AS soon as we approach the problem why and how societies in process of civilization have come into existence, we realize that our list of twenty-one societies of this kind falls, as far as this problem is concerned, into two groups. Fifteen of our societies are affiliated to predecessors of the same species. Of these a few are so closely affiliated that their separate individuality may be a matter for argument, while at the other end of the scale a few are so loosely affiliated that the metaphor implied in the term affiliation may seem to carry us too far. But let that pass. The fifteen more or less affiliated societies are in a different group from the six which, so far as we can discern, have emerged direct from primitive life. It is to the genesis of these six that we propose-to direct our attention at present. They are the Egyptiac, the Sumeric, the Minoan, the Sinic, the Mayan and the Andean.
What is the essential difference between the primitive and the higher societies? It does not consist in the presence or absence of institutions, for institutions are the vehicles of the impersonal relations between individuals in which all societies have their existence, because even the smallest of primitive societies is built on a wider basis than the narrow circle of an individual’s direct personal ties. Institutions are attributes of the whole genus ‘societies’ and therefore common properties of both its species. Primitive societies have their institutions—the religion of the annual agricultural cycle; totemism and exogamy; tabus, initiations and age-classes; segregations of the sexes, at certain stages of life, in separate communal establishments—and some of these institutions are certainly as elaborate and perhaps as subtle as those which are characteristic of civilizations.
Nor are civilizations distinguished from primitive societies by the division of labour, for we can discern at least the rudiments of the division of labour in the lives of primitive societies also. Kings, magicians, smiths and minstrels are all ‘specialists’— though the fact that Hephaestus, the smith of Hellenic legend, is lame, and Homer, the poet of Hellenic legend, is blind, suggests that in primitive societies specialism is abnormal and apt to be confined to those who lack the capacity to be ‘all-round men’ or ‘jacks of all trades’.
An essential difference between civilizations and primitive societies as we know them (the caveat will be found to be important) is the direction taken by mimesis or imitation. Mimesis is a generic feature of all social life. Its operation can be observed both in primitive societies and in civilizations, in every social activity from the imitation of the style of film-stars by their humbler sisters upwards. It operates, however, in different directions in the two species of society. In primitive societies, as we know them, mimesis is directed towards the older generation and towards dead ancestors who stand, unseen but not unfelt, at the back of the living elders, reinforcing their prestige. In a society where mimesis is thus directed backward towards the past, custom rules and society remains static. On the other hand, in societies in process of civilization, mimesis is directed towards creative personalities who command a following because they are pioneers. In such societies, ‘the cake of custom’, as Walter Bagehot called it in his Physics and Politics, is broken and society is in dynamic motion along a course of change and growth.
But if we ask ourselves whether this difference between primitive and higher societies is permanent and fundamental, we must answer in the negative; for, if we only know primitive societies in a static condition, that is because we know them from direct observation only in the last phases of their histories. Yet, though direct observation fails us, a train of reasoning informs us that there must have been earlier phases in the histories of primitive societies in which these were moving more dynamically than any ‘civilized’ society has moved yet. We have said that primitive societies are as old as the human race, but we should more properly have said that they are older. Social and institutional life of a kind is found among some of the higher mammals other than man, and it is clear that mankind could not have become human except in a social environment. This mutation of sub-man into man, which was accomplished, in circumstances of which we have no record, under the aegis of primitive societies, was a more profound change, a greater step in growth, than any progress which man has yet achieved under the aegis of civilization.
Primitive societies, as we know them by direct observation, may be likened to people lying torpid upon a ledge on a mountainside, with a precipice below and a precipice above; civilizations may be likened to companions of these sleepers who have just risen to their feet and have started to climb up the face of the cliff above; while we for our part may liken ourselves to observers whose field of vision is limited to the ledge and to the lower slopes of the upper precipice and who have come upon the scene at the moment when the different members of the party happen to be in these respective postures and positions. At first sight we may be inclined to draw an absolute distinction between the two groups, acclaiming the climbers as athletes and dismissing the recumbent figures as paralytics; but on second thoughts we shall find it more prudent to suspend judgement.
After all, the recumbent figures cannot be paralytics in reality; for they cannot have been born on the ledge, and no human muscles except their own can have hoisted them to this halting-place up the face of the precipice below. On the other hand, their companions who are climbing at the moment have only just left this same ledge and started to climb the precipice above; and, since the next ledge is out of sight, we do not know how high or how arduous the next pitch may be. We only know that it is impossible to halt and rest before the next ledge, wherever that may lie, is reached. Thus, even if we could estimate each present climber’s strength and skill and nerve, we could not judge whether any of them have any prospect of gaining the ledge above, which is the goal of their present endeavours. We can, however, be sure that some of them will never attain it. And we can observe that, for every single one now strenuously climbing, twice that number (our extinct civilizations) have fallen back on to the ledge, defeated.
We have failed to find the immediate object of our search, a permanent and fundamental point of difference between primitive societies and civilizations, but incidentally we have obtained some light on the ultimate objective of our present inquiry: the nature of the geneses of civilizations. Starting with the mutation of primitive societies into civilizations we have found that this consists in a transition from a static condition to a dynamic activity; and we shall find that the same formula holds good for the emergence of civilizations through the secessions of internal proletariats from the dominant minorities of pre-cxistent civilizations which have lost their creative power. Such dominant minorities are static by definition; for to say that the creative minority of a civilization in growth has degenerated or atrophied into the dominant minority of a civilization in disintegration is only another way of saying that the society in question has lapsed from a dynamic activity into a static condition. Against this static condition the secession of a proletariat is a dynamic reaction; and in this light we can see that, in the secession of a proletariat from a dominant minority, a new civilization is generated through the transition of a society from a static condition to a dynamic activity, just as it is in the mutation which produces a civilization out of a primitive society. The geneses of all civilizations—the unrelated and the related class alike—could be described in the phrase of General Smuts: ‘Mankind is once more on the move.’
This alternating rhythm of static and dynamic, of movement and pause and movement, has been regarded by many observers in many different ages as something fundamental in the nature of the Universe. In their pregnant imagery the sages of the Sinic Society described these alternations in terms of Yin and Yang— Yin the static and Yang the dynamic. The nucleus of the Sinic character which stands for Yin seems to represent dark coiling clouds overshadowing the Sun, while the nucleus of the character which stands for Yang seems to represent the unclouded sun-disk emitting its rays. In the Chinese formula Yin is always mentioned first, and, within our field of vision, we can see that our breed, having reached the ‘ledge’ of primitive human nature 300,000 years ago, has reposed there for ninety-eight per cent of that period before entering on the Yang-activity of civilization. We have now to seek for the positive factor, whatever it may be, which has set human life in motion again by its impetus. And first we will explore two avenues which will turn out to be blind alleys.
It seems obvious that the positive factor which, within the last 6,000 years, has shaken part of mankind out of the Yin state of primitive societies ‘on the ledge’ into the Yang state of civilizations ‘on the cliff’ must be sought either in some special quality in the human beings who made the transition or in some special feature of the environment in which the transition has taken place or in some interaction between the two. We will first consider the possibility that one or other of these factors taken by itself will give us what we are looking for. Can we attribute the geneses of civilizations to the virtues of some particular race or races?
Race is a term used to denote the possession of some distinctive and inheritable quality in particular groups of human beings. The supposed attributes of race which concern us here are distinctive psychic or spiritual qualities supposedly innate in certain societies. Psychology, however, and particularly social psychology, is a study which is still in its infancy; and all discussions of race up to date, when race is put forward as a factor productive of civilization, depend on the assumption that there is a correlation between valuable psychic qualities and certain manifest physical characteristics.
The physical characteristic most commonly emphasized by Western advocates of racial theories is colour. It is, of course, just conceivable that spiritual and mental superiority is somehow linked up with, and therefore positively correlated with, comparative absence of skin pigmentation, though it seems biologically improbable. However, the most popular of the racial theories of civilization is that which sets upon a pedestal the xanthotrichous, glaucopian, dolichocephalic variety of homo leucodermaticus, 1 called by some the Nordic man and by Nietzsche ‘the blond beast’; and it is worth while inquiring into the credentials of this idol of the Teutonic market-place.
Nordic man was first placed on his pedestal by a French aristocrat, the Comte de Gobineau, early in the nineteenth century, and his idolization of ‘the blond beast’ was an incident in the controversies that arose out of the French Revolution. When the French nobility were being dispossessed of their estates, exiled or guillotined, the pedants of the revolutionary* party, who were never happy unless they could present the events of their day in a ‘classical’ guise, proclaimed that the Gauls, after fourteen centuries of subjection, were now driving their Frankish conquerors back into the outer darkness beyond the Rhine from which they had come during the Volkerwanderung, and were resuming possession of the Gallic soil which, despite the long barbarian usurpation, had never ceased to be their own.
To this nonsense Gobineau replied with some more telling nonsense of his own. I accept your identification’, he replied in effect. ‘Let us agree that the populace of France is descended from the Gauls and the aristocracy from the Franks; that both races have bred pure; and that there is a definite and permanent correlation between their physical and psychic characteristics. Do you really imagine that the Gauls stand for civilization and the Franks for barbarism? Whence came such civilization as you Gauls ever acquired? From Rome. And what made Rome great? Why, a primeval infusion of that same Nordic blood that flows in my Frankish veins. The first Romans—and likewise the first Greeks, the Achaeans of Homer—were fair-haired conquerors who had descended from the invigorating north and established their dominion over the feebler natives of the enervating Mediterranean. In the long run, however, their blood was diluted and their race enfeebled; their power and their glory declined. The time had come for another rescue party of fair-haired conquerors to descend from the north and set the pulse of civilization beating again, and among these were the Franks.’
Such is Gobineau’s amusing account of a series of facts which we have already handled in a very different manner in our sketches of the origins first of the Hellenic and afterwards of the Western Civilization. His political jeu d’esprit gained plausibility from a contemporary discovery of which Gobineau was quick to take advantage. It was discovered that almost all the living languages of Europe, as well as Greek and Latin, and the living languages of Persia and Northern India as well as classical Iranian and classical Sanskrit, were related to one another as members of one vast linguistic family. It was rightly inferred that there must have been an original and primeval ‘Aryan’ or ‘Indo-European’ language, from which all known members of the family derived their descent. It was wrongly inferred that the peoples among whom these kindred languages were current were physically related in the same degree as the languages themselves, and that they were all descended from a primitive ‘Aryan’ or ‘Indo-European’ race which had spread, conquering and to conquer, east and west and north and south from its original home: a race which had brought forth the religious genius of Zarathustra and the Buddha, the artistic genius of Greece, the political genius of Rome and— fitting climax—our noble selves! Why, this race was responsible for practically all the achievements of human civilization!
The hare which the vivacious Frenchman started was run by heavy-footed German philologists who improved the word Indo-European into Indo-Germanic and located the original home of this imaginary race in the dominions of the King of Prussia. Shortly before the outbreak of the war of 1914-18 Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman who had fallen in love with Germany, wrote a book called The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century in which he added Dante and Jesus Christ to the list of Indo-Germans.
Americans also had their uses for the ‘Nordic man’. Alarmed by the overwhelming immigration of Southern Europeans during the quarter of a century before 1914, such writers as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard demanded a restriction of immigration as the only way of preserving—not American social standards but the purity of the American branch of the Nordic race.
The British Israelite doctrine is a theory of the same type using different terminology and supporting imaginary history with quaint theology.
It is curious to notice that, whereas the racial propagandists of our own civilization insist on fair skins as the mark of spiritual superiority, exalting Europeans over other races and Nordics over other Europeans, the Japanese employ a different physical test. It so happens that the bodies of the Japanese are remarkably free from hair, and they have as their neighbours in their northern island a primitive community of quite a different type, a physical type not unlike that of the average European, called the Hairy Ainu. Very naturally, therefore, the Japanese associate hairless-ness with spiritual superiority, and, though their claim may be as baseless as our plea for the superiority of fair skins, it is superficially more plausible, for the hairless man is certainly, qud hair-lessness, somewhat farther removed from his cousin, the ape.
Ethnologists, classifying White men in accordance with their physical types, long heads and round heads, fair skins and dark skins, and all the rest of it, have sorted out three main White ‘races’, which they call Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean. For what it is worth, we will reckon up the number of civilizations to which each of these races has made a positive contribution. The Nordics have contributed to four, possibly five: the Indie, the Hellenic, the Western, the Russian Orthodox Christian and possibly the Hittite. The Alpines have contributed to seven, possibly nine: the Sumeric, the Hittite, the Hellenic, the Western, both the Russian offshoot and the main body of the Orthodox Christian, the Iranic and possibly the Egyptiac and the Minoan. The Mediterraneans have contributed to ten: the Egyptiac, the Sumeric, the Minoan, the Syriac, the Hellenic, the Western, the main body of the Orthodox Christian, the Iranic, the Arabic and the Babylonic. Of the other divisions of the human race, the Brown (meaning thereby the Dravidian peoples in India and the Malays in Indonesia) have contributed to two: the Indie and the Hindu. The Yellow race have contributed to three: the Sinic and both the Far Eastern civilizations, namely the main body in China and the Japanese offshoot. The Red race of America are, of course, the sole contributors to the four American civilizations. The Black races alone have not contributed positively to any civilization— as yet. The White races hold the lead, but it is to be remembered that there are many White peoples that are as innocent of having made any contribution to any civilization as the Blacks themselves. If anything positive emerges from this classification it is that half our civilizations are based on contributions from more than one race. The Western and the Hellenic have three contributors each and, if the Yellow, Brown and Red races were analysed into ‘sub-races’, like the Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean divisions of the White race, we should probably be able to produce a plurality of contributors to all our civilizations. What the value of these sub-divisions may be and whether at any time they represented historically and socially distinct peoples is another matter; the whole subject is exceedingly obscure.
But enough has been said to justify us in dismissing the theory that a superior race has been the cause and author of the transition from Yin to Yang, from static to dynamic, in one part of the world after another since a date some six thousand years ago.
Modern Western minds have been led to emphasize, and overemphasize, the racial factor in history owing to the expansion of our Western Society over the world during the last four centuries. This expansion brought the peoples of the West into contact, and often unfriendly contact, with peoples differing from themselves not only in culture but in physique, and the notion of superior and inferior biological types was just what one might expect to result from such contacts, especially in the nineteenth century, when Western minds had been rendered biology-conscious by the work of Charles Darwin and other scientific investigators.
The Ancient Greeks also expanded, by way of trade and colonization, into the world around them, but it was a much smaller world containing a wide diversity of cultures but not a wide diversity of physical types. The Egyptian and the Scythian might be far apart from each other and from their Greek observer (Herodotus, for example) in their manner of life, but they were not physically different from him in the sensational way in which the Negro of West Africa and the Red Man of America differed from the European. It was natural, therefore, that the Greeks should find some factor other than biological inheritance of physical characteristics, i.e. race, to account for the differences of culture they observed around them. They found their explanation in differences of geographical habitat, soil and climate. 1
There is a treatise entitled Influences of Atmosphere, Water and Situation, dating from the fifth century B.C. and preserved among the collected works of the Hippocratean School of Medicine, which illustrates Greek views on this subject. Here we read, for example, that
‘Human physiognomies may be classified into the well-wooded and well-watered mountain type, the thin-soiled waterless type, the meadowy marshy type, the well-cleared and well-drained lowland type. . . . Inhabitants of mountainous, rocky, well-watered country at a high altitude, where the margin of seasonal climatic variation is wide, will tend to have large-built bodies constitutionally adapted for courage and endurance. . . . Inhabitants of sultry hollows covered with water-meadows, who are more commonly exposed to warm winds than to cold, and who drink tepid water, will, in contrast, not be large built or slim, but thickset, fleshy and dark-haired, with swarthy rather than fair complexions, and with less phlegm than bile in their constitutions. Courage and endurance will not be innate in their characters to the same degree, but will be capable of being produced in them by the co-efficient of institutions. . . . Inhabitants of rolling, wind-swept, well-watered country at a high altitude will be large-built and un-individualized, with a vein of cowardice and tameness in their characters. ... In the majority of cases, you will find that the human body and character vary in accordance with the nature of the country.’ 1
But the favourite Hellenic illustrations of the ‘environment theory’ were furnished by the contrast between the effect of life in the Lower Nile Valley on the physique, character and institutions of the Egyptians and the effect of life on the Eurasian Steppe on the physique, character and institutions of the Scythians.
Both the race theory and the environment theory try to account for the observed diversity in the psychical (intellectual and spiritual) behaviour and performance of different fractions of mankind by supposing that this psychical diversity is fixedly and permanently correlated, in the relation of effect to cause, with certain elements of observed diversity in the non-psychical domain of nature. The race theory finds the differentiating cause in the diversity of human physique, the environment theory in the diverse climatic and geographical conditions in which different societies live. The essence of both theories is the correlation between two sets of variables, in the one case character and physique, in the other case character and environment, and this correlation must be proved to be fixed and permanent if the theories founded on it are to be established. Under this test we have already seen the race theory break down, and we shall now see that the environment theory, though less preposterous, will fare no better. What we have to do is to test the Hellenic theory on its two favourite examples, the Eurasian Steppe and the Nile Valley. We must find other areas of the Earth’s surface geographically and climatically similar to each of these two regions. If all of them can show populations resembling, in character and institutions, the Scythians in the one case and the Egyptians in the other, the environment theory will be vindicated; but if not, it will be refuted.
Let us take first the Eurasian Steppe, that vast area of which the Greeks knew only the south-western corner. We may set beside it the Afrasian Steppe which stretches from Arabia across Northern Africa. Is the similarity between the Eurasian and Afrasian steppes matched by any corresponding similarity between the respective human societies that have emerged in • these two areas? The answer is in the affirmative. Both have produced the nomadic type of society, a nomadism which displays just those resemblances and differences—differences, for example, in the animals domesticated—that we should expect to find in view of the resemblances and differences between the two areas. But under further tests the correlation breaks down; for we find that other parts of the world which offer environments for nomad societies—the prairies of North America, the Llanos of Venezuela, the Pampas of Argentina and the Australian grasslands— have not produced nomadic societies of their own. Their potentialities are not open to question, for they have been realized by the enterprise of our Western Society in modern times; and the pioneering Western stockmen—North American cowboys, South American gauchos and Australian cattlemen—who have won and held these untenanted ranges for a few generations, in the van of the advancing plough and mill, have captivated the imagination of mankind as triumphantly as the Scythian, the Tatar and the Arab. The potentialities of the American and Australian steppes must have been powerful indeed if they could transform into nomads, if only for a generation, the pioneers of a society which had no nomadic traditions, having lived by agriculture and manufacture ever since it first emerged. It is all the more remarkable that the peoples whom the first Western explorers found in occupation had never been stimulated by their environment into nomadism but had found no better use for these nomads’ paradises than to take them as hunting-grounds.
If we next test the theory by a survey of areas resembling the Lower Nile Valley, our experience will be the same.
The Lower Nile Valley is, so to speak, a ‘sport’ in the landscape of the Afrasian Steppe. Egypt has the same dry climate as the vast area surrounding it, but it has one exceptional asset—an unfailing supply of water and alluvium, provided by the great river which rises, beyond the limits of the Steppe, in an area of abundant rainfall. The creators of the Egyptiac Civilization used this asset to produce a society in sensational contrast with the nomadism on either side of them. Then is the special environment offered by the Nile in Egypt the positive feature to which the genesis of the Egyptiac Civilization is due? To establish this thesis we have to show that in every other separate area in which an environment of the Nilotic type is offered, a similar civilization has independently emerged.
The theory stands the test in a neighbouring area where the required conditions are fulfilled, namely the lower valley of the Euphrates and Tigris. Here we find both similar physical conditions and a similar society, the Sumeric. But it breaks down in the much smaller but similar Jordan Valley, which has never been the seat of a civilization. It probably also breaks down in the Indus Valley—that is, if we are right in surmising that the Indus Culture was brought there ready made by Sumerian colonists. The Lower Ganges Valley may be ruled out of the test as too moist and tropical and the Lower Yangtse and Lower Mississippi valleys as too moist and temperate, but the most captious critic cannot deny that the environmental conditions offered by Egypt and Mesopotamia are also offered by the valleys of the Rio Grande and the Colorado River in the United States. Under the hands of the modern European settler, equipped with resources which he has brought with him from the other side of the Atlantic, these rivers of America have performed the miracles which the Nile and Euphrates performed for Egyptiac and Sumeric engineers. But this magic has never been taught by the Colorado or the Rio Grande to people who were not adepts at it already through having learnt it elsewhere.
On the showing of this evidence the environmental factor cannot be the positive factor which brought the ‘fluvial’ civilizations into existence; and we shall be confirmed in this conclusion if we glance at some other environments which have produced civilizations in one area but not in another.
The Andean Civilization came into existence on a high plateau, and its achievement was in sharp contrast with the savagery ensconced in the Amazonian forests below. Was, then, the plateau the reason why the Andean Society forged ahead of its savage neighbours? Before we admit the idea we ought to glance at the same equatorial latitudes in Africa, where the East African highlands fringe the forests of the Congo Basin. We shall find that in Africa the plateau was no more productive of a ‘civilized’ society than the tropical forests of the great river valley.
Similarly, we observe that the Minoan Civilization emerged in a cluster of islands situated in an inland sea and blessed with the climate of the Mediterranean, but a similar environment failed to evoke another civilization of the archipelago type round the Inland Sea of Japan. Japan never gave birth to an independent civilization but was occupied by an offshoot of a continental civilization that had emerged in the interior of China.
The Sinic Civilization is sometimes represented as the offspring of the Yellow River because it happened to emerge in the Yellow River Valley, but the Danube Valley with much the same disposition of climate and soil and plain and mountain failed to produce a similar civilization.
The Mayan Civilization emerged amid the tropical rainfall and vegetation of Guatemala and British Honduras, but no such civilization ever arose out of savagery in the similar conditions on the Amazon and the Congo. These two river basins, it is true, lie actually astride of the equator, while the Mayan homeland is fifteen degrees north. If we follow the fifteenth parallel of latitude round to the other side of the world we stumble upon the tremendous ruins of Angkor Wat amid the tropical rainfall and vegetation of Cambodia. Surely these are comparable with the ruined Mayan cities of Copan and Ixkun? But archaeological evidence shows that the civilization represented by Angkor Wat was not native to Cambodia but was an offshoot of a Hindu Civilization that had emerged in India.
We might pursue the subject farther, but we have, perhaps, said enough to convince the reader that neither race nor environment, taken by itself, can be the positive factor which, within the last six thousand years, has shaken humanity out of its static repose on the level of primitive society and started it on the hazardous quest of civilization. In any case, neither race nor environment, as hitherto envisaged, has offered, or apparently can offer, any clue as to why this great transition in human history occurred not only in particular places but at particular dates.