THE INEQUALITY
OF HUMAN RACES
THE RENAISSANCE
By ARTHUR, COUNT GOBINEAU.
With an Introductory Essay on Count
Gobineau’s Life-Work by Dr. Oscar Levy.
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LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES
BY ARTHUR DE GOBINEAU
TRANSLATED BY ADRIAN COLLINS, M.A.
INTRODUCTION BY DR. OSCAR LEVY, EDITOR OF THE AUTHORISED ENGLISH VERSION
OF NIETZSCHE’S WORKS
[Illustration]
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
LONDON MCMXV
_London William Heinemann 1915_
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
INTRODUCTION vii
FROM THE AUTHOR’S DEDICATION xi
AUTHOR’S PREFACE xv
I. THE MORTAL DISEASE OF CIVILIZATIONS AND SOCIETIES PROCEEDS
FROM GENERAL CAUSES COMMON TO THEM ALL 1
II. FANATICISM, LUXURY, CORRUPTION OF MORALS, AND IRRELIGION DO
NOT NECESSARILY LEAD TO THE FALL OF SOCIETIES 7
III. THE RELATIVE MERIT OF GOVERNMENTS HAS NO INFLUENCE ON THE
LENGTH OF A NATION’S LIFE 19
IV. THE MEANING OF THE WORD “DEGENERATION”; THE MIXTURE OF
RACIAL ELEMENTS; HOW SOCIETIES ARE FORMED AND BROKEN UP 23
V. RACIAL INEQUALITY IS NOT THE RESULT OF INSTITUTIONS 36
VI. NATIONS, WHETHER PROGRESSING OR STAGNATING ARE INDEPENDENT
OF THE REGIONS IN WHICH THEY LIVE 54
VII. CHRISTIANITY NEITHER CREATES NOR CHANGES THE CAPACITY FOR
CIVILIZATION 63
VIII. DEFINITION OF THE WORD “CIVILIZATION”; SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
HAS A TWOFOLD ORIGIN 77
IX. DEFINITION OF THE WORD “CIVILIZATION” (_continued_);
DIFFERENT CHARACTERISTICS OF CIVILIZED SOCIETIES; OUR
CIVILIZATION IS NOT SUPERIOR TO THOSE WHICH HAVE GONE
BEFORE 89
X. SOME ANTHROPOLOGISTS REGARD MAN AS HAVING A MULTIPLE ORIGIN 106
XI. RACIAL DIFFERENCES ARE PERMANENT 117
XII. HOW THE RACES WERE PHYSIOLOGICALLY SEPARATED, AND THE
DIFFERENT VARIETIES FORMED BY THEIR INTER-MIXTURE. THEY
ARE UNEQUAL IN STRENGTH AND BEAUTY 141
XIII. THE HUMAN RACES ARE INTELLECTUALLY UNEQUAL; MANKIND IS NOT
CAPABLE OF INFINITE PROGRESS 154
XIV. PROOF OF THE INTELLECTUAL INEQUALITY OF RACES (_continued_).
DIFFERENT CIVILIZATIONS ARE MUTUALLY REPULSIVE; HYBRID
RACES HAVE EQUALLY HYBRID CIVILIZATIONS 168
XV. THE DIFFERENT LANGUAGES ARE UNEQUAL, AND CORRESPOND
PERFECTLY IN RELATIVE MERIT TO THE RACES THAT USE THEM 182
XVI. RECAPITULATION; THE RESPECTIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE THREE
GREAT RACES; THE SUPERIORITY OF THE WHITE TYPE, AND,
WITHIN THIS TYPE, OF THE ARYAN FAMILY 205
INTRODUCTION TO GOBINEAU’S “INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES”
Though many people have accused this age of irreligion, there is at
least one point of similarity between modern Europe and that
pre-Christian Era to which our present religion is due. Just as in
ancient Palestine, there are living amongst us two kinds of prophets—the
prophets of evil and disaster, and those of bliss, or, as Europe likes
to call it, of “progress.” As in Palestine of old the public usually
sides with the lighter, the optimistic, the more comfortable sort of
people, with the prophets of bliss, while Time and Fate invariably
decide in favour of the sterner and gloomier individuals, the prophets
of evil. In the world to-day as well as in Palestine of old, the
prophets of bliss are the false prophets; the prophets of evil, to-day
as of yore, are the true ones. Such a true prophet was Count Arthur de
Gobineau.
Even his friends—those few friends whom he gained at the end of his
life—still thought him unduly pessimistic. Old Wagner, who introduced
him to the German public, thought of brightening his gloom by a little
Christian faith, hope, and charity, in order to make the pill more
palatable to that great public, which he, the great Stage-manager, knew
so well. Other Germans—Chamberlain, Schemann, and the Gobineau
school—poured a great deal of water into his wine, sweetened it with
patriotic syrups, adulterated it with their own pleasant inventions,
which were all too readily swallowed by a gullible and credulous
generation. But stern old Gobineau knew the world better than his young
and cheerful offspring. He had seen through all that boisterous gaiety
of the age, all its breathless labour, all its technical advancement,
all its materialistic progress, and had diagnosed, behind it that muddle
of moral values which our forefathers have bequeathed to us and which in
our generation has only become a greater muddle still. The catastrophe
which Gobineau had prophesied to an Aristocracy which had forgotten its
tradition, to a Democracy which had no root in reality, to a
Christianity which he thought entirely inefficient, is now upon us.
Under the stress of the present misfortunes, we frequently hear that all
our previous opinions need revision, that we have to forget many things
and to learn afresh still more, that we must try to build up our
civilization on a safer basis, that we must reconsider and reconstruct
the values received from former ages. It is therefore our duty, I think,
to turn back to those prophets who accused our forefathers of being on
the road to destruction, all the more so as these prophets were likewise
true poets who tried as such to point out the right road, endeavouring
to remedy, as far as their insight went, the evil of their time. This is
the best, and I trust a perfectly satisfactory, reason for the
translation of “The Inequality of Human Races.”
This book, written as early as 1853, is no doubt a youthful and somewhat
bewildering performance, but it gives us the basis of Gobineau’s creed,
his belief in Race and Aristocracy as the first condition of
civilization, his disbelief in the influence of environment, his
distrust in the efficacy of religion and morality. The latter kind of
scepticism brings him into relationship with Nietzsche, who has even
accentuated Count Gobineau’s suspicions and who has branded our morality
as Slave-Morality, and consequently as harmful to good government. What
a Europe without Masters, but with plenty of Half-masters and Slaves,
was driving at, Gobineau foresaw as well as Nietzsche.
I sincerely hope that no intelligent reader will overlook this sceptical
attitude of Gobineau towards religion, because that is a point of great
importance at the present time, when our faith will certainly thrive
again on a misfortune, which, by the propagation of slave-values, it
indirectly has caused. It is this scepticism against the Church and its
Semitic values, which separates a Gobineau from Disraeli, to whom
otherwise—in his rejection of Buckle, Darwin, and their science, in his
praise of Race and Aristocracy, and in his prophecy of evil—he is so
nearly related. Disraeli still believed in a Church based upon a revival
of the old principles, Gobineau, like Nietzsche, had no hope whatever in
this respect. It is the great merit of both Nietzsche and Gobineau, that
they were not, like Disraeli, trying to revive a corpse, but that they
frankly acknowledged, the one that the corpse was dead, the other that
it was positively poisoning the air. The occasional bows which Gobineau
makes to the Church cannot, I repeat, mislead any serious critics of his
work, especially if they likewise consult his later books, about which,
by the way, I have spoken at greater length elsewhere.[1] Both Spinoza
and Montaigne had the same laudable habit, and they did not mean it
either. For the first business of a great freethinker is not to be
mistaken for a little one; his greatest misfortune is to be “understood”
by the wrong class of people, and thus an occasional bow to the old and
venerable Power—apart from the safety which it procures—protects him
from an offensive handshake with enthusiastic and unbalanced disciples
and apostles.
OSCAR LEVY
GENEVA, _July 1915_
FROM THE AUTHOR’S DEDICATION (1854)[2]
TO HIS MAJESTY GEORGE V, KING OF HANOVER
The great events—the bloody wars, the revolutions, and the breaking up
of laws—which have been rife for so many years in the States of Europe,
are apt to turn men’s minds to the study of political problems. While
the vulgar consider merely immediate results, and heap all their praise
and blame on the little electric spark that marks the contact with their
own interests, the more serious thinker will seek to discover the hidden
causes of these terrible upheavals. He will descend, lamp in hand, by
the obscure paths of philosophy and history; and in the analysis of the
human heart or the careful search among the annals of the past he will
try to gain the master-key to the enigma which has so long baffled the
imagination of man.
Like every one else, I have felt all the prickings of curiosity to which
our restless modern world gives rise. But when I tried to study, as
completely as I could, the forces underlying this world, I found the
horizon of my inquiry growing wider and wider. I had to push further and
further into the past, and, forced by analogy almost in spite of myself,
to lift my eyes further and further into the future. It seemed that I
should aspire to know not merely the immediate causes of the plagues
that are supposed to chasten us, but also to trace the more remote
reasons for those social evils which the most meagre knowledge of
history will show to have prevailed, in exactly the same form, among all
the nations that ever lived, as well as those which survive to-day—evils
that in all likelihood will exist among nations yet unborn.
Further, the present age, I thought, offered peculiar facilities for
such an inquiry. While its very restlessness urges us on to a kind of
historical chemistry, it also makes our labours easier. The thick mists,
the profound darkness that from time immemorial veiled the beginnings of
civilizations different from our own, now lift and dissolve under the
sun of science. An analytic method of marvellous delicacy has made a
Rome, unknown to Livy, rise before us under the hands of Niebuhr, and
has unravelled for us the truths that lay hid among the legendary tales
of early Greece. In another quarter of the world, the Germanic peoples,
so long misunderstood, appear to us now as great and majestic as they
were thought barbarous by the writers of the Later Empire. Egypt opens
its subterranean tombs, translates its hieroglyphs, and reveals the age
of its pyramids. Assyria lays bare its palaces with their endless
inscriptions, which had till yesterday been buried beneath their own
ruins. The Iran of Zoroaster has held no secrets from the searching eyes
of Burnouf, and the Vedas of early India take us back to events not far
from the dawn of creation. From all these conquests together, so
important in themselves, we gain a larger and truer understanding of
Homer, Herodotus, and especially of the first chapters of the Bible,
that deep well of truth, whose riches we can only begin to appreciate
when we go down into it with a fully enlightened mind.
These sudden and unexpected discoveries are naturally not always beyond
the reach of criticism. They are far from giving us complete lists of
dynasties, or an unbroken sequence of reigns and events. In spite,
however, of the fragmentary nature of their results, many of them are
admirable for my present purpose, and far more fruitful than the most
accurate chronological tables would be. I welcome, most of all, the
revelation of manners and customs, of the very portraits and costumes,
of vanished peoples. We know the condition of their art. Their whole
life, public and private, physical and moral, is unrolled before us, and
it becomes possible to reconstruct, with the aid of the most authentic
materials, that which constitutes the personality of races and mainly
determines their value.
With such a treasury of knowledge, new or newly understood, to draw
upon, no one can claim any longer to explain the complicated play of
social forces, the causes of the rise and decay of nations, in the light
of the purely abstract and hypothetical arguments supplied by a
sceptical philosophy. Since we have now an abundance of positive facts
crowding upon us from all sides, rising from every sepulchre, and lying
ready to every seeker’s hand, we may no longer, like the theorists of
the Revolution, form a collection of imaginary beings out of clouds, and
amuse ourselves by moving these chimeras about like marionettes, in a
political environment manufactured to suit them. The reality is now too
pressing, too well known; and it forbids games like these, which are
always unseasonable, and sometimes impious. There is only one tribunal
competent to decide rationally upon the general characteristics of man,
and that is history—a severe judge, I confess, and one to whom we may
well fear to appeal in an age so wretched as our own.
Not that the past is itself without stain. It includes everything, and
so may well have many faults, and more than one shameful dereliction of
duty, to confess. The men of to-day might even be justified in
flourishing in its face some new merits of their own. But suppose, as an
answer to their charges, that the past suddenly called up the gigantic
shades of the heroic ages, what would they say then? If it reproached
them with having compromised the names of religious faith, political
honour, and moral duty, what would they answer? If it told them that
they are no longer fit for anything but to work out the knowledge of
which the principles had already been recognized and laid down by
itself; that the virtue of the ancients has become a laughing-stock,
that energy has passed from man to steam, that the light of poetry is
out, that its great prophets are no more, and that what men call their
interests are confined to the most pitiful tasks of daily life;—how
could they defend themselves?
They could merely reply that not every beautiful thing is dead which has
been swallowed up in silence; it may be only sleeping. All ages, they
might say, have beheld periods of transition, when life grapples with
suffering and in the end arises victorious and splendid. Just as Chaldæa
in its dotage was succeeded by the young and vigorous Persia, tottering
Greece by virile Rome, and the degenerate rule of Augustulus by the
kingdoms of the noble Teutonic princes, so the races of modern times
will regain their lost youth.
This was a hope I myself cherished for a brief moment, and I should like
to have at once flung back in the teeth of History its accusations and
gloomy forebodings, had I not been suddenly struck with the devastating
thought, that in my hurry I was putting forward something that was
absolutely without proof. I began to look about for proofs, and so, in
my sympathy for the living, was more and more driven to plumb to their
depths the secrets of the dead.
Then, passing from one induction to another, I was gradually penetrated
by the conviction that the racial question overshadows all other
problems of history, that it holds the key to them all, and that the
inequality of the races from whose fusion a people is formed is enough
to explain the whole course of its destiny. Every one must have had some
inkling of this colossal truth, for every one must have seen how certain
agglomerations of men have descended on some country, and utterly
transformed its way of life; how they have shown themselves able to
strike out a new vein of activity where, before their coming, all had
been sunk in torpor. Thus, to take an example, a new era of power was
opened for Great Britain by the Anglo-Saxon invasion, thanks to a decree
of Providence, which by sending to this island some of the peoples
governed by the sword of your Majesty’s illustrious ancestors, was to
bring two branches of the same nation under the sceptre of a single
house—a house that can trace its glorious title to the dim sources of
the heroic nation itself.
Recognizing that both strong and weak races exist, I preferred to
examine the former, to analyse their qualities, and especially to follow
them back to their origins. By this method I convinced myself at last
that everything great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this
earth, in science, art, and civilization, derives from a single
starting-point, is the development of a single germ and the result of a
single thought; it belongs to one family alone, the different branches
of which have reigned in all the civilized countries of the universe.
THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES
CHAPTER I
THE MORTAL DISEASE OF CIVILIZATIONS AND SOCIETIES PROCEEDS FROM GENERAL
CAUSES COMMON TO THEM ALL
The fall of civilizations is the most striking, and, at the same time,
the most obscure, of all the phenomena of history. It is a calamity that
strikes fear into the soul, and yet has always something so mysterious
and so vast in reserve, that the thinker is never weary of looking at
it, of studying it, of groping for its secrets. No doubt the birth and
growth of peoples offer a very remarkable subject for the observer; the
successive development of societies, their gains, their conquests, their
triumphs, have something that vividly takes the imagination and holds it
captive. But all these events, however great one may think them, seem to
be easy of explanation; one accepts them as the mere outcome of the
intellectual gifts of man. Once we recognize these gifts, we are not
astonished at their results; they explain, by the bare fact of their
existence, the great stream of being whose source they are. So, on this
score, there need be no difficulty or hesitation. But when we see that
after a time of strength and glory all human societies come to their
decline and fall—all, I say, not this or that; when we see in what awful
silence the earth shows us, scattered on its surface, the wrecks of the
civilizations that have preceded our own—not merely the famous
civilizations, but also many others, of which we know nothing but the
names, and some, that lie as skeletons of stone in deep world-old
forests, and have not left us even this shadow of a memory; when the
mind returns to our modern States, reflects on their extreme youth, and
confesses that they are a growth of yesterday, and that some of them are
already toppling to their fall: then at last we recognize, not without a
certain philosophic shudder, that the words of the prophets on the
instability of mortal things apply with the same rigour to civilizations
as to peoples, to peoples as to States, to States as to individuals; and
we are forced to affirm that every assemblage of men, however ingenious
the network of social relations that protects it, acquires on the very
day of its birth, hidden among the elements of its life, the seed of an
inevitable death.
But what is this seed, this principle of death? Is it uniform, as its
results are, and do all civilizations perish from the same cause?
At first sight we are tempted to answer in the negative; for we have
seen the fall of many empires, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, amid the
clash of events that had no likeness one to the other. Yet, if we pierce
below the surface, we soon find that this very necessity of coming to an
end, that weighs imperiously on all societies without exception,
presupposes such a general cause, which, though hidden, cannot be
explained away. When we start from this fixed principle of natural
death—a principle unaffected by all the cases of violent death,—we see
that all civilizations, after they have lasted some time, betray to the
observer some little symptoms of uneasiness, which are difficult to
define, but not less difficult to deny; these are of a like nature in
all times and all places. We may admit one obvious point of difference
between the fall of States and that of civilizations, when we see the
same kind of culture sometimes persisting in a country under foreign
rule and weathering every storm of calamity, at other times being
destroyed or changed by the slightest breath of a contrary wind; but we
are, in the end, more and more driven to the idea that the principle of
death which can be seen at the base of all societies is not only
inherent in their life, but also uniform and the same for all.
To the elucidation of this great fact I have devoted the studies of
which I here give the results.
We moderns are the first to have recognized that every assemblage of
men, together with the kind of culture it produces, is doomed to perish.
Former ages did not believe this. Among the early Asiatics, the
religious consciousness, moved by the spectacle of great political
catastrophes, as if by some apparition from another world, attributed
them to the anger of heaven smiting a nation for its sins; they were, it
was thought, a chastisement meet to bring to repentance the criminals
yet unpunished. The Jews, misinterpreting the meaning of the Covenant,
supposed that their Empire would never come to an end. Rome, at the very
moment when she was nearing the precipice, did not doubt that her own
empire was eternal.[3] But the knowledge of later generations has
increased with experience; and just as no one doubts of the mortal state
of humanity, because all the men who preceded us are dead, so we firmly
believe that the days of peoples are numbered, however great the number
may be; for all those who held dominion before us have now fallen out of
the race. The wisdom of the ancients yields little that throws light on
our subject, except one fundamental axiom, the recognition of the finger
of God in the conduct of this world; to this firm and ultimate principle
we must adhere, accepting it in the full sense in which it is understood
by the Catholic Church. It is certain that no civilization falls to the
ground unless God wills it; and when we apply to the mortal state of all
societies the sacred formula used by the ancient priesthoods to explain
some striking catastrophes, which they wrongly considered as isolated
facts, we are asserting a truth of the first importance, which should
govern the search for all the truths of this world. Add, if you will,
that all societies perish because they are sinful—and I will agree with
you; this merely sets up a true parallel to the case of individuals,
finding in sin the germ of destruction. In this regard, there is no
objection to saying that human societies share the fate of their
members; they contract the stain from them, and come to a like end. This
is to reason merely by the light of nature. But when we have once
admitted and pondered these two truths, we shall find no further help, I
repeat, in the wisdom of the ancients.
That wisdom tells us nothing definite as to the ways in which the Divine
will moves in order to compass the death of peoples; it is, on the
contrary, driven to consider these ways as essentially mysterious. It is
seized with a pious terror at the sight of ruins, and admits too easily
that the fallen peoples could not have been thus shaken, struck down,
and hurled into the gulf, except by the aid of miracles. I can readily
believe that certain events have had a miraculous element, so far as
this is stated by Scripture; but where, as is usually the case, the
formal testimony of Scripture is wanting, we may legitimately hold the
ancient opinion to be incomplete and unenlightened. We may, in fact,
take the opposite view, and recognize that the heavy hand of God is laid
without ceasing on our societies, as the effect of a decision pronounced
before the rise of the first people; and that the blow falls according
to rule and foreknowledge, by virtue of fixed edicts, inscribed in the
code of the universe by the side of other laws which, in their rigid
severity, govern organic and inorganic nature alike.
We may justly reproach the philosophy of the early sacred writers with a
lack of experience; and so, we may say, they explain a mystery merely by
enunciating a theological truth which, however certain, is itself
another mystery. They have not pushed their inquiries so far as to
observe the facts of the natural world. But at least one cannot accuse
them of misunderstanding the greatness of the problem and scratching for
solutions at the surface of the ground. In fact, they have been content
to state the question in lofty language; and if they have not solved it,
or even thrown light upon it, at least they have not made it a breeder
of errors. This puts them far above the rationalistic schools and all
their works.
The great minds of Athens and Rome formulated the theory, accepted by
later ages, that States, civilizations, and peoples, are destroyed only
by luxury, effeminacy, misgovernment, fanaticism, and the corruption of
morals. These causes, taken singly or together, were declared to be
responsible for the fall of human societies; the natural corollary being
that in the absence of these causes there can be no solvent whatever.
The final conclusion is that societies, more fortunate than men, die
only a violent death; and if a nation can be imagined as escaping the
destructive forces I have mentioned, there is no reason why it should
not last as long as the earth itself. When the ancients invented this
theory, they did not see where it was leading them; they regarded it
merely as a buttress for their ethical notions, to establish which was,
as we know, the sole aim of their historical method. In their narrative
of events, they were so taken up with the idea of bringing out the
admirable influence of virtue, and the deplorable effects of vice and
crime, that anything which marred the harmony of this excellent moral
picture had little interest for them, and so was generally forgotten or
set aside. This method was not only false and petty, but also had very
often a different result from that intended by its authors; for it
applied the terms “virtue” and “vice” in an arbitrary way, as the needs
of the moment dictated. Yet, to a certain extent, the theory is excused
by the stern and noble sentiment that lay at the base of it; and if the
genius of Plutarch and Tacitus has built mere romances and libels on
this foundation, at any rate the libels are generous, and the romances
sublime.
I wish I could show myself as indulgent to the use that the authors of
the eighteenth century have made of the theory. But there is too great a
difference between their masters and themselves. The former had even a
quixotic devotion to the maintenance of the social order; the latter
were eager for novelty and furiously bent on destruction. The ancients
made their false ideas bear a noble progeny; the moderns have produced
only monstrous abortions. Their theory has furnished them with arms
against all principles of government, which they have reproached in turn
with tyranny, fanaticism, and corruption. The Voltairean way of
“preventing the ruin of society” is to destroy religion, law, industry,
and commerce, under the pretext that religion is another name for
fanaticism, law for despotism, industry and commerce for luxury and
corruption. Where so many errors reign, I certainly agree that we have
“bad government.”
I have not the least desire to write a polemic; my object is merely to
show how an idea common to Thucydides and the Abbé Raynal can produce
quite opposite results. It makes for conservatism in the one, for an
anarchic cynicism in the other—and is an error in both. The causes
usually given for the fall of nations are not necessarily the real
causes; and though I willingly admit that they may come to the surface
in the death-agony of a people, I deny that they have enough power,
enough destructive energy, to draw on, by themselves, the irremediable
catastrophe.