271. Civilization, Race, and the Future
Culture may be independent of race; possibly is wholly so. But culture must be carried by races of some sort; and it may be of interest to consider whether the sweep of culture history reveals certain races as the most favorable carriers or as inherently constituted to be producers and dispensers of civilization (§ [44-46]).
On the whole, the greatest share of culture production has fallen to Caucasians. The art of Upper Palæolithic Europe, the laying of the foundations of modern civilization along the Nile and Euphrates six or seven thousand years ago, the more special ancient efflorescences like that of Crete, not to mention most of the advances of the last twenty-five hundred years, all fall to the account of the white race.
The part of the Mongoloids must not be underestimated. Even if the foundation of Chinese civilization prove to be largely western, its main structure is native, and the alien elements that flowed in during the last three thousand years have been thoroughly adapted to this structure. The fact that derivative civilizations like the Japanese have succeeded in reaching a high degree of organization and refinement argues still further for the vigor of Chinese culture. Then, the East Indians, another Mongoloid branch, have shown a fair power of assimilation. In the past two thousand years they may be said to have accepted and digested at least as much of Hindu and Mohammedan civilization as the North Europeans took over from Mediterranean sources between 1500 B.C. and 500 A.D. Finally, the achievements of the American Mongoloids in Mexico and Peru must be given heavy weight because they appear to have been made in utter isolation, without the stimulus of contact or import, and on the basis of nothing more than a late Palæolithic or earliest Neolithic culture.
The share of the Negroids in the higher advances has been small. Africa, to be sure, lies off to one side from the great Eur-Asian axis, and like southern India and Arabia has suffered from constituting almost a blind alley. Yet central Africa is no farther from the Mediterranean than is northern Europe. East Africa lies open to Egypt which six and five and four thousand years ago represented the apex of civilization. Yet Negro Africa to-day possesses scarcely more culture elements of Egypto-Babylonian origin than remote Scandinavia had absorbed by 500 B.C., and far fewer than Scandinavia had in 1000 A.D. It is hard to believe that this difference is due wholly to desert and jungle and tropical heat.
There is a parallel in the Oceanic Negroes. The Australians may be disregarded in this connection, both on account of the isolation of their continent and the doubt whether they are to be reckoned as a branch of the Negroid stem. But the Papuans and Melanesians are undisputedly Negroid and far less touched by influences of higher culture than the adjacent East Indians. It may be only geographic accident that writing and iron and kingship and Hindu and Arab religion traversed the Oceanian islands as far as the brown Mongoloids inhabited them, but stopped dead at the threshold of the blacks. Even the brown Polynesians, much more remote in the central Pacific than the Melanesians, possess more elements that are presumably traceable to Asia—such as their cosmogony, genealogies, kingship.
It is of course not fair to argue from cultural accomplishment to racial faculty unless all times and parts of the world are considered equally, and not safe to interpret the evidence too rigorously then. But the consistent failure of the Negro race to accept the whole or even the main substance of the fairly near-by Mediterranean civilization, or to work out any notable sub-centers of cultural productivity, would appear to be one of the strongest of the arguments that can be advanced for an inferiority of cultural potentiality on their part.
Yet the weakness of correlation of race faculty and civilization, except in the most general way, can be driven home to North Europeans and North Americans as soon as the relative parts played in culture history by the several Caucasian divisions are examined. On the ground of long continued lead in productivity, of having reared the largest portion of the structure of existing civilization, the Mediterranean branch of the Caucasian race would have to be awarded the palm over all others. To it belonged the Egyptians; the Cretans and other Ægeans; the Semitic strain in the Babylonians; the Phœnicians and Hebrews; and a large element in the populations of classic Greece and Italy, as well as the originators of Mohammedanism. With the Hindus added as probably nearly related, the dark whites have a clear lead.
The next largest share civilization would owe to the Alpine-Armenoid broad-headed Caucasian branch. This may have included the Sumerians, if they were not Mediterranean; comprised the Hittites; and contributed important strains to the other peoples of Western Asia and Greece and Italy.
By comparison, the Nordic branch looms insignificant. Up to a thousand years ago the Nordic peoples had indeed contributed ferment and unsettling, but scarcely a single new culture element, certainly not a new element of importance and permanence. For centuries after that, the center of European civilization remained in Mediterranean Italy or Alpine France. It is only after 1500 A.D. that any claim for a shift of this center to the Nordic populations could be alleged. In fact, most of the national and cultural supremacy of the Nordic peoples, so far as it is real, falls within the last two hundred years. Against this, the Mediterraneans and Alpines have a record of leading in civilizational creativeness for at least six thousand years.