In this 2022 an anniversary strikes that will not be celebrated, and for excellent reasons, but it shouldn’t be left in oblivion either: 140 ago Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, author of the “Essay on the inequality of human races” (published between 1853 and 1855). In that Luciferian book Gobineau divided human beings into whites, yellows and blacks and attributed only the first to a civil creative faculty, furthermore he regretted that the white race was declining. But there is a singular fact, which is rarely mentioned: it was not Gobineau who inaugurated the trend. Half a century before him, none other than Immanuel Kant, the philosopher of the Enlightenment, had anticipated it by publishing a volume with an almost identical title, “Essay on the different human races”, in which he argued, among other things, that “yellows have poor talents and blacks are far below them” (and this is not a sentence taken out of context). Discerning the good and the bad is much more complicated than we like to imagine.
The historian Franco Cardini explains that between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “racism was a component of the Enlightenment and evolutionist culture. They were all racists ”. The statement sounds paradoxical, but just scrolling through the entry “Scientific racism” on Wikipedia to discover that for Voltaire “the black race is a species of men different from ours as the breed of the spaniel is different from that of the greyhound”, and in this review of eighteenth-nineteenth-century racists there are many other surprising names, from Linnaeus to Hegel. It was a widespread belief that the progress of humanity walked only on the legs of men of European origin. Léopold Senghor, the Senegalese poet of the “négritude”, remembers with what dismay the young African Marxists like him read Marx discussing “barbaric and semi-barbaric nations” and stiffened thinking: “He is talking about us”.
A further paradox: unlike the names mentioned so far, Gobineau, a nostalgic pastist who did not like the Enlightenment and who did not believe in the progress of humanity, as a racist theorist did not draw the slightest practical indication from his writings, nor in private or public life. Your book is not a call to arms.
Gobineau did not consider himself a champion of the superior race, on the contrary he saw himself as a typical example of decay, even physical; aware of having a Creole ancestor with some Indian and black blood in her veins, Gobineau married (and had offspring) to another Creole of mixed origins, making her lineage increasingly spurious. As for public life, as a diplomat of the highest level and co-architect, for many years, of French foreign policy, Gobineau always spoke out against the imperialism of nineteenth-century Europe towards peoples of color, and in particular against colonization French of Algeria, and wrote plague and horns of slavery in America.
Is that what you would expect from a racism theorist? Yet that’s the way it is.
Let me be clear, there is absolutely no way to re-evaluate Gobineau’s thought or to absolve the author, but the parts that the theater of history assigns to the characters are sometimes different and more complicated than one imagines.
If anything, it was others, not Gobineau, who made the apology for European imperialism. There is a truly surprising testimony, the exchange of letters (“About racism. Correspondence 1843-1859 “, published by Donzelli) between Gobineau and his friend Alexis de Tocqueville, the singer of democracy in America. In this dispute, Gobineau frankly expresses his racist theses, which are not new, and Tocqueville gracefully points out to him that they do not have the slightest scientific basis. But then the liberal Tocqueville gives a positive judgment on European expansion in the rest of the world, attributing it a civilizing function, and justifies and exalts it even when it is imposed with arms and blood, as was happening at that time in Algeria. . Gobineau replies that by staining themselves with atrocities such as the conquest of Algeria and the slavery of blacks in America, the whites lose the honor without actually gaining anything historically. The liberal Tocqueville insists and points out to him, positively, that for an entire era Europe has the possibility of leading the world, by hook or by crook, and Gobineau replies that it is not worth it, so much so. whites will disappear anyway.
This is not to say that Gobineau and Tocqueville are even, but they both speak at a time when Europe was groping to measure the world and it was easy to skid.
But if, as Cardini says, “they were all racists”, then is the “cancel culture” that is raging in the Anglo-Saxon world right? It is right to tear down all the monuments of Western civilization, starting with those of the Southern generals to get to George Washington, a South American gentleman who founded a nation of slavers, or Winston Churchill, who led the fight against Nazism but to defend a colonial empire of which still in 1947 did not want to give up “not even a crumb”? Maybe so, cancel culture may be right. Or he can be wrong and fall into anachronism: perhaps (and we emphasize: perhaps) it is wrong to measure the world of yesterday with today’s yardstick. “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently over there ”(Leslie Poles Hartley).
We jump from the nineteenth to the twentieth century and we come across the gloomy meditator Oswald Spengler, also cataloged as a “racist” (but in his case the use of quotation marks is particularly suitable). The book “Years of the decision” (Clinamen and Oaks editions) raises the alarm against what he calls the “world color revolution”, represented by colonized peoples to whom the author attributes a strong desire for revenge, yet Spengler does not propose Nibelungian perspectives or racial wars at all, but a sober alliance of the powers of Europe and America to defend the status quo, for as long or as little as it can last; Spengler considers every effort on the part of “whites” absolutely vain, and the descent into hell of the West is already written. How come? Ernst Nolte (ne “The Weimar Republic. An unstable democracy between Lenin and Hitler “, Marinotti) observes that Spengler ne “The sunset of the West” (various recent editions, from Aragno to Longanesi) did not express a prophecy or a call to arms, as is usually believed, but limited himself to diagnosing the state of advanced and now irreversible putrefaction of our Kultur. In a private letter of 1936, Spengler defines Hitler as “the corrupter of Germany” and predicts an ignominious and well-deserved defeat for him and his criminal projects; predicts that “in ten years from now the Reich will probably no longer exist”, and since he wrote in ’36 and in the perspective of 1945, Spengler proves to have a prophetic capacity, with the stopwatch in hand.
The racism of the 21st century deserves all condemnation and all possible anathemas, but in looking for its historical and philosophical antecedents one must be cautious, otherwise one risks identifying the wrong ones, or expanding the concept too much to include everything, from Voltaire to Kant , from Hegel to Spengler and from Washington to Churchill, to the point of emptying the word racism of meaning. Meanwhile, Gobineau rests quietly in the Monumental Cemetery of Turin.