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Typos — p. 9 (Part I): recevons [= reçevons]; p. 12 (Part II): physisical [= physical]


Feelings masquerading as thoughts
in the modern world


by
Anthony M. Ludovici

The South African Observer 8.9, 1963, pp. 9–10;
8.10, 1963, pp. 11–12; 8.11, 1963, pp. 14–15


- p. 9 -
I

The most deplorable features of our political and social life to-day were bound to come about, could indeed hardly have been prevented from the moment when, at the behest of certain European wiseacres, the gullible masses, high and low, accepted the principle that majority judgments must by right prevail as if their preponderance signified a superior sum of Thought.
        For no connoisseur of humanity in the mass could pretend to ignore that Thinking — i.e., the use of reason in pondering any question — is among the rarest of mankind's activities. Rare among the educated and well-informed, how could it be common among the ignorant, the mentally indolent and undisciplined?
        Every candid friend of humanity knows that in judging any issue the difficulty is not only to master the relevant facts, but above all to distinguish Feeling from Thought. For the most persistent of false pretences is that by which Feeling tries to pass itself off as reasoned reflection in every judgment.
        On this account one's constant comment, whenever a question of any consequence is left to the decision of the emotional and unqualified crowd, high and low, is and always must be: "How unfair!" Because it is essentially unfair to leave to the multitude weighty decisions which sooner or later must affect their destiny. — Hence the cynical inhumanity of all Democracies!

Enemies of their species

        Not easy to forgive, therefore, are the first popularisers of the Heresy that majority judgments should determine political and social policies, and Locke and his disciple Rousseau may thus be regarded among the enemies of their species.
        Their political philosophy relied, as we now perceive, not merely on a serious error in Psychology, but also on a grave error in Logic. For what sense was there in denying Man the right to use his force to impose his will on a fellow-being, as Locke did in Book II. Chap. III, 19 of his TWO TREATISES OF GOVERNMENT (1689), if in Chap. VIII, 99 of the same Book, he was able to assert that "Whosoever, out of a state of Nature unite into a community, must be understood to give up all the power necessary to the ends for which they unite into society to the majority of the Community"? Does Force cease to be Force when instead of being exerted by a paltry 13 stone of flesh and bones, it is exerted by hundreds of tons of the same compound constituting the crowd?
        So that, apart from the psychological error already noted, we have here a palpable error in Logic. Everybody knows, of course, that although the majority in a democracy do not as a rule enforce their decisions on the minority by an act of physical violence, implicit in their right to make their decisions prevail is the knowledge that, if it came to a trial of strength, they, by virtue of their superior physical Force must overcome their numerical inferiors.
        Rousseau, blindly emulating his English Master, inevitably fell into the same errors of both Psychology and Logic. Professing to abhor Force as a means to Power over one's fellow-beings, he was yet able in discussing "le pacte social" to maintain that "Chacun de nous met en commun sa personne et toute sa puissance sous la suprême direction de la volonte gÉnÉrale, et nous recevons en corps chaque membre comme partie indivisible du tout." (LE CONTRAT SOCIAL, 1792, Ch. VI.: "Each of us places his person and all his power under the supreme direction of the general will, and in our corporate capacity we accept each member as an individual part of the whole.")
        Thus, when F. L. Lucas declared in THE ART OF LIVING (1959, Chap. I), that "The Age of Reason owed some of its most fatal mistakes to bad psychology," he was guilty of an understatement; for the truth is that the Age of Reason owed some of its most fatal mistakes also to villainous Logic.

Fatal consequences

        It is true that the English never have shone as logicians, so that Locke's error may not surprise us. But Rousseau belonged to a nation better endowed for observing the rules of sound reasoning, and his oversight is therefore less pardonable.
        We do not need to be unduly shrewd at once to perceive the fatal consequences of Locke's and Rousseau's crudely materialistic claim that Right and Wisdom necessarily reside where the scales register the largest tonnage of flesh and bones; for modern Cosmic events have at last taught us that, owing to the ease with which skilful propaganda on the part of interested and influential parties may sway whole multitudes without their being aware of what has happened, the doctrine of majority rule has placed in the hands of every unscrupulous and determined self-seeker in control of publicity channels, the means whereby the pathetic apathy, mental indolence, indiscipline and sentimentality of crowds may lead to any "majority decision" a skilled wire-puller may desire. The result may be called "Public Opinion"; but even Locke and Rousseau, could they have witnessed many recent expressions of such alleged "Public Opinion", would hardly have been able to suppress their doubts concerning their much too hasty conclusions about majority rule.
        For when we have once witnessed how insensibly the mental indiscipline of multitudes, or their indolence and indifference alone, often lead to their meek acquiescence in changes completely reversing their former convictions and preferences, we can but wonder how a publicist of Arthur Bryant's fame could ever have had the simplicity to claim that "the English have never been easy to govern" (THE NATIONAL CHARACTER, 1934, p. 42.) What with their fundamental particularism which inclines them to remain unmoved by any political issue that does not appear to affect their private interests, and their rooted adherence to the rule of "Chacun pour soi et Dieu pour tous" (Each for himself and the Devil take the hindmost), the truth, as Professor Salvador Madariaga properly maintains, is that "the people of England are an easily led nation " (ENGLISHMEN, FRENCHMEN AND SPANIARDS, 1937, p. 156).

Example of irresponsibility

        Let us take as our first example of this irresponsibility and levity of "Public Opinion" the ease with which, in the hysterical and emotional days of 1918, Feminine Domination was finally imposed upon the nation by Law, without a thought having been given to the inevitable consequences of the change, and

- p. 10 -
without a murmur of protest from the vast majority of men.
        For here again, a profound error in psychology was made by the leaders of the nation without an inkling of its enormity ever occurring to the male majority in the electorate.

Era of anarchy

        I was alone in pointing out that the dominance of women must culminate in an era of ramping anarchy, and I made myself extremely unpopular for so doing. I saw this dominance increasing long before Parliament granted women the suffrage. For to anyone like myself, who was convinced that mind and body cannot be separated, must always be in harmony, and therefore that somatic are an infallible clue to mental attributes, Woman, with her deep bodily affinities to the child — affinities recognized and enumerated by all sexologists and gynaecologists — must display many of the child's mental characteristics and therefore retain even in adulthood the child's inveterate tendency to observe the Pleasure, rather than the Reality, principle. (See, for instance, Dr. A. Heilborn: THE OPPOSITE SEXES, 1927, Chap. I; Dr. B. A. Bauer: WOMAN, 1927, Bk. IV, Chap. V; Havelock Ellis: MAN AND WOMAN, 1926, Chap. III; and above all Dr Oskar Schultze: DAS WEIB IN ANTHROPOLOGISCHER UND SOZIALE BETRACHTUNG, 1920, I, ii, iii, who concludes his exhaustive examination of the question with the words "Das Weib bleibt in seinem ganzem Körper mehr Kind als der Mann." (In her whole being, woman remains more of a child than man).
        That feminine dominion must consequently lead to a general decline in discipline, law and order, should have been recognized by all well-informed leaders of society. Yet we have seen the era of indiscipline and laisser aller come about, with all its accompanying symptoms of increasing crime, raging juvenile delinquency and general social anarchy in all classes of the community, without anyone in authority having so far revealed the remotest inkling of its causes.
        Over two centuries ago, Montesquieu certainly maintained on historical grounds that "Une nation où les femmes donnent le ton est une nation perdue" (PENSÉES DIVERSES DE MONTESQUIEU, 1858: "Where women set the tone a nation is lost.") But who to-day pays any heed to ancient wisdom?

Begun to suspect

        Much too late, certain English people, staggered by the increasing anarchy of the Age, have at last begun to suspect that female dominion may not be unconnected with the conditions they deplore. But how many supported me when over a generation ago I prophesied that this outcome of Feminism was inevitable?
        Thus in a letter to the TIMES (27.9.61), Colonel O. G. Brody said: "The decline in moral standards during the last 50 years has been coincident with the gradual emancipation of women. Is it not time we asked ourselves how far it is consequent upon it?" Two days later, to my surprise, a woman — Elizabeth Scott Daniell — wrote saying, "Obviously Colonel Brody's theory in to-day's issue of the TIMES should be looked into very closely." (TIMES, 29.9.61). Whilst more recently, the Duchess of Bedford has asked: "What would the Suffragettes have thought to-day? Would they be sorry? That the emancipation of women . has led us into our present problems I have no doubt. . . . Thank you Suffragettes!" (SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, 19.11.61).
        But, alas! all this is not only too late, it is also rather beside the point. For the rot had set in long before the Suffrage Laws of 1918, and later, put the official seal to changes that had long been on the way and were already well established before World War I.
        As an example of a radical alteration in majority opinion and practice, however, effected overnight, without any mass protests, the advent and ultimate triumph of Feminism in England, by which women's tastes, methods, weaknesses, and above all reckless hedonism set the tone and shaped all our standards and values, must remain historically one of the most egregious example of Majority Judgments ever produced by insidious, persistent and largely mendacious propaganda.
        In my next article, I shall examine a similar and equally astounding volte face engineered in so-called "Public Opinion" by skilful wirepullers, aware of how majorities may be induced to bleat views which, however untraditional and newfangled, are considered desirable by the Powers that be.
        I refer to the staggering, recent and relatively sudden change that came over the Majority, in England at least, concerning Racial Discrimination.



- p. 11 -
II

The surreptitious yet radical modification and ultimate reversal of ancient well-founded sentiments and beliefs in the masses, high and low, of Europe and especially of England, by the deliberate action of interested and unscrupulous parties bent on effecting a complete revolution in so-called "Public Opinion", which is often injurious, should prove a sufficient refutation of the alleged sanctity of Majority Judgments.
        Yet there are still very few modern people to whom the idea of the Right of Majority Judgments to prevail, does not seem so self-evident as to constitute a mere platitude of political science. Such has been the triumph of rank materialism in an Age constantly boasting of its respect for "Spiritual Values".

Startling change

        To men of my generation, who have watched some of the more fundamental changes in "Public Opinion," which ever since Victorian days have come over the English world, only to leave the listless and gullible masses smiling once more over a further victory of their Majority Judgments, no change has been more startling, sudden and apparently complete, than that which surely and insidiously has spread throughout the nation on the question of racial discrimination.
        From a people once highly conscious of the qualities, virtues and tastes distinguishing them from other races of men, and anxious to husband and preserve these attributes from the adulteration that would certainly follow any random mating with other peoples, the English almost overnight have been transformed into a population in which not only every vestige of racial consciousness and pride have been extinguished, but in which such sentiments are looked upon as a barbaric perversion, as a symptom of moral turpitude.
        From the days, not so long ago, when in India the English, in daily contact with a people different enough from themselves to stimulate a jealous regard for their peculiar racial heritage, were well aware of what that heritage meant in the form of generations of sedulously garnered qualities, of countless feats of self-overcoming and disciplined conduct in the light of their national codes of honour, decency and taste — the English, I say, displayed a natural and instinctive aloofness from the native population about them; and those by whom this attitude was not maintained, the few who flouted and violated the convention, were instantly disgraced and ostracized.
        What was the meaning of this vigilant custodianship of their peculiar racial heritage by a people like the English? How was it but a counterpart of a similar convention observed by the Hindus and Moslems about them? What prompted these races, daily confronting each other, to eschew the adulteration of their blood and therefore of their patrimony of ancestral virtues, aptitudes and sensibilities, by mingling it with that of strangers?
        Was it simply a sort of snobbery, an unjustifiable sense of intrinsic superiority, a foolish prejudice springing from feelings wholly uncharitable and mean, as our modern ignorant multitudes would have us believe? Was it due to the White Man's unswerving refusal in India to accept the belief now current in all English homes, that the Chinaman, the East Indian, the Negro, the Polynesian and the Australian aborigine, are merely Europeans with differently coloured skins? Could it have been the outcome of the Englishman's blind insistence on the fact that there was more than a matter of superficial pigmentation involved?

Slipshod psychology

        There is so much slipshod psychology rife to-day and so much false coinage among the principles on which our crowds are reared, that few people are equipped immediately to detect the flaw and the fraud in the propaganda aimed at undermining and extirpating the instincts of aloofness and ethnic distance which naturally preserve the integrity of any human stock in whom time, the special conditions of their life, and the protracted observance of peculiar codes of taste, honour and behaviour in general, have produced a specific type that answers in appearance and manner to the ideals of that stock's ancestors.
        What does the average man know of the laws of inheritance, of how accurately Nature builds up in

- p. 12 -
any close group a sum of characteristics which, being the product of centuries of obedience paid to ancestral codes, ends in establishing an heirloom of native qualities which is transmitted with relatively faultless regularity and becomes the hall-mark of a race?
        It is not merely inaccurate, it is actually malicious to interpret, as most modern people have now been persuaded to do, the natural sense of difference — that instinctive feeling of being the heir of a peculiarly precious heritage, which racial differences evoke — as nothing more than an unfounded superstition satisfying private pride and empty prejudice. It has as little to do with any conscious illusions about superiority as the action of a cat that arches its back at a dog. It is above all a natural feeling of difference, compounded of an instinctive sense of having something precious to lose if there should be any mixture with an alien identity.

Irreparable loss

But only if we reflect what happens when this instinctive feeling is flouted and we are induced to mingle our heirloom of long-garnered tastes, virtues and propensities, in short our type and character, with those of an alien group, do we recognize how wise, how rational and well-founded was our instinctive aloofness. Because we are then confronted with an irreparable loss, the sort of devastation that follows a rude territorial incursion.
        For every one of our long-cultivated qualities has its own corresponding impulse and momentum, impelling us to the kind of behaviour and acts of choice our ancestors found salutary for our mode of life and its conditions. And all these impulses and motivations have their organic roots enshrined in our ganglia and brain.
        Then, suddenly, with the rude incursion into our stock of a similarly cultivated but different set of hereditary qualities, together with their appropriate impulses and promptings, the whole situation changes. We no longer hear or respond to any clear single voice in our breasts, but to a chorus of discordant voices. We have at a stroke become creatures of chaos, in whom no dominant note rises above the pandemonium in our being. Our will is no longer unhesitating; our direction no longer certain.

Direst nonsense

        This being so, to claim as millions of modern ignoramuses with lumps in their throats are now doing, that the peculiar type representative of a race is merely a matter of outward appearance, no more than a disparity of pigmentation, or an epidermal eccentricity, is therefore the direst nonsense. It is the one form of modern idiocy which alone should justify a certificate of insanity.
        This is not to imply that the incursion of strange hereditary elements into our blood, necessarily means the access into our stock of factors essentially inferior. It may and often does mean this. But it is not essential to the argument against mongrelisation. What is essential is the fact that there has occurred an act of adulteration, of inextricable mixture, which in practice produces confusion and invincible conflicts within us. From being a harmony we become a chaos; from the ability to say Yea or Nay unhesitatingly before every alternative, we become neurotics, destitute of any well-defined choice and taste. We are the prey of every wind, good or ill, that sweeps across our path. As the outcome of differently-conditioned heirlooms of long-cultivated attributes, we are spiritual harlequins in whom every colour vies with its neighbour.
        Most moderns are more or less chronic neurotics in this sense, and the psychologist's routine diagnosis of their abnormality reveals that its cause is Conflict. It is incurable because it is not an infection or an acquired disability, but an inborn disorder inaccessible to treatment. You might as well try to integrate a mosaic as to simplify the condition.

Safeguard of well-being

        "But", the reader may say, "are we then all mongrels to-day. And if so, which are the races whose disparities have been joined in us?"
        We moderns are not necessarily the product of any alien races that can now be precisely defined. Although many of us may be such hybrids, in our modern Western populations which have for so long been fluid and unstable, the majority are what for lack of a better term we may call "Type-mongrels" — that is to say we are members of a heterogeneous horde, and our parents, although believing themselves of the same race, were not only disparate themselves, but also the offspring of parents who were aliens as to type, and so on for generations back. So that, since physique and character cannot be separated, we are as a general rule descended from couples each of whom was probably already a chaos incarnate at marriage and who, owing to their disparity, could only have offspring who were an aggravation of their parents' harlequin condition.
        This offers at least one explanation of the prevailing neurasthenia which is so characteristic of the modern Age.
        So much then for the infinitely precious instinct of aloofness which, in both animals and Man acts as a custodian of the cultivated attributes of a particular race and preserves them from the most irreparable loss any creature can suffer — the loss of its wholeness, its ethnic identity, and therefore of its well-defined physical type and mental health. To deride this aloofness and brand it as a sin and a perversion, is one of the most deplorable of modern rackets and aberrations.
        In my next article I hope to show how in a physisical sense also, this instinctive aloofness is both a safeguard and a sine-qua-non of psycho-physical well-being.



- p. 14 -
III

The fundamental trouble about the democracies of the West, led by England, is their domination by majorities who never doubt but what a pleasant thrill down their spine constitutes a thought.
        If, therefore, by dint of persevering inculcation you can get them to believe that it is noble, praiseworthy and decent to hold a certain opinion about any matter, however complicated and beyond their grasp it may be, they will eventually respond with that spinal thrill and give you their "Majority" support unstintingly, whenever they are invited to demonstrate their approval of the opinion in question.
        If to make assurance doubly sure, you can contrive to connect the converse of the opinion you wish them to accept with ideas branded as base, or preferably "bestial"; if, for instance you can show that any failure to champion the view you wish them to adopt necessarily indicates a mind corrupted by Nazi, Fascist, or even Imperialistic doctrines, then the hope of hearing them bleat the notes you expect becomes a certainty you can stake your life on.
        Such has been the history of the success — at least in England — of all those emotional slogans appealing directly to sentiment: NO COLOUR BAR! DOWN WITH RACIAL DISCRIMINATION! SKIN DOES NOT DISPROVE KIN!

Grievous consequences

        In my previous article, I attempted to show the grievous consequences, at least, in the sphere of mind and character, that are bound to follow and have indeed followed the practical application of such doctrines. I shall now try to illustrate briefly what these consequences are in the realm of Man's physical constitution and bodily well-being. For here again the ignorance of the masses high and low of Europe on the matter of breeding and concerning what happens in the process of human procreation, is so profound, and what little passes as knowledge about these matters is usually so wide of the mark that it is not surprising that a mendacious and unscrupulous minority should have at length succeeded in extirpating all those instinctive safeguards which, in well-defined ethnic groups, have hitherto protected them from the evils of miscegenation.
        In the very vagaries and hazards of hereditary transmission Nature herself would seem to have contrived laws which contained an anticipated refutation of modern Man's sophistries concerning the alleged harmlessness of random mating and mongrelization. For let no one for a moment forget that the havoc likely to be caused by Nature's laws of inheritance can be severe only in a heterogeneous population; and that then they may be so grave as to make health and well-being — let alone smooth and uneventful functioning — impossible.
        Let us therefore see what happens when a couple of human beings procreate their kind.
        The one essential fact to be grasped about this business is that the innumerable parts contributed by each parent to the formation of every child, are not selected in any such order as necessarily to ensure the harmony of its structure — that is to say, they do not reach the child as of set purpose with the object of producing a composite whole in which every part exactly suits the rest, unless — and here we come to the crux of the whole process — unless the respective parts in question derive from parents who are homogeneous, or of the same type and constitution.

Inherited independently

        The reason of this is that, in the process of reproduction, the parts derived from either parent are, in innumerable cases passed on and inherited independently. One part only of an organ or of the skeleton will come from the father while the other part will come from the mother. Whole combinations of parts of the head and body may thus be inherited at haphazard from either of the two parents; and if, as in the case of a nose or jaw, for instance, the parents are disparate in build and constitution and the parts each contributes independently are consequently incompatible, the result, although it may not prevent life, may mar appearance, impair smooth functioning, and, in some cases, where the incompatibilities affect deep-seated organs, may be the cause of chronic and often obscure disorders. We have only to think of the tragic consequences that may arise from certain incompatibilities in the components of the blood stream in order to appreciate how radically Nature herself is opposed to indiscriminate mongrelization.
        It is this peculiarity in the transmission of human traits that explains how it is we so often start with surprise on beholding the plainness and asymmetry of offspring whose parents, though disparate, are each in his or her way comely and possessed of well-drawn features. But we cease to wonder at these anomalies when we learn that at least "four hereditary factors inherited independently" may determine the shape of a nose. Differences in the shape and length of the ear are controlled by many independent hereditary parts. The chin also is probably inherited independently of the parts constituting the angle of the jaw.
        When parents, however personable in themselves, happen to be disparate, the result of all these in

- p. 15 -
dependently inherited parts, many of which are incompatible, inevitably produce conflict and disorder, which in terms of external appearance we call ugliness. But this state of disorder and conflict is, of course, not confined to external features. It pervades the whole body of the child. Every organ and frequently every separate part of every organ may thus become a patchwork of discordant factors.
        Unless, therefore, the two sources from which the child derives its structure are approximately uniform, it cannot be free from certain disproportions and disharmonies. These may be grave or trivial. But it is important to remember that they are bound to occur.

Phenomenon observed early

        The phenomenon was observed fairly early by workers in dentistry. It was found, for instance, that it was often necessary to correct the crowding of teeth due to a child's inheriting its dentition from a father with a widely arched jaw, and inheriting its mother's V-shaped palate which was too narrow to accommodate the teeth in question.
        Miss Fleming found that sometimes the child inherited its palate shape from one parent and the shape of its lower jaw from the other, a condition which led to severe disharmony. In one case, the upper jaw was V-shaped and small and the teeth on it were small, whilst the lower jaw, inherited independently of the rest of the bones of the mask, was large and widely-arched, with large teeth "so that these slipped over the outside of the upper lip."
        Investigations carried out on other parts of the skeleton, organs and musculature, revealed that similar combinations of incompatible parts pervaded the whole system of children born of couples disparately proportioned and designed. It would take too long to enumerate the many grosser disharmonies that may thus arise. But when we remember that, whether serious or slight, such disharmonies cannot fail to occur, it is both dishonest and misanthropic to persuade mankind that the law of the independent inheritance of bodily parts is not an implicit and flat denial levelled by Nature herself at the modern European Movement against Racial Discrimination. For we know now that even the disparities between parents of the same nation and race will produce the very same conflicts in their offspring which result from racial differences.

Elusive and undetected

        So often are the disproportions and disharmonies elusive or undetected, so often do they lead only to faint disorders (if ugliness may be considered a faint disorder), that there has been a tendency for both medical men and the lay public to overlook them.
        When, however, we remember that even in the crossing of tall and short parents, an investigator like Davenport was able to speak "of large men with small internal organs and inadequate circulatory systems, both of which conditions tax the organism". (See HEREDITY IN MAN, 1929 by R. Ruggles Gates); that the frequency of disease in Lapp and Norwegian hybrids has been traced by Mjoen "to large hybrids inheriting their pancreas from the smaller race" (VOLK UND RASSE, 1928), and that diabetes has been traced by the same investigator to congenital disharmonies, we can no longer with any pretence at candour question the value of the instincts of aloofness and racial discrimination which hitherto have protected differentiated human groups from mixing their blood.
        One does not need to travel far in any European country to-day in order to see with one's own eyes, from the faces, figures and general looks of many of the inhabitants, especially in the large cities and towns, that they are the results of reckless breeding policies; and it is idle to search for other deep-seated causes of our prevailing state of more or less acute morbidity, our increasing toll of mental disease, delinquency and crime, our growing disorder and anarchy (aggravated by the anarchy resulting from feminine domination), whilst refusing to recognize in the low breeding and the random jumbling of all types, sizes and pigmentations in our modern populations, which is fast turning the old races of the world into a rabble of mongrels, the probable major cause of most of the unrest, confusion and unpredictability of modern people high and low.
        In America, where miscegenation has reached its apogee, the results of these reckless breeding policies have long been giving us a warning which we should have heeded. But mobs are not given to sober reflection. Nor can they be expected to be moved by principles which they would have difficulty in understanding. They are at the mercy of any one who can bring tears to the eyes of their womenfolk and blushes of indignation to the cheeks of their men. And, in the modern movement against racial discrimination there has unfortunately been no lack of these preachers of maudlin sentiment who know how to exploit the emotions of the ill-informed majorities of the world.
        Quem deus perdere vult, prius dementat. One can only pray that the world may recover its sanity before it is too late.

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