The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races. comte de Arthur Gobineau
States (for we sometimes see the same culture subsist in a country under foreign domination, and survive the destruction of the political body which gave it birth; while, again, comparatively slight misfortunes cause it to be transformed, or to disappear altogether), we become more and more confirmed in the idea that this principle of death in all societies is not only a necessary condition of their life, independent, in a great measure, of external causes, but is also uniform in all. To fix and determine this principle, and to trace its effects in the lives of those nations, of whom history has left us records, has been my object and endeavor in the studies, the results of which I now lay before the reader.
The fact that every human agglomeration, and the peculiar culture resulting from it, is doomed to perish, was not known to the ancients. Even in the epochs immediately preceding ours, it was not believed. The religious spirit of Asiatic antiquity looked upon the great political catastrophes in the same light that they did upon the sudden destruction of an individual: as a demonstration of Divine wrath, visiting a nation or an individual whose sins had marked them out for signal punishment, which would serve as an example to those criminals whom the rod had as yet spared. The Jews, misunderstanding the meaning of the promise, believed their empire imperishable. Rome, at the very moment when the threatening clouds lowered in the horizon of her grandeur, entertained no doubt as to the eternity of hers.[31] But our generation has profited by experience; and, as no one presumes to doubt that all men must die, because all who came before us have died; so we are firmly convinced, that the days of nations, as of individuals, however many they be, are numbered. The wisdom of the ancients, therefore, will afford us but little assistance in the unravelling of our subject, if we except one fundamental maxim: that the finger of Divine Providence is always visible in the conduct of the affairs of this world. From this solid basis we shall not depart, accepting it in the full extent that it is recognized by the church. It cannot be contested that no civilization will perish without the will of God, and to apply to the mortal condition of all societies, the sacred axiom by which the ancients explained certain remarkable, and, in their opinion, isolated cases of destruction, is but proclaiming a truth of the first order, of which we must never lose sight in our researches after truths of secondary importance. If it be further added that societies perish by their sins, I willingly accede to it; it is but drawing a parallel between them and individuals who also find their death, or accelerate it, by disobedience to the laws of the Creator. So far, there is nothing contradictory to reason, even when unassisted by Divine light; but these two truths once admitted and duly weighed, the wisdom of the ancients, I repeat, affords no further assistance. They did not search into the ways by which the Divine will effected the ruin of nations; on the contrary, they were rather inclined to consider these ways as essentially mysterious, and above comprehension. Seized with pious terror at the aspect of the wrecks, they easily imagined that Providence had specially interfered thus to strike and completely destroy once powerful states. Where a miracle is recorded by the Sacred Scriptures, I willingly submit; but where that high testimony is wanting, as it is in the great number of cases, we may justly consider the ancient theory as defective, and not sufficiently enlightened. We may even conclude, that as Divine Justice watches over nations unremittingly, and its decrees were pronounced ere the first human society was formed, they are also enforced in a predeterminate manner, and according to the unalterable laws of the universe, which govern both animated nature and the inorganic world.
If we have cause to reproach the philosophers of the earlier ages, for having contented themselves, in attempting to fathom the mystery, with the vindication of an incontestable theological truth, but which itself is another mystery; at least, they have not increased the difficulties of the question by making it a theme for a maze of errors. In this respect, they rank highly above the rationalist schools of various epochs.
The thinkers of Athens and Rome established the doctrine, which has retained its ground to our days, that states, nations, civilizations, perished only through luxury, enervation, bad government, corruption of morals, fanaticism. All these causes, either singly or combined, were supposed to account for the downfall of civilizations. It is a necessary consequence of this doctrine, that where neither of these causes are in operation, no destructive agency is at work. Societies would therefore possess this advantage over individuals, that they could die no other but a violent death; and, to establish a body politic as durable as the globe itself, nothing further would be necessary than to elude the dangers which I enumerated above.
The inventors of this thesis did not perceive its bearing. They considered it as an excellent means for illustrating the doctrine of morality, which, as is well known, was the sole aim of their historical writings. In their narratives of events, they were so strongly preoccupied with showing the happy rewards of virtue, and the disastrous results of crime and vice, that they cared little for what seemed to furnish no illustration. This erroneous and narrow-minded system often operated contrary to the intention of the authors, for it applied, according to occasion, the name of virtue and vice in a very arbitrary manner; still, to a great extent, the severe and laudable sentiment upon which it was based, excuses it. If the genius of a Plutarch or a Tacitus could draw from history, studied in this manner, nothing but romances and satires, yet the romances were sublime, and the satires generous.
I wish I could be equally indulgent to the writers of the eighteenth century, who made their own application of the same theory; but there is, between them and their teachers, too great a difference. While the ancients were attached to the established social system, even to a fault, our moderns were anxious for destruction, and greedy of untried novelties. The former exerted themselves to deduce useful lessons from their theory; the latter have perverted it into a fearful weapon against all rational principles of government, which they stigmatized by every term that mankind holds in horror. To save societies from ruin, the disciples of Voltaire would destroy religion, law, industry, commerce; because, if we believe them, religion is fanaticism; laws, despotism; industry and commerce, luxury and corruption.
I have not the slightest intention of entering the field of polemics; I wished merely to direct attention to the widely diverging results of this principle, when applied by Thucydides, or the Abbé Raynal. Conservative in the one, cynically aggressive in the other, it is erroneous in both.
The causes to which the downfall of nations is generally ascribed are not the true ones, and whilst I admit that these evils may be rifest in the last stages of dissolution of a people, I deny that they possess in themselves sufficient strength, and so destructive an energy, as to produce the final, irremediable catastrophe.
CHAPTER II.
ALLEGED CAUSES OF POLITICAL CATASTROPHES EXAMINED.
Fanaticism—Aztec Empire of Mexico.—Luxury—Modern European States as luxurious as the ancient.—Corruption of morals—The standard of morality fluctuates in the various periods of a nation's history: example, France—Is no higher in youthful communities than in old ones—Morality of Paris.—Irreligion—Never spreads through all ranks of a nation—Greece and Rome—Tenacity of Paganism.
Before entering upon my reasons for the opinion expressed at the end of the preceding chapter, it will be necessary to explain and define what I understand by the term society. I do not apply this term to the more or less extended circle belonging to a distinct sovereignty. The republic of Athens is not, in my sense of the word, a society; neither is the kingdom of Magadha, the empire of Pontus, or the caliphat of Egypt in the time of the Fatimites. These are fragments of societies, which are transformed, united, or subdivided, by the operation of those primordial laws into which I am inquiring, but whose existence or annihilation does not constitute the existence or annihilation of a society. Their formation is, for the most part, a transient phenomenon, which exerts but a limited, or even indirect influence upon the civilization that gave it birth. By the term society, I understand an association of men, actuated by similar ideas, and possessed of the same general instincts. This association need by no means be perfect in a political sense, but must be complete from a social point of view. Thus, Egypt, Assyria, Greece, India, China, have been, or are still, the theatres upon which distinct societies