Summer Books

Richard Luckett on the 'men of colour in timber deposits'

Some of my best friends are racialists. They would not recognise the term, since they prefer the bisyllabic 'racist', which consorts so well with elegant formulations such as 'sexist'. Nor would they admit the justice of the observation; indeed they give me to understand that it is only an unethical subordination of the public interest to private goodwill which prevents their reporting me to the relevant tribunal when thoughtless cliches about men of colour in timber deposits slip from my lips. They are ready to assert, at the slightest provocation, those bonds of equality and fraternity that unite the Esquimo and the Patagonian Indian. They have never doubted that it is a fundamental human right to batter a policeman who stands between you and a man tarred with the brush of racism. Yet, for all that, racialists they remain, and it is Ireland that is their undoing. But it would be wrong to imagine that this is because they see the present imbroglio as the consequence of an innate Celtic predilection for the shillelagh, fuelled — of course — by a further Celtic predilection for usquebaugh. With admirable perspicacity they have long since observed that the IRA is a Marxist and hence an internationalist organisation; only the difficulties of orthography prevent them from deedpolling their names into Erse. It is when they turn their attention to the inhabitants of Ulster that the blemish appears, for they are never slow to stigmatise the majority of the inhabitants as Protestant, loyalist and Scots.

It might be objected to this that what it demonstrates is a fundamentally nationalist outlook, and that it is nationalism, not racialism, which is at stake here. The matter is complicated by the probability that many of the inhabitants of the Lowlands who emigrated to Ulster were themselves descended from a wave of immigrants from Ireland. As Leon Poliakov tells us in his studysof the belief that white men could trace their origin to a common, 'Aryan' stock, which uniquely contained the seeds of progress and civilisation, ideas of race and of nationhood are not readily separable. For the would-be analyst they present formidable problems, since they depend on notions which are, of their nature, confused. The student of the history of race has to accept, as the definition of his topic, whatever meaning was attached to the word in the period under discussion. He is likely to be further hindered in his investigations by the fact that his topic, so far as its modern meaning is concerned, is the subject of a taboo.

M. Poliakov is fully sensible of this situation, and a cynic might charge him with playing off the first component of the problem against the second: since his book is a record of other men's ideas he is absolved from the necessity to pronounce on the issue himself. This interpretation would be wrong, since M. Poliakov's attitude to his subject is made explicit in his argument. He contends that the earliest ideas of tribal and national origins were formulated as myth, and that the validity of such myths collapsed with the spread of Christendom. The account of the creation in Genesis asserted the uniqueness of man and also explained hpw the children of men came to be dispersed over the face of the earth; Christ, the 'second Adam', gathered all the people of the world back into himself, and in him all men could see their humanity. So long as the Biblical version had seneral acceptance there could be no possibili ty of a war of extermination on racial grounds.

But the enlightenment, which sought to establish in place of the Biblical account a 'scientific' reading of the situation,provided the grounds for a view of mankind which equated humanity with technologically advanced civi lisations, and saw the rest of the peoples of the world as degenerate or primitive by their very nature. Without the saving figure of Christ they became, literally, irredeemable.

There are a number of objections to such an interpretation. The most obvious concern the Jews, who have often been alleged to have promoted, through their conviction that they were the chosen people, the very attitudes that came close to destroying them. It is equally easy to argue that the Church, which regularly reminded believers that the Jews had murdered the Son of God, prefigures modern racialist doctrines. Such an argument need not stop short with the treatment of the Jews; the crusades of the Teutonic Knights against the Wends and the Letts were bolstered by pronouncements from dignitaries of the order, who denied that their victims were truly men. M.

Poliakov's defence would presumably be to refer his critics to his major work, the exhaus tive Histore de l'antisernitisme, which still

awaits translation into English. There he defends his thesis that the idea of the Jews as

'chosen' was a misinterpretation of a purely religious proposition, and offers correctives to what he takes to be popular misconceptions of the Church's dogmas on Jewry. Both matters are, at best, perplexed, and I have no means of telling how M. Poliakov would view the acti

vities of the Teutonic orders. It may well be that the most accessible authority for their sava

gery, the nineteenth-century historian Heinrich von Treitschke, imposed on the

order the views that earn him a place — as 8 commentator on his own time — in M. Poliakov's narrative.

The fact remains that M. Poliakov sees Christianity as a demythologising force, and he, uses it, in conjunction with a few fairly general and unexceptionable concepts derived from psycho-analysis, as a constant point of reference. His argument may be faulted in partica' lars, but as a broad picture it seems coherent and convincing. His indictment of eighteenth' and nineteenth-century rationalists and scientists is probably the most lively and interesting part of the book. Voltaire, Darwin arid . Marx are only three of the representative figures whom he shows to have believed in the clear superiority or inferiority of some races over others. Goethe, Pushkin and Wilhelm von Humboldt stand almost alone in their refusal to subscribe to such theories.

The weakness in the argument of the book is not, then, a product of the author's attitude to his subject, but of the subject itself. As general survey M. Poliakov's account serves very well, and his moral stance, though some people will think its roots surprising, is imPee. cable. But the failure to make any clear chs' tinction between racialism and naturalisla creates serious problems, which are exacerbated by the fact that Poliakov has ample evidence for the inter-relation of the tWe ideas. Much depends on whether he is prepared to accept a further category, distinct front' nationalism but akin to it; it might well he termed patriotism, but this only expresses one sense of it. The difficulty is demonstrated by the fact that M. Poliakov is not above using as' i sumptions about national character; he se' I cepted German idealism as an historical realitY' and by it he seems to mean a national temper rather than a narrowly academic movement' His discussion of England (by which he means, Britain) suggests the influence of that view 9' the British which holds them to be pragmatic though he is helped in this by their admittedlY, mongrel origins, which have always prevented them from according too much weight to n(); tions of racial purity. M. Poliakov has a g000 deal to say about Wagner and Parzifal as ArYell, redeemer-figures; he might profitably hay' noted that the only worthwhile British na. tional opera, Purcell's King Arthur, celebrate the union of Saxon and Briton, and ends WR.I/ a strong suggestion of miscegenation to con' This does not prevent the work from being intensely, even arrogantly patriotic. Yet King Arthur could be used to support 1\4' Poliakov's case. St George, who appears in the final scene, has Britain under his special Pa' I

tronage, but other countries had other patrorIS' equally distinguished. The French were differ'

ent from the English and, needless to saYt' inferior, but because they were French, n° because they were Franks pr Gauls. The dele'

terious effect on character of a diet of frogs WI ; as well known in England as the singule, s circumstance of Englishmen's having tails We' I notorious in France. But none of this was taker' I very earnestly, because the absolute serious ness demanded by the claims of science vial r

at that time unthought of. In the end h became a question of the kind of seriousr1e,a5r we are prepared to accord to the particule. proposition. The difficulty is that the criter! of seriousness have changed. M. Polialc0: implies that the Aryan myth might have bei.e'e

ignored had Europe continued to esteem t" myth of Genesis. This may well be the case,:

but his remedies are now as discredited as tive theories to which he would oppose them. Tild taboo that we have is a kind of vacuum, an its effect is nullifying; in our reluctance to bar suspected of claiming that one race is supe1i°,0 or inferior to another we lose the capaicity insist on the fructifying differences that egis between one nation and the next. The final confusion is political. It is widely ,ransidered that racialism is right-wing and 'eactionary. But scepticism, a knowledge of inan's potential for evil, and distrust of progress Which I take to be the virtues of reaction — ,tauld provide a basis for the continuation of "le myth of Adam, whilst socialism, with its rainmitment to progress and human perfecti

bility, places its adherents at the mercy of the transitory claims of science. At the moment the taboo still holds, except in Russia — which in itself substantiates the point. The question is whether, with expanding populations, finite material resources, and a concept of progress harnessed to the destructive and uninteresting aim of equality, it can hold for all that long.