Nationalism and Culture (61 page)

"^ Di$ Anjange der menschlichfn KuUur, Leipzig, p. 2.

of things that we call nature. It is culture that assures him of his place in the great realm of Nature, who is his mother also. Of course, one can speak only of a relative mastery of nature by man, for even the most advanced culture is not yet in a position completely to control nature. A tidal wave suffices to destroy his carefully built dams, to drown his planted fields, and to send his well-built ships to the bottom of the sea. An earthquake annihilates in a few minutes painful products of a century of creative activity. The progress of culture is therefore only a gradual mastery of nature by man, which with his advancing development becomes ever better planned and surer of its goal without ever becoming absolute.

With this view the artificial distinction that has been set up between "nature peoples" and "culture peoples" disappears. Such a distinction corresponds in no way to actual facts, since there are no tribes or peoples anywhere entirely without__a culture. Indeed, Friedrich Ratzel, the actual founder of the anthropo-geographical theory of history, stated, in his Voikerkundey that there is to -be found no essential difference between nature peoples and culture peoples, but merely differences in the' degree of their culture, so that one can in reality speak only of culturally poorer and culturally richer peoples.

The different forms of the cultural life have of themselves given rise to certain distinctions, and even though it is hardly possible to draw sharp lines between the separate fields of activity of human culture, still we cannot get along without them, for our brains are so constructed that we can proceed only with the help of the crutches of concepts. So it was the presentation of the purely political history of separate states, whose content was limited almost exclusively to the enumeration of dynasties, the description of wars and conquests and the explanation of the different systems of government, which undoubtedly gave the first impulse to profounder cultural interpretations of history. We came to see that these one-sided presentations by no means exhaust the unlimited abundance of cultural events but rather make indecent display of their most unfruitful aspect. For, just as the forces of nature are not all of service for human purposes, so also, not all the occurrences in the social environment man has built up further his higher development. Some of them, in fact, operate as dangerous obstacles to this development.

Even slavery and despotism are manifestations of the general cultural movement; for they, too, represent a conscious attack on the natural course of things. But these are in the last analysis only defects of social culture, and their disastrous effects are brought more and more clearly to the consciousness of man in the course of his history. The long list of social upheavals and the uncounted uprisings against old and new systems of rulership bear witness to this. As man continually strives to impart to his natural environment more and more of his own character, his own

development impels him in ever increasing measure to eliminate the evils of his social environment, to advance the intellectual development of his species and to lead it toward ever higher perfection. It is the essential core of all culture that man does not submit blindly to the rough caprice of natural processes, but struggles against them in order to shape his fate by his own standards j so he will some day hreak those chains which he forged for himself while ignorance and superstition still interfered with his freer insight. The farther his mind forces its way along the winding road of his social evolution, the broader become the purposes he holds before him, the more consciously and insistently will he try to influence the course of this evolution and to make all social occurrences serve the higher ends of culture.

Thus we advance, urged by an inner longing and spurred on by the influence of the social institutions under which we live, toward a social culture which will no longer know any form of exploitation or slavery. And this coming culture will work the more beneficently the more clearly its representatives recognize in the personal freedom of the individual and the union of all in the solidaric bonds of a sense of social justice the mainspring of their social activity. Freedom, not in the abstract sense of Hegel, but conceived as a practical possibility which guarantees to every member of society that he may develop to the fullest all those powers, talents and capacities with which nature has/ endowed him, without hindrance by authoritative compulsion and the inevitable effects of an ideology of brute force! Freedom of the person on the basis of economic and social justice! Only by this is man offered the possibility of bringing to full flower that consciousness of his personal responsibility which is the firm foundation of each and every freedom, and of developing the vital sense of his unity with his own kind to a stage where the wishes and desires of the individual spring from the depths of his social feeling.

Just as in nature the brutal struggle for existence that is fought out with tooth and claw is not the only mode of maintaining lifej just as along with this crude manifestation another and much more involved form of the struggle for existence is in operation which finds expression in the social banding together of the weaker genera and in their practical rendering of mutual aidj so also in culture are manifested different forms of human activities which employ the more primitive or the finer traits of man. And just as in nature that second type of struggle for existence is far more effective in preserving the individual and the race than the brutal war of the so-called "strong" against the "weak"—a fact which is shown satisfactorily by the astounding retrogression of those species which have no social life and in their struggle with the environment have to rely merely on physical superiority ^—so also in the social life of mankind

' Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution.

the higher forms of moral and intellectual development slowly achieve victory over the brute forces of political forms of rulership, which have thus far only served to cripple every higher cultural development.

We are led to conclude, then, that if culture is simply a constant subduing by man of the primitive processes of nature, and the political endeavors within the social structure which throughout his life circumscribe man and subject his creative activities to the external compulsion of rigid forms, then it is in its essence everywhere the same despite the ever increasing number and the endless diversity of its special forms of expression. Then the notion of the alleged existence of purely national cultures, each of which constitutes by itself a closed whole and carries within itself the laws of its origin, is no more than a wish-concept which has nothing in common with life's realities. The universal which lies at the foundation of all cultures is infinitely more important than the difference in their outer forms, which are for the most part determined by the environment. For every culture springs from the same urge and strives consistently toward the same goal. Everywhere it begins at first as a civilizing force that sets up artificial limits to the rough, unbridled rule of nature and enables man to satisfy his essential needs more easily and with less interference. Later there grows out of it quite spontaneously the aspiration for worthier organization and loftier spirit in social and individual life that is deeply rooted in the social sentiment of man and must be regarded as the driving force in every higher culture. If one wishes to get a clear picture of the relations and closer connections of the various groups of human beings with this thing we call culture he might make use of this comparison:

Over the broad surface of the ocean the sun unceasingly draws up watery vapors to the skies. Clouds form, and float, wind-driven, to the ' land where they discharge their garnered fullness and fall to earth as fruitful rain. By millions the raindrops hide themselves within the bosom of the earth, and then from countless springs gush, laughing, out again upon its surface. Rivulets are formed, cut through the land in every direction, swell to a brook, a river. The river rolls its floods down again to that same sea in which it had its beginning. Through endless time the circuit has gone on with irresistible certainty, unchanging j and it will continue in unbroken sequence as long as the cosmic conditions of our solar system themselves endure unchanged.

It is not different with the cultural work of peoples, with every creative activity of the individual. What we in general designate as culture is at bottom only a great all-embracing unity of the "Occurring," which is gripped by a restless, uninterrupted transforming and makes itself apparent in countless forms and structures. Always and everywhere the same creative urge is hungry for action j only the mode of expression differs

and is adapted to the environment. Just as every spring, every brook, every river is in its depths allied to the sea, into whose tides it ever pours itself anew, so also is every separate culture cycle only part of the same all-embracing unity, from which it draws its deepest and most original forces and into whose lap its own creative work always falls again at last. Like the brooks and rivers are all the culture forms that through the millennia have followed one another or have existed side by side. They are all rooted in the same primitive soil, to which they are in their depth allied as are the waters to the sea.

Cultural reconstructions and social stimulation always occur when different peoples and races come into closer union. Every new culture is begun by such a fusion of different folk elements and takes its special shape from this. This is quite natural, for only through outside influences do those new needs, those new understandings arise which constantly struggle for expression in every field of cultural activity. The desire to preserve the "purity of the culture" of a people by the deliberate elimination of foreign influences—a notion which is today advocated with great zeal by extreme nationalists and adherents of the race doctrine—is just as unnatural as it is futile, and merely shows that these peculiar fanatics for cultural autonomy have not understood at all the profound significance of the cultural process. Such distorted ideas have about the same meaning as saying to a man that he can attain to the highest state of manhood only if he eliminates woman from his life. The result would be the same in both cases.

New life arises only from the union of man with woman. Just so a culture is born or fertilized only by the circulation of fresh blood in the veins of its representatives. Just as the child results from the mating so new culture forms arise from the mutual fertilization of different peoples and their spiritual sympathy with foreign achievements and capacities. One needs a strong dose of mental shortsightedness to dream of withdrawing an entire country from the spiritual influences of the wider cultural circle to which it belongs, especially today when peoples are more than ever bent on the mutual enlargement of their cultural aspirations.

But even if the possibility existed, such a people would not experience an uplift in their cultural life, as the exponents of cultural autonomy so strangely insist. All experience indicates rather that such inbreeding would lead inevitably to a general stunting, to a slow extinction of culture. In this respect it is with peoples as it is with persons. How poorly that man would fare who in his cultural development had to rely entirely on the creations of his own people! This quite apart from the fact that it is utterly useless to talk of such a possibility, since even the wisest is in no position to say which among the cultural possessions of a people they actually worked out for themselves and which they took over in one form or

another from others. The inner culture of a man grows just in the measure that he develops an ability to appropriate the achievements of other peoples and enrich his mind with them. The more easily he is able to do this the better it is for his mental culture, the greater right he has to the title, man of culture. He immerses himself in the gentle wisdom of Lao-tse and rejoices in the beauty of the Vedic poems. Before his mind unfold the wonder-tales of the Thovi^and and One Nights, and with inner rapture he drinks in the sayings of the wine-loving Omar Khayyam or the majestic strophes of Firdusi. His soul absorbs the profundities of the Book of Job and swings in rhythm with the Iliad. He laughs with Aristophanes, weeps with Sophocles, reads with enjoyment the humorous incidents of the Golden Ass of Apuleius, and hears with interest Petronius' portrayal of conditions in declining Rome. With Maistre Rabelais he treads the tastefully decorated halls of the happy Abbey of Theleme and with Francois Villon he wanders past the Ravenstone. He tries to fathom the soul of Hamlet and rejoices in Don Quixote's lust for deeds. He presses through the terrors of Dante's Hell and grieves with Milton for the lost Paradise. In one word, he is everywhere at home, and therefore knows better how to value the charm of his own homeland. With unprejudiced eye he searches the cultural possessions of all peoples and so perceives more clearly the strong unity of all mental processes. And of these possessions no one can rob himj they are outside the jurisdiction of the government and are not subject to the will of the mighty ones of the earth. The legislator may be in a position to close the gates of his country to the stranger, but he cannot keep him from making his demands upon the treasure of the people, its mental culture, with the same assurance as any native.

Here is the point at which the preponderant importance of culture over any political-national frontier-fixing reveals itself most clearly. Cul ture unlooses the shackles that the jtheologicaL spirit of politics has fastened on the peoples. In this sense_ it is in its_deepest_essence revolutionary. We indulge in profound reflections about the evanescence of all existence and demonstrate that all the great kingdoms which have played a world-commanding role in history were irrevocably doomed to downfall as soon as they had attained the highest peak of their culture. A number of well-known historians have even maintained that we have to do here with the inevitable operation of a definite law, to which all historic process is subject. But really the fact that the decline or downfall of a kingdom is not in any way equivalent to the decline of a culture should indicate to us where the actual causes of the downfall are to be sought. A political rulership can go down without leaving behind it a trace of its former existence; with a culture it is quite otherwise. It can, as it were, wither in a country where it has been disturbed in its natural growth. In this