IV.1.2 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1077552
In this extract, “Grounds for a New Civilization,” from the first chapter of his hallmark 1925 book La raza cósmica, José Vasconcelos outlines his vision for a comprehensive, undivided race—the cosmic race—resulting from the fusion of all existing ones. Highlighting its aesthetic sensitivity, love of beauty, and—most importantly—deeply rooted Christian faith, the Mexican thinker proposes this universal fifth race that embodies the intermingling in the Americas as the basis for a new civilization. With Vasconcelos at the helm of 1920s Mexico’s Ministry of Public Education, these values were also tantamount to the country’s literacy policy under president Álvaro Obregón (in office 1920–24). In fact, the book had far-reaching influence in the Americas during Vasconcelos’s lifetime and, later on, for the Chicano intelligentsia of the 1970s who asserted Mexican ancestry as the foundation of their cultural and political militancy [SEE FOR EXAMPLE LUIS VALDEZ, DOCUMENT IV.1.1]. First published in Madrid as La raza cósmica. Misión de la raza iberoamericana. Notas de viajes a la América del Sur [José Vasconcelos, (Agencia Mundial de Librería, 1925)], this translation is by Didier T. Jaén [José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race: A Bilingual Edition, (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1979)].
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We have the duty to formulate the basis of a new civilization, and for that very reason, it is necessary that we keep in mind the fact that civilizations cannot be repeated, neither in form nor in content. The theory of ethnic superiority has been simply a means of combat, common to all fighting peoples, but the battle that we must wage is so important that it does not admit any false trickery. We do not claim that we are, or that we shall become the first race of the world or the most illustrious, the strongest and the most handsome. Our purpose is even higher and more difficult to attain than temporary selection. Our values are still potential to such an extent that we are nothing yet. However, the Hebrew race was, for the arrogant Egyptians, nothing more than a miserable caste of slaves. Yet, from that race was born Jesus Christ, who announced the love of all men and initiated the greatest movement in history. This love shall be one of the fundamental dogmas of the fifth race that will be produced in America. Christianity frees and engenders life, because it contains universal, not national, revelation. For that reason, it had to be rejected by the Jews themselves, who could not decide to commune with gentiles. But America is the fatherland of gentility, the true Christian Promised Land. If our race shows itself unworthy of this consecrated land, if it lacks in love, it will be replaced by peoples more capable of accomplishing the fateful mission of those lands, the mission of serving as the seat for humanity fashioned out of all the nations and all the racial stocks. The biótica [mode of life] imposed by world progress on the America of Hispanic origin is not a rival creed that confronts the adversary saying: “I surpass you,” or “I am self-sufficient.” Instead, it is an infinite longing for integration and totality that, for the same reason, invokes the universe. The infinitude of her longing insures her strength to combat the exclusivist creed of the enemy faction and grants her confidence in victory, which always corresponds to the gentiles. The danger is rather that it may happen to us as it happened to the majority of the Hebrews, who, not wanting to become gentiles, lost the grace that originated in their midst. This may happen, if we do not learn how to offer a home and fraternity to all men. Then another people will serve as the axis, another tongue will be the vehicle, but no one can detain any longer the fusion of the races, the emergence of the fifth era of the world, the era of universality and cosmic sentiment.
The doctrine of sociological and biological formation we propose in these pages is not a simple ideological effort to raise the spirits of a depressed race by offering it a thesis that contradicts the doctrine with which its rivals wanted to condemn it. What happens is that, as we discover the falsity of the scientific premise upon which the domination of contemporary power rests, we also foresee, in experimental science itself, orientations that point the way, no longer for the triumph of a single race, but for the redemption of all men. It is as if the palingenesis1 announced by Christianity with an anticipation of thousands of years, would be confirmed at present by the different branches of scientific knowledge. Christianity preached love as the basis of human relations, and now it begins to be clear that only love is capable of producing a lofty humanity. The official policy and the Positivists’ science, which was directly influenced by that policy, said that the law was not love but antagonism, fight, and the triumph of the fittest. However, they established no other criterion to judge fitness, but the curious begging of the question contained in that thesis itself, since the fittest is the one who triumphs, and only the fittest triumph. Thus, we can reduce to verbal formulas of this kind all the small wisdom that wanted to disassociate itself from the genial revelations, in order to substitute them with generalizations founded on the mere sum of details.
The discredit of such doctrines is aggravated by discoveries and observations that are revolutionizing the sciences today. It was not possible to combat the theory of history as a process of frivolities when it was thought that also individual life was deprived of a metaphysical end and a providential plan. But now mathematics wavers and modifies its conclusions in order to give us the concept of a moveable world, whose mystery changes according to our relative position and the nature of our concepts. Physics and chemistry no longer dare to affirm that the functions of the atom involve nothing else but the action of masses and forces. Biology also states in its new hypotheses, for example, with [Jakob von] Uexküll,2 that in the course of life “cells behave as if they worked within a complete organism whose organs are harmonized according to a plan and work in conjunction, that is, they possess a functional plan . . . there being an interlocking of vital factors in the physico-chemical motor—a notion which contradicts Darwinism, at least in its interpretation by Darwinists who deny that nature obeys a plan. Mendelianism also demonstrates, according to Uexküll, that the protoplasm is a mixture of substances from which everything, more or less, can be made. Faced with all these changes in the concepts of science, it is necessary to recognize that the theoretical edifice for the domination by a single race has collapsed. This, in turn, is a forewarning that the material power of those who have produced all that false science of circumstance and conquest will not be long in falling.
[Gregor] Mendel’s law, particularly when it confirms “the intervention of vital factors in the physico-chemical wheel,” must be part of our new patriotism, because from it we can draw the conclusion that the different faculties of the spirit take part in the processes of destiny.
What does it matter if Spencerian materialism had us condemned, when today it turns out that we can see ourselves as a sort of reserve for humanity, as the promise for a future that will surpass all previous times? We find ourselves, then, in one of those epochs of palingenesis, and in the center of the universal maelstrom. It is urgent to bring to our consciousness all of our faculties in order that—alert and active—they begin to intervene right away in the process of collective redemption. This is the splendid dawn of a peerless age. One could say that it is Christianism that is going to be consummated, now not only in the souls, albeit at the root of beings. As an instrument for this transcendental transformation, a race has been developing in the Iberian continent; a race full of vices and defects, but gifted with malleability, rapid comprehension, and easy emotion, fruitful elements for the seminal plasma of the future species. The biological materials have already been gathered in abundance: the predispositions, the characters, genes of which Mendelians speak. Only the organizing impulse, the plan for the formation of the species has been lacking. What should be the traits of this creative drive?
If we were to proceed according to the law of pure confused energy of the first period, according to primitive biological Darwinism, then blind force, by almost mechanical imposition of the most vigorous elements, would make the decision in a simple and brutal manner, exterminating the weak, or, properly speaking, those who do not fit into the plan of the new race. But in the new order, by its own law, the permanent elements will not support themselves on violence but on taste, and, for that reason, the selection will be spontaneous, as it is done by the artist when, from all the colors, he takes only those that are convenient to his work.
If in order to constitute the fifth race we should proceed according to the law of the second period, then a contest of craftiness would ensue, in which the astute ones and those lacking in scruples would win the game over the dreamers and the kind at heart. Probably, then, the new humanity would be predominantly Malaysian, for it is said that no one surpasses them in caution and ability, and even, if necessary, in perfidy. By the road of intelligence, one could even arrive, if you wish, at a humanity of stoics that would take duty as the supreme norm. The world would become like a vast nation of Quakers, where the plan of the spirit would end up strangled and deformed by the rule. Because reason, pure reason, may be able to recognize the advantages of the moral law, but is incapable of imprinting action with the combative ardor to make it fruitful. On the other hand, the joy-creating faculty is contained in the law of the third period, which is a feeling for beauty and a love so refined that it becomes identified with divine revelation. A quality assigned to beauty since ancient times, in the Phaedro,3 for example, is that of being pathetic. Its dynamism is contagious; it moves the emotions and transforms everything, even destiny itself. The race best qualified to discover and to impose such a principle upon life and material things will be the matrix race of the new civilization. Fortunately, such a gift, necessary to the fifth race, is possessed in a great degree by the Mestizo people of the Ibero-American continent; people for whom beauty is the main reason for everything. A fine aesthetic sensitivity and a profound love of beauty, away from any illegitimate interests and free from formal ties, are necessary for the third period, which is impregnated with a Christian aestheticism that puts upon ugliness itself the redemptive touch of pity which lights a halo around everything created.
We have, then, in the continent all the elements for the new Humanity: A law that will gradually select elements for the creation of predominant types; a law that will not operate according to a national criterion, as would be the case with a single conquering race, but according to a criterion of universality and beauty; and we also have the land and the natural resources. No people in Europe could replace the Ibero-American in this mission; no matter how gifted they might be, because all of them have their culture already made and a tradition that constitutes a burden for such enterprises. A conquering race could not substitute us, because it would fatefully impose its own characteristics, even if only out of the need to exert violence in order to maintain its conquest. This mission cannot be fulfilled either by the peoples of Asia, who are exhausted, or at least, lacking in the necessary boldness for new enterprises.
The people that Hispanic America is forming in a somewhat disorderly manner yet free of spirit and with intense longings on account of the vast unexplored regions, can still repeat the feats of the Castilian and Portuguese conquerors. The Hispanic race, in general, still has ahead of it this mission of discovering new regions of the spirit, now that all lands have already been explored.
Only the Iberian part of the continent possesses the spiritual factors, the race, and the territory necessary for the great enterprise of initiating the new universal era of Humanity. All the races that are to provide their contribution are already there: The Nordic man, who is today the master of action but who had humble beginnings and seemed inferior in an epoch in which already great cultures had appeared and decayed; the black man, as a reservoir of potentialities that began in the remote days of Lemuria; the Indian, who saw Atlantis perish but still keeps a quiet mystery in the conscience. We have all the races and all the aptitudes. The only thing lacking is for true love to organize and set on its way the law of History.
Many obstacles are opposed to the plan of the spirit, but they are obstacles common to all progress. Of course, some people may object, saying that how are the different races going to come to an accord, when not even the children of the same stock can live in peace and happiness within the economic and social regime that oppresses man today. But such a state of mind will have to change rapidly. All the tendencies of the future are intertwined in the present: Mendelianism in biology, socialism in government, growing sympathy among the souls, generalized progress, and the emergence of the fifth race that will fill the planet with the triumphs of the first truly universal, truly cosmic culture.
If we view the process panoramically, we shall find the three stages of the law of the three states of society, each one vivified with the contribution of the four fundamental races that accomplish their mission and, then, disappear in order to create a fifth superior ethnic specimen. This gives us five races and three stages, that is, the number eight which in the Pythagorean gnosis represents the ideal of the equality of all men. Such coincidences are surprising when discovered, although later they may seem trivial.
In order to express all these ideas that today I am trying to expound in a rapid synthesis, I tried, some years ago, when they were not yet well defined, to assign them symbols in the new Palace of Public Education in Mexico. Lacking sufficient elements to do exactly what I wished, I had to be satisfied with a Spanish renaissance building, with two courtyards, archways, and passages that give somewhat the impression of a bird’s wing. On the panels at the four corners of the first patio, I had them carve allegories representing Spain, Mexico, Greece, and India, the four particular civilizations that have most to contribute to the formation of Latin America. Immediately below these four allegories, four stone statues should have been raised, representing the four great contemporary races: the white, the red, the black, and the yellow, to indicate that America home to all and needs all of them. Finally, in the center, a monument should have been raised that in some way would symbolize the law of the three states: the material, the intellectual and the aesthetic. All this was to indicate that through the exercise of the triple law, we in America shall arrive, before any other part of the world, at the creation of a new race fashioned out of the treasures of all the previous ones: the final race, the cosmic race.
1
Palingenesis (a composite of the Greek palin, “again,” and the Latin-derived term genesis) implies the ideas of resurrection, regeneration, and re-birth.—Ed.
2
Jakob Johan von Uexküll (1864–1944) was a Baltic German biologist born in what is present-day Estonia. He worked in the fields of muscular physiology, animal behavior studies, and the cybernetics of life.—Ed.
3
Phaedro is one of the most popular Dialogues of Plato (428–347).—Ed.