General Introduction to the Series
In the last article on this blog I stressed the need for people in the Anglosphere to “draw from their own well”. By this I mean that we should draw, as much as is possible, from sources developed by our own people, or at any rate within our intellectual tradition. This article will be the first instalment of a series in which I cover a number of important figures whose ideas can be drawn upon to develop a distinct folkish theory for the Anglosphere, and England in particular. Along the way, I will continue to write articles on other topics.
Life and Work of Arthur Keith
In the first half of the 20th century, the name of Arthur Keith (1866-1955) would have been well-known in Britain. He was a prominent physical anthropologist who had done important work in the study of non-human primates, as well as co-discovering the sinoatrial node, which is responsible for the beating of the heart, in 1906. He wrote numerous books, such as A Manual of Practical Anatomy (1901), The Antiquity of Man (1915), Race as a Political Factor (1931), and others. Clearly, much of his work will have been superseded by subsequent developments. However, Keith wrote much that would be of interest to the contemporary ethnonationalist or folkist. Today we will focus on one particularly useful contribution made by Keith rather late in his career, when he was in his 60s.
The Place of Prejudice in Modern Civilization
By 1930, Keith’s professional reputation was firmly established. In addition to his scientific discoveries and the success of his books, he had been knighted in 1921, received an honorary doctorate from the University of Leeds, and belonged to several internationally renowned scientific societies. It was not so unusual, then, for him to be elected that year to the position of Lord Rector of the University of Aberdeen, where he had received his Bachelor of Medicine back in 1888.
In line with tradition, Keith delivered a rectoral address to the students that year, but he chose an interesting theme: “The Place of Prejudice in Modern Civilization”. Two things made this thesis strange to his listeners. Firstly, was prejudice not the enemy of civilisation? Secondly, wasn’t part of the purpose of a university to eliminate prejudices in the minds of its students, and encourage reason instead? Throughout the course of his lecture, Keith would explain why this was not so.
His address was timely, as the conflict between universalism and nationalism had come to the fore in the 1920s and 30s. The Great War was still fresh in many people’s minds. The League of Nations had been founded in order to encourage cooperation between peoples. But since the War, nationalist movements had been gaining steam: the Fascists in Italy, the National Socialists (among a number of other movements) in Germany.
As a biologist, Keith had wondered as to why these sentiments kept reappearing despite the best efforts of altruists and humanitarians. He spent years studying racial and tribal variations, and came to the conclusion that the root of these variations lay, not in geographic separation, but in what he called “the tribal spirit”. This spirit consisted, in brief, or favouring one’s own group and having an aversion to others. The question Keith then poses is: are such prejudices to be stamped out, or are they useful in some way? To answer this, we inquire into the nature of human beings, and the development of this nature in prehistory.
Keith begins by noting that there are two categories into which the “mental manifestations” of human beings can be grouped: the head, and the heart. The head, of course, refers to reason. The heart refers to “our feelings and passions, our hopes and fears, our likes and dislikes”. Neither of the two is wholly dominant or absent—we can only speak of the preponderance of one or the other. Together, they might be considered as two chambers in a parliament, with the head being the upper chamber and the heart the lower chamber. In modern civilisation the head ought to keep the heart in check. However, those who call for the elimination of our prejudices are being hasty, and not considering their possible value. As a Darwinian, Keith believed that mental tendencies so widespread and so fundamental to life must have an evolutionary purpose.
This insight that prejudice may be fundamental, and not possible to eliminate even if we want to was shared even by pre-Darwinian thinkers. For example, Thomas Carlyle noted, in Sartor Resartus:
But indeed man is, and always was, a blockhead and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider. Prejudice, which he pretends to hate, is his absolute lawgiver; mere use and wont everywhere leads him by the nose.
Not only Carlyle, but Adam Smith—the great darling of many classical liberals and conservatives today—observed in his 1759 book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, that the Creator had endowed human beings with sentiment for 1) the preservation of the individual life, and 2) for the welfare of human life in the mass. Man’s destiny has not been entrusted to his reason alone, but to his instincts and prejudices also, which guide him where reason often cannot.
To really understand how fundamental these prejudices are, we are taken back to prehistory, when people were organised into small tribes or clans. Although this may seem a long time to us, it is a blip in evolutionary terms, as evolution operates over a very long timescale, and thus we cannot have changed so much in biological terms over the brief history of what we call civilisation. In our prehistoric state, Keith asserts, Nature had arranged things for the purpose of “the production of new and better breeds of men”. Each tribe, indeed, was an evolutionary experiment.
Keith uses the metaphor of a football team to explain what life was like in that time. All men were organised into competing teams (tribes). Their uniforms consisted of their phenotypes. Deserters from the team were shunned and branded as traitors. What’s more, the preference for one’s own team and the antipathy towards the other did not have to be manufactured, but occurred naturally. Under these conditions, it would have been imperative to have an attachment to territory also. A tribe that did not fiercely hold onto its territory would swiftly lose it to other tribes who, if they had the tribal spirit, would not govern in the conquered tribe’s interests.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of the tribal man was laid out so well by Keith that we should not summarise, but let him speak for himself:
Every tribesman had a dual personality; he was one person to his tribe; to the rest of the world quite another. All were Barrie-Macconochies or Jekyll-Hydes. To his fellow-tribesmen our tribesman was kind, unselfish, loyal, and affectionate; the moment he thought of or dealt with those outside his tribe he became hard-hearted, treacherous, and cruel. He was idealistic, but his ideals were for the aggrandisement of his own people and the undoing of all rival tribes. Faith, hope, and charity resided in his heart, but the field of their activity was confined within the narrow limits of the tribal frontier. Within these limits he religiously observed the ten commandments; outside them he habitually broke each one of them. If his fellow-tribesman killed one of an alien tribe, that, in his eyes, was an act of heroism, but if his friend were slain by an alien enemy, then he viewed the act as one of foul murder. The tribal heart had two standards of justice—one which held within the tribe, the other which was applied to those who were outside it. The tribesman listened to slanders cast upon rival tribes with equanimity, but the slightest aspersion on his own touched him to the quick. He had a peace heart and a war heart; in the twinkling of an eye the one replaced the other.
Why this dual mechanism? Simply put, because if all we could do was hate and had no regard for anyone else’s wellbeing, we would not be able to form and maintain tribes at all, or even the barest subsistence; but if we loved all human beings as brothers, there would be no separation into the “evolutionary cradles” that Keith speaks of, and hence no evolutionary progress. If new and favourable characteristics—mental or physical—were to develop among some individuals in a population, they would have to be given time to proliferate in that population: immediate mixture with distant groups would disturb the process.
Subsequently, these original tribal arrangements were broken down by technological and economic developments. With the development of agriculture, an expansion of population became possible, new specialised trades developed, and settlements were established that became commercial centres. Peoples had to maintain some relations with each other in order to acquire resources that they did not have in their own territory, and interdependence began to develop. Nations and empires replaced the small tribes and clans of the past (even though the latter sometimes persisted quite late even in European countries such as Scotland). This did not result in the abolition of the tribal spirit. It was simply transferred to a larger entity.
Clearly, Keith argues, the old manifestation of the tribal spirit would have the potential result in constant war between peoples. In the age of conflicts on the scale of WWI, this was not acceptable. Something had to be done. How then could the tribal spirit be adapted to the needs to the modern world?
Some had proposed as a solution that our natural feelings of kinship could be extended to humanity as a whole, so that we could think of all men as brothers. The creation of the League of Nations itself was, Keith argues, the result of a desire for an “untribal world”, or perhaps a world in which there would only be one tribe. In effect, this would be an abolition of the tribal spirit.
World peace might sound like a commendable aim. Indeed, it has seemed so obviously desirable to many that they have been blinded to the potential cost of such a scheme. Keith points out that people could not be made to see all men as kin except through the systematic mingling of the blood of all of the worlds peoples until they were roughly the same. This necessitates the destruction of the “racial inheritance” of all of the subunits of the species. As Keith argued, both the head and the heart revolt against such a high price. For my part, I would add that such a project is not even possible of attainment. We see in many Latin American countries that, despite extensive miscegenation, racial distinctions, hierarchies, and antagonisms still exist, even between groups that are themselves mixed-race. Most likely, all we would do through mingling of the peoples is pay the cost of the loss of our inheritance and not even achieve our coveted aim of world peace.
Naturally, Keith says, there is a cost to maintaining the tribal spirit, namely the constant possibility of war arising from tribal or national antagonisms. But war itself can (on occasion) be prevented by compromise or good diplomacy, and it seems unlikely that the mingling of peoples would stop wars, as we have argued above. In any case, we ought to think of the benefits of cultivating the tribal spirit: self-reliance, faith, pride, commitment to collective goals, and the creation of distinctive customs, literature, music, etc.
Clearly, then, it is a better option to maintain our prejudices, but allow our reason to keep them in check when needed, since when indulged to excess, they can lead to enormous violence and destruction. (As can the desire for “world betterment”, we might add.)
Keith closes by citing a line from the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid:
As far as the intention of Nature appears in the constitution of Man, we ought to comply with that intention and act agreeably to it.[1]
Rebelling against our nature does us no good. We can only learn to work with it: “Under the control of reason, prejudice has to be given a place in the regulation of human affairs.”
Summary
The Place of Prejudice in Modern Civilization was published in 1931. So far as I know, it was not reprinted and is difficult to find today. Keith went on to publish other books after The Place of Prejudice which would expand upon its central themes, such as Evolution and Ethics (1946). However, this book is the most succinct expression of his views on the subject. Although the book is somewhat dated in details (which I have omitted here), its basic thesis still holds up to scrutiny, and it shows that Keith was a thinker who remains relevant to contemporary folkists. At root, folkishness is based on a recognition of the division of the species into groups separated by ancestry, language and culture. The attachment to one’s own group, the desire to preserve it, and to prioritise its interests over others, is not pathological, not the result of indoctrination, but a deeply-rooted and ineradicable instinct. The work of Arthur Keith goes some way towards substantiating that, as well as to show that there was once a receptive audience for an essentially folkish message in Britain. With hard work and perseverance, there will be again.
[1] Reid will be the subject of a later article.
Thank you Esotericist, for rediscovering the contributions of our folk and summarising their ideas. I anticipate that this series will be informative and interesting. 👍
Bravo, a great start. I set up this* Wordpress some years ago to try to widen awareness of Keith (it didn't work). Ostara publishes the speech you mentioned, alongside other snippets.
* https://arthurkeith.wordpress.com/