THE MEANING OF THE WORD “DEGENERATION”; THE MIXTURE OF RACIAL ELEMENTS;
HOW SOCIETIES ARE FORMED AND BROKEN UP
However little the spirit of the foregoing pages may have been
understood, no one will conclude from them that I attach no importance
to the maladies of the social organism, and that, for me, bad
government, fanaticism, and irreligion are mere unmeaning accidents. On
the contrary I quite agree with the ordinary view, that it is a
lamentable thing to see a society being gradually undermined by these
fell diseases, and that no amount of care and trouble would be wasted if
a remedy could only be found. I merely add that if these poisonous
blossoms of disunion are not grafted on a stronger principle of
destruction, if they are not the consequences of a hidden plague more
terrible still, we may rest assured that their ravages will not be fatal
and that after a time of suffering more or less drawn out, the society
will emerge from their toils, perhaps with strength and youth renewed.
The examples I have brought forward seem to me conclusive, though their
number might be indefinitely increased. Through some such reasoning as
this the ordinary opinions of men have at last come to contain an
instinctive perception of the truth. It is being dimly seen that one
ought not to have given such a preponderant importance to evils which
were after all merely derivative, and that the true causes of the life
and death of peoples should have been sought elsewhere, and been drawn
from a deeper well. Men have begun to look at the inner constitution of
a society, by itself, quite apart from all circumstances of health or
disease. They have shown themselves ready to admit that no external
cause could lay the hand of death on any society, so long as a certain
destructive principle, inherent in it from the first, born from its womb
and nourished on its entrails, had not reached its full maturity; on the
other hand, so soon as this destructive principle had come into
existence, the society was doomed to certain death, even though it had
the best of all possible governments—in exactly the same way as a spent
horse will fall dead on a concrete road.
A great step in advance was made, I admit, when the question was
considered from this point of view, which was anyhow much more
philosophic than the one taken up before. Bichat,[13] as we know, did
not seek to discover the great mystery of existence by studying the
human subject from the outside; the key to the riddle, he saw, lay
within. Those who followed the same method, in our own subject, were
travelling on the only road that really led to discoveries.
Unfortunately, this excellent idea of theirs was the result of mere
instinct; its logical implications were not carried very far, and it was
shattered on the first difficulty. “Yes,” they cried, “the cause of
destruction lies hidden in the very vitals of the social organism; but
what is this cause?” “_Degeneration_,” was the answer; “nations die when
they are composed of elements that have _degenerated_.” The answer was
excellent, etymologically and otherwise. It only remained to define the
meaning of “nation that has degenerated.” This was the rock on which
they foundered; a _degenerate people_ meant, they said, “A people which
through bad government, misuse of wealth, fanaticism, or irreligion, had
lost the characteristic virtues of its ancestors.” What a fall is there!
Thus a people dies of its endemic diseases because it is degenerate, and
is degenerate because it dies. This circular argument merely proves that
the science of social anatomy is in its infancy. I quite agree that
societies perish because they are degenerate, and for no other reason.
This is the evil condition that makes them wholly unable to withstand
the shock of the disasters that close in upon them; and when they can no
longer endure the blows of adverse fortune, and have no power to raise
their heads when the scourge has passed, then we have the sublime
spectacle of a nation in agony. If it perish, it is because it has no
longer the same vigour as it had of old in battling with the dangers of
life; in a word, because it is _degenerate_. I repeat, the term is
excellent; but we must explain it a little better, and give it a
definite meaning. How and why is a nation’s vigour lost? How does it
degenerate? These are the questions which we must try to answer. Up to
the present, men have been content with finding the word, without
unveiling the reality that lies behind. This further step I shall now
attempt to take.
The word _degenerate_, when applied to a people, means (as it ought to
mean) that the people has no longer the same intrinsic value as it had
before, because it has no longer the same blood in its veins, continual
adulterations having gradually affected the quality of that blood. In
other words, though the nation bears the name given by its founders, the
name no longer connotes the same race; in fact, the man of a decadent
time, the _degenerate_ man properly so called, is a different being,
from the racial point of view, from the heroes of the great ages. I
agree that he still keeps something of their essence; but the more he
degenerates the more attenuated does this “something” become. The
heterogeneous elements that henceforth prevail in him give him quite a
different nationality—a very original one, no doubt, but such
originality is not to be envied. He is only a very distant kinsman of
those he still calls his ancestors. He, and his civilization with him,
will certainly die on the day when the primordial race-unit is so broken
up and swamped by the influx of foreign elements, that its effective
qualities have no longer a sufficient freedom of action. It will not, of
course, absolutely disappear, but it will in practice be so beaten down
and enfeebled, that its power will be felt less and less as time goes
on. It is at this point that all the results of degeneration will
appear, and the process may be considered complete.
If I manage to prove this proposition, I shall have given a meaning to
the word “degeneration.” By showing how the essential quality of a
nation gradually alters, I shift the responsibility for its decadence,
which thus becomes, in a way, less shameful, for it weighs no longer on
the sons, but on the nephews, then on the cousins, then on collaterals
more or less removed. And when I have shown by examples that great
peoples, at the moment of their death, have only a very small and
insignificant share in the blood of the founders, into whose inheritance
they come, I shall thereby have explained clearly enough how it is
possible for civilizations to fall—the reason being that they are no
longer in the same hands. At the same time I shall be touching on a
problem which is much more dangerous than that which I have tried to
solve in the preceding chapters. This problem is: “Are there serious and
ultimate differences of value between human races; and can these
differences be estimated?”
I will begin at once to develop the series of arguments that touch the
first point; they will indirectly settle the second also.
To put my ideas into a clearer and more easily intelligible form I may
compare a nation to a human body, which, according to the physiologists,
is constantly renewing all its parts; the work of transformation that
goes on is incessant, and after a certain number of years the body
retains hardly any of its former elements. Thus, in the old man, there
are no traces of the man of middle age, in the adult no traces of the
youth, nor in the youth of the child; the personal identity in all these
stages is kept purely by the succession of inner and outer forms, each
an imperfect copy of the last. Yet I will admit one difference between a
nation and a human body; in the former there is no question of the
“forms” being preserved, for these are destroyed and disappear with
enormous rapidity. I will take a people, or better, a tribe, at the
moment when, yielding to a definite vital instinct, it provides itself
with laws and begins to play a part in the world. By the mere fact of
its wants and powers increasing, it inevitably finds itself in contact
with other similar associations, and by war or peaceful measures
succeeds in incorporating them with itself.
Not all human families can reach this first step; but it is a step that
every tribe must take if it is to rank one day as a nation. Even if a
certain number of races, themselves perhaps not very far advanced on the
ladder of civilization, have passed through this stage, we cannot
properly regard this as a general rule.
Indeed, the human species seems to have a very great difficulty in
raising itself above a rudimentary type of organization; the transition
to a more complex state is made only by those groups of tribes, that are
eminently gifted. I may cite, in support of this, the actual condition
of a large number of communities spread throughout the world. These
backward tribes, especially the Polynesian negroes, the Samoyedes and
others in the far north, and the majority of the African races, have
never been able to shake themselves free from their impotence; they live
side by side in complete independence of each other. The stronger
massacre the weaker, the weaker try to move as far away as possible from
the stronger. This sums up the political ideas of these embryo
societies, which have lived on in their imperfect state, without
possibility of improvement, as long as the human race itself. It may be
said that these miserable savages are a very small part of the earth’s
population. Granted; but we must take account of all the similar peoples
who have lived and disappeared. Their number is incalculable, and
certainly includes the vast majority of the pure-blooded yellow and
black races.
If then we are driven to admit that for a very large number of human
beings it has been, and always will be, impossible to take even the
first step towards civilization; if, again, we consider that these
peoples are scattered over the whole face of the earth under the most
varying conditions of climate and environment, that they live
indifferently in the tropics, in the temperate zones, and in the Arctic
circle, by sea, lake, and river, in the depths of the forest, in the
grassy plains, in the arid deserts, we must conclude that a part of
mankind, is in its own nature stricken with a paralysis, which makes it
for ever unable to take even the first step towards civilization, since
it cannot overcome the natural repugnance, felt by men and animals
alike, to a crossing of blood.
Leaving these tribes, that are incapable of civilization, on one side,
we come, in our journey upwards, to those which understand that if they
wish to increase their power and prosperity, they are absolutely
compelled, either by war or peaceful measures, to draw their neighbours
within their sphere of influence. War is undoubtedly the simpler way of
doing this. Accordingly, they go to war. But when the campaign is
finished, and the craving for destruction is satisfied, some prisoners
are left over; these prisoners become slaves, and as slaves, work for
their masters. We have class distinctions at once, and an industrial
system: the tribe has become a little people. This is a higher rung on
the ladder of civilization, and is not necessarily passed by all the
tribes which have been able to reach it; many remain at this stage in
cheerful stagnation.
But there are others, more imaginative and energetic, whose ideas soar
beyond mere brigandage. They manage to conquer a great territory, and
assume rights of ownership not only over the inhabitants, but also over
their land. From this moment a real nation has been formed. The two
races often continue for a time to live side by side without mingling;
and yet, as they become indispensable to each other, as a community of
work and interest is gradually built up, as the pride and rancour of
conquest begin to ebb away, as those below naturally tend to rise to the
level of their masters, while the masters have a thousand reasons for
allowing, or even for promoting, such a tendency, the mixture of blood
finally takes place, the two races cease to be associated with distinct
tribes, and become more and more fused into a single whole.
The spirit of isolation is, however, so innate in the human race, that
even those who have reached this advanced stage of crossing refuse in
many cases to take a step further. There are some peoples who are, as we
know positively, of mixed origin, but who keep their feeling for the
clan to an extraordinary degree. The Arabs, for example, do more than
merely spring from different branches of the Semitic stock; they belong
at one and the same time to the so-called families of Shem and Ham, not
to speak of a vast number of local strains that are intermingled with
these. Nevertheless, their attachment to the tribe, as a separate unit,
is one of the most striking features of their national character and
their political history. In fact, it has been thought possible to
attribute their expulsion from Spain not only to the actual breaking up
of their power there, but also, to a large extent, to their being
continually divided into smaller and mutually antagonistic groups, in
the struggles for promotion among the Arab families at the petty courts
of Valentia, Toledo, Cordova, and Grenada.[14]
We may say the same about the majority of such peoples. Further, where
the tribal separation has broken down, a national feeling takes its
place, and acts with a similar vigour, which a community of religion is
not enough to destroy. This is the case among the Arabs and the Turks,
the Persians and the Jews, the Parsees and the Hindus, the Nestorians of
Syria and the Kurds. We find it also in European Turkey, and can trace
its course in Hungary, among the Magyars, the Saxons, the Wallachians,
and the Croats. I know, from what I have seen with my own eyes, that in
certain parts of France, the country where races are mingled more than
perhaps anywhere else, there are little communities to be found to this
day, who feel a repugnance to marrying outside their own village.
I think I am right in concluding from these examples, which cover all
countries and ages, including our own, that the human race in all its
branches has a secret repulsion from the crossing of blood, a repulsion
which in many of the branches is invincible, and in others is only
conquered to a slight extent. Even those who most completely shake off
the yoke of this idea cannot get rid of the few last traces of it; yet
such peoples are the only members of our species who can be civilized at
all.
Thus mankind lives in obedience to two laws, one of repulsion, the other
of attraction; these act with different force on different peoples. The
first is fully respected only by those races which can never raise
themselves above the elementary completeness of the tribal life, while
the power of the second, on the contrary, is the more absolute, as the
racial units on which it is exercised are more capable of development.
Here especially I must be concrete. I have just taken the example of a
people in embryo, whose state is like that of a single family. I have
given them the qualities which will allow them to pass into the state of
a nation. Well, suppose they have become a nation. History does not tell
me what the elements were that constituted the original group; all I
know is that these elements fitted it for the transformation which I
have made it undergo. Now that it has grown, it has only two
possibilities. One or other of two destinies is inevitable. It will
either conquer or be conquered.
I will give it the better part, and assume that it will conquer. It will
at the same time rule, administer, and civilize. It will not go through
its provinces, sowing a useless harvest of fire and massacre. Monuments,
customs, and institutions will be alike sacred. It will change what it
can usefully modify, and replace it by something better. Weakness in its
hands will become strength. It will behave in such a way that, in the
words of Scripture, it will be magnified in the sight of men.
I do not know if the same thought has already struck the reader; but in
the picture which I am presenting—and which in certain features is that
of the Hindus, the Egyptians, the Persians and the Macedonians—two facts
appear to me to stand out. The first is that a nation, which itself
lacks vigour and power, is suddenly called upon to share a new and a
better destiny—that of the strong masters into whose hands it has
fallen; this was the case with the Anglo-Saxons, when they had been
subdued by the Normans. The second fact is that a picked race of men, a
sovereign people, with the usual strong propensities of such a people to
cross its blood with another’s, finds itself henceforth in close contact
with a race whose inferiority is shown, not only by defeat, but also by
the lack of the attributes that may be seen in the conquerors. From the
very day when the conquest is accomplished and the fusion begins, there
appears a noticeable change of quality in the blood of the masters. If
there were no other modifying influence at work, then—at the end of a
number of years, which would vary according to the number of peoples
that composed the original stock—we should be confronted with a new
race, less powerful certainly than the better of its two ancestors, but
still of considerable strength. It would have developed special
qualities resulting from the actual mixture, and unknown to the
communities from which it sprang. But the case is not generally so
simple as this, and the intermingling of blood is not confined for long
to the two constituent peoples.
The empire I have just been imagining is a powerful one, and its power
is used to control its neighbours. I assume that there will be new
conquests; and, every time, a current of fresh blood will be mingled
with the main stream. Henceforth, as the nation grows, whether by war or
treaty, its racial character changes more and more. It is rich,
commercial, and civilized. The needs and the pleasures of other peoples
find ample satisfaction in its capitals, its great towns, and its ports;
while its myriad attractions cause many foreigners to make it their
home. After a short time, we might truly say that a distinction of
castes takes the place of the original distinction of races.
I am willing to grant that the people of whom I am speaking is
strengthened in its exclusive notions by the most formal commands of
religion, and that some dreadful penalty lurks in the background, to awe
the disobedient. But since the people is civilized, its character is
soft and tolerant, even to the contempt of its faith. Its oracles will
speak in vain; there will be births outside the caste-limits. Every day
new distinctions will have to be drawn, new classifications invented;
the number of social grades will be increased, and it will be almost
impossible to know where one is, amid the infinite variety of the
subdivisions, that change from province to province, from canton to
canton, from village to village. In fact, the condition will be that of
the Hindu countries. It is only, however, the Brahman who has shown
himself so tenacious of his ideas of separation; the foreign peoples he
civilized have never fastened these cramping fetters on their shoulders,
or any rate have long since shaken them off. In all the States that have
made any advance in intellectual culture, the process has not been
checked for a single moment by those desperate shifts to which the
law-givers of the Aryavarta were put, in their desire to reconcile the
prescriptions of the Code of Manu with the irresistible march of events.
In every other place where there were really any castes at all, they
ceased to exist at the moment when the chance of making a fortune, and
of becoming famous by useful discoveries or social talents, became open
to the whole world, without distinction of origin. But also, from that
same day, the nation that was originally the active, conquering, and
civilizing power began to disappear; its blood became merged in that of
all the tributaries which it had attracted to its own stream.
Generally the dominating peoples begin by being far fewer in number than
those they conquer; while, on the other hand, certain races that form
the basis of the population in immense districts are extremely
prolific—the Celts, for example, and the Slavs. This is yet another
reason for the rapid disappearance of the conquering races. Again, their
greater activity and the more personal part they take in the affairs of
the State make them the chief mark for attack after a disastrous battle,
a proscription, or a revolution. Thus, while by their very genius for
civilization they collect round them the different elements in which
they are to be absorbed, they are the victims, first of their original
smallness of number, and then of a host of secondary causes which
combine together for their destruction.
It is fairly obvious that the time when the disappearance takes place
will vary considerably, according to circumstances. Yet it does finally
come to pass, and is everywhere quite complete, long before the end of
the civilization which the victorious race is supposed to be animating.
A people may often go on living and working, and even growing in power,
after the active, generating force of its life and glory has ceased to
exist. Does this contradict what I have said above? Not at all; for
while the blood of the civilizing race is gradually drained away by
being parcelled out among the peoples that are conquered or annexed, the
impulse originally given to these peoples still persists. The
institutions which the dead master had invented, the laws he had
prescribed, the customs he had initiated—all these live after him. No
doubt the customs, laws, and institutions have quite forgotten the
spirit that informed their youth; they survive in dishonoured old age,
every day more sapless and rotten. But so long as even their shadows
remain, the building stands, the body seems to have a soul, the pale
ghost walks. When the original impulse has worked itself out, the last
word has been said. Nothing remains; the civilization is dead.
I think I now have all the data necessary for grappling with the problem
of the life and death of nations; and I can say positively that a people
will never die, if it remains eternally composed of the same national
elements. If the empire of Darius had, at the battle of Arbela, been
able to fill its ranks with Persians, that is to say with real Aryans;
if the Romans of the later Empire had had a Senate and an army of the
same stock as that which existed at the time of the Fabii, their
dominion would never have come to an end. So long as they kept the same
purity of blood, the Persians and Romans would have lived and reigned.
In the long run, it might be said, a conqueror, more irresistible than
they, would have appeared on the scene; and they would have fallen under
a well-directed attack, or a long siege, or simply by the fortune of a
single battle. Yes, a State might be overthrown in this way, but not a
civilization or a social organism. Invasion and defeat are but the dark
clouds that for a time blot out the day, and then pass over. Many
examples might be brought forward in proof of this.
In modern times the Chinese have been twice conquered. They have always
forced their conquerors to become assimilated to them, and to respect
their customs; they gave much, and took hardly anything in return. They
drove out the first invaders, and in time will do the same with the
second.
The English are the masters of India, and yet their moral hold over
their subjects is almost non-existent. They are themselves influenced in
many ways by the local civilization, and cannot succeed in stamping
their ideas on a people that fears its conquerors, but is only
physically dominated by them. It keeps its soul erect, and its thoughts
apart from theirs. The Hindu race has become a stranger to the race that
governs it to-day, and its civilization does not obey the law that gives
the battle to the strong. External forms, kingdoms, and empires have
changed, and will change again; but the foundations on which they rest,
and from which they spring, do not necessarily change with them. Though
Hyderabad, Lahore, and Delhi are no longer capital cities, Hindu society
none the less persists. A moment will come, in one way or another, when
India will again live publicly, as she already does privately, under her
own laws; and, by the help either of the races actually existing or of a
hybrid proceeding from them, will assume again, in the full sense of the
word, a political personality.
The hazard of war cannot destroy the life of a people. At most, it
suspends its animation for a time, and in some ways shears it of its
outward pomp. So long as the blood and institutions of a nation keep to
a sufficient degree the impress of the original race, that nation
exists. Whether, as in the case of the Chinese, its conqueror has, in a
purely material sense, greater energy than itself; whether, like the
Hindu, it is matched, in a long and arduous trial of patience, against a
nation, such as the English, in all points its superior; in either case
the thought of its certain destiny should bring consolation—one day it
will be free. But if, like the Greeks, and the Romans of the later
Empire, the people has been absolutely drained of its original blood,
and the qualities conferred by the blood, then the day of its defeat
will be the day of its death. It has used up the time that heaven
granted at its birth, for it has completely changed its race, and with
its race its nature. It is therefore degenerate.
In view of the preceding paragraph, we may regard as settled the vexed
question as to what would have happened if the Carthaginians, instead of
falling before the fortunes of Rome, had become masters of Italy.
Inasmuch as they belonged to the Phœnician stock, a stock inferior in
the citizen-virtues to the races that produced the soldiers of Scipio, a
different issue of the battle of Zama could not have made any change in
their destiny. If they had been lucky on one day, the next would have
seen their luck recoil on their heads; or they might have been merged in
the Italian race by victory, as they were by defeat. In any case the
final result would have been exactly the same. The destiny of
civilizations is not a matter of chance; it does not depend on the toss
of a coin. It is only men who are killed by the sword; and when the most
redoubtable, warlike, and successful nations have nothing but valour in
their hearts, military science in their heads, and the laurels of
victory in their hands, without any thought that rises above mere
conquest, they always end merely by learning, and learning badly, from
those they have conquered, how to live in time of peace. The annals of
the Celts and the Nomadic hordes of Asia tell no other tale than this.
I have now given a meaning to the word _degeneration_; and so have been
able to attack the problem of a nation’s vitality. I must next proceed
to prove what for the sake of clearness I have had to put forward as a
mere hypothesis; namely, that there are real differences in the relative
value of human races. The consequences of proving this will be
considerable, and cover a wide field. But first I must lay a foundation
of fact and argument capable of holding up such a vast building; and the
foundation cannot be too complete. The question with which I have just
been dealing was only the gateway of the temple.