The Inequality of Human Races/Chapter 2

by Arthur de Gobineau

CHAPTER II

FANATICISM, LUXURY, CORRUPTION OF MORALS, AND IRRELIGION DO NOT NECESSARILY LEAD TO THE FALL OF SOCIETIES

I must first explain what I understand by a "society." I do not mean the more or less extended sphere within which, in some form or other, a distinct sovereignty is exercised. The Athenian democracy is not a "society" in our sense, any more than the Kingdom of Magadha, the empire of Pontus, or the Caliphate of Egypt in the time of the Fatimites. They are fragments of societies, which, no doubt, change, coalesce, or break up according to the natural laws that I am investigating; but their existence or death does not imply the existence or death of a society. Their formation is usually a mere transitory phenomenon, having but a limited or indirect influence on the civilization in which they arise. What I mean by a "society" is an assemblage of men moved by similar ideas and the same instincts; their political unity may be more or less imperfect, but their social unity must be complete. Thus Egypt, Assyria, Greece, India, and China were, or still are, the theatre where distinct and separate societies have played out their own destinies, save when these have been brought for a time into conjunction by political troubles. As I shall speak of the parts only when my argument applies to the whole, I shall use the words "nation" or "people" either in the wide or the narrow sense, without any room for ambiguity. I return now to my main subject, which is to show that fanaticism, luxury, corruption of morals, and irreligion do not necessarily bring about the ruin of nations.

All these phenomena have been found in a highly developed state, either in isolation or together, among peoples which were actually the better for them—or at any rate not the worse.

The Aztec Empire in America seems to have existed mainly "for the greater glory" of fanaticism. I cannot imagine anything more fanatical than a society like that of the Aztecs, which rested on a religious foundation, continually watered by the blood of human sacrifice. It has been denied,^[1] perhaps with some truth, that the ancient peoples of Europe ever practised ritual murder on victims who were regarded as innocent, with the exception of shipwrecked sailors and prisoners of war. But for the ancient Mexicans one victim was as good as another. With a ferocity recognized by a modern physiologist ^[2] as characteristic of the races of the New World, they massacred their fellow citizens on their altars, without pity, without flinching, and without discrimination. This did not prevent their being a powerful, industrious, and wealthy people, which would certainly for many ages have gone on flourishing, reigning, and throat-cutting, had not the genius of Hernando Cortes and the courage of his companions stepped in to put an end to the monstrous existence of such an Empire. Thus fanaticism does not cause the fall of States.

Luxury and effeminacy have no better claims than fanaticism. Their effects are to be seen only in the upper classes; and though they assumed different forms in the ancient world, among the Greeks, the Persians, and the Romans, I doubt whether they were ever brought to a greater pitch of refinement than at the present day, in France, Germany, England, and Russia — especially in the last two. And it is just these two, England and Russia, that, of all the States of modern Europe, seem to be gifted with a peculiar vitality. Again, in the Middle Ages, the Venetians, the Genoese, and the Pisans crowded their shops with the treasures of the whole world; they displayed them in their palaces, and carried them over every sea. But they were certainly none the weaker for that. Thus luxury and effeminacy are in no way the necessary causes of weakness and ruin.

Again, the corruption of morals, however terrible a scourge it may be, is not always an agent of destruction. If it were, the military power and commercial prosperity of a nation would have to vary directly with the purity of its morals ; but this is by no means the case. The curious idea that the early Romans had all the virtues ^[3] has now been rightly given up by most people. We no longer see anything very edifying in the patricians of the early Republic, who treated their wives like slaves, their children like cattle, and their creditors like wild beasts. If there were still any advocates to plead their unrighteous cause by arguing from ,an assumed " variation in the moral standard of different ages," it would not be very hard to show how flimsy such an argument is. In all ages the misuse of power has excited equal indignation. If the rape of Lucrece did not bring about the expulsion of the kings, if the tribunate ^[4] was not established owing to the attempt of Appius Claudius, at any rate the real causes that lay behind these two great revolutions, by cloaking themselves under such pretexts, reveal the state of public morality at the time. No, we cannot account for the greater vigour of all early peoples by alleging their greater virtue. From the beginning of history, there has been no human society, however small, that has not contained the germ of every vice. And yet, however burdened with this load of depravity, the nations seem to march on very comfortably, and often, in fact, to owe their greatness to their detestable customs. The Spartans enjoyed a long life and the admiration of men merely owing to their laws, which were those of a robber-state. Was the fall of the Phoenicians due to the corruption that gnawed their vitals and was disseminated by them over the whole world ? Not at all ; on the contrary, this corruption was the main instrument of their power and glory. From the day when they first touched the shores of the Greek islands,^[5] and went their way, cheating their customers, robbing their hosts, abducting women for the slave-market, stealing in one place to sell in another — from that day, it is true, their reputation fell not unreasonably low ; but they did not prosper any the less for that, and they hold a place in history which is quite unaffected by all the stories of their greed and treachery. Far from admitting the superior moral character of early societies, I have no doubt that nations, as they grow older and so draw nearer their fall, present a far more satisfactory appearance from the censor's point of view. Customs become less rigid, rough edges become softened, the path of life is made easier, the rights existing between man and man have had time to become better defined and understood, and so the theories of social justice have reached, little by little, a higher degree of delicacy. At the time when the Greeks overthrew the Empire of Darius, or when the Goths entered Rome, there were probably far more honest men in Athens, Babylon, and the imperial city than in the glorious days of Harmodius, Cyrus the Great, and Valerius Publicola.

We need not go back to those distant epochs, but may judge them by ourselves. Paris is certainly one of the places on this earth where civilization has touched its highest point, and where the contrast with primitive ages is most marked ; and yet you will find a large number of religious and learned people admitting that in no place and time were there so many examples of practical virtue, of sincere piety, of saintly lives governed by a fine sense of duty, as are to be met to-day in the great modern city. The ideals of goodness are as high now as they ever were in the loftiest minds of the seventeenth century; and they have laid aside the bitterness, the strain of sternness and savagery— I was almost saying, of pedantry — that sometimes coloured them in that age. And so, as a set-off to the frightful perversities of the modern spirit, we find, in the very temple where that spirit has set up the high altar of its power, a striking contrast, which never appeared to former centuries in the same consoling light as it has to our own.

I do not even believe that there is a lack of great men in periods of corruption and decadence; and by "great men" I mean those most richly endowed with energy of character and the masculine virtues. If I look at the list of the Roman Emperors (most of them, by the way, as high above their subjects in merit as they were in rank) I find names like Trajan, Antoninus Pius, Septimius Severus, and Jovian; and below the throne, even among the city mob, I see with admiration all the great theologians, the great martyrs, the apostles of the primitive Church, to say nothing of the virtuous Pagans. Strong, brave, and active spirits filled the camps and the Italian towns; and one may doubt whether in the time of Cincinnatus, Rome held, in proportion, so many men of eminence in all the walks of practical life. The testimony of the facts is conclusive.

Thus men of strong character, men of talent and energy, so far from being unknown to human societies in the time of their decadence and old age, are actually to be found in greater abundance than in the days when an empire is young. Further, the ordinary level of morality is higher in the later period than in the earlier. It is not generally true to say that in States on the point of death the corruption of morals is any more virulent than in those just born. It is equally doubtful whether this corruption brings about their fall; for some States, far from dying of their perversity, have lived and grown fat on it. One may go further, and show that moral degradation is not necessarily a mortal disease at all; for, as against the other maladies of society, it has the advantage of being curable; and the cure is sometimes very rapid.

In fact, the morals of any particular people are in continual ebb and flow throughout its history. To go no further afield than our own France, we may say that, in the fifth and sixth centuries, the conquered race of the Gallo-Romans were certainly better than their conquerors from a moral point of view. Taken individually, they were not always their inferiors even in courage and the military virtues.^[6] In the following centuries, when the two races had begun to intermingle, they seem to have deteriorated; and we have no reason to be very proud of the picture that was presented by our dear country about the eighth and ninth centuries. But in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth, a great change came over the scene. Society had succeeded in harmonizing its most discordant elements, and the state of morals was reasonably good. The ideas of the time were not favourable to the little casuistries that keep a man from the right path even when he wishes to walk in it. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were times of terrible conflict and perversity. Brigandage reigned supreme. It was a period of decadence in the strictest sense of the word; and the decadence was shown in a thousand ways. In view of the debauchery, the tyranny, and the massacres of that age, of the complete withering of all the finer feelings in every section of the State — in the nobles who plundered their villeins, in the citizens who sold their country to England, in a clergy that was false to its professions — one might have thought that the whole society was about to crash to the ground and bury its shame deep under its own ruins. . . . The crash never came. The society continued to live; it devised remedies, it beat back its foes, it emerged from the dark cloud. The sixteenth century was far more reputable than its predecessor, in spite of its orgies of blood, which were a pale reflection of those of the preceding age. St. Bartholomew's day is not such a shameful memory as the massacre of the Armagnacs. Finally, the French people passed from this semi-barbarous twilight into the pure splendour of day, the age of Fénelon, Bossuet, and the Montausier. Thus, up to Louis XIV, our history shows a series of rapid changes from good to evil, from evil to good; while the real vitality of the nation has little to do with its moral condition. I have touched lightly on the larger curves of change; to trace the multitude of lesser changes within these would require many pages. To speak even of what we have all but seen with our own eyes, is it not clear that in every decade since 1787 the standard of morality has varied enormously? I conclude that the corruption of morals is a fleeting and unstable phenomenon; it becomes sometimes worse and sometimes better, and so cannot be considered as necessarily causing the ruin of societies.

I must examine here an argument, put forward in our time, which never entered people's heads in the eighteenth century; but as it fits in admirably with the subject of the preceding paragraph, I could not find a better place in which to speak f it. Many people have come to think that the end of a society is at hand when its religious ideas tend to weaken and disappear. They see a kind of connexion between the open profession of the doctrines of Zeno and Epicurus at Athens and Rome, with the consequent abandonment (according to them) of the national cults, and the fall of the two republics. They fail to notice that these are virtually the only examples that can be given of such a coincidence. The Persian Empire at the time of its fall was wholly under the sway of the Magi. Tyre, Carthage, Judaea, the Aztec and Peruvian monarchies were struck down while fanatically clinging to their altars. Thus it cannot be maintained that all the peoples whose existence as a nation is being destroyed are at that moment expiating the sin they committed in deserting the faith of their fathers. Further, even the two examples that go to support the theory seem to prove much more than they really do. I deny absolutely that the ancient cults were ever given up in Rome or Athens, until the day when they were supplanted in the hearts of all men by the victorious religion of Christ. In other words, I believe that there has never been a real breach of continuity in the religious beliefs of any nation on this earth. The outward form or inner meaning of the creed may have changed; but we shall always find some Gallic Teutates making way for the Roman Jupiter, Jupiter for the Christian God, without any interval of unbelief, in exactly the same way as the dead give up their inheritance to the living. Hence, as there hats never been a nation of which one could say that it had no faith at all, we have no right to assume that " the lack of faith causes the destruction of States."

I quite see the grounds on which such a view is based. Its defenders will tell us of "the notorious fact" that a little before the time of Pericles at Athens, and about the age of the Scipios at Rome the upper classes became more and more prone, first to reason about their religion, then to doubt it, and finally to give up all faith in it, and to take pride in being atheists. Little by little, we shall be told, the habit of atheism spread, until there was no one with any pretensions to intellect at all who did not defy one augur to pass another without smiling.

This opinion has a grain of truth, but is largely false. Say, if you will, that Aspasia, at the end of her little suppers, and Lælius, in the company of his friends, made a virtue of mocking at the sacred beliefs of their country ; no one will contradict you. But they would not have been allowed to vent their ideas too publicly; and yet they lived at the two most brilliant periods of Greek and Roman history. The imprudent conduct of his mistress all but cost Pericles himself very dear; we remember the tears he shed in open court, tears which would not of themselves have secured the acquittal of the fair infidel. Think, too, of the official language held by contemporary poets, how Sophocles and Aristophanes succeeded Æschylus as the stern champions of outraged deity. The whole nation believed in its gods, regarded Socrates as a revolutionary and a criminal, and wished to see Anaxagoras brought to trial and condemned. . . . What of the later ages? Did the impious theories of the philosophers succeed at any time in reaching the masses? Not for a single day. Scepticism remained a luxury of the fashionable world and of that world alone. One may call it useless to speak of the thoughts of the plain citizens, the country folk, and the slaves, who had no influence in the government, and could not impose their ideas on their rulers. They had, however, a very real influence; and the proof is that until paganism was at its last gasp, their temples and shrines had to be kept going, and their acolytes to be paid. The most eminent and enlightened men, the most fervent in heir unbelief, had not only to accept the public honour of wearing the priestly robe, but to undertake the most disagreeable duties of the cult — they who were accustomed to turn over, day and night, manu diurna, manu nocturna, the pages of Lucretius. Not only did they go through these rites on ceremonial occasions, but they used their scanty hours of leisure, hours snatched with difficulty from the life-and-death game of politics, in composing treatises on augury. I am referring to the great Julius.^[7] Well, all the emperors after him had to hold the office of high-priest, even Constantine. He, certainly, had far stronger reason than all his predecessors for shaking off a yoke so degrading to his honour as a Christian prince ; yet he was forced by public opinion, that blazed up for the last time before being extinguished for ever, to come to terms with the old national religion. Thus it was not the faith of the plain citizens, the country folk, and the slaves that was of small account ; it was the theories of the men of culture that mattered nothing. They protested in vain, in the name of reason and good sense, against the absurdities of paganism; the mass of the people neither would nor could give up one belief before they had been provided with another. They proved once more the great truth that it is affirmation, not negation, which is of service in the business of this world. So strongly did men feel this truth in the third century that there was a religious reaction among the higher classes. The reaction was serious and general, and lasted till the world definitely passed into the arms of the Church. In fact, the supremacy of philosophy reached its highest point under the Antonines and began to decline soon after their death. I need not here go deeply into this question, however interesting it may be for the historian of ideas; it will be enough for me to show that the revolution gained ground as the years went on, and to bring out its immediate cause.

The older the Roman world became, the greater was the part played by the army. From the emperor, who invariably came from the ranks, down to the pettiest officer in his Praetorian guard and the prefect of the most unimportant district, every official had begun his career on the parade-ground, under the vine-staff of the centurion ; in other words they had all sprung from the mass of the people, of whose unquenchable piety I have already spoken. When they had scaled the heights of office, they found confronting them, to their intense annoyance and dismay, the ancient aristocracy of the municipalities, the local senators, who took pleasure in regarding them as upstarts, and would gladly have turned them to ridicule if they had dared. Thus the real masters of the State and the once predominant families were at daggers drawn. The commanders of the army were believers and fanatics — Maximin, for example, and Galerius, and a hundred others. The senators and decurions still found their chief delight in the literature of the sceptics; but as they actually lived at court, that is to say among soldiers, they were forced to adopt a way of speaking and an official set of opinions which should not put them to any risk. Gradually an atmosphere of devotion spread through the Empire ; and this led the philosophers themselves, with Euhemerus at their head, to invent systems of reconciling the theories of the rationalists with the State religion — a movement in which the Emperor Julian was the most powerful spirit. There is no reason to give much praise to this renaissance of pagan piety, for it caused most of the persecutions under which our martyrs have suffered. The masses, whose religious feelings had been wounded by the atheistic sects, had bided their time so long as they were ruled by the upper classes. But as soon as the empire had become democratic, and the pride of these classes had been brought low, then the populace determined to have their revenge. They made a mistake, however, in their victims, and cut the throats of the Christians, whom they took for philosophers, and accused of impiety. What a difference there was between this and an earlier age! The really sceptical pagan was King Agrippa, who wished to hear St. Paul merely out of curiosity.^[8] He listened to him, disputed with him, took him for a madman, but did not dream of punishing him for thinking differently from himself. Another example is the historian Tacitus, who was full of contempt for the new sectaries, but blamed Nero for his cruelty in persecuting them. Agrippa and Tacitus were the real unbelievers. Diocletian was a politician ruled by the clamours of his people ; Decius and Aurelian were fanatics like their subjects.

Even when the Roman Government had definitely gone over to Christianity, what a task it was to bring the different peoples into the bosom of the Church! In Greece there was a series of terrible struggles, in the Universities as well as in the small towns and villages. The bishops had everywhere such difficulty in ousting the little local divinities that very often the victory was due less to argument and conversion than to time, patience, and diplomacy. The clergy were forced to make use of pious frauds, and their ingenuity replaced the deities of wood, meadow, and fountain, by saints, martyrs, and virgins. Thus the feelings of reverence continued without a break ; for some time they were directed to the wrong objects, but they at last found the right road. . . . But what am I saying ? Can we be so certain that even in France there are not to be found to this day a few places where the tenacity of some odd superstition still gives trouble to the parish priest ? In Catholic Brittany, in the eighteenth century, a bishop had a long struggle with a village-people that clung to the worship of a stone idol. In vain was the gross image thrown into the water ; its fanatical admirers always fished it out again, and the help of a company of infantry was needed to break it to pieces. We see from this what a long life paganism had — and still has. I conclude that there is no good reason for holding that Rome and Athens were for a single day without religion.

Since then, a nation has never, either in ancient or modern times, given up one faith before being duly provided with another, it is impossible to claim that the ruin of nations follows from their irreligion.

I have now shown that fanaticism, luxury, and the corruption of morals have not necessarily any power of destruction, and that irreligion has no political reality at all; it remains to discuss the influence of bad government, which is well worth a chapter to itself.

1. By C. F. Weber, Lucani Pharsalia (Leipzig, 1828), vol. i, pp. 122-3, note.
2. Prichard, "Natural History of Man." Dr. Martius is still more explicit. Cf. Martius and Spix, Reise in Brasilien, vol. i, pp. 379-80.
3. Balzac, Lettre à madame la duchesse de Montausier.
4. The power of the Tribunate was revived after Appius's decemvirate in 450 B.C., but the office had been founded more than forty years before. On the other hand, consular tribunes were first elected after 450 (in 445); but the consular tribunate could hardly be described as a "great revolution." The author may be confusing the two tribunates. — Tr.
5. Cp. Homer, "Odyssey," xv, 415 sqq.
6. Augustin Thierry, Recits des temps mirovingiens ; see especially the story of Mummolus.
7. Caesar, the democrat and sceptic, knew how to hold language contrary to his opinions when it was necessary. His funeral oration on his aunt is very curious: "On the mother's side," he said, "Julia was descended from kings; on her father's, from the immortal gods : for the Marcian Reges, whose name her mother bore, were sprung from Ancus Marcius, while Venus is the ancestress of the Julii, the clan to which belongs the family of the Caesars. Thus in our blood is mingled at the same time the sanctity of kings, who are the mightiest of men, and the awful majesty of the gods, who hold kings themselves in their power" (Suetonius, "Julius," p. 6). Nothing could be more monarchical; and also, for an atheist, nothing could be more religious.
8. Acts xxvi, 24, 28, 31.