Scientific Racism’s Mistake

The debate on racism has recently been revived. This has stemmed less from a sincere desire to contribute to an objective clarification of the problems, however, than from the ambitions of certain groups. In it, a false note has been sounded that should be pointed out. We are referring to people who today insist on ‘scientific racism’. They never tire of repeating that the problem of race should be expressed in terms that are ‘purely scientific’ and biological, and have chosen as a false target an undefined ‘spiritual racism’, against which they fight like Don Quixote against the windmills.

Here we have a misunderstanding that needs to be cleared up; cleared up, of course, before a public in good faith, and not before those who created it — people who almost always know perfectly well what the real situation is, but who are the first not to believe what they say. The relevant explanation is necessary because we are dealing essentially with intellectual integrity and honesty.  When writers fail to demonstrate these elementary qualities of character, we think it is futile for them to proclaim themselves racists and to boast of their Aryan body type, which could even be quite true, and thus make themselves out as ready to eat Jews alive. We just used the term ‘false note’. There is no other way to characterise the fact that, in a climate replete with spiritual, ethical, and heroic forces such as Fascism’s, they make use of the superstition of ‘scientism’ in order to make an impression on the naïve. They have nothing but the idol of ‘science’ at their disposal, a fetish belonging to the toolbox of the age of democracy and the Enlightenment, and of the more or less Masonic and rationalist progressivism of the nineteenth century. This is really ‘speaking the people’s language’, but in the worst sense of the expression. 

Ideologies, which the more serious culture of a country has surpassed, often survive for a long time by the force of inertia in the less cultivated levels of a nation. We know well the drunken rampages of the ‘Enlightenment’ and its Jacobin consequences. People no longer believed in God, tradition, or blood, but only in Science with a capital S. Only with Science — and by this they naturally meant materialist and ‘positivistic’ science — would begin the age of truth and certainty, and the obscurantism and superstition of earlier times would be overcome.  Science would create prosperity and happiness for humanity. The more extreme forms of these ideological aberrations think that the peoples will be led into the future not, of course, by dynastic, spiritual, or heroic aristocracies, but by groups of technicians and scientists. According to this kind of radicalism, these progressivist and Enlightenment ideas have long since disappeared. Only Bolshevism is silly enough to believe that science and technology will open the doors of a new earthly paradise to the depersonalised and materialised masses. 

Remnants of this same mentality, however, survive in less educated circles. The superstition of ‘science’ survives. People have been persuaded that it is only with science that we ‘get serious’; that only science imposes itself on everyone with the language of facts, offers precise certainties, and establishes solid knowledge. They believe that everything else is fog and arbitrary ideas, more or less as Marxism calls everything that transcends the level of the brute economy ‘superstructure’. Anyway, people who today are agitating so loudly for a ‘purely scientific racism’ are absolutely ‘speaking the people’s language’. Instead of helping to liquidate these remnants of an obsolete myth that survive in the less educated classes, they repeat them as a solid basis for ‘making an impression’, and to confer a false authority by means that are authoritative in their exterior affirmations, but which are incoherent and confused before every serious investigation conducted with sound thought. If we were dealing here with the natural sciences on a purely physical or abstractly classificatory level, the evil would not be fundamentally serious. In this field it is not possible to correct overnight mental deformations that date back centuries, and to convince everyone that the modern ‘scientific’ knowledge of nature is a crippled and inorganic knowledge that concerns only one sector of reality and, indeed, the least interesting sector. What it calls ‘facts’ do not exist in themselves, but are the artificial products of an arbitrary abstraction, and acquire different meanings according to the system which is used to interpret them. In the modern critique of science, all this is a commonplace.

There is no need to consult a Boutroux,[1] a Guénon, a Pavese,[2] or a Poincaré.[3] Every honest scientist, if taken in camera caritatis,[4] will of course acknowledge the relativism and contingency of the modern scientific ‘knowledge’ of nature. The myth of its ‘indisputable facts’ and its indisputable certainty belongs only to the grossest forms of vulgarisation and are related to the ideological remnants of the ‘Enlightenment’ that we have already mentioned. Since, however, we are still far from the restoration of a traditional, qualitative, and living knowledge of nature, the illusions that befuddle the general public about the actual range of the physical sciences do not have great consequences. Matters begin to proceed differently when we are no longer dealing with the physical and classificatory sciences, but with the domain of life, that is, the biological sciences. Here the consequences of the scientistic superstition could be absolutely deleterious. It is precisely to this field that the persons to whom we are alluding refer dogmatically, when they proceed to claim that this legendary ‘objectivity’ exists in the field of biological science, this language of ‘pure and indisputable facts’, this ipse dixit,[5] that modern epistemology has denied even in the domain of the physical sciences. In the area of social applications it has provoked these words from Mussolini: ‘There is nothing truly scientific in the world. Science explains the How of phenomena, but it does not explain their Why.’[6]

There is also a question here of a special ignorance. Because of a misunderstood patriotism, the people we are talking about, who proclaim scientific racism without, however, possessing any scientific competence, are basically referring to Italian biology and anthropology. Italian biology and anthropology are areas that do not, unfortunately, stand at the forefront in the overall context of world research because of the simple fact that they reflect the general climate, both materialist and positivist, of nineteenth century Italy. On the contrary, many recent currents in biology and genetics have been compelled to assume working hypotheses and criteria that lead rather far afield from ‘positivism’ and scientism, from the narrow confines in which they find themselves. It is enough to cite Driesch[7] and Dacque.[8] In the Italian circles we are discussing, all this counts as non-existent. The biology that they make into a myth is essentially an outdated biology in the field of technical scientific research. They probably do not know this. Even if they did know it, it would probably change nothing, because for them it is not a question of explaining and working through the truth, but rather of spreading simple propaganda in a mistaken direction. And why is this? If we leave aside personal interests, it is essentially from fear. These people are well aware that, whenever the problem of race has not been discussed on a simply ‘scientific’ and ‘biological’ level, but rather in a totalitarian fashion, as happens in Germany, serious difficulties have arisen. We run into various tendencies, and headaches and complications are created, which, despite the outward appearance of polemical activism, they very much prefer to offer easy lies about, sparing the ‘headaches’.   These people do not notice that they are abdicating and playing the enemy’s game. In fact, what more could those who would like to monopolise spiritual values, everything that is ‘tradition’ and worldview, ask for than to limit the problem of race to the material, biological, and ‘scientific’ level so as to have a free hand before such a castrated racism? The scientistic direction of racist propaganda is mistaken, because if the idea of race is really to become a force in Italy, it must be understood in primis et ante omnia[9] in the ethical and political field as spiritual and heroic. All the rest could only be working out the details. 

This consideration is not only the indispensable premise for coherence between the racist idea and Fascist ideals, but is also the necessary condition to avoid a series of absurdities that are obvious. For instance, the people we are discussing hold the myth of the ‘Italian race’ dear. It is well-known that from the scientific and purely biological point of view, an Italian race does not exist. The biological and anthropological races are unities that have nothing to do with the historic nations, in which more or less all races are found, distributed in different ways.  And so we would end up with a result that is quite the opposite of the solidarity at which these people are confusedly aiming, by talking improperly and unscientifically of an ‘Italian race’. If, then, there is no common race on the biological and anthropological level, on what basis can we ‘scientifically’ found a myth like the one to which we have just referred? The theory of internal races, or races of the soul, which might come to our aid here, is exactly what has the effect of a thorn in the side of the people we are talking about — for mysterious reasons that will end by becoming clear.  And on the purely scientific, biological, and anthropological level, what about the Jewish problem? Do they not notice the absurdity of insisting on dealing exclusively with it from the purely scientific point of view, while the Jewish problem in Italy has been imposed not on a biological basis, but on an essentially political and spiritual one? The banning of Jews from public life in Italy did not take place because their lips and noses and cranial indices were actually radically different from those of some ‘Mediterranid’ racial components, which are also present in our people. It happened rather on the basis of their works, their lifestyle and actions, and their spirit. Anyhow, from the ‘purely anthropological’ point of view, I find talk of a ‘Hebrew race’ rather risky. It is well-known that modern Israel does not constitute a race according to the prevalent opinion in modern racism, but rather a people comprised of rather diverse racial components.

Another point: on a ‘purely biological’ and positivist scientific basis, even the means of individuating the unity of Israel would be lacking. It is, however, very real, but it is found on a rather different level. This is why Roberto Farinacci has correctly written, ‘Is it really necessary to justify our racism by resorting to differences in hair or noses, of hands and feet? Is it really necessary to entrust to analyses of blood and chromosomes what is a question of a political and spiritual nature? Of course not! We can follow a more certain path, which does not admit debates and removes every doubt, and persuades the most stubborn. We do not need the anthropologist and the biologist to prove that we belong to a different race.’  (Vita Italiana, July 1942) Farinacci is expressing what is immediately acknowledged by people who really feel the problem of race, but not by those who squeal about it because it suits them or because they have received their marching orders. If race is not experienced directly as a way of being and a spontaneous interior realty, dolls from an anthropological museum, cranial measurements, and racial laws will be of very little use.

Of course human beings also have bodies, but research conducted on bodily, somatic, and anthropological phenomena is conclusive and serious only when these phenomena can count as signs and symptoms of a corresponding interior reality, and after centuries of crossbreeding this does not always happen. Only by acknowledging this frankly and openly, and leaving behind once and for all the scientific myth, is it possible to speak the people’s language — now in the good sense of the expression — and to prepare in Italy, little by little, a reawakening of an Aryan racial consciousness. Since it is useless to hide the fact: especially today, it is the Italian people who are wondering whether, finally, Jews are not becoming a kind of scapegoat, since they see everywhere one hundred percent ‘Aryan’ types who brazenly hoard, force prices up and take unfair profits, social climbers, and — why not? — even journalists who do not hesitate to resort to the most twisted and unfair methods for polemical purposes.

Let us add that if today there is so much talk of race, the reason is that people have finally noticed the fact of our effective decadence in Europe. Where race was really alive and strong, no one talked about it. A secure instinct sufficed as a guide. This instinct silently conferred an unwritten authority with very precise norms and laws. Scientific racism is following the wrong path, because it almost wants to repeat the attempt to create the homunculus. It seriously believes (or at least lets it be understood) that, when race is in trouble, it can be reconstructed and rescued, as it were, with laboratory procedures on the basis of ‘positive’ acquired knowledge, almost as how artificial mushrooms are grown when there is a shortage of natural ones. The undoubted and integral sentiment of race and blood which is found in the ancient Aryan cultures of the East such as Sparta, the old Roman aristocracy, and certain parts of Europe’s nobility, did not need these shenanigans. It was secure without these pseudo-scientific excuses, which, let us say it once more, can make an impression only on the rabble and rustics of the world of our middle class and intellectuals. Awakening the sentiment and dignity of race directly, by essentially spiritual means, is what really matters. Biology, genetics, anthropology, Mendelian laws, and whatever else you may desire are all useful things, but are subordinate, like accessory tools and sources of knowledge to be used cum grano salis,[10] while always being aware of the demands of a superior ethical and political character. This is to say, there must be an integral conception of race, one that is especially ethical and spiritual in order to fix the measure and means by which certain scientific ‘knowledge’ can be accepted and incorporated as auxiliary elements. Here the contributions will never be very many, because, as we have said, biology and anthropology bear birth defects, always and indelibly. This is to say, they are founded on premises of a materialist and evolutionary character which are incompatible with what is needed for any truly superior sentiment of race.

We wonder, in fact, what will come of a sentiment taken from disciplines in which people continue to seriously believe in man’s having descended from the monkey, more or less implicitly, and where, with the predominance of the theory of a single origin for life, it is necessary to resort to a materialistic determinism. Otherwise they may have recourse to the miraculous idea of ‘scientifically’ inexplicable mutations, in order to ‘explain’ the differentiation of species and races from one hypothetical homogenous original substance. Try to touch similar scientistic superstitions, or try to recall the testimony of all ancient peoples concerning the earliest races, which were not animals but almost ‘divine’, and you will suddenly see yourself accused of an anti-scientific mentality and even of…magic. This is exactly the charge levelled at us by Canella,[11] for instance, addressing we do not know what innocent souls, in a typically inconclusive work which was supposed to treat racial psychology, in his words, ‘scientifically’.

We concede that, despite the ideological deformations that proceed from their premises, some results of genetic and biological research can be useful, but always, as we have said, with the proper reservations, must always be checked by super-scientific principles which will constitute the final court of appeal. An example is the Mendelian laws and their development into the so-called ‘higher Mendelism’.[12] They are true and accepted, or not, depending on the reference point. Pavese has very appropriately distinguished race as ‘fact’ — that is, a spontaneous naturalistic effect produced by a process that is over and done with — from race as ‘becoming’. For the first aspect of race, the laws are roughly exact. For the second, instead, there are no longer precise laws. Those who fail to acknowledge this distinction end up turning Mendelism into a kind of fate, which can be used, for instance, as an accessory tool in the anti-Jewish campaign, by demonstrating the inadequacy of all legislation that does not take the element of heredity into account. At the same time, however, we shall find ourselves paralysed before the essential tasks of a selective and active racism. In fact, there would be very little to do, if these laws are supposed to control race as ‘becoming’ (that is, what counts the most politically), if what is present in a people because of crossbreeding that took place centuries ago constitutes a fatal heritage, and if the ‘dominant’ and ‘recessive’ characteristics are supposed to remain such ad infinitum in everyone’s body and mind. This is not the place, however, to go into technical details. It is essentially the central thesis that matters. Racists who defend the exclusive claims of the scientistic point of view, and who can coherently boast only of the gorilla and the pithecanthropus as their glorious ancestors, should be able to persuade themselves that we in Italy do not find ourselves in a Soviet regime, nor in the times of the Jacobin Enlightenment, which would mean that the adjective ‘spiritual’, when added to the noun ‘racism’, would signify shame and disrepute. We naturally prefer to define our terms, by saying that spirit, for us, does not mean either philosophical deviation or ‘theosophy’, or a mystical, devotional evasion, but simply what well-born people always understood by race in better times: that is, rectitude, internal integrity, character, dignity, manliness, and an immediate and direct sensitivity for all values, virtues that stand at the foundation of all human greatness and that tower over, and so dominate, the level of all contingent and material reality.

The view of race as a ‘scientistic’ construction and a mannequin from an anthropological museum we leave to those parts of a pseudo-intellectual middle class who are still dominated by the idols of the positivism of the nineteenth century. This is assuredly the last thing that can propitiate the awakening of that force and dignity which, in terms of racism, could only be attained in a heroic and spiritual vision of the world such as Fascism’s. (...) 

(1942)

Julius Evola

A Traditionalist Confronts Fascism Selected Essays