The proposition that race is an essential factor in the growth and development of culture, and expresses culturally that phenomenon of variation and progressive differentiation so apparently vital on the plane of the development of organic nature, faces a pacifist and an internationalist with a terrific dilemma, and a consequently difficult choice. Even so, granted that race has been such a factor in human history, would you today deliberately help perpetuate its idioms at the cost of so much more inevitable sectarianism, chauvinistic prejudice, schism and strife? It amounts to this, then, can we have the advantages of cultural differences without their obvious historical disadvantages? For we must remember that national and racial prejudices have been all through history concurrent with such traditional differences, and have grown up from the roots of the engendered feelings of proprietorship and pride.
History has made this question a grave dilemma. Or rather the chauvinistic interpretation of history,—which is orthodox. Theoretically the question can be straddled; but practically it is time to front-face the sharp paradoxes of the situation, even at the risk of being impaled. The issue is particularly unavoidable in our day when we have side by side with our conscious and growing internationalism a resurgence everywhere of the spirit of nationalism and the principle of the autonomy and self-determination of national and racial groups. We have carried the principle into the inner boundaries of many nations, and have aroused expectant and clamorous minorities, where before there were repressed and almost suffocated minor groups.
Personally I belong to such a minority, and have had some part in the revival of its suppressed hopes; but if I thought it irreconcilable with the future development of internationalism and the approach toward universalism to foster the racial sense, stimulate the racial consciousness and help revive the lapsing racial tradition, I would count myself a dangerous reactionary, and be ashamed of what I still think is a worthy and constructve cause.
The answer to this dilemma, in my opinion, lies behind one very elemental historical fact, long ignored and oft-forgotten. There is and always has been an almost limitless natural reciprocity between cultures. Civilisation, for all its claims of distinctiveness, is a vast amalgum of cultures. The difficulties of our social creeds and practices have arisen in great measure from our refusal to recognise this fact. In other words it has been the sense and practice of the vested ownership of culture goods which has been responsible for the tragedies of history and for the paradoxes of scholarship in this matter. It is not the facts of the existence of race which are wrong, but our attitudes toward those facts. The various creeds of race have been falsely predicated. The political crimes of nations are perpetuated and justified in the name of race; whereas in many instances the cultural virtues of race are falsely appropriated by nationalities. So that in the resultant confusion, if we argue for raciality as a desirable thing, we seem to argue for the present practice of nations and to sanction the pride and prejudice of past history. Whereas, if we condemn these things, we seem close to a rejection of race as something useful in human life and desirable to perpetuate.
But do away with the idea of proprietorship and vested interest,—and face the natural fact of the limitless inter-changeableness of culture goods, and the more significant historical facts of their more or less constant exchange, and we have, I think, a solution reconciling nationalism with internationalism, racialism with universalism. But it is not an easy solution,—for it means the abandonment of the use of the idea of race as a political instrument, perhaps the second most potent ideal sanction in the creed of the Western nations—the “Will of God” and the “good of humanity” being the first. But we are in a new era of social and cultural relationships once we root up this fiction and abandon the vicious practice of vested proprietary interests in various forms of culture, attempting thus in the face of the natural reciprocity and our own huge indebtedness, one to the other, to trade unequally in proprietary and aggressive ways. There are and always will be specialised group superiorities; it is the attempt to capitalise these by a politics of civilisation into theoretical and practical group supremacies which has brought the old historical difficulties.
Freed from this great spiritual curse, the cult of race is free to blossom almost indefinitely to the enrichment and stimulation of human culture. On the grand scale, as between East and West,—European, Asiatic, African; and on the small scale as well, within the borders of our political units, as the self-expression and spiritual solidarity of minorities. I have often thought that the greatest obstacle that has prevented the world from realising unity has been a false conception of what unity itself meant in this case. It is a notion, especially characteristic of the West, that to be one effectively, we must all be alike and that to be at peace, we must all have the same interests. On the contrary, apart from the practical impossibility of such uniformity, and its stagnant undesirability, we have, in the very attempt to impose it, the greatest disruptive force active in the modern world today.
That way, with its implications of “superior” and “inferior,” “dominant” and “backward,” “legitimate” and “mongrel,” is the path of reactionism and defeat. If this all too-prevalent psychology is to survive, then it is a modern crime to encourage minorities and preserve races, either in the physical or the cultural sense; for one is only multiplying the factors of strife and discord. But the modern world is doing just these things, hoping meanwhile for internationalism, peace and world cooperation. It is easier, and more consistent to change our false psychology than to stem the rising tide of resurgent minorities, which have every right and reason for self-expression which the older established majorities ever had; and in addition the moral claims of compensation. The new nations of Europe, Zionism, Chinese and Indian Nationalism, the awakened American Negro and the awakening Africa have progressed too much to be pushed back or snuffed out. The revision of thought which we are speaking about now as an ideal possibility, tomorrow will be a practical necessity, unless history is tragically to repeat itself in terms of other huge struggles for dominance and supremacy. The best chance for new world lies in a radical revision of this root-idea of culture, which never was soundly in accordance with the facts, but which has become so inveterate that it will require a mental revolution to change it.
For a moment let us look at some of its anomalies, Missionarism, so dear to our Western hearts, is one of them, and one of the gravest. The very irony of self-asserted superiority and supremacy of an adopted Oriental religion turned against the Oriental world as an instrument of political and cultural aggression ought to chasten the spirit of a rational Christianity. Or, to take another instance, the Aryan myth has no validity if political expediency demands a rationalisation of the domination of an Asiatic branch of Aryans by a European branch of Aryans. America, for example, appropriates as characteristically “American” the cultural products of their Negroes, while denying them civic and cultural equality. A North Teutonic tribe, with a genius for organisation, appropriates a Palatinate culture-history and what was largely a South German culture, and sets out to dominate the world under its aegis. These are typical anomalies. And they are not cited in a spirit of accusation. They could be matched for almost every nation or race or creed, and are cited, to prove by the force of their mutual self-contradiction, their common underlying fallacy. Shall the new nations, the insurgent minorities the awakening races adopt the same psychology, advance in the name of their race or nation the same claims, avow the same antiquated sanctions? Inevitably,—unless there is rapid and general repudiation of the basic idea, and a gradual but sincere abandonment of the old politic of cultural aggression and proprietary culture interests. We began by talking about the cult of race—but this is not beside the point. For the cult of race is dangerous and reactionary if the implications of the old creeds of race are not disposed of or revised. There can be two sorts of modern self-determination,—one with the old politic of revenge and aggressive self-assertion, another with a new politic of creative individuality and cultural reciprocity.
With this new ideology lies the only hope for combining the development of a greater solidarity of civilisation successfully with a period of greater intensification and fresh creativeness in our individual cultures. Divorced from the political factors, this is possible. It is not an accident that Switzerland is the foster home of internationalism. By good historical fortune it has arrived at culturally neutral nationhood, and so is a prototype of the reconstructed nationality of the future. We may just as naturally have several nations sharing a single culture, as, on the other hand, have several cultures within a single nation. But we must revert to the natural units of culture, large or small, rather than try to outrival one another, like Aesop’s ox-emulating frogs, in these artificially inflated, politically motivated cultures. Let us notice that the same motive is responsible for two sorts of cultural violence, not always associated in the common mind,—external aggression for building up artificial combinations for the sake of power and size, arbitrary internal repressions for the sake of dominance and uniformity.
To summarise, the progress of the modern world demands what may be styled “free-trade in culture,” and a complete recognition of the principal of cultural reciprocity. Culture-goods, once evolved, are no longer the exclusive property of the race or people that originated them. They belong to all who can use them; and belong most to those who can use them best. But for all the limitless exchange and transplanting of culture, it cannot be artificially manufactured; it grows. And so far as I can understand history, it is always a folk-product, with the form and flavour of a particular people and place, that is to say, for all its subsequent universality, culture has root and grows in that social soil which, for want of a better term, we call “race.”