Castes and Races

 

The ideology of anti-racism is the veritable opium of the people: this powerful drug is cunningly used by the 'democratic' ruling class to distract public opinion from the most pressing problems and to make civil society swallow the new world order that takes the form of a surreal 'multiracial' society that in fact inevitably takes on the characteristics of a multi-criminal society. 'Fighting discrimination' is an expression that has a lysergic effect on the weak, fragmented and easily impressed personality of contemporary man, who has regressed to the infantile stage and is willing to believe the most far-fetched fairy tales.

In contrast, the world of Tradition was founded on a strong feeling for the identities of race, caste and religion. Frithjof Schuon's book Castes and Races, which the author published in French in 1957, is very useful for understanding these aspects of the history of mentality. Schuon was one of the most qualified scholars of the history of religions, which he interpreted in the light of the philosophia perennis, highlighting the similarities between cultures distant in time and space. Castes and Races is a highly topical text that anticipated by decades the differentialist conceptions prevalent in the cultural debate today.

Schuon's treatment opens with a definition of the caste institution, which finds its justification in the differentiation of human types with the consequent diversity of attitudes and qualifications. In Hinduism, the caste system had its strictest application based on the principle of caste inheritance, while in Judaism and Islam castes are absent, since in these cultures the egalitarian consideration prevailed according to which all men were created in the image and likeness of God. Between these two conceptions is medieval Christian Europe in which society was divided into castes, but in a fairly flexible manner: the priestly caste was vocational and the warrior caste could take in elements of the workers' castes through ennobling processes, and in this way the eventuality of a peasant becoming pope and consecrating emperor could occur. But the members of the castes, even the humblest, each had their own dignity and specific qualities that determined their social function. Ancient hierarchical societies also created spaces for individuals with no particular aptitudes, with a chaotic and ill-defined psychology, and therefore prone to transgression: to protect the social order from the contamination of these elements, the groups of the 'outcastes' and 'untouchables' were formed in the Hindu world, or the Jews and Gypsies in the Western world. The modern mentality, founded on egalitarian conceptions derived from crude and improbable materialist ideologies, and particularly averse to the principle of heredity, considers it unacceptable to divide humanity into castes. But ancient castes, as we have seen, had a social function that balanced human aptitudes, whereas modern materialism has turned mediocre elements into a ruling class and has in fact overturned the meaning of castes, assigning completely unjustified prerogatives and privileges to the incapable and parasitic, and leading to the social dysfunctions that characterise the contemporary world. In antiquity and the Middle Ages, men had a clear awareness of the sense of limitation and were aware of the risks that humanity ran if it gave way to demonic forces outside the horizon of the sacred. In the modern world, however, the mechanisation and technologisation of the economy have created the mass of the 'proletariat', which does not correspond to a natural caste but to a quantitative collectivity.

To account for the absurdities it is responsible for, modern culture has even managed to give a pseudo-religious superstructure to its 'humanitarian' conceptions. Humanitarianism, in fact, holds that the totality of human beings is the personal God: a conception that degrades the divine to the human level, whereas in the traditional conception it is the human that strives to rise to the divine. From this idea of the sacred derives an equivocal charity that saves bodies but kills souls; people's faults are attributed to unfavourable material conditions, so consciences are derelict, as deviant and criminal behaviour is accepted and encouraged on the basis of the 'sociological' explanations that are so successful in contemporary culture. Third-worldism, then, has managed to elaborate concepts that are, to say the least, misleading about the idea of 'welfare'. The notion of an 'underdeveloped country', in its candid perfidy, is inspired by a crudely materialist conception of life: for progressives, happiness consists in a technological development destined to destroy many elements of beauty, and therefore of well-being, while they forget that atrocities exist on the spiritual plane, and with these atrocities the humanitarian culture of moderns is saturated. In the name of humanitarianism, vocations are trampled upon and people of genius are humiliated in a school system whose purpose is no longer to select the best, but to homogenise intelligences in the prevailing mediocrity.

Schuon points out that modern democratic levelling is at the antipodes of religious egalitarianism: the equality of monotheistic religions, in fact, is based on the theomorphism of man, whereas democratic equality takes animality as its model. In the religious conception of life, men are expected to see in their neighbour the image of God and to treat each other as 'virtual' saints: in this sense, even the humblest assume an aristocratic demeanour. Modernity, on the other hand, by elevating progress to an ideology, has taken wealth as the yardstick by which all things are judged, viewing poverty as a kind of curse and creating odious forms of social exclusion far more rigid than those enacted by the caste system. Similarly, modern ideologies have claimed to annul the differences between men and women, destroying the natural family and creating the scenario of social disintegration that modernity has placed before our eyes.

Turning to the subject of race, Schuon immediately makes it clear that caste prevails over race, since race is a form, while caste is a spirit, and spirit prevails over form. It would be absurd, however, to think that racial differences do not imply differences in attitudes and attitudes: if it is right to reject racially inspired feelings of hatred, it is equally right to reject a prejudicial anti-racism that claims to standardise all diversities, with the obvious aim of providing the power of globalist technocrats with a mass of citizen-slaves incapable of critical thought.

Schuon analyses the three main racial groups into which humanity is divided, Whites, Blacks, Yellows, which he likens to the natural elements: White to the sky, Black to the earth, Yellow to water. Each of these races has given rise to social organisations inspired by their respective characteristics, and within these large groups there are further differentiations, due to cultural and historical factors that have marked the various civilisations. In particular, within white culture there have always been moments of confrontation, and sometimes conflict, between Nordic cultures and Mediterranean cultures, as well as between pagan mentality and Christian mentality, between monotheistic messianism and Aryan avatarism.

Schuon also emphasises the important distinction between peoples and states: in fact, the people does not always coincide with the state, indeed in the modern world more and more often different peoples live within the same territory, which is precisely why today it is all the more important for ethnic groups to acquire a clear awareness of their identity. Indeed, while racial mixing can ventilate an overly closed environment, it also risks the disappearance of human groups with precious qualities: the model of the multiracial society, besides being a blatant failure in terms of social cohesion, represents an impoverishment of human cultures, which should be enriched in the confrontation of differences, rather than mutually annihilating each other in global homologation. Schuon concludes the book with a consideration that effectively sums up the meaning of the racial question beyond any ideological forcing: “the qualities that make a certain human being lovable, make the genius of his race lovable at the same time...the man of another race is like a forgotten aspect of ourselves, and therefore a found mirror of God”.


Frithjof Schuon, Castes and Races, Sophia Perennis, 1982

CASTES AND RACES