Taken from : http://www.frithjof-schuon.com/racism.htm
Frithjof Schuon: Racism, Patriotism and Nationalism
The Transfiguration of Man, Chapter: "Usurpations of Religious Feeling"
The sacred character of a nation depends, not on the sanctity of its citizens,
this is obvious, but on the traditional integrity of its regime; what makes it
impossible to equate a secular State with a "Holy Land" is precisely the
confessionally "neutral" and therefore heterogeneous and profane character of
modern civilization. There are two idolatries which are incompatible with the
sacred character of a nation: one is civilizationism, the other is nationalism;
the former, which is "pagan" and worldly in essence, dates from the irruption of
Prometheanism that was the Renaissance, and the latter, which is secular, racist
and democratic in essence, dates from the French Revolution, which itself was a
kind of Renaissance but in vulgar, not aristocratic mode. Now it is precisely
these two frameworks, "civilization" and "fatherland," that many people lay
claim to in the name of tradition, without realizing that this involves more
than one contradiction: firstly, and this is essential, religion is something
sacred and thus cannot fit in with entirely profane ideologies and institutions;
secondly, "civilization" would have itself essentially objective, since it is
rationalistic and scientistic, whereas the nationalist and racist "fatherland"
on the contrary is subjective by definition, whence an absurd and hypocritical
mixture of scientism and romanticism.
Profane patriotism improperly mixed with religion is a luxury which is all the
more useless in that it substitutes itself for a normal patriotism, and all the
more pernicious in that it fatally compromises the prestige of religion. Here it
is a case of two religions being confused in fact, one of them true and the
other false, and this doubtless explains to some extent the reluctance shown by
Heaven in coming to the aid of a tradition which has already been betrayed in
various ways by its own adherents. According to nationalistic and "Jacobin"
patriotism, the fatherland never commits a crime, or nothing is a crime if it is
done in the name of the fatherland; or again, if it does act badly, it is a
crime to reproach it for this.(5) The fatherland-nation is erected into a
transcendent value, and the patriotic sentiment of others is possibly trampled
under foot, even while an unsullied "loyalty" is still expected of them; one
despises foreign peoples, but one still wishes to be liked by them. What we
reproach chauvinistic patriots for is certainly not their consciousness of the
real values of their country, but their blindness toward those of certain other
countries it is a question of political and sentimental interest and even
toward the most elementary rights of other peoples, whereas the said patriots
erect these same rights into a universal law and make of them a principle of
life. This brings to mind those so-called "peace treaties," conceived in the
name of "self-determination," which replace ancient oppressions by new ones
while at the same time maintaining such of the past subjugations as do not
inconvenience any of the signatories.
5 But it is never wrong to proclaim aloud, or to carve in marble, the tale of
other peoples' misdeeds, taking them out of their context of circumstances and
without taking into account the laws of collective psychology lying behind them,
in any given case.
Castes and Races, Chapter: "The meaning of Race".
In order to understand the meaning of races, one must first of all realize that
they are
derived from fundamental aspects of humanity and not from something fortuitous
in nature. If racism is something to be rejected, so is an anti-racism which
errs in the opposite direction by attributing racial difference to merely
accidental causes and which seeks to reduce to nothing these differences by
talking about inter-racial blood-groups, or in other words by mixing up things
situated on different levels. Moreover, that the isolation of a race may have
contributed to its elaboration certainly does not mean that this race can be
explained in terms of its isolation alone, nor that the isolation was fortuitous
and thus something which might not have happened.
Again, the fact that there is nothing absolute in nature and that races are not
separated in completely watertight compartments in no way means that pure races
are not to be found as well as mixed ethnic groupings. Such an opinion has no
meaning for the simple reason that all men have the same origin and that
humanity as a whole often wrongly referred to as the human raceconstitutes
one single species. Racial mixtures may be good or detrimental according to the
case: mixing may "aerate" an ethnic stock that has become too "compact," just as
it may bastardize a homogeneous group endowed with precise and precious
qualities. What is never understood by those who have a passion for racial
purity is that there is a greater qualitative difference between the psychic
heredity of different natural castes even if the race be the same than
between that of members of the same caste of different races; fundamental and
personal tendencies have more importance than racial modes, at any rate insofar
as the major races or their healthy branches are concerned, and not degenerate
groups.
To have a Center, Chapter: Survey of Integral Anthropology
As for the question of physiognomy, there are not only types peculiar to the
races, there are also what may be termed "astrological" types, which are found
everywhere and which can coincide with given racial types; so much so that one
cannot in every case determine whether a given type is of a racial or
astrological origin. One may well note, for example, that the Nordics are tall
and dolichocephalic, yet there are necessarily pure Nordics who are small and
brachycephalic, for the simple reason that the same typological possibilities
are manifested in all the racial frameworks, independently of races and regional
elaboration. This is precisely what certain racists are unaware of, or wish to
be unaware of:(4) according to them, all the great works of humanity are due to
the Nordic race which, it would seem, is present everywhere; if they observe, in
China for example, tall individuals with long faces, they claim that Vikings
or the ancestors of the Vikings passed through there, and they explain all the
achievements of Chinese civilization, above all the creation and expansion of
the empire, by the presence of Nordic blood. They are unaware of the fact that
in each race repetition of certain types is due, not to mixtures, but to the
homogeneity of mankind and to the ubiquity of the same typological
possibilities, not to mention the role of astrological types, the universality
of the temperaments, and other factors both diversifying and repetitive.(5)
4 Such as Chamberlain, Gobineau, Gunther and others. It is not the Scandinavians
or the Germans who invented Nordic or Nordist racism; no race or people is
responsible for it.
5 Don Quixote and Sancho Panzo are both or could be Mediterraneans; they
represent a human opposition which, precisely because it is human, is found in
all races. It would be ridiculous to claim that the "knight of the woeful
countenance" is Dinaric because he is tall and bony, and that his squire is an
Alpine because he is short and stocky.
To have a Center, Chapter "To Have a Center"
The question of normal genius, unconditioned by any cultural abuse, allows us to
pass to the following considerations, which have their importance in this
context. The racist argument that the whites, and among them the Europeans, have
more genius than other races, obviously loses much of its value to say the
least in the light of what we have said about humanism and its consequences;
because it is all too evident that neither a hypertrophy nor a deviation
constitutes an intrinsic superiority. Still, when considering genius under its
natural and legitimate aspect, one has a right to ask whether this phenomenon is
also met with among peoples without writing, given the fact that they do not
seem to have any such examples to offer; we reply without hesitation that genius
lies within human nature and that it must be possible for it to occur wherever
there are men. Obviously, the manifestation of genius depends on such cultural
materials as are at the disposal of a racial or ethnic group; since these
materials are relatively poor among the peoples in question, the manifestations
of genius must be all the more intangible and exposed to oblivion, except for
legends and proverbial expressions.(37)
37 "Not every man is the son of Gaika," the Zulus say, evoking the memory of a
particularly gifted and glorious
chief, but who has disappeared in the mists of time.
Castes and Races, Chapter: "The meaning of Race".
It will have been gathered from what has been said above that for us the
question is not: "What is our racial heritage?" but rather: "What are we making
of that heritage?" To talk about a racial value is, for the individual, quite
meaningless, for the existence of Christ or of the Vedantic doctrine adds
nothing to the value of a white man with a base nature any more than the
barbarism of certain African tribes takes anything away from a black man of
saintly soul; and as for the effective value, not of a race, but of an ethnic
atavism, this is a question of "spiritual alchemy," not of scientific or racist
dogmatism.
In one respect the metaphysical reason for races is that differences cannot be
merely qualitative as in the case of castes; differences can and must also arise
"horizontally," from the point of view simply of modes and not of essences.
There cannot be only differences between light and darkness, there must also be
differences of color.
If each caste is in some way to be found in the other castes, the same thing
can be said of races, for the same reasons and apart from any question of racial
admixtures. But besides castes and races there are also four temperaments, which
Galen relates to the four sensible elements, and the astrological types, which
are related to the planets of our system. All these types or possibilities are
present in the human substance and form the individual by determining him in
many different ways: to know the aspects of man is one way of better knowing
oneself.
Races exist and we cannot ignore them, less than ever now that the time of
closed universes has come to an end and with it the right to purely conventional
simplifications; in any case what it is above all important to understand is
that racial determination can only be relative, man thus determined never
ceasing to be man as such. The modern movement towards uniformity, which causes
the world to become smaller and smaller, seems able to attenuate racial
differences, at any rate at the mental level and without speaking of ethnic
mixtures. In this there is nothing surprising if one reflects that this
standardizing civilization is at the opposite pole from any higher synthesis,
based as it is solely on man's earthly needs; human animality provides in
principle a rather facile ground for mutual understanding and favors the
breaking down of traditional civilizations under auspices of a quantitative and
spiritually inoperative "culture." But the fact of thus depending on what gives
mankind a "low level solidarity" presupposes the detaching of the masses, who
are intellectually passive and unconscious, from the elites who legitimately
represent them and in consequence also incarnate both the tradition, insofar as
it is adapted to a given race, and the genius of that race in the most lofty
sense.(22)
22 If we write "elites" in the plural it is not because we believe in the
existence of some other elite besides that which is intellectual or spiritual
without a foundation of truth and thus intellectuality no spirituality can exist
but solely in order to show that the elite includes modes and levels which run
through a people as arteries run through a body; if the elite is first of all
sacerdotal in substance, it is nonetheless true that sections of the elite are
to be found at all levels of society, just as inversely, there is no sacerdotal
body without its Pharisees, but this fact in no way abolishes the normal
hierarchy.
Christianity and Islam, Chapter: Alternations in Semitic Monotheism
Note 16: The prejudice which reduces the ethnic and cultural substance of the
Catholic Church to the Mediterranean world alone is at the root of a number of
fatal errors: to begin with, insufficient account was taken in Rome of the needs
and rights of the Germanic soul Protestantism was the reaction to this and
thereafter, Catholic nationalists and racists of Latin culture have obstinately
refused to understand that there is no Western Christianity without the Germanic
world, and that to exclude this world from Christianity or from Western
civilization is to destroy the one as well as the other, or the one along with
the other; indeed this has already come about to a large extent. Moreover, it
should not be forgotten that the Renaissance, and later the French Revolution,
were Latin, not Germanic misdeeds; to each his role, for good and for ill.