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Arthur de Gobineau |
Among the thinkers influencing Richard Wagner was a failed
dramatist and poet turned French diplomat, Arthur de Gobineau, whose writings
underscored the cultural pessimism that characterized so much of nineteenth-century
polemics. Already bitter about the loss of prestige of the nobility, the rise
of the “philistine” bourgeoisie with its power of money and the influence of
the “mob” since the French Revolution of 1789, Gobineau’s worst fears were
confirmed by the Revolutions of 1848 that originated in France and spread their
tentacles throughout Europe. These convulsive upheavals destroyed the old
aristocratic order with its reverence for political elites, hierarchical social
orders and family lineage. Doubts about his own aristocratic background drove
Gobineau to idealize the Aryan nobility as a surrogate for his own origins.
Turning to history, he argued in his four-volume
magnum opus Essay on the Inequality of
Races, that race or blood was the decisive factor in determining the
vitality of a civilization. He accepted the existing racial hierarchy of blacks
at the bottom who possessed animal passion but had limited intellectual and
moral faculties, yellows who sought material satisfactions but otherwise were
mediocre, and whites with “an energetic intelligence” that sustained their love
of freedom and order and honour. He further distinguished within the white
category the super-elite of Aryans with superior blood. The Aryan, that
originally poured down from the Hindu Kush, “by virtue of his intelligence and
his energy” was superior to other men, and for a time was uncontaminated by
other races and debased Whites. His survey of ten civilizations purportedly
demonstrated that a white Aryan race, originating in Central Asia, was
responsible for the creation of civilizations culminating in Charlemagne’s
Europe with its Teutonic and Frankish warriors. History, he said, “shows us
that all civilizations derive from the white race, which none can exist without
its help,” and “a society is great and brilliant only so far as it preserves
the blood of the noble group that created it.” But this Aryan race, too, found
itself abutted to the conquered peoples and inevitably succumbed to
miscegenation. Gobineau wrote that over the centuries, promiscuous
interbreeding with inferior races led to the slow debilitation of the noble
race, and Europe was in decline because “the blood of the civilizing race is
gradually drained away.”
Barely disguising his hatred of democracy, he argued
that Europe was a cesspool of racial degeneration, as “fresh hoards of
mongrelized masses emerge from the rural darkness to descend on the cities and
towns” wreaking havoc through their revolutionary fervor incited by demagogues
preaching a false egalitarianism. Even with pockets of Aryan blood still
remaining, contemporary disorders, intellectual and aesthetic mediocrity and
racial enervation only reinforced his bleak and irreversible conclusion that
“the white species will disappear from the face of the earth” as other races
ascend and obliterate their memory forever. Some races were already
disappearing and others have become extinct: “China has never had fewer
inhabitants than it has now; central Asia was an anthill, and now there is no
one there.” His bleak implication was
that mankind itself would not survive.
Consistent with his era’s taxonomy, Gobineau
employed race interchangeably with ethnicity, nation, civilization and most
likely class, because the latter category is frequently the subtext of his analysis.
However he blurred the distinctions, Gobineau argued the bizarre notion that
the “white race has disappeared from the face of the earth” having “lost their
original purity by the time of Christ.” The French Revolution had only marked
the final defeat of racial exclusivity and the further dilution and exhaustion
of Whites. If he had substituted class for race, his ideas would likely have
carried greater resonance. But this perspective would have forced him to
grapple with the ideas expounded by the left, and his conservative temperament
did not allow that kind of dialogue since liberalism, democracy and socialism
were symptoms of racial decline. Yet Gobineau, considering his work to be an
exact science, compared himself to Copernicus. The more striking parallel is
with Karl Marx, who concurrently was developing a so-called scientific economic
basis of history, which explained not only the past but, following its own
laws, predicted the future. They both shared a profound alienation from the
dominant political, economic and cultural milieus of their time. Marx, however,
was formulating a theory that, in his view, would inevitably eliminate class
inequalities and inevitably inaugurate an idyllic society. If Marx perceived
Britain as a beacon of hope in his belief that a highly advanced industrialized
society provided the most fertile ground for a proletarian revolution, Gobineau
despised it. To him it represented a debased, bourgeois society dominated by
mercantile values. Gobineau’s overview of global history foreclosed the
possibility of cultural renewal since it rested on a biological determinism
that would lead inexorably to extinction since racial inequalities had been
dissolved. Only in his book, The Renaissance did he hold out the slim
possibility that disaster might be averted if societies looked to the
inspiration provided by the beauty of ancient Greece and the virtues of Rome
even though the characters he draws upon fail to defeat the forces of
evil.
Gobineau’s lack of evidence to support his ludicrous
hypothesis and ahistorical fatalism, particularly absent in his infamous Essay, troubled his French
contemporaries. Where was the proof that the observable features of
contemporary civilizations were the result of supposed mixtures in the past? According
to his one-time mentor, the liberal Alex de Tocqueville, whose old Norman
family bequeathed to him a greater inner security, if humanity’s best days were
over, it would be necessary “to know not only the past but also the future.” In
addition, Gobineau dogmatically accepted the “immutable laws” of race history
that had predetermined his gloom-laden and apocalyptic conclusion. Gobineau
said that man was dying and “no one will replace [him] when [his]
degeneration
is completed.” This fatalism disturbed Tocqueville because, as a committed
believer in human liberty, these repugnant views sapped energy, confidence and
the will to achieve as well as rendering man helpless. Gobineau’s racist
outlook also repelled Tocqueville. He perceptively raised the question: “Do you
not see inherent in your doctrine all the evils engendered by permanent
inequality – pride, violence, scorn of fellow men, tyranny and abjection in all
their forms?” Gobineau and later racists either evaded this consideration or in
acknowledging it did not regard as evil the cost of racial inequality. That a
contemporary of Gobineau recognized the pernicious effects of racism reveals
that we do not need the benefit of hindsight when we discuss the link between
the French Count and Nazism. But instead of wrestling with the implications of
this devastating question, Gobineau deflected criticism as confirmation of his
views. Michael Biddiss, his biographer, (Father of Racist Ideology: The Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau New York:Weybright and Talley, 1970) perceived a direct link between
Gobineau’s work and the more infamous one written seventy years later when he
commented that Essay “elaborated a racial philosophy of history and society
that surpasses in scope and sinister grandeur even the pages of Mein Kampf.”
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Alex de Tocqueville |
Although extraordinarily popular at the time, Gobineau’s
ideas have been largely discredited by recent science. First Europeans are a
result of the genetic mixture resulting from migrations from Africa and Asia,
two-thirds Asian and one-third African. Secondly racial purity is impossible to
create; partial purity could only be created through at least twenty
generations of inbreeding that would have severe consequences for the health
and fertility of the children. (Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, Peoples, and Languages, translated by Mark Seielstad, New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000, 76, 12.) These discoveries demonstrate
that Darwin’s conception of mankind, as a single species, was more accurate
than the racist fantasies that proved so destructive.
Nevertheless, researchers like the psychologist
Philippe Rushton have recycled with modifications Gobineau’s hierarchy of
races. The late controversial former professor at the University of Western Ontario
was funded by an American foundation that supports research into the roots
of intelligence. Asians have supplanted whites in the racial hierarchy with the
most brains and the least testosterone; blacks remain on the bottom with the
biggest genitals, the most testosterone and the smallest brains. This kind of
research demonstrates that a windfall of funds is available for intellectual cul-de-sacs.
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Richard Wagner |
If Gobineau’s ideas as a racist theorist carried
little immediate import in France, they found an enthusiastic reception via
Richard Wagner in Germany, who embraced both him and the pith and substance of
his argument. Gobineau and Wagner met in 1876 and a friendship ensued through
their enjoyment of each other’s company and in Wagner’s appreciation of the
intelligence and "original mind" of the retired diplomat. By 1881, Wagner in
reading Gobineau’s magnum opus believed that it provided scientific evidence
for his own avowed racist views even though he did not appreciate Gobineau’s
disparaging remarks about contemporary Germans. According to Wagner, Gobineau
understood “all the peoples in the world except the Germans.” More importantly
like Tocqueville, he rejected Gobineau’s fatalism; unlike the French liberal,
who objected to Gobineau’s conclusion of irreversible decline for humanitarian
reasons, Wagner repudiated his pessimistic beliefs on religious grounds. Races
may be done for but redemption was possible in the acceptance of Christianity
and through art, which he believed was essentially a religious experience.
According to his second wife Cosima, he said on February 14, 1881, that the
Gospels, not racial strength, were what really mattered. Gobineau in turn rejected Wagner’s faith in
the redemptive power of Christianity. Nor did he share Wagner’s notorious
anti-Judaism that larded the latter’s prose as well as his frequent and odious
rants against the Jews, (the French and the Roman Catholic Church, especially
the Jesuits) that laced Cosima’s posthumously published diaries. Anti-Judaism
had not penetrated into Gobineau’s racist arsenal because ancient Jews
warriors, farmers and traders surpassed their neighbours, were a “free, strong
and intelligent people,” and their survival through the Diaspora constituted
evidence of the virtues of racial purity. Indeed, because of his hostility to
miscegenation, Gobineau admired, among all the Semitic peoples, the
isolationism of the Jews.
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Cosima Wagner (1877) |
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