In which the need for ethnology is substantiated and the author sets out his views on ethnogenesis, without his line of reasoning, to which the rest of the treatise will be devoted, and in which the author will lead the reader through a labyrinth of contradictions.
The Grounds for Scientific Quest
Time and history. History is the study of processes taking place in time, but what that time is nobody knows. There is nothing surprising in that. Fish probably do not know what water is, because they have nothing to compare it with. And if they chance to be in air they do not have enough time to compare it with water.'
V.I. Vernadsky deemed death as the separation of space and time, 1 because inert matter, in his opinion, was timeless. He was seemingly right, but historians are concerned only with the processes of dying in which the now becomes the past. But is the past real? There is not unanimity of opinion on that among modern scholars.
There is a very common view that there is no past. Giovanni Gentile wrote:
"In times past men were born and thought and labored... but all these are long since dead like the flowers on whose scent and beauty in their lives they feasted, or like the leaves which they saw growing green in spring or sere and fallen in the Autumn. Their memory lives; but a world remembered, like the world of dreams, is nothing; and remembering no better than to dream."2
The historian, in short, knows well enough that the life and meaning of past facts is not to be discovered in characters or inscriptions, or in any actual relics of the past; their source is in his own personality.3
One cannot agree with that, but let us wait to dispute it, since others, too, have written on this theme. Dilthey and Gardiner were even more categorical. They, in fact, denied history, affirming that its conclusions were unreliable since historians were inevitably subjective, and therefore could not be dispassionate. 'The primeval cell of the historical world is the happening in which the subject finds himself in an active relation of life with his surroundings.'4
Gardiner has said:
"There are no absolute Real Causes waiting to be discovered by historians with sufficiently powerful magnifying-glasses. What do exist are historians writing upon different levels and at different distances, historians writing with different aims and different interests, historians writing in different contexts and from different points of view."5
Modern historians, it would seem, have provided these thinkers with the material for such pessimistic conclusions, the same historians aptly described by Anatole France:
"Do we write history? Do you imagine that we attempt to extract the least parcel of life or truth from a text or a document? We publish texts purely and simply. We keep to their exact letter... Ideas are crotchets."6
I do not wish to defend that position but surely the dispute is in fact about it. So let us introduce the needed clarity.
The dispute, if one began it, would be based on a philological misunderstanding. A whole series of tasks, quite different from one another though interconnected, are called history now. (1) The publication and translation of ancient sources is a necessary task, but only yields raw material. (2) Historical criticism, sifting out the deliberate and sometimes unconscious lies of authors of antiquity, is the production of semifinished goods. (3) Comparison of the material won about what was previously accumulated is already the product, but not yet a consumable one. Then there is (4) the interpretation of facts on the plane of the problem posed and (5) the posing of new problems arising at the juncture of sciences. The philosophers mentioned above, and many like them, were sorry essentially about the fact that they could not use the obtained raw material without further processing, which is actually impossible, but there is no other way and will not be. The philosophers are right about something else - not everyone can find this road.
The simplest generalizations, it seems, call for such mental élan and heat of emotions that thought melts and takes on a new form, astonishing the candid reader at first but then convincing him. The point is not what course of thought or choice of arguments a thesis is proved by; that is a craft, which it is necessary to know, of course, but is not enough to know. The point is why a new thesis is sometimes discovered and demonstrated. That is a mystery of the psychology of creation that the Greeks ascribed to the muse of history Clio, who reminded us that the skepticism of the philosophers was unjustified and that the past was not personal experience and not a dream. Because the present is only a moment, instantaneously becoming the past. There is no future, because no acts that determine consequences of some sort are completed, and it is not known whether they will be in the future. The future can only be gauged statistically, with a tolerance that deprives the calculation of practical value. But the past exists; and everything that exists is past, since anything completed then and there becomes the past. That is why history studies the only reality, which exists outside us and in spite of us.
Talk about the unreliability of subjective perception is idle chatter. Reliability is always necessary within definite limits, beyond which it becomes meaningless. It is impossible and unnecessary to calculate the distance from Moscow to Leningrad to an accuracy of a millimeter. It is the same in history, but it has its own specifics of the posing of the problem.
It is reasonable to study processes (social, ethnic, and cultural) rather than nuances of the sensations of historical personages. The degree of accuracy in collecting primary information is small, but when long-lasting processes are traced chance errors cancel one another out, so that we can get a description meeting the needs of our practical task, viz. to understand an epoch. And the wider the coverage the greater the accuracy.
With that posing of the matter there is no sense in increasing the number of petty details above the necessary, because they create cybernetic 'noise'. And the principle of the selection of facts is prompted by the task posed.
Since I start from the point that an ethnos is a natural phenomenon in its forming, the basis for studying it can only be the philosophy of science, i.e. dialectical materialism. Historical materialism sets itself the goal of disclosing the laws of social development, i.e. relates (as Marx put it) to the history of people and not to the history of nature which lies in men's bodies. And although both these 'histories' are closely interwoven and interconnected, scientific analysis calls for refining the angle of vision, i.e. the aspect. The historical material we draw on is our information archive and no more. It is necessary and sufficient for the purposes of analyzing it. Marx expressed himself clearly about this:
"History itself is a real part of natural history and of nature's becoming man. Natural science will in time subsume the science of man just as the science of man will subsume natural science: there will be one science."7
We are now on the threshold of the creation of this science.
When it becomes a matter of synthesis, the approach to a problem is correspondingly altered. But, of course, analysis precedes synthesis, and there is no need to jump the gun. Let us say simply that the elements of a scientific materialist science will remain inseparable in it. Having agreed on the meaning of the terms and character of the method, let us pass to the posing of the problem.
In declaring that an ethnos is a biophysical phenomenon, that drive is an effect of the energy of the animate matter of the biosphere, and that consciousness, and equally the history of culture linked with the biosphere, play the role of rudder and not of the motor, we have not resolved the problem posed but have only noted the means of tackling it. But let's not rush things; let us see whether there is an analogous posing of the problem in contemporary science. There is! Karl Jaspers proposed his own solution. 8 Let us familiarize ourselves with it.
A philosophical-historical conception has prevailed in Western Europe (and only there) since the fifth century A.D., i.e. from Augustine to Hegel, that regarded the historical process as a single line with a beginning and an end, i.e. with completion of its sense. A religious comprehension of history as a striving for the Absolute arose initially from this conception, and then an atheistic 'religion of progress'. Jaspers' views are the latest version of this theory.
Jaspers singled out from history an 'axial time' when, between 800 and 200 B.C., spiritual movements arose parallelly in China, India, Persia, Palestine, and Hellas that shaped the type of man that allegedly has existed to the present time. In China these were Confucius and Lao-tzu, in India the Upanishads and Buddhism, in Iran Zarathustra, in Palestine the prophets, in Hellas Homer and the great philosophers. All the world religions and philosophical systems arose from them, and other peoples, like the 'pre-axials', are unhistorical and can only become enlightened from the 'axial' peoples and their successors, because there was an 'awakening of the spirit' and 'ultimate questions of being' were posed in the 'axial time', questions of death, finitude, tragic guilt, and the meaning of human existence. The 'axial time' was, as it were, the root of all subsequent history.
Jaspers did not explain how the parallelism he noted arose in the development of cultures independent of each other, and from what. Neither the invasion of China, India, and Europe by nomad Arians nor the social conditions in those countries, can provide a satisfactory answer. The genesis of the phenomenon remains an open question, but it is an undoubted fact that a 'philosophy of faith' arose at that time, and in those regions, which provides a real link, to Jaspers' mind, between nations and cultures.
I shall stop here, because the philosophical part of the doctrine of existentialism, discussion of the present and future, and attempts to explain the sense of history, can only be interesting when the structure's foundation is quite firm. And that seems even to be doubtful.
First of all, this 'axis' is very broad. Six hundred years is a period into which much could be squeezed; in addition, it is clear by comparison that immense changes took place during that time, with different results for different countries. China, for example, was united by the Han dynasty, and Hellas and Persia were conquered by 'unhistorical' barbarians - Macedonians and Parthians. Something is not right.
Let us read further attentively. Jaspers compared how the period of progressive development was completed: in China the Ch'ing Empire (221-202 B.C.), the Maurya Kingdom in India, the Roman Empire, and the Hellenistic states. But in the third century B.C. the kingdoms of the Diadochi in Egypt, Syria, Macedonia, and Bactria were by no means powerful, while Rome was exhausted by the Second Punic War. The Maurya Kingdom in India broke up after the death of Asoka in 226 B.C. Was it because there was disintegration in the West but integration in China? If we compare China with the age of Augustus the chronological assumption is as much as 300 years. Isn't that a lot?
The idea of an 'axial time' as a source of spiritual life is refuted by the history of ancient America; the Mayas, Toltecs, and the forerunners of the Incas in the Andes (the Tiahuanaco culture) were not, after all, inferior to the ancient Chinese, Indians, Persians, Hebrews, and Greeks. And it is quite untrue that China withstood the onslaught of the Mongol nomads, rather the contrary.
One can also find more grounds for doubt, but that is not the point. Jaspers' conception is the most substantiated attempt to understand history as a boon bestowed on primitive savages by these five peoples that made the 'breakthrough' or 'leap', and were born anew as it were. This is an arrangement of the views not only of St. Augustine, the source of all the heresies of the Middle Ages, but even of the old Judaic thinkers who created their doctrine of being the God-Chosen people. With a theory of ethnogenesis as a process occurring everywhere, it is impossible to agree with Jaspers. But disagreement is not enough. Let us try and get evidence from the contrary, but not from an academic survey of the trifles it is easy to drown any dispute in, but by a graphic survey of historical reality in the millennium since the 'axial time'.
To begin with, let me note that there actually was the parallelism of the development of the several cultures of antiquity noted by Jaspers, but it was not the sole parallel, and not so fruitful one for singling out the Chinese, Hindus, Iranians, Hebrews, and Greeks in a special category of people; and it faded like other drive explosions of ethnogenesis. That is my counter-thesis. Now let me proceed to check it.
The view from up above. Feelings for other ages swirl in the breast of the historian, but when they surface they are converted into thoughts that hover like ghosts, pale and weightless, incapable of penetrating the consciousness of the reader -the unknown friend for whom they are born.
How is one to give them the primary force of the passion that once generated them? Let me try an old dodge-an image-and may the reader forgive me for beginning a scientific treatise with a lyrical digression.
Imagine that a space vehicle has come close to Earth carrying supermodern observational instruments that record the details of a strip of the Old World of the surface between 30' and 50' north latitude. America, let us assume, lies in unilluminated part of the planet at the time of approach. The observations are fed into the spacecraft's computer, which rejects data not of interest to the spacemen, leaving only what is connected with human culture. Natural conditions will be taken into consideration only when it becomes clear during the work that they are needed in order to understand the genesis of culture.
The first thing the newcomer will see will be the geographical areas of different independent cultures connected with the peculiarities of relief and climate of the regions of the Eurasia and of those of North Africa contiguous to it. The cultural types themselves will be blurred, as for the earthly historian who is concerned with early antiquity. Before the spaceman there will then be outlined the contours of Egypt and Babylon of the second millennium B.C., but not yet of China and India. In the first millennium B.C. he will see, in addition to those countries, Hellas and Rome, but the main, central part of the continent will open up to his instruments only from the beginning of our era. He will then be able to begin a global analysis of his historical observations.
Try and imagine yourself in the place of this newcomer from outer space, on the assumption that he is anthropomorphous and thinks in the categories of earthly logic.
The stream of fight coming to meet him from Earth will bear with it quick panoramas with intervals (breaks) for the time when the territory interesting him is on the other side of the planet rotating on its axis.
Assume that historical panoramas are fixed every 300 years for, say (arbitrarily), the second, fifth, eighth, and twelfth centuries A.D. The sum total of the knowledge so obtained will correspond approximately to the level of knowledge of an educated person but not of a professional, i.e. of the dilettante (who loves, as we know, to pass judgment on the history of mankind, suggesting without grounds of any kind that it is much easier to do that than to interpret problems of organic chemistry).
But we must not judge by preconceived opinions of any kind. Dilettantism can also be useful, or rather fruitful. So let us go the whole hog with the hypothetical astronauts and at the same time check the expediency of the following method, i.e. let us compare logically impeccable conclusions drawn from instantaneous observations (from the standpoint of the scale of history) with what in fact happened in the 300-year interval.
First observation. Second century A.D. Following the Sun. A dim meandering strip on a yellow loess plain, and broad blue ribbons on a green cover of jungles -these are the Huangho and Yangtse rivers and between them the great China of the late Han dynasty. The fields are tilled, the peasants are harvesting millet in the north and rice in the south. Silk garments of various colors and fanciful patterns are being made in workshops. Clay huts surround the luxurious palaces of grandees, built of wood and bamboo, and buried in green gardens with light arbors and pavilions.
In the imperial palace plump eunuch officials keep business accounts on a precious material-paper, and military commanders come to them with bows and gifts, begging to be given profitable appointments. The eunuchs take bribes, knowing quite well how short the giver's career will be. Here a former lucky one is being led to execution for having robbed the inhabitants of the province he governed, getting money for the patrons. No one intercedes for the person being executed because grim soldiers armed with halberds and arbalests - Tanguts or Hunni from the borderlands - are lined up on both sides of the executioner's block. On the contrary, there is merriment that there is one oppressor less. The robbed Chinese rejoice, not suspecting that the emperor's current favorite will ask him to appoint her brother to a profitable place, and that he will begin new extortions.
Only among the Confucian scholars can one note the distress on the faces, because they foresee the future calamities arising as a rule with the universal venality and decline of education, and also, perhaps, among the Taoists whose teaching is banned on pain of death. But the Taoists are bold people; in the mountain villages they not only forecast the weather, and treat the sick, but also whisper the peasant youths that the 'Blue heaven of violence' will be succeeded by the 'Yellow heaven of justice'. The authorities, however, pay no attention to such trifles.
The spacecraft's computer processes these data and proposes a forecast: the economic system is firm, there are no dangerous neighbors, the export of silk, unprofitable for China, may be stopped, since the gold obtained for it flows into the hands of favorites who, foreseeing disgrace, hide it in the ground so as to provide for their children. And the astronauts draw the logical conclusion that before them is a stable society with a rich, developing culture, that the boundaries of the Han Empire will be extended to the north and west so as to enlighten the savage Hunni and Tibetans by an advanced civilization, and that the drawbacks of the bureaucratic system will be eliminated by the spread of education, because that is profitable for the state and consequently should lead to universal good.
I shall not blame the astronauts for ignorance of the dialectic of ethnic history. Let me say, only, that within 50 years the population of China will decline from 56 million to 7 500 000, that all the possessions 'beyond the Wall' will be lost, and people will forget to think about culture.