Read Nationalism and Culture Online
Authors: Rudolf Rocker
Tags: #General, #History, #Sociology, #Social Science, #Political Science, #Political Ideologies, #Culture, #Multicultural Education, #Nationalism and nationality, #Education, #Nationalism, #Nationalism & Patriotism
Nationalism and Culture (60 page)
^' Rasse tind Kultur, p. 14.
condottieri is merely the thoughtless adoption of an assertion of Taine's. The fact is that in the whole tribe of the Bonapartes there was not a single condottiere—neither in the line from Treviso nor in that from Florence—though probably there is Saint Bonaventura. Wherefore Mereshkowski quite properly inquires: "Why should the blood of these supposititious robbers (condottieri) have run stronger in the veins of Napoleon than that of the actually provable saint?"
But enough of this unpleasant game, which one could keep up indefinitely without becoming any the wiser. It is neither the conclusions of science nor the voice of the blood which is responsible for the ideas of the founders of the race theory, but their strongly asocial sentiment, which makes them walk roughshod over every feeling of human dignity. To no one so well as to them does the old saying of Goethe apply: "We are able to understand correctly how anyone will think about any particular matter only when we know what is his sentiment toward it." It was not their doctrine that shaped their sentiment} it was the sentiment that gave form and content to the doctrine. But this sentiment is rooted in the very foundations of all spiritual, political and social reaction: in the attitude of masters towards their slaves. Every class that has thus far attained to power has felt the need of stamping their rulership with the mark of the unalterable and predestined, till at last this becomes an inner certainty for the ruling castes themselves. They regard themselves as the chosen ones and think that they recognize in themselves externally the marks of men of privilege. Thus arose in Spain the belief in the sangre azul^ the "blue blood" of the nobility, which is first mentioned in the medieval chronicles of Castile. Today they appeal to the blood of the "noble race" which allegedly has been called to rule over all the peoples of the world. It is the old idea of power, this time disguised as race. Thus one of the best known defenders of the modern race idea declares with noble self-assurance: "All Nordic culture is power culture j all Nordic talent is talent for matters of power, for matters of enterprise and world-making, whether in the material or in the spiritual realm, in the state, in art, in research." *"
All advocates of the race doctrine have been and are the associates and defenders of every political and social reaction, advocates of the power principle in its most brutal form. Gobineau stood squarely in the camp of the counterrevolution and made no bones about his purpose of attacking by his teaching "democracy and its weapon, the revolution." The slave-owners of Brazil and of the southern states of North America appealed also to his work to justify Negro slavery. Chamberlain's Grundlagen was an open declaration of war against all the achievements of the last hundred years in the direction of personal freedom and the social equalization of men. He hated everything which had sprung from the
^* L. F. Clauss, Rasse und Seele, p. 8 I.
revolution with grim bitterness and remained to the last the bellwether of political and social reaction in Germany. In this respect the representatives of the modern race theory differ in not the slightest degree from their predecessors except that they are more soulless, outspoken and brutal, and therefore more dangerous at a time when the spiritual in people is crippled and their emotions have grown callous and dull because of the war and its horrible after-effects. People of the brand of Ammon, Giinther, Hauser and Rosenberg, are in all their undertakings ruthless and hidebound reactionaries. What that leads to, the Third Reich of Hitler, Goering and Goebbels shows us realistically. When Giinther, in his Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes speaks of a "gradation in rank of the Germans according to their blood" his concept is thoroughly that of a slave-people who are arranged in a definite order of ranks that reminds us of the castes of the Indians and the Egyptians. One comprehends how this doctrine found such ready acceptance in the ranks of the great industrialists. The Deutsche Arbeitgeberzeitung wrote thus about Gunther's book: "What becomes of the dream of human equality after one takes even a single glance at this work? Not only do we regard the study of such a work as this as a source of the highest interest and instruction j we believe, too, that no politician can form a correct judgment without investigation of the problems here dealt with."
Of course! No better moral justification could be produced for the industrial bondage which our holders of industrial power keep before them as a picture of the future.
The race theory first appeared as an interpretation of history. But with time it has acquired a political significance, and it has crystallized today in Germany into a new ideology of reaction in which lurk future dangers that cannot be overlooked. He who thinks that he sees in all political and social antagonisms merely blood-determined manifestations of race, denies all conciliatory influence of ideas, all community of ethical feeling, and must at every crisis take refuge in brute force. In fact, the race theory is only the cult of power. Race becomes destiny, against which it is useless to struggle; therefore any appeal to the basic principles of humanity is just idle talk which cannot restrain the operation of the laws of nature. This delusion is not only a permanent danger to the peaceful relations of peoples with one another, it kills all sympathy within a people and flows logically into a state of the most brutal barbarism. Whither this leads is shown in Ernst Mann's Moral der Krafty where we read: "Who because of his bravery in battle for the general welfare has acquired a serious wound or disease, even he has no right to become a burden to his fellow men as cripple or invalid. If he was brave enough to risk his life in battle, he should possess also the final courage to end his life himself. Suicide is the one heroic deed available to invalids and weaklings."
Thus we should happily attain the cultural level of the Papuans. Such lines of thought lead to total depravity and inflict on all human feeling deeper wounds than one suspects. The race theory is the leitmotif of a new barbarism which endangers all the intellectual and spiritual values in culture, threatening to smother the voice of the spirit with its "voice of the blood." And so belief in race becomes the most brutal violence to the personality of man, a base denial of all social justice. Like every other fatalism, so also race-fatalism is a rejection of the spirit, a degrading of man to a mere blood-vessel for the race. The doctrine of race when applied to the concept of the nation proves that this is not a community of descent, as has been so often asserted j and as it dissects the nation into its separate components it destroys the foundations of its existence. When in spite of this its adherents today so noisily proclaim themselves the representatives of the national interests, one can but recall the saying of Grillparzer: "The course of the new education runs from humanity through nationality to bestiality."
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CONCERNING THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE. CULTURE AS ETHICAL STANDARD OF VALUE WITH KANT, HERDER AND OTHERS. CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION. CULTURE AS CONSCIOUS RESISTANCE TO THE NATURAL COURSE OF EVENTS. NATURE PEOPLES AND CULTURE PEOPLES. CULTURE IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST TYRANNY AND LUST FOR POWER. SOLIDARITY AS THE MOST EFFECTIVE PROMOTER OF CULTURE. RELATION OF SEPARATE HUMAN GROUPS TO THE GENERAL COURSE OF CULTURE. CULTURAL VITALIZATION BY FOREIGN INFLUENCES. VICTORY OF THE HIGHER CULTURE OVER POLITICAL SUPPRESSION. CULTURAL FITNESS AND ASSIMILATION BY THE STATE.
BEFORE we go further into the relation of the national state to the general course of culture it is necessary to define as sharply as possible the concept of culture, so as to avoid confusion. The word "culture," the general use of which is a rather recent matter, embodies no very clearly defined idea—as one would infer from the multiplicity of its applications. Thus one speaks of culture of the soil, of physical, spiritual and mental culture, of the culture of a race or a nation, of a man of culture, and other like matters, and in each instance the word means something different. It is not very long since we gave to the concept of culture an almost purely ethical meaning. One spoke of the morality of peoples as we today speak of their cultures. In fact, up to the end of the eighteenth century and later men employed the concept "humanity," which is a purely moral concept, in the same sense in which we today use the word culture, and one cannot say that such application was less appropriate or less clear.
Montesquieu, Voltaire, Lessing, Herder and many others thought of culture only as a moral concept. Herder, in his Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankindy had laid down the principle that the culture of a people is higher in proportion as it expresses the spirit of humanity. Besides, even today, ethical feeling is for many the essential content of all culture. Thus, Vera Strasser declares, in a much-noticed work, that "the progress of culture consists in this: that every individual shall suppress the bestial and develop the spiritual," which by the contrast selected
reveals clearly that the spiritual is thought of as primarily a moral concept.^
Kant, also, saw in morality the essential characteristic of culture. Proceeding from the standpoint that man is a being in whom the inclination toward seclusion is matched with the impulse toward sociability, he thought he saw in the conflict of these two attitudes the "great instrument of culture" and the real source of ethical feeling in man. By it man was first enabled to overcome his natural crudity and to ascend the steps of culture, which, according to Kant's own utterance, "comprises the social worth of man." Culture seemed to him the final purpose of nature, which in man attained to consciousness of itself. According to Kant's view, culture carries in itself many obstacles which seem to hinder the free growth of humanity, but which really serve this final purpose. Holding this opinion he thought he saw in every form of expression of culture a fingerpost that pointed to the great goal toward which humanity strives.
Later, attempts were made to differentiate culture and civilization. Civilization was to mean merely the subjugation of external nature by man, while culture was to be valued as intellectualizing and spiritual refinement of physical existence. Based on this definite divisions were made of the phenomena of social life and conceived art, literature, music, religion, philosophy and science as separate spheres of culture; while technical skill, industrial life and political organization were gathered under the heading of civilization. Others wanted to recognize in science, too, only a manifestation of civilization, since its practical application constantly influenced and transformed the material life of man. Each of these attempts has its peculiar advantages, each also its inadequacies; for it is not a simple matter to draw lines of division here, even when we recognize that this is only an attempt to set up a classification that shall make the study of actual occurrences easier.
The Latin word cultural which had been almost forgotten, was originally applied almost exclusively to agriculture, animal-breeding and similar matters which represent a conscious attack by man upon the course of natural events; it had very nearly the meaning of rearing or cultivating. Such an approach involves no contradiction; it can also be conceived as a particular shaping of events which attaches itself to the long course of natural occurrences. It is very probable that only the Christian theologic way of thinking was the cause of this setting up of an artificial opposition between nature and culture by its placing of man above nature and its belief that nature was created entirely for man's sake.
When we take culture to mean simply man's conscious attack on the blind operation of natural forces, with the possibility of distinguishing between lower and higher forms of cultural process, there is no longer
^ Psychologie der Zusammenhdnge und Begebenheiten. Berlin, 1921.
any possibility of misinterpretation. Thus understood, culture is the conscious resistance of man against the course of nature, to which resistance alone he owes the preservation of his species. Countless genera which once inhabited the earth perished in the early glacial period because nature had deprived them of food and of their old conditions of life. But man struggled against the altered conditions and found ways and means to escape from their destructive influence. In this sense the whole course of his development and dispersal over the earth has been a constant struggle against the natural conditions of his environment, which, in his way, he has tried to change to his advantage. He made for himself artificial utensils, weapons and tools, learned to use fire, and adapted himself by appropriate clothing and shelter to the circumstances under which he was compelled to live. Thus he made, so to speak, his own climate and was enabled to change his residence and to defy the natural conditions of his life. Thus understood, the appearance of man is the beginning of culture, and human life is merely its content. Ludwig Stein made an illuminating presentation of the contrasting concepts, nature and culture:
The unbroken regularity in the succession of events which goes on without definite purpose and independent of human activity, we call nature. What human beings have elaborated, planned, striven for, achieved, shaped purposively and deliberately, we call culture. What grows freely from the soil without any demands upon human labor is a natural product; but what takes shape only by the intervention of human labor is an artifact or culture-product. By pursuing conscious purposes and by a developed system of adapting these purposes to available means human effort controls the unconsciously adaptive creative activity of nature. By means of tools, which men as an imitative being makes in the approximate likeness of his own members, and with the help of institutions and labor-saving devices which he has invented, man speeds up the monotonous, tedious course of natural processes, and makes them serve his own ends. The type of the natural status is, therefore: mastery of man by his environment; the essence of the cultural status, on the other hand, is: m.astery of his environm.ent by m-an?
This definition of the concept is simple and clearj it has the further advantage that it simply presents the relation between nature and culture without setting up an express opposition between them. This is important; for if one holds the view that man also is only a part of nature, one of its creatures who stands neither above it nor outside it, then neither does his work fall outside the general frame of nature, whether we call it culture, civilization, or something else. Viewed thus, culture is only a special manifestation of nature, and its beginning is linked with the appearance of man upon earth. His history is the history of culture in its manifold gradations; and yet he belongs, like every other being, to the same totality
