taken in by such stark Unreality. The weak will of society manifests itself in the Bolshevism of the upper classes, the sympathy with the enemies of society. Anyone with unimpaired will however is really felt to be the enemy — even cogent reasoning is hated: ideals are so much less demanding.

Mediocrity rises over the horizon of a dying race as its last great ideal; total mediocrity, renunciation of all greatness and distinction of any kind whatever; also mediocrity of the racial blood-stream — anyone can come in now, not only on our terms, for there are no more terms, and there are no racial differences, everything is one, dull, eventless, mediocre.

The weakening of the will is not hard put to find an ideology which rationalizes it as “progress,” everything desirable, the aim of all previous history. The democracy-liberalism complex lies to hand, and it acquires in such times the meaning of Death — of race, nation and Culture. There are no human differences, everyone is equal, men are women, women are men, “the individual” is everything. Life is a long holiday whose main problem is devising new and more stupid pleasures, there is no God, no State, off with the head of anyone who says there is a mission, who wishes to resurrect Authority.

These symptoms, or similar ones, will be found present at the demise of every upper stratum whose will is weakened. Thus Tocqueville has described for us how the French upper stratum of 1789 had no suspicion whatever of the impending Revolution, how nobility waxed enthusiastic over the “natural goodness of Humanity,” the “virtuous people,” the “innocence of Man” while the Terror of 1793 lay before their very feet — spectacle terrible et ridicule. Did not the Petrine nobility of Russia up until 1917 go through the same performance? The Tsar resisted pleas to leave while there was time with “My people will not hurt me.” Their picture of the Russian peasant was that of a happy, simple muzhik, basically good. Similarly the weakening of the Western will in certain countries was shown by the deluge of pro-Russian propaganda spread, sometimes with official encouragement, in those countries from 1920 to 1960.

from Francis Parker Yockey (Ulick Varange), Imperium (1948; Costa Mesa, Cal.: Noontide Press, 1962), 292-99. Imperium is available in the TOQ Online Bookshop.

From "The Elder Scrolls" IV: "Oblivion"

Today’s youth are especially preoccupied with video games, spending countless hours on Xbox Live or the World of Warcraft, working with other gamers worldwide on quests to destroy goblins and liberate office buildings from zombie infestations; this time could be better used for homework, personal study, exercise, or productive hobbies.

Video games have become such an integral part of young people’s lives that they have even led to fatalities among dedicated gamers. One woman essentially drowned herself in a contest to win a Nintendo Wii for her children by drinking gallons of water and holding in her urine (whoever held it the longest would win).

In another legendary incident, a man killed himself because his character in a particular game was accidentally deleted. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with the dynamics of video games, players are able to save their progress onto a “memory card” at a given time during the main quest and return to it later.)

But what if there were a video game that had an educational significance, and a racial one at that? What if there were a video game that subliminally opened the player up to issues of race, politics, and culture? I believe I have found just such a game, as I myself have enjoyed it for many hours at a time over the last few years — I’m in my early twenties, so give me a break — and have had a chance to dissect its contents. It is not a single game exactly, but rather a series: The Elder Scrolls (TES).

The setting, or “universe” of the TES series is the fictional world of Nirn. Nirn is like Earth, having numerous continents and oceans; every game in the series takes place on the continent known as Tamriel, which is populated by a multitude of sentient humanoid races that hail from their own respective countries and kingdoms (e.g. the Nords of Skyrim and the Argonians of Black Marsh).

Tamriel is currently ruled over by the great Cyrodiilic Empire which resembles Ancient Rome in its people, language, material culture, religion, and cosmopolitan social structure, among other things. Though it boasts the most powerful military force, the Imperial Legion, Cyrodiil is a waning power, beset by continual internal threats that demand the intervention of the game’s players for resolution.

Subliminal Racialism

Racial themes permeate every aspect of TES games. At the very beginning of the game the player must construct a basic identity for his character: a name, class (knight, mage, assassin, etc.), gender, and race, among other things, comprise this identity. There are nine playable races, and interestingly enough, each one bears notable similarities to actual races in our world. Not all races in the game are human, however.

The peoples of Tamriel are divided into Man, Mer (Elves), and different bestial races. The subspecies of Man include the Nords, a tall, robust, fair-skinned people who physically and culturally resemble Nordic Vikings; the Imperials, or Cyrodiilic peoples who bear Greco-Roman sounding names and resemble White Mediterraneans; the Redguards, an African-looking people who even have African-American sounding names (e.g. Trevond); and the Bretons, a very short and pale-skinned mix of Man and Elf with French-sounding names.

Among the Elven peoples come the Altmer, or “High Elves,” who are a tall, golden-skinned, Aryan-like race that sees itself as superior to the other races; the Dunmer, or “Dark Elves,” a xenophobic and deeply religious group that reminds one of the ancient Hebrews (in no small reason because they were said to have departed from their proto-Elven kin under the leadership of a prophet who felt that they needed the guidance of different gods); the green-skinned and monstrous Orsimer (Orcs); and the Bosmer, or “Wood Elves,” who live in tree-top villages and embrace a pantheistic way of life.

Each of the above has a genetically determined set of racial traits. Each has a unique “special power” that the player can use for defense or attack (e.g., Bosmer can command animals to assist them in battle, while the folk-oriented Dunmer can call forth ancestral spirits). Some races are more gifted in the magical arts while others make better warriors; some have high resistances to diseases and elemental attacks while others are severely weakened by them. To give a specific example, the reptilian-humanoid Argonians can breath underwater while other races have a limited amount of breathing time while submerged, after which their health is impaired.

All of the above is presented to the player within the first five minutes of game play. In choosing their character attributes the players are immediately opened up to the concept of racial differences. The rest of the game is saturated with issues of race and culture.

The different races in the game have predispositions toward one another, both positive and negative. These relations are based on the rich racial history of Tamriel that the player can actually read about in in-game books. In-game books are items the player can actually pick up, place into their inventory, and read when they choose; they can be found anywhere from obscure caves to well-stocked stores in cities. If the player has a particular interest in the Dark Elves, for example, he or she can go to a book store and learn the following:

1. They have a very xenophobic culture that precludes them from friendly relations with other peoples, whom they refer to collectively as n’wah (sounds rather Semitic).

2. They have a particular hatred for the Argonians because the two peoples have fought numerous wars over territorial expansion and slavery. (The Dark Elves see the Argonians as an easily procurable source of slave labor.)

As a result of these history-based inter-ethnic relations, the player’s race determines how other characters feel about him. If characters have a negative attitude toward the player they will refuse to impart bits of information that are crucial to completing the game. The player will then be forced to bribe them with money or manipulate them verbally (a skill that is governed by “Personality” points, which can be increased as the player gains experience; the starting number of points, however, is determined by the player’s race).

In Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, racial epithets are flung around liberally. At the start of the game the player finds himself in a prison cell opposite one of a nasty Dark Elf. Depending on the player’s race, the Dark Elf will go into a particular racist diatribe against him. Take for example his monologue against an Orc player:

By the Nine Divines, you’re an ugly one. But then, all Orcs are ugly. The most repulsive race in all of Tamriel, really. At least you’ve got that brutish strength, huh? Must be nice to just rip someone apart like some kind of monster. Oh, but you must be the one Orc weakling, huh? Captured by Imperials. How pathetic. You’re going to die in here, Orc! Like an animal in a cage!

Enemies at later points in the game will also hurl racial insults at the player: “All you Elves/Humans are the same: all flash and no fury!” If the player is in combat with an enemy of the same race, the latter will sometimes cry “You’re a traitor to your own race!” One would turn a lot of heads for uttering those words in the real world, especially if one is white. Nevertheless, such barrages constantly remind the player of racial differences, which is significant even if the message comes from a fictional universe.

Racial verbal exchanges are not always negative. In Oblivion the player will often be addressed as “brother” by members of the same race as he passes them in the streets of Cyrodiil; these characters will also have a more positive disposition towards the player, making them more likely to assist him during missions or sell goods for cheaper prices.

Certain god characters in the game favor certain races. For example, Malacath, the apotheosized ancestor of the Orcs, will say to an Orc character in Oblivion who approaches his shrine: “Nice present! Good! And from a nice Orc, too! Double good! Orcs are smart. They know, you want something, you do what the Boss tells you.”

The game series also includes intellectual analyses of race. In The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, the player is able to uncover a book on physical anthropology titled Notes on Racial Phylogeny. Here is an excerpt:

After much analysis of living specimens, the Council long ago determined that all “races” of elves and humans may mate with each other and bear fertile offspring. Generally the offspring bear the racial traits of the mother, though some traces of the father’s race may also be present. It is less clear whether the Argonians and Khajiit are interfertile with both humans and elves. . . . Khajiit differ from humans and elves not only their skeletal and dermal physiology — the “fur” that covers their bodies — but their metabolism and digestion as well. Argonians, like the dreugh, appear to be a semi-aquatic troglophile form of humans, though it is by no means clear whether the Argonians should be classified with dreugh, men, mer, or (in this author’s opinion), certain tree-dwelling lizards in Black Marsh.

The above sounds like something out of a book by Carleton Coon or H. F. K. Günther, if they were Elven scholars. Another in-game book describes the genesis of the Orc race in similar anthropological terms: “Orcs were born during the latter days of the Dawn Era. History has mislabeled them beastfolk, related to the goblin races, but the Orcs are actually the children of Trinimac, strongest of the Altmeri ancestor spirits.”

Parallels to European Mythology

The fictional world of Nirn has an exhaustive history that can be researched through in-game books and dialogues between characters. What is significant to the white racialist about this history are its countless elements of Indo-European mythology and mythical conceptions of racial genesis.

The history of Nirn, particularly its continent of Tamriel, is cyclical like the history of our world as viewed by the Ancients and later by Oswald Spengler and Julius Evola. Rather than following a straight line of events, Tamriel has gone through a series of “Eras” that each represent a new stage of civilized development. The transition from one phase to the next usually entails a step down from archetypal perfection, a view also held by the ancients.

In the beginning was the Dawn Era where the archetype of order, Anu, clashed with the forces of chaos represented by Padomay-Sithis over the love of a celestial being named Nir. The battle caused the universe, the stars, and a multitude of deities to materialize. This bears a striking similarity to the Nordic understanding of cosmogenesis in which the ice of the realm Niflheim converged with the fires of Muspelheim in a middle space known as Ginnungagap, which caused the universe to explode forth. In fact, the order-chaos dichotomy in general is a theme that pervades virtually all Indo-European origin stories.

One of the gods born from this cataclysmic event was Lorkhan, also known as the “Trickster-Deity.” The spelling of his name along with his personality suggest that his role was inspired by the Nordic god Loki, who was notorious for malevolent knavery (e.g. he fooled the other gods into slaying Baldur, one of their most beloved kin). In any event, Lorkhan ultimately tricked half of his divine kin, the Aedra (a term bearing notable similarities to the Nordic Aesir and Hindu Asuras), into constructing a sentient world at the expense of their own immortality; the result was the Earth-like planet known as Nirn. Now sapped of their divinity, the gods were forced to dwell in their new realm as imperfect demigods.

This Era corresponds in many ways to the “Golden Age” or “Satya Yuga” of Indo-European myth. It was a time when the gods were pristine and immortal, and they maintained perfect order in the cosmos. However, a fall ultimately occurred that rendered the gods imperfect and ushered in a new age. As Hesiod writes:

Worse than the first, a second Age appears,
Which the Celestials call the Silver Years.
The Golden Age’s Virtues are no more;
Nature grows weaker than she was before . . .

Though they were no longer gods in the transcendental sense, these demigods did not merely die off. Several of them ascended into the heavens and metamorphosed into what look like planets, if one were looking up at the sky from Nirn’s surface. By so doing, they are able to exert an occult influence on their sentient creation in the form of “magicka” for the rest of time. Magicka is an ethereal substance that allows people to cast magical spells, similar to the numina of Latin myth. We once again see a parallel in Hesiod’s prehistory:

Aeiral Spirts, by great Jove design’d,
To be on Earth the Guardians of Mankind;
Invisible to mortal Eyes they go,
And mark our Actions, good, or bad, below . . .

Those demigods who did not enter the sky ultimately degenerated as they begat further generations of beings through reproduction. The inevitable result was the birth of the Ehlnofey, or the antecedents of both Elves and Humans who claimed the island of Aldmeris as their primordial seat. The birth of this race officially ushered in the Merethic Era.

Shortly thereafter, the Ehlnofey diverged into separate races: the Aldmer, or proto-Elves who remained on Aldmeris, and the Nedes, or proto-Humans who emigrated to a new continent called Atmora. For various reasons the two ultimately reconnected on the continent of Tamriel and quarreled.

What happened to Aldmeris and Atmora according to the in-game history books betrays another Indo-European mythic theme used by the designers: lost continents. Aldmeris was said to sink beneath the sea for unknown reasons (likely magical), forcing the Aldmer to settle in Tamriel. There they splintered off into the miscellany of Elven races discussed above. This story invokes the mythical account of Atlantis from Plato’s Timaeus and Critias, the continent “beyond the Pillars of Hercules” that was submerged by metaphysical causes.

Meanwhile, Atmora was said to have frozen over and become inhospitable, which forced the Nedes to migrate into Tamriel and diverge into the multitude of human stocks. In this we find a parallel event in the Zoroastrian Zend-Avesta where the primordial Airyano Vaego is destroyed by the “fatal winters,” forcing the first humans to flee under the leadership of King Yima; among the ancient Greeks this primordial seat was known as Hyperborea or Thule.

For many centuries the Elves were the dominant race on Tamriel, having erected grand civilizations across the continent and enslaving the Men and beast-folk (the animal-like races that were created when Nirn came into being) for manpower. Like many empires, the Elves became decadent, suffered intra-racial discord, and were overthrown by a human slave revolt. This event marked the beginning of the First Era and the dominance of Man under the Cyrodiilic Empire.

Julius Evola, the Italian esotericist, comparative mythologist, and founding father of the European New Right, referred to such a development as the “regression of the castes,” in which a lower stratum of society seizes power from that directly above it (e.g., the merchants surmount the nobility) and thus completely alters the cultural style of that society. From the First to the Third Era the Imperials would wax and wane in power, but with the passage of time came ultimate decline, as it does in any human civilization.

The Third Era ends with the Oblivion Crisis (the central plot of TES IV: Oblivion), in which hordes of Daedra (the gods not tricked by Lorkhan) spill into the realm of Nirn from the chaotic dimension of Oblivion and attempt to destroy Tamriel. The game is completed when the player brings the empire’s crown prince (voiced by actor Sean Bean) into the capital city, where he is transfigured into the avatar of another deity and obliterates the hellish invaders.

In this sequence more Indo-European motifs are found. Firstly, the final battle between the forces of chaos (Daedra) and the forces of order (the Empire and its divine patrons) at the close of an Era is similar to the Nordic Ragnarok, when the Aesir engage in an apocalyptic war with the Vanir that leads to a radically new period of human existence. Secondly, the concept of an avatar acting on behalf of the gods and defeating chaos is clearly inspired by Hindu mythology.

Next to the complex metaphysical themes are more simple aspects of European mythology: the existence of Elves and forest-dwelling sprites, the ability to don legendary armor like mithril and adamant, brewing magical potions, raiding caves and slaying goblins, going pound for pound with a troll, looting treasure, rescuing damsels, pursuing necromancers, dueling with undead legions, freeing the specters of tormented souls, crusading for relics, saving kingdoms, and the like — all are elements of the heroic spirit that permeates Celtic, Germanic, and Classical folkways. Constant exposure to them in the world or Nirn cannot help but generate interest in their real-world origins.

Conclusion

Maybe I am just a nerd who gives too much credit to a form of modern entertainment. Be that as it may, one cannot deny the value that TES holds for white racialism. Of critical importance is that this game appeals predominantly to intelligent white people (with a few Asians thrown in). Being young myself, I have had a chance to observe the habits of American youth. One thing I have noticed is that the plebeian-minded simpletons always contented themselves with sports games and shoot’em ups, whereas the truly intelligent kids always go for role-playing games. Even if you went back in time to the 80s, before video games were as prevalent, you would see the student council members, chess club chairmen, math geniuses, and other future leaders of society spending their Friday nights slaying goblins and casting lightning bolts in the board game Dungeons and Dragons.

Now, with TES games, bright white youth are being overtly and covertly bombarded with racial concepts and Indo-European cultural themes. From the first five minutes of the game to the very end, they are exposed to a steady barrage of racial differences, physical anthropology, medieval Gothic architecture, feudalism, Indo-Aryan myths, and Greek and Nordic myths — a subliminal course in Indo-European humanities. For whites who care about our cultural legacy and genetic future, perhaps TES games will prove a useful weapon in our occult war against the Daedra of our world, that is, multiculturalism and decadent modernism.

Other role-playing games are also significant tools in the battle for young minds. Games like the Final Fantasy series, Secret of Mana, World of Warcraft, Chrono Trigger, Neverwinter Nights, and Warhammer are saturated with ancient, medieval, and archaeo-futuristic themes of European inspiration. In playing such games our youth might very well take an interest in the racial and cultural history of their people, then put down the in-game books and pick up some real ones about who we are.

Revilo Oliver in 1938

Conceived before the First World War is Oswald Spengler’s magisterial work, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Munich, 1918). Read in this country chiefly in the brilliantly faithful translation by Charles Francis Atkinson, The Decline of the West (New York, two volumes, 1926-28), Spengler’s morphology of history was the great intellectual achievement of our century. Whatever our opinion of his methods or conclusions, we cannot deny that he was the Copernicus of historionomy. All subsequent writings on the philosophy of history may fairly be described as criticism of the Decline of the West.

Spengler, having formulated a universal history, undertook an analysis of the forces operating in the immediately contemporary world. This he set forth in a masterly work, Die Jahre der Entscheidung, of which only the first volume could be published in Germany (Munich, 1933) and translated into English (The Hour of Decision, New York, 1934). One had only to read this brilliant work, with its lucid analysis of forces that even acute observers did not perceive until 25 or 30 years later, and with its prevision that subsequent events have now shown to have been absolutely correct, to recognize that its author was one of the great political and philosophical minds of the West. One should remember, however, that the amazing accuracy of his analysis of the contemporary situation does not necessarily prove the validity of his historical morphology.

The publication of Spengler’s first volume in 1918 released a spate of controversy that continues to the present day. Manfred Schroeter in Der Streit um Spengler (Munich, 1922) was able to give a précis of the critiques that had appeared in a little more than three years; today, a mere bibliography, if reasonably complete, would take years to compile and would probably run to eight hundred or a thousand printed pages.

Spengler naturally stirred up swarms of nit-wits, who were particularly incensed by his immoral and preposterous suggestion that there could be another war in Europe, when everybody knew that there just couldn’t be anything but World Peace after 1918, ’cause Santa had just brought a nice, new, shiny “League of Nations.” Such “liberal” chatterboxes are always making a noise, but no one with the slightest knowledge of human history pays any attention to them, except as symptoms.

Unfortunately, much more intelligent criticism of Spengler was motivated by emotional dissatisfaction with his conclusions. In an article in Antiquity for 1927, the learned R. G. Collingwood of Oxford went so far as to claim that Spengler’s two volumes had not given him “a single genuinely new idea,” and that he had “long ago carried out for himself” — and, of course, rejected — even Spengler’s detailed analyses of individual cultures. As a cursory glance at Spengler’s work will suffice to show, that assertion is less plausible than a claim to know everything contained in the Twelfth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Collingwood, the author of the Speculum Mentis and other philosophical works, must have been bedeviled with emotional resentments so strong that he could not see how conceited, arrogant, and improbable his vaunt would seem to most readers.

It is now a truism that Spengler’s “pessimism” and “fatalism” was an unbearable shock to minds nurtured in the nineteenth-century illusion that everything would get better and better forever and ever. Spengler’s cyclic interpretation of history stated that a civilization was an organism having a definite and fixed life-span and moving from infancy to senescence and death by an internal necessity comparable to the biological necessity that decrees the development of the human organism from infantile imbecility to senile decrepitude. Napoleon, for example, was the counterpart of Alexander in the ancient world.

Oswald Spengler

We were now, therefore, in a phase of civilizational life in which constitutional forms are supplanted by the prestige of individuals. By 2000, we shall be “contemporary” with the Rome of Sulla, the Egypt of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and China at the time when the “Contending States” were welded into an empire. That means that we face an age of world wars and what is worse, civil wars and proscriptions, and that around 2060 the West (if not destroyed by its alien enemies) will be united under the personal rule of a Caesar or Augustus. That is not a pleasant prospect.

Greatness or Optimism

The only question before us, however, is whether Spengler is correct in his analysis. Rational men will regard as irrelevant the fact that his conclusions are not charming. If a physician informs you that you have symptoms of arteriosclerosis, he may or may not be right in his diagnosis, but it is absolutely certain that you cannot rejuvenate yourself by slapping his face.

Every detached observer of our times, I think, will agree that Spengler’s “pessimism” aroused emotions that precluded rational consideration. I am inclined to believe that the moral level of his thinking was a greater obstacle. His “fatalism” was not the comforting kind that permits men to throw up their hands and eschew responsibilities. Consider, for example, the concluding lines of his Man and Technics (New York, 1932):

Already the danger is so great, for every individual, every class, every people, that to cherish any illusion whatever is deplorable. Time does not suffer itself to be halted; there is no question of prudent retreat or wise renunciation. Only dreamers believe that there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice.

We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.

Now, whether or not the stern prognostication that lies back of that conclusion is correct, no man fit to live in the present can read those lines without feeling his heart lifted by the great ethos of a noble culture — the spiritual strength of the West that can know tragedy and be unafraid. And simultaneously, that pronouncement will affright to hysteria the epicene homunculi among us, the puling cowards who hope only to scuttle about safely in the darkness and to batten on the decay of a culture infinitely beyond their comprehension.

That contrast is in itself a very significant datum for an estimate of the present condition of our civilization …

Three Points of Criticism

Criticism of Spengler, therefore, if it is not to seem mere quibbling about details, must deal with major premises. Now, so far as I can see, Spengler’s thesis can be challenged at three really fundamental points, namely: (1) Spengler regards each civilization as a closed and isolated entity animated by a dominant idea, or Weltanschauung, that is its “soul.” Why should ideas, or concepts, the impalpable creations of the human mind, undergo an organic evolution as though they were living protoplasm, which, as a material substance, is understandably subject to chemical change and hence biological laws? This logical objection is not conclusive: Men may observe the tides, for example, and even predict them, without being able to explain what causes them. But when we must deduce historical laws from the four of five civilizations of which we have some fairly accurate knowledge, we do not have enough repetitions of a phenomenon to calculate its periodicity with assurance, if we do not know why it happens.

(2) A far graver difficulty arises from the historical fact that we have already mentioned. For five centuries, at least, the men of the West regarded modern civilization as a revival or prolongation of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Spengler, as the very basis of his hypothesis, regards the Classical world as a civilization distinct from, and alien to, our own — a civilization that, like the Egyptian, lived, died, and is now gone. It was dominated by an entirely different Weltanschauung, and consequently the educated men of Europe and America, who for five centuries believed in continuity, were merely suffering from an illusion or hallucination.

Even if we grant that, however, we are still confronted by a unique historical phenomenon. The Egyptian, Babylonian, Chinese, Hindu, and Arabian (“Magian”), civilizations are all regarded by Spengler (and other proponents of an organic structure of culture) as single and unrelated organisms: Each came into being without deriving its concepts from another civilization (or, alternatively, seeing its own concepts in the records of an earlier civilization), and each died leaving no offspring (or, alternatively, no subsequent civilization thought to see in them its own concepts). There is simply no parallel or precedent for the relationship (real or imaginary) which links Graeco-Roman culture to our own.

Since Spengler wrote, a great historical discovery has further complicated the question. We now know that the Mycenaean peoples were Greeks, and it is virtually certain that the essentials of their culture survived the disintegration caused by the Dorian invasion, and were the basis of later Greek culture. (For a good summary, see Leonard R. Palmer, Mycenaeans and Minoans, London, 1961). We therefore have a sequence that is, so far as we know, unique:

Mycenaean>Dark Ages>Graeco-Roman>Dark Ages>Modern. If this is one civilization, it has had a creative life-span far longer than that of any other that has thus far appeared in the world. If it is more than one, the interrelations form an exception to Spengler’s general law, and suggest the possibility that a civilization, if it dies by some kind of quasi-biological process, may in some cases have a quasi-biological power of reproduction.

The exception becomes even more remarkable if we, unlike Spengler, regard as fundamentally important the concept of self-government, which may have been present even in Mycenaean times (see L. R. Palmer, Mycenaeans and Minoans, cited above, p. 97). Democracies and constitutional republics are found only in the Graeco-Roman world and our own; such institutions seem to have been incomprehensible to other cultures.

(3) For all practical purposes, Spengler ignores hereditary and racial differences. He even uses the word “race” to represent a qualitative difference between members of what we should call the same race, and he denies that that difference is to any significant extent caused by heredity. He regards biological races as plastic and mutable, even in their physical characteristics, under the influence of geographical factors (including the soil, which is said to affect the physical organism through food) and of what Spengler terms “a mysterious cosmic force” that has nothing to do with biology. The only real unity is cultural, that is, the fundamental ideas and beliefs shared by the peoples who form a civilization. Thus Spengler, who makes those ideas subject to quasi-biological growth and decay, oddly rejects as insignificant the findings of biological science concerning living organisms.

It is true, of course, that man is in part a spiritual being. Of that, persons who have a religious faith need no assurance. Others, unless they are determined blindly to deny the evidence before us, must admit the existence of phenomena of the kind described by Franz E. Winkler, M.D., in Man: The Bridge Between Two Worlds (New York, Harper, 1960), and, of course, by many other writers. And every historian knows that no one of the higher cultures could conceivably have come into being, if human beings are merely animals.

But it is also true that the science of genetics, founded by Father Mendel only a century ago and almost totally neglected down to the early years of the Twentieth Century, has ascertained biological laws that can be denied only by denying the reality of the physical world. Every educated person knows that the color of a man’s eyes, the shape of the lobes of his ears, and every one of his other physiological characteristics is determined by hereditary factors. It is virtually certain that intellectual capacity is likewise produced by inheritance, and there is a fair amount of evidence that indicated that even moral capacities are likewise innate.

Man’s power of intervention in the development of inherited qualities appears to be entirely negative, thus affording another melancholy proof that human ingenuity can easily destroy what it can never create. Any fool with a knife can in three minutes make the most beautiful woman forever hideous, and one of our “mental health experts,” even without using a knife, can as quickly and permanently destroy the finest intellect. And it appears that less drastic interventions, through education and other control of environment, may temporarily or even permanently pervert and deform, but are powerless to create capacities that an individual did not inherit from near or more remote ancestors.

The facts are beyond question, although the Secret Police in Soviet Russia and “liberal” spitting-squads in the United States have largely succeeded in keeping these facts from the general public in the areas they control. But no amount of terrorism can alter the laws of nature. For a readable exposition of genetics, see Garrett Hardin’s Nature and Man’s Fate (New York, Rinehart, 1959), which is subject only to the reservation that the laws of genetics, like the laws of chemistry, are verified by observation every day, whereas the doctrine of biological evolution is necessarily an hypothesis that cannot be verified by experiment.

The Race Factor

It is also beyond question that the races of mankind differ greatly in physical appearance, in susceptibility to specific diseases, and in average intellectual capacity. There are indications that they differ also in nervous organization, and possibly, in moral instincts. It would be a miracle if that were not so, for, as is well known, the three primary races were distinct and separate at the time that intelligent men first appeared on this planet, and have so remained ever since. The differences are so pronounced and stable that the proponents of biological evolution are finding it more and more necessary to postulate that the differences go back to species that preceded the appearance of the homo sapiens. (See the new and revised edition of Dr. Carleton S. Coon’s The Story of Man, New York, Knopf, 1962.)

That such differences exist is doubtless deplorable. It is certainly deplorable that all men must die, and there are persons who think it deplorable that there are differences, both anatomical and spiritual, between men and women. However, no amount of concerted lying by “liberals,” and no amount of decreeing by the Warren [Supreme Court] Gang, will in the least change the laws of nature.

Now there is a great deal that we do not know about genetics, both individual and racial, and these uncertainties permit widely differing estimates of the relative importance of biologically determined factors and cultural concepts in the development of a civilization. Our only point here is that it is highly improbable that biological factors have no influence at all on the origin and course of civilizations. And to the extent that they do have an influence, Spengler’s theory is defective and probably misleading.

Profound Insights

One could add a few minor points to the three objections stated above, but these will suffice to show that the Spenglerian historionomy cannot be accepted as a certainty. It is, however, a great philosophical formulation that poses questions of the utmost importance and deepens our perception of historical causality. No student of history needed Spengler to tell him that a decline of religious faith necessarily weakens the moral bonds that make civilized society possible. But Spengler’s showing that such a decline seems to have occurred at a definite point in the development of a number of fundamentally different civilizations with, of course, radically different religions provides us with data that we must take into account when we try to ascertain the true causes of the decline. And his further observation that the decline was eventually followed by a sweeping revival of religious belief is equally significant.

However wrong he may have been about some things, Spengler has given us profound insights into the nature of our own culture. But for him, we might have gone on believing that our great technology was merely a matter of economics — of trying to make more things more cheaply. But he has shown us, I think, that our technology has a deeper significance — that for us, the men of Western civilization, it answers a certain spiritual need inherent in us, and that we derive from its triumphs as satisfaction analogous to that which is derived from great music or great art.

And Spengler, above all, has forced us to inquire into the nature of civilization and to ask ourselves by what means — if any — we can repair and preserve the long and narrow dikes that alone protect us from the vast and turbulent ocean of eternal barbarism. For that, we must always honor him.

Journal of Historical Review, vol. 17, no. 2 (March-April 1998), 10-13.

Editor’s Note: This is the third and final online installment of this essay, which originally appeared in Samuel Francis, ed., Race and the American Prospect: Essays on the Racial Realities of Our Nation and Our Time (The Occidental Press, 2006), available for purchase here. Read part I here. Read part II here.

What do the neo-Confederates cite as evidence for their case?

Their arguments against race and slavery as primary motivations for Southern secession rely on a potpourri of quotes from various Southern leaders that blacks should be enrolled as soldiers, that the South should even consider freeing the slaves if that would induce Britain to intervene.

The neo-Confederates ignore two apparent, and (for them) most unpleasant facts about their little arsenal of quotations. First, the statements are almost exclusively drawn from the very last months of the war, when defeat was staring the South in the face and any straw for survival had to be seized.

On August 21, 1862, President Davis denounced Union Generals David Hunter and John Phelps for stating their intentions to enlist blacks into the Union Army. Davis characterized Hunter and Phelps as “outlaws” and stated they were to be held “for execution as felons at such time and place as the President shall order.”[1] It is hard to believe that Davis favored enrollment of blacks in the Confederate Army if he was willing to execute federal officers who enlisted blacks as soldiers.

It was not until September 12, 1864 (40 months after Fort Sumter and less than seven months before the surrender at Appomattox), that Lee wrote to Davis advising that due to the extremities of the situation blacks should be used in support services in the Confederate Army so as to free whites for combat.[2]

It was not until November 7, 1864, that Davis endorsed the purchase of blacks for employment in the Confederate Army, but not as soldiers unless in the last extremity.[3]

It was not until March 13, 1865, less than a month before Appomattox, that the Confederate Congress in secret session, over vehement opposition and by a one-vote margin, approved the recruitment of blacks as soldiers.[4]

Second, even in those dire circumstances, as late as 1865, there are many statements from Southern leaders that black soldiers should not be permitted. For example, Howell Cobb of Georgia in the Confederate Congress, in the debate in 1865 on allowing blacks to serve as soldiers, characterized the proposal as the “beginning of the end of our revolution.”[5]

Despite the historical record that the South only reluctantly and at a very late date made tentative efforts to enroll black soldiers, the neo-Confederates, undeterred, claim that large numbers of blacks served as soldiers in the Confederate Army. Their sources of evidence are few. They frequently excuse the lack of evidence by citing National Park Service historian Edward Bearrs, who said, “I don’t want to call it a conspiracy to ignore the role of Blacks, both above and below the Mason-Dixon line, but it was definitely a tendency that began around 1910.”[6]

What Bearrs probably meant was that the role of minorities has been excised from history, presumably by “racist” whites bent on stealing their history from them—a fairly typical leftist claim. The neo-Confederates have twisted this into an explanation for the paucity of evidence to support their claims of large-scale black participation in the Confederacy.[7] They fail, however, to address the fact that Bearrs has expressed an opinion that only a few dozen, or at most, a few hundred blacks ever served in the Confederate Armed forces.

In contrast, 200,000 blacks are known to have served in the Union forces. An interesting subject of study would be the behavior of these black troops toward Southern white people. Such an investigation would not interest neo-Confederates because they are not interested in anything that might be considered “racist” research. One suspects, however, that research into the behavior of these troops would probably demonstrate the perspicacity of President Davis and other Southerners who were outraged by the use of these slave volunteers for the Union.

One example is what has been characterized as “the famous Marianna” incident in Florida—which is no longer famous at all. I have met Southerners who were born and reared in Marianna, Florida, who had never heard of it. On September 25, 1864, federal forces attacked the little village of Marianna. They were resisted by a home guard militia unit consisting of very young teenaged boys and a few elderly men, whom they easily defeated. The federal forces consisted of a battalion of Maine cavalry, the Thirteenth Massachusetts Volunteers, and two companies of what the Southerners termed “ferocious Louisiana negroes.”

The black Union volunteers followed up their victory by throwing the wounded Confederate teenage boys into a church and burning them alive. The white federal soldiers from Massachusetts intervened to try to stop the massacre of surrendered Confederates. The behavior of these black Unionist troops shows that many Southern blacks did not have the same love for their masters and the South that neo-Confederates such as Charles Kelley Barrow, James Ronald Kennedy, and Walter Donald Kennedy like to relate to their avid fans.[8]

The evidence advanced by the neo-Confederates to support the contention that significant numbers of blacks served in the Confederate forces consists of a handful of bits and pieces of quotations that are improbable and suspect. Their trump card is a quotation from a Dr. Lewis Steiner, chief of the Union Sanitary Commission, who was in Frederick, Maryland, during its occupation by Stonewall Jackson.

Over 3,000 negroes must be included in this number [Confederate troops]. These were clad in all kinds of uniforms, not only in cast-off or captured United States uniforms, but in coats with Southern buttons, State buttons, etc. These were shabby, but not shabbier or seedier than those worn by white men in the rebel ranks. Most of the Negroes had arms, rifles, muskets, sabers, bowie-knives, dirks, etc. . . . and were manifestly an integral portion of the Southern Confederate Army.[9]

Steiner’s comments about 3,000 black soldiers he claims to have observed in Stonewall Jackson’s forces are remarkable in many ways. Most remarkable is the fact that he alone observed this astonishing matter. No one else is recorded as having shared his discovery. Thousands and tens of thousands of people in Maryland observed the Confederate forces. No one else saw the black soldiers. There were foreign observers with the Confederate forces. None of them observed the black Confederate soldiers either. No pictures of the black Confederates in Jackson’s forces seem to have survived.

They are unmentioned in the letters of Confederate soldiers.

None of them ever seems to have been captured by the federal forces. Indeed, after the defeat at Appomattox the North paroled 28,231 Confederate soldiers from the Army of Northern Virginia. The records noted the soldiers’ race. According to the Appomattox parole records maintained by the National Parks Service, exactly 35 blacks are identified as soldiers in the Confederate Army; not one is in a combat position.

Also unexplained is how Jackson came to enroll so many black soldiers when the policies of the civilian administration did not permit it. Do the neo-Confederates believe Stonewall Jackson secretly defied and violated his orders?

Georgia’s Congressman Howell Cobb was serving with Jackson’s forces when they were in Frederick, Maryland. Over two years later, in February 1865, Cobb was vehemently opposing the proposal to allow the enrollment of black soldiers, characterizing the proposal as “the end of our revolution.” One has to ask why Howell Cobb failed to notice the thousands of blacks serving with Jackson’s corps, or to address Stonewall Jackson’s defiance of his superiors’ policies.

Despite all these improbabilities, the neo-Confederates have clutched Steiner to their bosoms as their star witness. They characterize him as a witness of the utmost credibility. When one reads the report of Lewis H. Steiner (available on the internet at http://www.edinborough.com/Learn/cw_nurses/Steiner.PDF), however, other serious problems arise as to his credibility, problems that must surely discomfit the neo-Confederates.

Steiner relates numerous farfetched stories about the Southern soldiers. He accuses an officer in Jackson’s corps of grossly insulting young Unionist ladies in Frederick by handing them a gift of a ring that he told them he had carved from the bone of a dead Yankee. Only the quick and gallant action of a Yankee gentleman who snatched away this barbaric relic saved the young women from the alleged brutality and rudeness of this Southern officer. Steiner accuses Southern soldiers of not bearing themselves with fortitude (i.e., of unmanliness). He recounts with relish a story of a stalwart, clever Union lad who tricks a stupid, gullible Southerner into buying a broken- down horse near death. He characterizes the behavior of Jackson’s troops in Frederick as a “reign of terror,” although he concedes that no personal violence was done to civilians.

Steiner seems also to have been the source of the false information given to the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier about the alleged Barbara Frietchie incident (“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, but spare your country’s flag!”). Whittier, who was embarrassed when the tear-jerking story was exposed as humbug, defended himself by saying he had written the poem in good faith based upon what he had been told by a doctor in Frederick, Maryland. Steiner wrote of two women in his report, one elderly, the other the wife of a Unionist, who confronted the Rebels with “their country’s flag.” The Frietchie falsehood borders on being a pastiche of these two stories.

Steiner was also a staunch abolitionist. He had a purpose in making the claim that blacks were serving as soldiers in the Confederate Army. That purpose is suggested by the concluding sentence in the paragraph about the 3,000 black soldiers: “The fact was patent, and rather interesting when considered in connection with the horror rebels express at the suggestion of black soldiers being employed for the National defense.”

Steiner and escaped slave Frederick Douglass were both supporters of enrolling black soldiers into the Union ranks. Suggesting, as both Steiner and Douglass did, that the South was using blacks as soldiers was a means of inducing reluctant conservative Northerners to go along with the proposal.

Enough has been said to deflate the myth of Confederate political correctness and multiculturalism. What are we to make of neo-Confederate Southerners who so frantically adhere to these myths?

I believe they must be viewed as nothing less than wounded victims of the incessant psychological warfare waged not merely against Southerners, but against white Americans in general. Like Patty Hearst and other kidnapping victims, the neo-Confederates have come to identify with their abusers. They beg, “Please don’t hurt me anymore.” They desperately seek forgiveness and inclusion.

Alas, their enemies, no matter how gratified they may be to see the descendants of Confederate veterans debasing themselves by embracing the ideology of the most extreme New England abolitionists, have no intention of sitting down at the table of brotherhood with white Southerners who seek to preserve their heritage.

They intend to diabolize the South and ultimately to destroy it, all in the name of “love.”

Neo-Confederates are not the only casualties of the psychological hate war against whites in America. Huge numbers of other victims are found in all areas of our country. This is so because the liberal/Marxist coalition and its minority racist allies, while they have a special hate for the South as the last region of the country populated by the founding British stock and as the embodiment of all that they despise and detest, hate the rest of white America with only slightly less intensity. The 500th anniversary of the voyage of Columbus demonstrated this as the media and universities erupted into a frenzy of denunciation of the European colonization of the New World. Their view in essence, is that white America was a mistake, a mistake that needs urgently to be corrected.

Race, therefore, is no longer a peculiar Southern problem. It is a national problem. As Jared Taylor has written, paraphrasing Gunnar Myrdal, it is the “real American dilemma.”

The South has a wealth of experience and wisdom to offer the beleaguered whites of America. The white community in the South is still more of a cohesive whole than those of the North and West of the United States. The South needs the help of sympathetic whites throughout the nation, but it also has much help to offer white Americans in other regions.

Contrary to the fantastic conceptions of neo-Confederates, white Southerners have more in common with white Northerners than they do with black Southerners. This is not to minimize the importance of the fact that the South is still a separate cultural, linguistic, and to some extent ethnic community with values and concerns distinct from the rest of the white community in America.

Nor can Northern whites remain indifferent to the psychological “hate” campaign being waged against Southern whites. As shown by the vilification of Columbus, minority hatred is not focused exclusively on Southern whites. In resisting this minority aggression a Southerner who has been indoctrinated with hatred and guilt for his own heritage will not be a reliable ally to Northern whites.

There can be no geographic solution to an ethnic problem. A demographic tsunami is bearing down upon the South, and the nation as a whole. Thanks to the current policy of colonizing America with non-white Third World immigrants, the prospect of our becoming a minority in our own lands is no longer that distant. The hugely disproportionate birthrate of whites and blacks in the South, by itself, would reduce whites to a minority in many Southern states in only two or three generations. And if blacks and other non-whites become the majority, the Confederate Battle Flag, Confederate monuments, and all the symbols and shrines revered by true Southerners will come down. No amount of truckling by wild exaggerations of black soldiers in the Confederate Army, no amount of flattery, no amount of pleading “we just want to be friends” could change that.

The last half of the twentieth century was a discouraging time for those who desire to see the preservation and survival of our race. At times it seems as if resistance is futile. There is nothing more demoralizing to our race than the spectacle of those who, like the neo-Confederates, are ashamed to fight for its survival and who, indeed, accept the enemy propaganda that anyone who desires the survival of the white race is immoral.

However dark the present situation may be, I cannot believe that 100 million British Americans and their cousins from other European countries are simply going to walk off the stage of history. I believe, as Rhett Butler said of the retreating Confederates from Atlanta, that they will still turn and make a stand. And when they do, Southerners who still hold the faith and beliefs of Lee and Davis will be there with them in establishing a nation on this continent where the white European race may safely abide.

Editor’s Note: This essay, which will appear online in three parts, is from Samuel Francis, ed., Race and the American Prospect: Essays on the Racial Realities of Our Nation and Our Time (The Occidental Press, 2006), available for purchase here. Read part I here.

Contrary to the contentions of the neo-Confederates, race, i.e. slavery, was the primary cause of both secession and the ensuing war. States’ rights played a very secondary role at all in secession itself. A moment’s reflection should reveal the foolishness of the idea that issue of a state’s right to secede led to secession. If our ancestors seceded just to prove a point, that states’ rights gave them the right to secede, they would certainly have been foolish, trivial, self-destructive, and petty in the extreme.

Indeed, history reveals the uncomfortable fact that the South was quite happy with a strong central government and prepared to use that government’s powers so long as the government was the protector and defender of the institution of slavery. Right down to the collapse of the Union, Southerners, who had dominated the federal government until Lincoln’s election, had availed themselves of federal power to protect slavery.

Northern states, invoking doctrines of interposition and states’ rights, passed “personal liberty laws” to thwart the federal Fugitive Slave Law. These laws erected legal barriers to Southern slave owners trying to recover their runaway slaves, and to federal agents, employees, and officials who tried to implement the Fugitive Slave Law.

Southerners were rightly enraged at this Northern experiment in resisting federal power. Indeed, Southern anger at the refusal of the Northern states to comply with federal law figures prominently in the debates on secession in the crisis following Lincoln’s victory.

Thomas R. R. Cobb, younger brother of the famous Howell Cobb who was to serve in the Confederate Congress, gave his secessionist speech to the Georgia legislature on November 12, 1860. He condemned the personal liberty laws, the effort of Northern states, invoking states’ rights, to thwart the federal government’s Fugitive Slave Law.

Cobb went so far as to say, “so long as the ‘Personal Liberty Bills’ disgrace the Statute Books of these [the Northern] States, their electoral votes should not be counted in the Electoral College.”[1]

States’ rights and interposition were not to Southerners’ tastes when such doctrines were invoked to interfere with federal law supporting slavery. The Georgia act of secession noted disapprovingly the action of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin, which had rendered a decision upholding the idea that the Wisconsin legislature could nullify the Fugitive Slave Act.

Nor were ideas of limited government and personal liberties any bar to the use of government power to support slavery and keep blacks down. In 1835 President Andrew Jackson proposed a federal ban prohibiting the mailing of abolitionist propaganda in the mails. Many Southern leaders embraced this idea. While the proposed law did not pass, in part because of Senator John C. Calhoun’s opposition on correct constitutional grounds, an understanding was reached that effectively accomplished the goal. Southern postmasters were allowed to refuse to deliver abolitionist materials to the addressees.[2]

Likewise, when the Confederate Constitutional Convention met, the resulting Confederate Constitution subordinated the rights of the states to issues involving slavery.

As Professor Don E. Fehrenbacher of Stanford University commented, “With Lincoln’s election the national government shifted from one which had enforced the rights of slave owners to one which would oppose those rights. Southerners came to the conclusion that they needed another national government.”[3]

While the new national government that Southerners created enshrined many principles of states’ rights, the issue of race (slavery) trumped philosophies of decentralized government. Thus, the Confederate Constitution guaranteed rights of slaveholders in the territories and effectively made it illegal for a state to abolish slavery by guaranteeing it “in any of the States or Territories” and prohibited the Confederate Congress from ever passing legislation “denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves.”[4]

Nor were the framers of the Confederate Constitution as squeamish in talking about slavery and the Negro as the Founding Fathers had been in Philadelphia in 1789, the term “negro slavery” being used repeatedly in contrast with the euphemisms employed in the US Constitution.

As Fehrenbacher (quoting historian Arthur Bestor) observed:

[T]he new Constitution was hardly dedicated to states rights. Instead, at least as far as the institution of slavery was concerned, “the Confederacy was a unitary, consolidated, national state, denying to each one of its allegedly sovereign members any sort of local autonomy with respect to this particular one among its domestic institutions.”[5]

All of this was, of course, completely in keeping with the sentiments and beliefs of white Southerners during and after the secession crisis, as exemplified in the famous speech of Vice President Alexander H. Stephens in Savannah shortly after the founding of the new Confederate government. Stephens praised the new constitution for having clarified “the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization” and stated that in contrast with the mistaken assertion of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea. Its foundations are laid. Its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.”[6]

Stephens’ “corner-stone” speech is but the tip of a deadly iceberg for neo-Confederate Southerners that sinks their myth of an egalitarian, multicultural Confederacy. The most cursory research into the statements of Southern secessionists uncovers a plethora of “racist” remarks and positions that decisively confirms that the great motivating issue behind the decision to leave the Union was race.

Race was also a major consideration for the president of the Confederacy and one of its major theoreticians, Jefferson Davis. In May 1860, well before the secession crisis began, Davis introduced in the US Senate a series of seven resolutions expressing principles he regarded as essential for the preservation of the Union. While the first cited the vital importance of states’ rights, the second insisted:

That negro slavery, as it exists in fifteen states of this Union, composes an important portion of their domestic institutions, inherited from their ancestors, and existing at the adoption of the Constitution, by which it is recognized as constituting an important element in the apportionment of power among the states, and that no change of opinion or feeling on the part of the non-slaveholding states of the Union, in relation to this institution, can justify them, or their citizens, in open or covert attacks thereon, with a view to its overthrow; and that all such attacks are in manifest violation of the mutual and solemn pledge to protect and defend each other given by the states respectively on entering into the constitutional compact which formed the Union, and are a manifest breach of faith, and a violation of the most solemn obligations.

When Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, Davis issued his own response to it, which he later reprinted in his defense of the Confederacy:

We may well leave it to the instinct of that common humanity, which a beneficent Creator has implanted in the breasts of our fellow‑men of all countries, to pass judgment on a measure by which several millions of human beings of an inferior race—peaceful, contented laborers in their sphere—are doomed to extermination, while at the same time they are encouraged to a general assassination of their masters by the insidious recommendation “to abstain from violence, unless in necessary self‑defense.”[7]

Davis expanded on his views of Negroes as “an inferior race” in discussing Lincoln’s policy of arming black soldiers in the Union army:

Let the reader pause for a moment and look calmly at the facts presented in this statement. The forefathers of these negro soldiers were gathered from the torrid plains and malarial swamps of inhospitable Africa. Generally they were born the slaves of barbarian masters, untaught in all the useful arts and occupations, reared in heathen darkness, they were transferred to shores enlightened by the rays of Christianity. There, put to servitude, they were trained in the gentle arts of peace and order and civilization; they increased from a few unprofitable savages to millions of efficient Christian laborers. Their servile instincts rendered them contented with their lot, and their patient toil blessed the land of their abode with unmeasured riches.[8]

The views of the major leaders of the Confederacy—Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Alexander H. Stephens—on race and slavery are therefore perfectly clear.

Shall we glance at a sampling of additional passages from the acts and ordinances of secession themselves, a small sampling, but more than sufficient to lay to rest any credibility of the neo-Confederate “multiracialism and magnolias” myth of Southern history?

South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession focuses its attention on the failure of the Northern states to adhere to their constitutional obligation to protect property in slaves), quoting Article IV of the U. S. Constitution, which required non-slaveholding states to return slaves to their owners.

Georgia, the fourth state to secede, imitated the framers of the Declaration of Independence in enumerating the grievances that had impelled the delegates to vote for secession. The very first grievance is stated as follows: “For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.” The statement continues in the next paragraph to explicitly condemn “. . . Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa . . .” because “. . . they have enacted laws which either nullify the acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them” [emphasis added]. This is about as clear a repudiation of the states’ rights doctrine of nullification as one could imagine. Surely it tells us all we need to know to judge the relative weight of racial concerns as opposed to sentiments of decentralized government motivating the state of Georgia to leave the Union.

The Act of Secession of Texas starts out: “Whereas, the recent developments in Federal affairs make it evident that the power of the Federal Government is sought to be made a weapon with which to strike down the interests and property of the people of Texas, and her sister slave-holding States . . . .” It goes on to condemn the North for (among many other things): “proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color—a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law.”

The Secession Act concludes on the following note: “in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator . . . while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states.”

After the formation of the new Confederate government, the Deep South states sent spokesmen to Virginia and other Middle and Upper South states to urge them to follow their example and leave the Union. In the speeches and statements made by these spokesmen (called “commissioners” by the states that dispatched them) the issues of race and slavery appear over and over again; there is scarcely a peep about tariffs or other issues.

Commissioners from Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina spoke to an immense crowd gathered at Mechanics’ Institute Hall in Richmond, Virginia, to speak on behalf of their respective states and to induce Virginia to secede.

What did they say?

Speaking for Mississippi, Fulton Anderson warned the Virginians that the Republican Party was “founded upon the idea of unrelenting and eternal hostility to the institution of slavery.” The Lincoln government sought “the ultimate extinction of slavery, and the degradation of the Southern people.” Northerners were committed to “a holy crusade for our benefit in seeking the destruction of that institution [slavery] which…lies at the very foundation of our social and political fabric.”[9]

Henry L. Benning, for Georgia: “By the time the North shall have attained the power, the black race will be in a large majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand that?” Benning warned that the abolitionists and their program of freeing the slaves and granting them rights would lead to a result in which “We will be completely exterminated, and the land will be left in the possession of the blacks, and then it will go back to a wilderness and become another Africa or St. Domingo.”[10]

Finally, John Smith Preston for South Carolina implored Virginians to secede by telling them, “For fully thirty years or more, the people of the Northern States have assailed the institution of African slavery.” He cited the example of John Brown to show correctly enough that the abolitionist fanatics were working to abolish slavery by killing the slaveholders. “There could be no doubt that the conflict between slavery and non-slavery is a conflict for life and death.” Lincoln’s election he considered to be a decree of annihilation for the white people of the South.[11]

Surely it would appear to any reasonable mind that the quotations and facts set out above conclusively refute the improbable notion that the Confederacy was not supportive of explicit racial consciousness and solidarity in the sense that it believed in and was deeply committed to the preservation of the white race, its dominance, and its civilization in the South.