CHAPTER SEVEN
THE greatest ideas of mankind have been conceived in the
lands between India and Germania, between Iceland and Benares (where Buddha
began to teach) amongst the peoples of Indo-European language; and these ideas
have been accompanied by the Indo-European religious attitude which represents
the highest attainments of the mature spirit. When in January 1804, in
conversation with his colleague, the philologist Riemer, Goethe expressed the
view that he found it “remarkable that the whole of Christianity had not brought
forth a Sophocles”, his knowledge of comparative religion was restricted by the
knowledge of his age, yet he had unerringly chosen as the precursor of an
Indo-European religion the poet Sophocles, “typical of the devout Athenian . . .
in his highest, most inspired form”,41 a poet who represented the
religiosity of the people, before the people (demos) of Athens had
degenerated into a mass (ochlos). But where apart from the
Indo-Europeans, has the world produced a more devout man with such a great soul
as the Athenian, Sophocles?
Where outside the Indo-European domain have religions arisen,
which have combined such greatness of soul with such high flights of reason
(logos, ratio) and such wide vision (theoria)? Where have
religious men achieved the same spiritual heights as Spitama Zarathustra, as the
teachers of the Upanishads, as Homer, as Buddha and even as Lucretius
Carus, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Shelley?
Goethe wished that Homer’s songs might become our Bible. Even
before the discovery of the spiritual heights and power of the pre-Christian
Teuton, but especially after Lessing, Winckelmann and Heinrich Voss, the
translator of Homer, the Indo-European outlook renewed itself in Germany,
recalling a world of the spirit which was perfected by great German poets and
thinkers during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Since Goethe’s death (1832), and since the death of Wilhelm von
Humboldt (1835), the translator of the devout Indo-European Bhagavad
Gita, this Indo-European spirit, which also revealed itself in the
pre-Christian Teuton, has vanished.
Goethe had a premonition of this decline of the West: even in
October 1801 he remarked in conversation with the Countess von Egloffstein, that
spiritual emptiness and lack of character were spreading — as if he had foreseen
what today characterises the most celebrated literature of the Free West. It may
be that Goethe had even foreseen, in the distant future, the coming of an age in
which writers would make great profits by the portrayal of sex and crime for the
masses. As Goethe said to Eckermann, on 14th March 1830, “the representation of
noble bearing and action is beginning to be regarded as boring, and efforts are
being made to portray all kinds of infamies”. Previously in a letter to Schiller
of 9th August 1797, he had pointed out at least one of the causes of the
decline: in the larger cities men lived in a constant frenzy of acquisition and
consumption and had therefore become incapable of the very mood from which
spiritual life arises. Even then he was tortured and made anxious, although he
could observe only the beginnings of the trend, the sight of the machine system
gaining the upper hand; he foresaw that it would come and strike (Wilhelm
Meisters Wanderjahre, Third Book, Chapter 15, Cotta’s Jubilee edition, Vol.
XX, p. 190). In a letter to his old friend Zelter, on 6th June 1825, he
pronounced it as his view that the educated world remained rooted in mediocrity,
and that a century had begun “for competent heads, for practical men with an
easy grasp of things, who . . . felt their superiority above the crowd, even if
they themselves are not talented enough for the highest achievements”; pure
simplicity was no longer to be found, although there was a sufficiency of simple
stuff; young men would be excited too early and then torn away by the vortex of
the time. Therefore Goethe exhorted youth in his poem Legacy of the year
1829:
| Join yourself to the smallest host! |
In increasing degree since approximately the middle of the
nineteenth century poets and writers as well as journalists — the descendants of
the “competent heads” by whom Goethe was alarmed even in the year 1801 — have
made a virtue out of necessity by representing characterlessness as a fact. With
Thomas Mann this heartless characterlessness first gained world renown. Mann
used his talent to conceal his spiritual desolation by artifices which have been
proclaimed by contemporary admirers as insurpassable. But the talent of the
writers emulating Thomas Mann no longer sufficed even to conceal their spiritual
emptiness, although many of their readers, themselves spiritually impoverished,
have not noticed this.
The freedom of the Press, which was introduced through the
constitution of May 1816 into the Duchy of Weimar and which had already been
demanded by Wieland with his superficial judgment would, Goethe declared, do
nothing more than give free rein to authors with a deep contempt of public
opinion (Zahme Xenien, Goethes Sämtliche Werke, Cotta’s Jubilee edition,
Vol. IV, p. 47; Annalen (Annals) 1816, same edition, Vol. XXX, p. 298).
In the Annalen of 1816, he remarked that every right-thinking man of
learning in the world foresaw the direct and incalculable consequences of this
act with fright and regret. Thus even in his time, Goethe must have reflected
how little the men of the Press, were capable of combining freedom with human
dignity.
When the descendants of the competent heads of the beginning of
the nineteenth century rose, through their talents, to the upper classes, where
due to a lower birthrate their families finally died out, the eliminating
process of social climbing in Europe seized hold of less capable heads and bore
them away into the vortex of the time. Their culture has been described most
mercilessly by Friedrich Nietzsche in his lectures of the year 1871-72:
Concerning the Future of Our Educational Institutions (Pocket edition,
Vol. I, 1906, pp. 314, 332-333, 396). Nietzsche above all concentrated on famous
contemporary writers, “the hasty and vain production, the despicable
manufacturing of books, the perfected lack of style, the shapelessness and
characterlessness or the lamentable dilution of their expressions, the loss of
every aesthetic canon, the lust for anarchy and chaos” — which he described as
if he had actually seen the most celebrated literature of the Free West, whose
known authors no longer mastered their own languages even to the extent still
demanded by popular school teachers around 1900. These vociferous heralds of the
need for culture in an era of general education were rejected by Nietzsche who
in this displayed true Indo-European views — as fanatical opponents of the true
culture, which holds firm to the aristocratic nature of the spirit. If Nietzsche
described the task of the West as to find the culture appropriate to Beethoven,
then the serious observer today will recognise only too well the situation which
Nietzsche foresaw and described as a laughing stock and a thing of shame.
In the year 1797, Friedrich Schiller composed a poem:
Deutsche Grösse. Full of confidence in the German spirit he expressed the
view that defeat in war by stronger foes could not touch German dignity which
was a great moral force. The precious possession of the German language would
also be preserved. Schiller (Das Siegesfest) certainly knew what peoples
had to expect of war:
| For Patrocles lies buried and Thersites comes back; |
but he must have imagined that the losses of the best in the
fight could be replaced. The dying out of families of dignity and moral stature
(megalopsychia and magnanimitas), had then not yet begun in
Europe.
In the year 1929, just a decade after the First World War had
ended, that Peloponnesian war of the Teutonic peoples, which caused both in
England and in Germany excessively heavy losses of gifted young men, of officers
and aristocrats, Oskar Walzel (Die Geistesströmungen des 19.
Jahrhunderts, 1929, p. 43), Professor of German literature at the university
of Bonn, gave it as his opinion that after this war the trend to de-spiritualise
Germany had gained ground far more rapidly than hitherto: “Is there in German
history in general such an identical want of depth in men to be observed as at
present?” But for the Germans it is poor consolation that this
“de-spiritualising” is just as marked in other Western countries. Another sign
of this trend is that today many famous writers are no longer capable of
preserving the precious possession of the German language. Other Western
languages are also neglecting their form and literature, but this again is poor
consolation for the Germans. Such neglect is considered by many writers today as
characteristic of, and part of the process of gaining their freedom and
liberation from all traditional outlooks. Goethe criticised this as a false idea
of freedom (Maxims and Reflections, Goethes Sämtliche Werke, Cottas
Jubiläumsausgabe, Vol. IV, p. 229) in the following words:
Thus, by freedom Goethe also understood the dignity of the
freeborn, not the nature and mode of life of the freed slave.
====================
CHAPTER EIGHT
QUINTUS Horatius Flaccus (Carmina, III, 25, 27)
has described the task of all art, especially of poetry, as being to create
“nothing small and in a low manner” (nil parvum aut humili modo). Yet the
most popular literature of the free West, and the culture of mass media, today
emphasises the unimportant sexual experiences of unbridled men, often in a
degrading and unclean manner, and this is described by many newspaper critics as
“art”. The churches also patronise such forms of art for the masses and attempt
to secure the attendance of youth by offering religious Jazz and Negro rhythms.
The best examples of pure sexual experience, as accomplished in the nil
parvum aut humili modo of Horace, may be found in the truly Indo-European
Homer. According to C. F. von Nägelsbach (Homerische Theologie, third
edition, edited by G. Authenrieth, 1884, p. 229) Homer always represented
sensuality without lust and without prudery and never enticingly and seductively
or with sensual excitement in mind; he was one of the most innocent poets of all
ages and even in describing sexual scenes, he never used a word which exceeded
artistic requirements. This is yet another example of how the Indo-European
linked freedom with dignity.
In Europe and North America, individuals who were still capable
of their own religiosity — of which the Commonplace Book of Thomas
Jefferson, the distinguished third President of the United States of America, is
an example — have been replaced by masses who by religiosity only understand an
appendage to a confession useful for personal advancement. There is no possible
hope, under these circumstances, that the great spiritual and religious heights
which were reached by the Indo-Europeans living between Europe and India at
various times from the Bronze Age up to the nineteenth century will ever be
matched again. For a world culture such as progressives seek to construct, an
elevation of the spirit above and beyond the entertainment needs of the masses —
above Jazz and Negro rhythm — is no longer to be hoped for, since what Europeans
and North Americans have to offer today to the “undeveloped” peoples (who,
however, should have been able to utilise the 10,000 to 20,000 years which have
passed since the end of the Old Stone Age for their own development), is nothing
more than the spiritually vacuous “culture” of a welfare state governed by a
hundred soulless authorities. In such societies the Press, literature, radio,
television and films and other media provide the masses with a controlled
“tensioning” and “de-tensioning” by alternately playing up this or that belief
or unbelief. With the further extinction of families capable of spiritual
independence, and the further disappearance of talents,42
particularly amongst the peoples of North America and Europe capable of
spiritual leadership, no alternative to the disappearance of the last remaining
elements of the Indo-European peoples and their culture can be expected.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), one of the founders of the free
state of Virginia, author of the Declaration of Independence (1776),
Governor of Virginia, ambassador in Paris, Foreign Minister under George
Washington, and from 1801 to 1809 President of the United States, sought to see
his people as a nation of Teutonic yeomen and distrusted trade and the upcoming
industry of the cities, which he regarded as foes of freedom. Jefferson sought
to protect the freedom and dignity of the individual man from the state, to
which he therefore wished to allow only a minimum of power. To preserve this
farmer aristocracy enjoying Indo-European freedom43 he sought to
avoid a centralised state in favour of a loose federation or association of the
former English colonies. But after the agricultural era, the urbanisation and
industrialisation of the industrial era brought into being the city masses whose
need for security became greater than their real or pretended urge to freedom.
Security against (in the Indo-European sense) destiny — cowardly security
against all difficult situations of life — can only be achieved in a state based
upon bureaucracy, a state which is therefore, of necessity, inhuman. The
excessive number of patronising departments and repressive laws, as well as the
large number of officials in dependent positions, gradually stifles the freedom
of any individuals still capable of a dignified and courageous conduct of life.
(Tacitus: Annals, XXXVII: corruptissima in re publica plurimae
leges.)
In the winter of 1791-92, Wilhelm von Humboldt, the friend of
Schiller, and like Schiller one of the last great Indo-Europeans, wrote a book:
Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu
bestimmen (An attempt to determine the limits of the effectiveness of the
State). In this work he sought to safeguard the humanitas and
dignitas, the dignity of man, from patronisation by governmental welfare
states. Yet with the twentieth century, more and more countries, including the
once so free English, and now in their wake, North America, have become
“socialised”, bureaucratic welfare states, whose masses, encumbered by thousands
of officials and organisations, have begun to forget freedom and dignity through
the de-tensioning offered them. With the loss of freedom and dignity in
political and social life, how is the preservation of traditional spiritual
values possible?
One of the first to recognise that the era of the free
individual, capable of self-determination, was coming to an end, and that with
the displacement of this free, self-reliant man, human dignity would vanish from
public life, was the Norman Count Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), the friend
of Count Arthur Gobineau (1816-1882). His work L’Ancien Régime et la
Révolution (7th edition, 1866) and the Souvenirs de Alexis de
Tocqueville (1893), which were not published until thirty-four years after
the death of the author, were only heeded in Germany when it was too late to
save the freedom of the individual; de Tocqueville studied the nature of the
democracies as displayed in their land of origin, in North America, and
afterwards wrote his work De la Démocratie en Amérique (1835), a
warm-hearted and richly informative description of the North American free
state, in which he also warned of the dangers facing democracies which fell
under the domination of the spirit of the masses. He feared that the rise of an
era of the masses, with state capitalism and state-controlled enterprise, would
pervert the democracies into repressing the freedom of the individual man of
dignity — to him the highest human good — so that democracy would lead to a
suppression of freedom in the Indo-European sense, the freedom still demanded by
Jefferson and by Wilhelm von Humboldt.
The last men who — without investigating its origins — defended
Indo-European freedom, namely the democracy of the free and mutually-equal
land-owning family fathers, were the English philosophers John Stuart Mill
(Michael St. John Packe: The Life of John Stuart Mill, 1954, pp. 488 et
seq.) and Herbert Spencer. J. S. Mill wrote a book On Liberty in 1859.
With almost incomprehensible far-sightedness Mill recognised the threat to the
dignity and freedom of independent and self-reliant individual thinking men
which was embodied in the “freedom” of the masses gathering in the cities. Mill
feared the tyranny of the majorities in the popular assemblies, the repression
of those capable of judgment by the mass of alternating public opinions. He
feared the Chinese ideal of the sameness of all men and saw — like Goethe in his
tragedy Die natürliche Tochter (I, 5) — that all contemporary political
trends were aiming to reshape the era by raising the depths, and debasing the
heights. When men had been made “equal” by law, every deviation from this
uniformity would be condemned as wicked, immoral, monstrous and unnatural (John
Stuart Mill: Die Freiheit, 1859, translated into German by Elsa
Wentscher, Philosophische Bibliothek, Vol. CCII, 1928, pp. 7, 100 et seq.).
Hence in the year 1859, when England was still free, that very conformity was
already predicted against which even the newspaper writers and literateurs of
unhindered mass circulation today complain.
To John Stuart Mill the freedom of the individual was the
highest good. He started with the viewpoint of Adam Smith and David Ricardo and
inclined to socialism, but feared that the abuse of freedom by parties and
majorities would lead to the rule of the masses, to the end of competition and
to the abolition of individual possessions, which would favour the stupid and
lazy, but rob the clever and industrious. For this reason Mill also advocated
Malthusianism and family planning, because families with many children whom they
were economically incapable of supporting would endanger the state.
Herbert Spencer found the highest degree of freedom within the
state in England in the middle nineteenth century, the highest degree of freedom
for men of independent judgment and independent conscience. But when he wrote
his Principles of Sociology in 1896, he recognized that this freedom was
already threatened by socialism. Socialism he said, would appear in every
industrial society and would repress every freedom; socialism itself would
become only another form of subjection, simply another form of the bureaucratic
regime, and thus it would become the greatest misfortune that the world had ever
experienced; no one might ever again do what he pleased, each would have to do
what he was ordered to do. A total and absolute loss of freedom would result.
Herbert Spencer might have added that only a minority of men capable of
independent thought would regret the loss of freedom in a bureaucratic,
patronising state, while the solid majority (Ibsen: An Enemy of the
People) would prefer state care to freedom, being unable to understand the
freedom of Jefferson or Wilhelm von Humboldt, or Mill or Spencer (Herbert
Spencer: Principles of Sociology, Vol. III, 1897, pp. 585, 595).
In two contributions to his Essays (Essays:
Scientific, Political and Speculative, Vol. II, 1883, pp. 48, 56, 66, 94,
100, 104; Vol. III, 1878, pp. 181, 186) Herbert Spencer the Liberal summarised
how socialism — when it finally penetrated all parties — would repress the
freedom of the individual to voice independent judgment; through a flood of laws
there would arise, supported by the blind faith of the socialist masses in
enactments, and in government machinery, a stupid and ponderous bureaucratic
state; the state would discourage its citizens from helping themselves, and no
one would be permitted to withdraw from the national institutions, as they may
from private ones, when they broke down or became too costly; the blind belief
in officialdom, above all in the Fascist and National Socialist form, has given
rise, as Spencer feared, to a blind faith in government, to a political
fetichism. But wherever socialist governments have been able to rule uncontested
for decades, officialdom, state control and state fetichism have set in, and
with them a further repression of the freedom of the individual, of that
Indo-European and above all Teutonic freedom emanating from the spirit of the
land-owning family heads, equal among one another, with which Spencer and the
liberals of his day were concerned — even though they did not realise that the
roots of this freedom were historically Indo-European.
One may describe the Teutons as born democrats, if by democracy
one understands the self-conscious freedom and equality of rural yeomen.
Democracy of this kind will always follow the command, found in the Edda
(Grogaldr, VI, Der Zaubergesang der Groa, Edda, Vol. II, 1920, p.
178): “Lead thyself!” This freedom, a dignified freedom found only in the man
capable of self-determination, was maintained in Iceland, whence Norwegian
freeholders removed themselves to avoid forcible conversion to Christianity at
the hands of the newly-converted Norwegian kings, with such resolution, that the
present day observer must doubt whether the Icelandic free state could in
general be called a state.
Likewise Eduard Meyer (Geschichte des Altertums, Vol. I,
2, 1909, p. 777) has alluded to the individualism and self-determination which
characterises the Indo-Europeans, to the individuality of the self-determining
man, hostile to every kind of leadership, even to the extent of frequently
proving a danger to his own nation or state. Bismarck himself bore witness to
this individuality when he said that he was less concerned with giving commands
than with punishing disobedience. Such an outlook is expressed in the motto,
valid earlier in Germany, Selbst ist der Mann — Rely on yourself — and
this outlook refuses charity from every other, even from the state. It
corresponds to a truly Indo-European remark of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius
Antoninus (Observations, III, 5): “You shall stand upright, and not be
supported by others!” In the Agamemnon (755) of Aeschylus, the king of
the Hellenic army, first among equals, expresses the view that he has his own
convictions, apart from those of his people. With Sophocles (Aias, 481)
the Chorus confirms to Aias, who has freely chosen death, that he never spoke a
word which did not proceed directly from his own nature.
But such attitudes have tended to disappear lately amongst
Indo-European speaking peoples — corresponding to the disappearance of men
capable of independent thought and opinion, the truly free-born. Recently,
through an accumulation of men incapable of independent thought, city masses
have come into existence which wish to be led: it is no longer “lead yourself —
yourself!” but “Leader, command and we will follow!” In such periods true
Indo-European freedom vanishes. Marcus Tullius Cicero (de officio, I,
112-113), imbued with the traditional freedom of an aristocratic republic and
acquainted through Panaetius with the Hellenic thinkers’ doctrines of freedom,
still risked praising Julius Caesar’s dead opponent Cato Uticensis, during the
former’s dictatorship. After the battle of Thapsos, many Romans accepted the
sole rule of a conquering leader of the city masses (consisting predominantly of
freedmen), the dictator perpetuus, Julius Caesar. Not, however, Cato
Uticensis, one of the last freeborn men of the aristocratic Roman republic:
Cato’s love of freedom taught him to choose death rather than live under
tyranny.
The historical work of Tacitus, which has already been
mentioned above, reveals that Indo-European freedom (libertas) is only
possible in a society of individuals capable of independent judgment, who rely
on their own resources and who do not need to be supported. Herbert Spencer had
already seen, towards the end of the nineteenth century, that such freedom would
no longer be practicable in industrial societies.
Indo-European spiritual freedom and human dignity have been
represented with the utmost beauty by the classical art of the Hellenes and this
spirit speaks with irrepressible vigour and clarity from the sculptures which
represent Hellenic thinkers and poets (K. Schefeld: Die Bildnisse der antiken
Dichter, Redner und Denker, 1943) — sculptures which could not have been
created had not the artists themselves been conscious of this freedom and
dignity. A great part of the present day, highly-praised “art of the free West”,
expresses in word and image a disgust which is perhaps pardonable — with the
genus Man, often even a disgust with the “artist” himself, and it is obvious
that as such, it no longer belongs to the spirit of the West, first expressed to
perfection by the Hellenes. The present day West, insofar as it is represented
by “famous artists”, is no longer capable of grasping the totality of the world
phenomenon or of the human picture. It is content to produce distorted fragments
which are then regarded with astonishment by the Press as assertions about
“essentials”. Writers, painters, sculptors and designers depict — after their
own image creatures which fall far short of the nobility of man, ranking
culturally with lemurs — “semi-natures” pieced together from ligaments, sinews
and bones (Goethe: Faust, II, Act 5, Great Courtyard of Palace),
“semi-natures” whose microcephaly or even headlessness, seem to symbolise the
rejection of reason, logos, ratio by the “artists” of the present
era. As for present day lyrics, Hugo Friedrich (Die Struktur der modernen
Lyrik, 1961) has made a most penetrating anaylsis of them from Baudelaire to
the present day and delineates a downward trend in lyricism which reflects the
decline of the West, even though he does not attempt to evaluate the artistic
level of modern lyricism or discuss the question whether it may in fact still be
regarded as Western.
The decline of human dignity and freedom through socialism,
which would demand as much state power as possible was also feared by Friedrich
Nietzsche, who, like Jefferson and Wilhelm von Humboldt, recommended as little
of the State as possible, and finally called the state the coldest of all cold
monsters (Also sprach Zarathustra: Von neuen Götzen). Today such an
opinion would incur disciplinary action against its author — not only in eastern
European states. Socialism, according to Nietzsche (Taschenausgabe, Bd. III, pp.
350-351), coveted “a fullness of state power such as only despotism had enjoyed
indeed it surpassed all the past because it strove for the formal annihilation
of the individual.” From a World State or a World Republic, which today is
regarded by “progressive” believers as the desired goal of humanity, Nietzsche
expected nothing other than the final disappearance of all remnants of freedom
and human dignity: “Once the earth is brought under all-embracing economic
control, then mankind will find it has been reduced to machinery in its service,
as a monstrous clockwork system of ever smaller, more finely adjusted wheels.”
(Nietzsches gesammelte Werke, Musarionausgabe, Bd. XIX, 1962, p. 266; cf.
also Charles Andler: Nietzsche, Sa Vie et sa Pensée, Vol. III, 1958, pp.
201 et seq.).
The decline of freedom and human dignity under socialism was
also foretold by Gustave Le Bon in his books Psychologie des Foules
(1895) and Les Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des Peuples (1894). Le
Bon was afraid that the masses would readily accept every subjection under
strong-willed leaders, and dissolve the age-old cultures of Europe, and that in
their delusion that freedom and equality could be achieved by ever-increasing
legislation, they would legally whittle it away, especially as they regarded
freedom as an external lack of restraint. From Caesarism, the despotism of
leaders, the masses expected not so much freedom, which they were not really
striving after, as equal subjection for all. The Socialism of our time (1895)
would have the effect of state absolutism, especially as the socialism of the
masses would appear as a new religion and would compel uniformity. Later the
state would become almighty God. The race soul of the peoples represents their
cultural condition; the mass soul of the population represents a condition of
barbarism and of decline.
Theobald Ziegler, Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Strasburg, stated in his work Die Soziale Frage (1891), a study of the
socialist ideas of his time, that the equal subjection of everyone under state
patronage, was a predominantly German tendency. Ernst Troeltsch, Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Berlin (Das 19. Jahrhundert, Gesammelte
Schriften, Vol. IV, p. 640), wrote in 1925, that “the pressure of universal
state power weighed ever-increasingly on the people”. This was and is without
doubt also true for those peoples who live in democracies, for, as Eduard
Schwartz, the historian (Charakterköpfe der Antike, 1943), has stated,
the civic courage of personal opinion, the courage of independent judgment, was
neither a self-evident nor a superfluous virtue in democracies. The freedom of
independently thinking men becomes more and more restricted in the era of the
legally “liberated” masses, departmental orders and public opinion.
Into what lack of dignity and lack of freedom, into what
abysses of official, spiritual and moral life, Socialist governments can lead a
once noble and free people, is illustrated by the outstanding example of modern
Sweden. Witness of this is the Swedish socialist Tage Lindbom, director of the
Stockholm Archives for the History of the Working Class Movement, a most
competent expert in his book Sancho Panzas Väderkvarnar (1963).
The abuse of the freedom of rural communities by hybrid city
masses was responsible for decay in Hellas as well as in Rome. For Plato
(Theaitetos, 172-173), freedom was the dignified independence of the
noble man. In his work The State (Politeia, VIII, 550, 557-558,
562-564), he criticised freedom as a slogan for city masses; an excess of such
freedom would hand over the state as well as the individual to an excess of
slavery. To a man of dignified freedom the guiding factor is merely truth
(Plato: Theaitetos, 172-173), which is always simple; to the unworthy
man, the guiding factor in freedom is gossip, slyness, flattery and persuasion
by means of confused and false proofs.
In this way freedom vanished towards the end of the
aristocratic Roman republic, with the extinction of the freeborn
(ingenui); under the Emperors the freedom of the freedman
(liberti), which was nothing less than self-restraint, started in the
capital and spread to all the cities of the Empire, a freedom from which the
last freeborn Romans could only withdraw, exchanging their earlier tradition of
participating in state life for one of isolation. The wiseman — Cicero once
wrote (de legibus, I, 61) — holds that what the masses praise so highly
is worth nothing. Horace (Carmina, I, 1; 2, 16, 39, 40), who had
experienced the transition from the aristocratic republic into the Caesarism of
the Emperors, favouring the masses, spoke of an evil-willed crowd (malignum
volgus). The behaviour of the freedmen in flattering the Emperors has been
described with contempt by Petronius, who originated from a family of the
nobilitas, the official nobility, in his Cena Trimalchionis. In
this satire one of the last freeborn Romans expresses his disgust, with the
superior calm of a man who looks towards decline without hope. In the year 66,
Petronius, hitherto popular at his court, was condemned to death by Nero.
The literature of the “free West” celebrated and praised by the
reviewers and critics of today’s newspapers, would probably be regarded by
Petronius as a literature of freedmen for freedmen. In particular it is just
those authors who are most praised today who promote with boring repetition
nothing less than the further decomposition of the spiritual and moral values of
the Indo-European. The newspaper writers praise the “freedom” of these “artists”
in contrast with the “aesthetic backwardness” of isolated doubters. To be
regarded as aesthetically backward is also the admonition of Horace: “Nothing
small and nothing in a low manner!”
After the ending of colonial rule it must be feared that the
populations of wide regions of the earth will behave as freedmen, all the more
so as colonial rule has destroyed what remains of the ancient ethical and social
orders of these populations; in other words, they will imitate large sections of
the youth of “cultured peoples”.
After every constitutional alteration and every upheaval since
the middle of the nineteenth century, the peoples of the west have lost more of
the freedom of the individual originally peculiar to their nature, and have had
to bear instead more subjection, more of “the insolence of office” (Shakespeare:
Hamlet, III, 1). Since this process took place gradually, the loss of the
freedom which was inherent in the spirit of Indo-European yeomen, the loss of
that freedom which although weakened and distorted, was still effective in the
political liberalism of the nineteenth century, has proceeded unnoticed, while
calculating opportunists have readily learned how to exploit officialdom or have
themselves obtained high appointment in government offices. As a result there
has been a gradual but powerful growth of authoritarianism in both the state and
political parties, and in the influence, exercised either openly or in secret of
moneyed people behind them.
The poet Paul Ernst (1866-1937), in his enthralling
Jugenderinnerungen (completed in 1929 and published in 1959), has
described the transition of his homeland from a land of rural craftsmen to an
industrial state accompanied by fearful losses in uprightness, solidarity and
mutual regard and confidence between men — a transition bringing with it an
increasing loss of freedom in which the younger men became more or less
willingly entangled. The father of the poet was obliged even at the age of nine,
to work in a mine in the Harz mountains as a “Pochjunge” with a weekly wage of
60 pfennigs. When twenty-two years old, he earned 2.40 marks per week; and from
1856, when he was in his twenty-third year, one Taler. The poet, his son,
succumbed just as little as did his father to the blandishments of Marxism which
appeared in his time; rather, he gave a warning of the universal subjection to
which socialist states would be reduced as had John Stuart Mill and Herbert
Spencer. The poet saw in Marxism a “path leading to a more terrible slavery than
the world had ever known” (pp. 289-290). He expressed the view that today a man
who wishes to avoid the embraces of such slavery, must so adapt his life that he
must place himself as far as possible beyond contemporary society, and must
remain completely isolated from contemporary influences.
The solitude of the individual was rejected in Germany by
mass-minded (Ochlocratic) National Socialism in favour of a Folk community of
urban masses, which also revealed the end of the Indo-European era in Germany.
But the person with understanding will realise, like Herbert Spencer, that the
loss of the freedom of the individual is unavoidable in all industrial
societies.
It is unfortunately true that amongst the peoples of the west,
the number of men who prefer freedom to a high standard of living has become
very small, and that men who are naturally freeborn (eleutheros,
ingenuus) and Paul Ernst was one, suffer from increasing patronisation.
In his Jugenderinnerungen (Memories of Youth, p. 312) Paul Ernst wrote
that his father had always been a free man despite his poverty, and his mother a
dignified woman, as befitted the wife of such a man.
There is a great need for men of the calibre of Paul Ernst, of
the kind of human breed whose dying out is being hastened today, if the loss of
freedom is to be noticed at all. Walter Muschg, Professor of Basle University,
in an address on the occasion of the Schiller celebrations, entitled
Schiller: The Tragedy of Freedom (1959), emphasised that freedom had “not
only vanished under dictatorships, but also in the so-called free countries.
Everywhere new power factors had formed which controlled the existence of men
and had produced invisible forms of slavery, before which our liberal
forefathers would have shuddered. . . . We are surrounded by Gessler hats, at
which no one takes aim. Present day man no longer knows what freedom is and
furthermore he no longer desires it. He wishes for comfort, for an effortless
enjoyment of life at the price of bureaucratic control for which he willingly
pays. The will to freedom has been succeeded by the longing for domination, for
release from self determination. From this longing . . . arise both open and
veiled forms of dictatorship.”
M. T. Vaerting, who went to North America, a land of apparent
freedom, when the National Socialist state in Germany became more and more
totalitarian to the extent, finally of mistrusting even the private sphere of
individuals who were incapable of mass existence — eventually came to the
conclusion, which she expounded in two books,44 that gradually all
states in Europe and North America were following the example of Soviet Russia,
and that they were on the road to the totalitarian mass state which can lead one
way only, to a super state under which freedom and human dignity are oppressed.
Thus she sees everywhere an increase in the power of the state
which will bring about the decline of man. Such a decline effected through the
increasing control of man by the State, will not be felt by the masses, who
demand security, but will be completed through the further extinction of
freeborn families, exactly as described and predicted by Walther
Rathenau45 in The Tragedy of the Aryan People, which Rathenau
saw as the greatest tragedy of the whole of human history. However, this
expiring race was, and is still, the race of Heraclitus and Sophocles, of Titus
Lucretius Carus, of that same Cato Uticensis, who preferred death to life under
the dictator perpetuus Julius Caesar; it was and is still the breed of
Giordano Bruno, Thomas Jefferson and Wilhelm von Humboldt, a breed which through
its inherited qualities is still capable of a brave, undaunted struggle for
dignity and freedom. Selbst ist der Mann: Rely on yourself!
Socrates once walked round the market in Athens, looking at the
quantity of goods on display, the luxury articles indicative of the high
standard of living of the Athenians — who were otherwise spiritually
impoverished — and he turned to his friends and said: “How many things there
are, which I can do without!”
The products of the mass media of our age, which will soon be
brought within reach of the remotest peoples on earth, at the cost of distorting
and replacing their native cultures by the spiritually-destructive technology
known as “world culture” will be renounced by the last true Indo-Europeans in
just the same way as Socrates renounced the wares displayed for sale in the
market place at Athens.
But to Indo-European man himself, the historic creator of
cultures from Benares to Reykjavik, we may truly apply the words of Hamlet:
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REFERENCES
1. HANS F. K. GÜNTHER
Rassenkunde Europas, 1929.
Die Nordische Rasse bei den Indogermanen Asiens, 1934.
Herkunft und Rassengeschichte der Germanen, 1935.
Lebensgeschichte des hellenischen Volkes, 1956.
Lebensgeschichte des römischen Volkes, 1957.
FRANZ ROLF SCHRÖDERGermanentum und Alteuropa, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, XXII, 1934, pp. 157 ff.
KARL J. NARRVorderasien, Nordafrika, Europa, Abriss der Vorgeschichte, 1957, pp. 60 ff.
Deutschland in vor- und frühgeschichtlicher Zeit, Handbuch der Geschichte, Vol. I, 1957, Section I, pp. 41 ff.
GIACOMO DEVOTOOrigini Indoeuropee, 1961.
2. BURKHARD WILHELM LEIST
Alt-arisches Jus gentium, 1889.
Alt-arisches Jus civile, 1892-6.
cf. Graeco-italische Rechtsgeschichte, 1884.
3. HANS F. K. GÜNTHER
Kleine Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes, 1933.
Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes, 1934.
WILHELM HAUERDie vergleichende Religionsgeschichte und das Indogermanen-problem, Germanen und Indogermanen: Festschrift für Herman Hirt, edited by Helmut Arntz, Vol. I, 1936, pp. 177 ff.
Glaubensgeschichte der Indogermanen, Part I, 1937.
F. HERTERDie Götter der Griechen, Kriegsvorträge der Universität Bonn, No. 57, 1941.
V. BASANOFFLes Dieux des Romains, 1942.
WALTHER WÜSTIndogermanisches Bekenntnis, 1942.
GEORGES DUMÉZILJupiter-Mars-Quirinus, 1948.
Les Dieux des Indo-Européens à Rome, 1954.
Déesses latines et mythes védiques, 1956.
L’Ideologie tripartie des Indo-Européens, 1958.
Les Dieux des Germains, 1959.
FRANZ ALTHEIMRömische Religionsgeschichte, 1951-53.
HELMUTH VON GLASENAPPDie Religionen Indiens, 1956.
4. ANDREAS HEUSLER
Germanische Religion, Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Vol. II, 1928, Sp. 1041 ff.
FRANZ ROLF SCHRÖDERDie Germanen, Religionsgeschichtliches Lesebuch, Vol. XII, 1929.
BERNHARD KUMMERMidgards Untergang, 1938.
ANDREAS HEUSLERDeutsche Literaturzeitung, Vol. XLIX, 1, 1928, Sp. 33 ff.
FELIX GENZMERHessische Blätter für Volkskunde, Vol. XXVII, 1928, pp. 217 ff.
VILHELM GRÖNBECHKultur und Religion der Germanen, 1937.
HERMANN SCHNEIDERDie Götter der Germanen, 1938.
ERIK THERMANEddan och dess Ödestragik, 1938.
MÜLLER-TRATHNIGGReligionen der Griechen, Römer und Germanen, 1954.
JAN DE VRIESAltgermanische Religionsgeschichte, 1956-7.
R. L. M. DEROLEZDe Godsdienst der Germanen, 1959.
TURVILLE-PETREMyth and Religion of the North: The Religion of Ancient Scandinavia, 1964.
5. ANDREAS HEUSLER
as 4 supra.
6. K. F. GELDNER
Die Zoroastrische Religion, Religionsgeschichtliches Lesebuch, Vol. I, 1926.
HERMANN LOMMELZarathustra und seine Lehre, Universitas, XII, 1957, pp. 267 ff.
Die Religion Zarathustras nach den Quellen dargestellt, 1930.
Von arischer Religion, Geistige Arbeit, I, 1934, No. 23, pp. 5-6.
Die Alten Arier: Von Art und Adel ihrer Götter, 1935.
H. S. NYBERGDie Religionen des Alten Irans, Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatisch-ägyptischen Gesellschaft, Vol. 34, 1938.
GEO. WIDENGRENIranische Geisteswelt, 1961.
OTTO VON WESENDONKDas Weltbild der Iraner, 1933.
7. WILHELM NESTLE
Griechische Religiostität von Homer bis Pindar und Aschylos, 1930, p. 113.
8. SIEGFRIED LAUFFER
Die Antike in der Geschichtsphilosophie, Die Welt als Geschichte, XVI, Vols. III-IV, 1958, pp. 175 ff.
HANS F. K. GÜNTHERLebensgeschichte des römischen Volkes, 1957, p. 307.
9. HANS F. K. GÜNTHER
Lebensgeschichte des hellenischen Volkes, 1956, pp. 157, 195-96.
10. R. A. NICHOLSON
Studies in Islamic Mysticism, 1921, pp. 162, 180-181, 184.
A Literary History of the Arabs, 1930, pp. 383 ff., 393-394.
EDUARD MEYERGeschichte des Altertums, Vol. I, 2, 1909, pp. 385-386.
11. WILHELM HAUER
Urkunden und Gestalten der Germanisch-Deutschen Glaubensgeschichte, 1940.
FRITZ BURIGottfried Kellers Glaube, 1944.
12. WALTER F. OTTO
Die Götter Griechenlands, 1947.
Theophania: Der Geist der altgriechischen Religion, 1956.
ELLISWORTH BARNARDShelley’s Religion, 1936.
13. AXEL OLRIK
Ragnarök, 1922.
STIG WIKANDERSur le fond commun Indo-iranien des épopées de la Perse et de l’Inde, La Nouvelle Clio, Vol. VII, 1949-50, pp. 330 ff.
Germanische und Indoiranische Eschatologie, Kairos, Vol. II, 1960, pp. 78-88.
GEORGES DUMÉZILLes Dieux des Germains, 1959, pp. 85, 92, 103.
14. HANS F. K. GÜNTHER
Platon als Hüter des Lebens, 1966.
15. WALTHER BAETKE
Arteigene Germanische Religion und Christentum, 1933, p. 40.
HANS RÜCKERTDie Christianisierung der Germanen, 1934, p. 20.
16. BODDHISATTVA ASVAGOSHA
A Life of Buddha, Sacred Books of the East, Vol. XIX, 1883, verse I, 52, p. 9, verse V, 1856, p. 270.
MAHAPADANA SUTTANTADialogues of Buddha, Sacred Books of the Buddhists, Vol. III, Part II, 1910, p. 36.
LAKKHANA SUTTANTASame series, Vol. IV, Part III, 1921, p. 138.
17. ALBERT CARNOY
Les Indo-Européens, 1921, p. 221.
18. MAX DEUTSCHBEIN
Individuum und Kosmos in Shakespeares Werken, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Vol. LXIX, 1933, p. 25.
cf. also Erik Therman, Eddan och dess Ödestragik, 1938.
19. WILHELM ENGEL
Die Schicksalsidee im Altertum, Veröffentlichungen des Indogermanischen Seminars der Universität Erlangen, Vol. II, 1926, pp. 45-70, 95-114.
JOHANNES MEWALDTDie tragische Weltanschauung der hellenischen Hochkulter, Forschungen und Fortschritte, No. 14, 1934, pp. 177 ff.
HANS NAUMANNGermanischer Schicksalsglaube, 1934.
WALTHER GEHLDer Germanische Schicksalsglaube, 1939.
WALTER F. OTTODas Wort der Antike, 1962, pp. 334 ff.
20. HANS RÜCKERT
Die Christianisierung der Germanen, 1934, p. 20.
21. WILLIAM JAMES
The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1907, pp. 78 ff., 127 ff.
22. GUSTAV NECKEL
Altgermanische Kultur, 1925, pp. 32-33.
HANS F. K. GÜNTHERDie Nordische Rasse bei den Indogermanen Asiens, 1934, pp. 26, 32, 111, 232.
23. ANDREAS HEUSLER
Altgermanische Sittenlehre und Lebensweisheit, Hermann Nollau: Germanische Wiedererstehung, 1926, p. 161.
24. VILHELM GRÖNBECH
Die Germanen, Chantepie de la Saussaye: Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte, Vol. II, 1925, p. 563.
KURT LEESEDie Krisis und Wende des Christlichen Geistes, 1932, pp. 405 ff.
25. HANS F. K. GÜNTHER
Rassenkunde des jüdischen Volkes, 1930, pp. 26 ff.
L. F. CLAUSSRasse und Seele, 1940, p. 146.
26. HANS F. K. GÜNTHER
Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes, 1934, pp. 236 ff.
Rassenkunde Europas, 1929, pp. 82 ff.
27. WILHELM HAUER
Die vergleichende Religionsgeschichte, 1936, p. 101 — see note 3 supra.
28. JULIUS VON NEGELEIN
Die Weltanschauungen des indogermanischen Asiens, Veröffentlichungen des indogermanischen Seminars der Universität Erlangen, Vol. I, 1924, pp. 100 et seq.
Chantepie de la Saussaye, 1925, pp. 18-19 — see note 24 supra.
29. VILHELM GRÖNBECH
in Johannes Edvard Lehmann: Illustrerad Religionshistoria, 1924, pp. 488-89.
See note 4 supra.
BERNHARD KUMMERSee note 4 supra.
30. KURT SCHRÖTTER & WALTHER WÜST
Tod und Unsterblichkeit im Weltbild Indogermanischer Denker, 1942.
ALBERT CARNOYLes Indo-Européens, 1921, pp. 228 ff.
PAUL THIEMEStudien zur indogermanischen Wortkunde und Religionsgeschichte, Berichte über die Verhandlungen der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, phil.-hist. Klasse, Vol. XCVIII, No. 5, 1952, pp. 35 ff., 55 ff.
31. GUSTAV NECKEL
Die Überlieferungen vom Gotte Balder, 1920.
RUDOLF MUCHBalder, Zeitschrift für Deutsches Altertum, Vol. LXI, 1924, pp. 93 ff.
JOHANNES LEIPOLDTSterbende und auferstehende Götter, 1923.
32. HANS F. K. GÜNTHER
Die Nordische Rasse bei den Indogermanen Asiens, 1934, pp. 40, 120.
33. HANS F. K. GÜNTHER
Rassenkunde des jüdischen Volkes, 1930, pp. 68 ff.
L. F. CLAUSSRasse und Seele, p. 117.
34. HERMANN OLDENBERG
Die Lehre der Upanischaden, 1915, pp. 39 ff., 44 ff.
PAUL DEUSSENDie Philosophie der Upanischaden, 1919.
35. CHRISTIAN AUGUST LOBECK
Aglaophamus, Vol. I, 1828, p. 412.
HERMAN DIELSDie Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Vol. I, 1951, pp. 113 ff., 129 ff., 217 ff.
36. PAUL DEUSSEN
Das System des Vedanta, 1883.
HELMUTH VON GLASENAPPDer Stufenweg zum Göttlichen, 1948.
37. HERMANN MANDEL
Deutscher Gottglaube von der Deutschen Mystik bis zur Gegenwart, 1934, pp. 19 ff.
Wirklichkeitsreligion, 1933.
38. ALFRED BIESE
Die Entwicklung des Naturgefühls bei den Griechen und Römern, 1882.
Die Entwicklung des Naturgefühls im Mittelalter und in der Neuzeit, 1922.
OTTO KÖRNERDas Naturgefühl in der homerischen Dichtung, Das humanistische Gymnasium, 45, 1934, pp. 119 ff.
JOSEF STRZYGOWSKIDie Landschaft in der nordischen Kunst, 1922.
39. HILDEBRECHT HOMMEL
Der Himmelsvater, Forschungen und Fortschritte, Year 19, 1943, Sp. 94 ff.
GIACOMO DEVOTOOrigini Indoeuropee, 1962, pp. 251-52.
40. MAX SCHNEIDEWIN
Die antike Humanität, 1897.
Humanitas, Realencyklopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaften, Supplement-Band V, 1931, Sp. 282 ff.
HANS F. K. GÜNTHERHumanitas, Führeradel durch Sippenpflege, 1941, pp. 158 ff.
41. WILHELM NESTLE
Griechische Religiosität vom Zeitalter des Perikles bis auf Aristoteles, 1930, p. 85.
42. BERTRAND RUSSELL
The Conquest of Happiness, 1953, p. 113.
LUDWIG WINTERDer Begabungsschwund in Europa, 1959.
43. CLAUDIUS FRHR. VON SCHWERIN
Freiheit und Gebundenheit im Germanischen Staat, Recht und Staat in Geschichte und Gegenwart, No. 90, 1933.
44. M. T. VAERTING
Europa und Amerika: Der Entwicklungsweg des Staates zum Überstaat, 1951.
Machtzuwachs des Staates — Untergang des Menschen, 1952.
45. HARRY GRAF KESSLER
Walther Rathenau, 1928, p. 43.
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