Spencer Heath Archive

Item 611

Penciling on notepad paper, an important unfinished essay

No date

 

CYCLING OF CIVILIZATIONS

IN ASIA AND EUROPE

 

Spencer Heath

 

The earth’s largest single area, the Asian continent gave to aboriginal man the greatest assembled variety and thereby the most accessible diversity of conditions for his own development into diverse racial forms and norms.

 

     As to the continent itself, its varieties and diversities range from its arctic to its tropic extremes and, within the mid-region, from its frigid to its thermal extremes. In altitude as in latitude, the diversities of environment and conditions tend to arrangement between the thermal extremes.

 

So it is also with the races of men. Man exists in a cycle of solar energy that enters his structure as nutri­tion in accumulated thermal form and in its return upon environment constitutes the energy by which he functions and lives. Now color (pigmentation) is an adjustment or defense against excess of solar energy in direct or non-nutritional forms. Hunger is due to internal underfunctioning. It prompts intake of energy organized in nutritional forms. But the animal metabolism and internal activity is not one hundred per cent efficient. A large part of the nutritional energy must be passed off as heat, just as an internal-combus­tion engine must be cooled. Thus, where the bodily surface must defend as by pigment against the impact of excess external energy, there the intake of nutritional energy must be limited and the metabolic and the dynamic energy be correspondingly low.

 

But where the bodily surface needs no defense but, on the contrary, its heat must be highly conserved, there the capacity for nutritional intake may enormously increase. The body now supplies itself with additional heat to keep it warm (instead of pigmentation and evaporation to keep cool), and the enormously increased functional and physi­cal energy may be looked upon as a by-product of the increased necessity for heat. Thus the need of heat increases the need of nutriment, the increase of nutriment supplies the needed heat, and this conversion of nutriment into heat sup­plies the physical energy both for the procurement of nutri­ment and of artificial means for the conservation of heat.

 

Thus it comes about that the external dynamics proceeding out of men is quantitatively inverse to the solar or environmental dynamics impinging directly upon them. High temperature, low energy; low temperature, high energy. This is true notably at the thermal extremes. Yet the highest developed men are found invariably within a broad middle range. Here there is less uniformity of heat or of cold, greater variability and diversity of climate, circumstances and conditions, and therewith a greater variety of races and greater variability among individuals within the race.

 

The human dynamic — uncultured force — has always run down-hill. In Asia as elsewhere conquest and rulership spring ever from the higher latitudes and from the higher altitudes, but not from nor yet upon the thermal extremes. Upon their coldest terrain the maximum energies of men are consumed in keeping them warm. They have but little power to conquer and command, and they have but little prosperity to be destroyed or despoiled; in their warmest climes they must keep their intake and output of energy at minimum in order to keep cool. They too have but little power to conquer and but little property to be destroyed.

 

All history, at least until the coming of world-wide communication and exchange, has been the story of peoples within that wide middle environmental range that approaches but does not include either of the thermal extremes. And this middle range for convenience may be divided into the cold and rugged lands and the warm and easy-living lands, the cold steppes and plateaus with animal-based nomadic way of life and the alluvial terrains with their chiefly agricultural and sedentary economies.

 

How such division came about is obscure, but it may be presumed that most men first lived where nature made it easiest to live, and here it may be presumed men were first ruled and enslaved, for there is no history of slavery as an established and maintained institution in any rugged land. Doubtless the bold or ruthless few enslaved the dull or docile many. But the bold would also revolt and wander into wilder lands, lands where they could not be captured or pursued, where nature would be less kind to men, where wits were sharpened by adversities, and where by mutual aid alone they could survive. Such was the likely origin in Asia of the nomadic world.

 

The history of Asia for her known thousands of years has been the interaction of peoples having these two con­trasting modes of life. On the one hand the masses of the easy lands /were/ chattel slaves to masters who were at once the tax slaves of monarchs and the agents of their power and will. These masses of men doomed to slave and to die under any change of masters or regime developed the slave virtues of slothful submission and fatalistic resignation while their masters and rulers became debilitated with luxury, vices and power.

 

On the other hand were the nomads, bold and adventurous, mobile and resourceful, wild yet free, cruel yet cooperative, consuming and destroying the natural bounty at every place of pause and so of necessity soon moving on. Out of this mode of life grew personal virtues and a strict morality and fidelity within the tribe or horde. Their leaders were such only in virtue of their leadership, not by appointment or election but by the test of performance. They had no masters to drive them as slaves to their labor or into battle with whips and knives /?/.

 

Political sovereignties are territorial within the metes and bounds of which they must be supreme and their populations settled and sedentary, and over their frontiers none may leave or enter without their permission. Nomads have leaders because they are on the march. All their property is movable. They claim no territory, nor do they respect any. They have no regard for real estate. They live only on the spoil of any land they traverse or invade. Such is nomadism in its native state.

 

     But when the nomad leader invades an effete political or slave state and finds there a richness of spoil that nature in the wild does not afford, and an organized sedentary population of permanent tax-payers and slaves, he leaves off his nomadism and settles himself and his followers as the political power in place of the rulers and masters whose power he has overthrown.

 

Such was the process of history in Asia through all the ages of nomadic power. The conquering nomads from the rugged terrain took possession of the political slave states, adopted their mode of rulership over sedentary tax-payers and slaves, became corrupted by adopting that mode of organization and life and became, in their turn, enervated and conquered and killed or enslaved.

 

Once a nomad conquered a territory and made himself chief ruler over its taxpayers and slaves he became a sovereign war-making power. Under such form of organization, he could not for long have any peaceable relationships with other sovereign powers. If he could refrain from further aggression he was still under the compulsion of preparation for a defensive and eventually a counter-aggressive war. And within his own frontiers he must increasingly tax and enslave in order to defend what he has and if successful at arms extend his sovereign power over additional territory, property and lives. This practice of warfare, aggressive or defensive, has been the policy of every Asian political power over its entire known past with conquest always moving from the rugged chiefly southward to the easy-living lands.

 

But from near the beginning of the Christian Era the North Asian nomads were deflected into wooded western lands in a movement that flooded nearly all of Europe and northern Africa and did not stop until it met a counter-barbarism in the Christian Crusades. The cause of this great movement westward is not positively known. It could have been popula­tion pressure upon a pastoral economy based on only the annual vegetation of vast treeless and burnt-over plains. It may have been deflection by the Great Wall and other mili­tary or natural barriers to the south. But certain it is that these vast hordes entered a whole continent in which, both north and south, a mixed mode of life, both pastoral and agri­cultural, could be carried on.

 

But this great western movement of the early Christian centuries did not find Europe wholly uninhabited. For perhaps a thousand years before, there had been Aryan peoples in the wooded mountains, plains and vales of southeastern Europe. For unknown thousands of years earlier the fertile crescent stretching from the Euphrates to the Valley of the Nile had been occupied by a long succession of Semitic empires and slave states whose ethnic origins are unknown. And these or kindred Semites had fringed the Mediterranean peninsulas and shores before the Graeco-Roman Aryans from the north superseded them in a strife that did not end until Carthage was laid waste by rising Rome.

 

Thus a virile southern current of the nomadic Asian flood, chiefly Aryan, displaced the Semitic Mediterranean powers but not without adopting their Asiatic and Egyptian style of political slave states under the weight of which Greece and Rome each at last and in turn went down and new Aryan Barbarians reveling in their ruin laid in Medieval Europe the same foundation for the modern warring sovereign­ties that are now a menace to the very existence of civilized mankind.

 

But not all the westering free barbarians came under influence of Asian absolutism through the politics of Greece and Rome. The Ugrian, Finnish Baltic and Scandinavian branches occupied such rugged terrain as to forbid both slavery and war as the dominant institutions and yet of such variety and vicissitudes as to stimulate intelligence and growth of the practical and in lesser degree the esthetic arts, For the esthetic arts are founded on leisure from necessi­tous or otherwise compulsive labor and the freedom of a rich variety of options from among which to choose high.

 

We can imagine roughly a line of social latitude extending westward from somewhat below Finland, the Baltic shores, Denmark and the British Isles above which line free institutions tend to prevail and below which, except in the high altitudes such as the Swiss and other mountain lands, the tendency is towards absolutism based on the coercive polity and codes of Rome. North of this line the free barbarians found no easy-living lands, no decadent empires to conquer, no institutions of slavery, tribute and taxation to adopt and thereby their own freedom to compromise, their own institutional tendencies to corrupt. Only under institu­tions less political, less corrupting and more free could men live and not perish in those harsher lands. Yet Britain far­thest west and bathed in vapors from the seas was an exception. With nature milder here to man, his institutions could be more harsh. Here, as in the sunnier lands, men could at least survive, even under Roman laws and arms, and Britain, from beyond a wall of waves, was last to be invaded by free barbar­ian hordes, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes.

 

The circumstance was unique. Hard pressed by Germanic valor, the Roman emperor transferred his British garrisons to reinforce his legions in the region of the Rhine and abandoned Roman Britain to her helpless fate — a migrant invasion of the sea raiders that already periled her “Saxon Shore.” This increase of Roman resistance on land doubtless raised the Germanic westward pressure both on land and by sea to the now evacuated and undefended Britain’s “Saxon Shore.” Be that as it may, it is certain that these invaders, of all Barbarians and unlike those who roved and raided southward and on land, had been as little exposed to Roman politics and institutions as they had been to Roman arms. As they overcame what resistance remained, they did not adopt any existing forms of organiza­tion but slowly evolved institutions that were peculiarly their own — and that in a brief five hundred years came to flower in their Alfredian Renaissance when Continental Europe was in its darkest age.

 

As migrants by sea they were perforce organized mainly as working crews. This in large measure dissolved their tribal organization based on family and on gens. Authority came to rest less upon birth and more upon leadership and valor and capacity for effective performance and cooperation. Their primary organization became not the privileged and exclusive family but the community group occupying a place of common defense under a land-lord provid­ing the land with defense and other common needs in exchange for voluntary returns as payments of rent. His relationship to others was not as ruler but as provider. Contract, and not privilege or status, was the basic relationship, and all parties so related were fundamentally free. Anglo-Saxon England was the first and only terrain…⁶¹¹

 

                                     /Breaks off/