Chapter Review: The Rise of Race Thinking, Racism and the Imperialist Bureaucracy

Racism: prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior; the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races

Race thinking: being short of overt racism, it is a mode of thinking or mindset, conscious or not, where race is a factor or category in perceiving people, which tends to create a moral distance between races, thereby making stereotyping and inevitable associations of superiority vs inferiority more easily seen as plausible and likely valid; the stereotyping mindset tends to lock perceptions of individuals in different races into something that is unchangeable due to circumstances of one’s birth; it arises not from accepting that race differences exist, which is harmless, but from thinking about people in terms of race as such

This is a review of chapters 6 and 7 of Hannah Arendt’s influential 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. These chapters are from Imperialism, which are in part two of her three-part book. Part one is Antisemitism, and part three is Totalitarianism. Chapter six is entitled Race Thinking Before Racism, and chapter seven is Race and Bureaucracy. These two chapters describe Arendt’s unique interpretation of the key historical precedents that formed global imperialism from 1887 to 1917 and later political events in Europe that led to the indescribably brutal and dehumanizing totalitarianism that Hitler and Stalin perfected a few decades later.

Chapter Six: Race-Thinking Before Racism: The period of imperialism with its central moral value of endless expansion and accumulation of wealth ran from 1884 until 1914 and the beginning of WWI. Chapter 6 chronicles the rise of race thinking that preceded this period and led to the true racism that was one of the necessary ingredients of imperialism. Race-thinking emerged in the 1700s and developed in the 1800s. It opened the door to romanticized perceptions of non-white races and their cultures. At the time, there was a widespread belief in Europe that all people were equal and that moral value stood in the way of the development of both imperialism and totalitarianism.

Arendt describes race-thinking in France, England, Germany and Prussia as arising for different reasons in response to differing political, geographic and economic conditions. In England, race-thinking developed to help maintain foreign possessions by fostering “unity among people who lived in far-flung colonies beyond seas, separated from the mother country by thousands of miles.” Specifically, the English relied on race-thinking to discourage intermarriage to protect the English lineage. Darwin’s 1859 Origins of the Species bolstered the English vision by including a scientific basis for the competition of the fittest, with the fittest being racially pure English. “Darwinism met with such overwhelming success because it provided, on the basis of inheritance, the ideological weapons for race as well as class rule and could be used for, as well as against, race discrimination. Politically speaking, Darwinism as such was neutral”, but it was used nonetheless to justify all manner of beliefs, including pacifism, cosmopolitanism and imperialism.

In France, the nobility was drawn to the idea that the French aristocracy was of Germanic descent and that theory was used as an instrument to foment internal political discord. The nobility was fighting to maintain power in the face of political change. French race-thinking was influenced by a work of overt racism by the aristocrat Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau in his 1853 work, Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Gobineau, whose work became prominent later in the 1800s, wrote that “the fall of civilizations is due to a degeneration of race and that the decay of race is due to the mixture of blood.” Arendt paints a curious picture of Gobineau: “Nobody before Gobineau thought of finding one single reason, one single force according to which civilization always and everywhere rises and falls. . . . He was only a curious mixture of frustrated nobleman and modern intellectual who almost by accident invented racism.” But in France, Gobineau’s idea had to compete with the contradictory French ideal of equality of all.

By contrast, race-thinking in Prussia developed not by the aristocracy for self-defense, but “as a weapon of certain nationalists who wanted the union of all German-speaking peoples and therefore insisted on a common origin.” Similarly, race-thinking in Germany arose and was employed to foster nationalist thinking and national emancipation “in an effort to unite the people against foreign domination.” The foreign domination that stimulated that idea was Napoleon’s defeat of the Prussian army.

Thus, race-thinking in France was a weapon to foster civil war, in England a tool for colonial rule, while in Prussia and Germany, it was a tool to build nationalist sentiment, but ultimately it turned out to be a weapon to foment war among nations. Clearly, the origins of race-thinking reflected the circumstances and progression in thinking of the times and it led to varying outcomes in the 20th century.

The Surviving Ideologies: Before “the fateful days of the ‘scramble for Africa,’” Arendt describes race-thinking as part of liberalism, and just one of many ideas competing for public acceptance. Regarding ideology, Arendt asserts that “an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution to ‘all the riddles of the universe’, or to the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man.” She goes on:

Few ideologies have won enough prominence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only two have come out on top and essentially defeated all others: the ideology that interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races. . . . . free public opinion has adopted them to such an extent that not only intellectuals but great masses of people will no longer accept a presentation of past or present facts that is not in agreement with either of these views. . . . . Every full-fledged ideology has been created and continued and improved as a political weapon and not as a theoretical doctrine.

Arendt appears to take a rather dim view of political ideologies in general. That raises the question of what ideology, if any, hers might have been. Nothing in this chapter or the next gives any clear indication.
Chapter six concludes with this: “Imperialism would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible ‘explanation’ and excuse for its deeds, even if no race-thinking ever has existed in the civilized world. Since, however, race-thinking did exist, it proved to be a powerful help to racism.” In sum, Arendt sees race-thinking as a doctrine with the appearance of national respectability and tradition that led to racism and “its utter incompatibility with all Western political and moral standards of the past, even before it was allowed to destroy the comity of European nations.”

Chapter seven, Race and Bureaucracy: This chapter focuses on the two key ingredients of colonial imperialism, full-blown racism and the development of a cold, aloof bureaucracy that operated, as much as possible, in strict secrecy with absolutely no governing law, treaty, control or moral constraint from the motherland or any other authority or source, e.g., the Bible. Colonial imperialism was, if nothing else, ruthless, cruel, uncaring and utterly focused on wealth accumulation and expansion. Deaths of millions along the way was mere collateral damage of no consequence whatever.

Two new devices for political organization and rule over foreign people were discovered during the first decades of imperialism. One was race as a principle of the body politic, and the other bureaucracy as a principle of foreign domination. Without race as a substitute for the nation, the scramble for Africa and the investment fever might well have remained the purposeless ‘dance of death and trade’ (Joseph Conrad) of all gold rushes. Without bureaucracy as a substitute for government, the British possession of India might well have been left to the recklessness of ‘the breakers of law in India’ (Burke) without changing the political climate of an entire era. Both discoveries were actually made on the Dark Continent.

Arendt assessed the European moral and political climate that lead to abandonment of traditional values:

In its [gold’s] uselessness in industrial production it bears an ironical resemblance to the superfluous money to the digging of gold and to the superfluous men who did the digging. To the imperialist’s pretense of having discovered a permanent savior for a decadent society and antiquated political organization, it added its own pretense of apparently eternal stability and independence of all functional determinants. It was significant that a society about to part with all traditional absolute values began to look for an absolute value in the world of economics where, indeed, such a thing does not and cannot exist, since everything is functional by definition.

Regarding the superfluous men who joined the imperialist colonial enterprise, ‘the Bohemians of the four continents’, they were “all game for anything from pitch and toss to willful murder”:

Thus, they brought with them, or they learned quickly, the code of manners which befitted the coming type of murderer to whom the only unforgiveable sin is to lose his temper. . . . . The world of native savages was a perfect place for men who had escaped the reality of civilization. . . . . They [native Africans] were, as it were, “natural” human beings who lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder.

For South Africa, settlement by the Dutch Boers, was followed by a few Jewish international financiers who made early financing possible for European wealth. That was followed by development of full-fledged imperialism under Cecil Rhodes, whose first order of business was to displace the Jewish financiers and ultimately the Boers themselves. Social conditions were awful. The racist Boers, basing authority on their own foundational racial origin myth, enslaved natives and hated the Jewish financiers. The Boers reacted instinctively with virulent anti-Semitism. The Boers understood and hated the fact that Jews had a better claim to pre-ordained “chosenness” than themselves. Also, they sensed that Jewish financiers were the harbingers of something very bad for themselves, namely a possibility that the temporary imperialist gold and diamond rush would eventually morph into a “much broader and more permanent business,” which it did.

However, it was the imperialists, not the Jews who completely displaced the Boers. And, it was the Boers themselves who willingly walked away from their own stakes in the gold and diamond rush. In essence, the Boers had gone native and simply abandoned their stolen land and moved farther inland and upland as imperialist civilization, if one can call it that, began to encroach. The Boers remained anti-Semitic even after the imperialists displaced them and took for themselves the Boer share of the wealth.

In developing the imperialist character, racism was discovered and developed in South Africa, while ruthless bureaucracy was discovered and developed in Egypt, India and Algeria. Decades later, the African experience, especially the saga of the Boers, cured the Nazis “of the illusion that the historical process is necessarily ‘progressive’.” In essence, the Boers had completely walked away from European civilization and norms.

Arendt describes Rudyard Kipling as the author of the foundation legend for the British Empire. The myth was that being surrounded by the sea, superior navigation allowed water, wind and sun to be transformed and harnessed for the empire. Navigation made “the Englishman master of the world.” Kipling’s myth also presented “the British as the only politically mature people, caring for law and burdened with the welfare of the world, in the midst of barbarian tribes who neither care or know what keeps the world together.” Apparently, Kipling was unaware of the rest of Europe, at the very least. Or, he just ignored it. Kipling’s great myth help to draw some of the best and worst of English society into believing and participating in the great cause.

The fact that the “white man’s burden” is either hypocrisy or racism has not prevented a few of the best Englishmen from shouldering the burden in earnest and making themselves the tragic and quixotic fools of imperialism. . . . . Only those who had never been able to outgrow their boyhood ideals and therefore had enlisted in the colonial services were fit for the task. . . . . Strange and curious lands attracted the best of England’s youth since the end of the 19th century, deprived her society of the most honest and the most dangerous elements, and guaranteed, . . . . petrification of boyhood noblesse which preserved and infantilized Western moral standards.

The first imperialist administrator was Lord Cromer, who took the position of British Consul General in Egypt (1883-1907) and served, among other things, for the British race. Cromer was far sighted. He could have ruled India, or taken a high-level position in the British government, but instead he chose the then-obscure Egypt. He correctly foresaw that Egypt was a necessary means for the continued control of India, the crown jewel of the Empire. Cromer developed and perfected the imperialist bureaucracy. At the same time, Cecil Rhodes was developing and perfecting imperialist racism in South Africa. The two necessary ingredients of imperialism had their champions.

At first Cromer had qualms about imperialist ‘hybrid government’ based on (i) individual bureaucrats working in as much secrecy as possible and controlling governance with no controlling law or treaty, and (ii) racism. Cromer was correct to see the only way to fix the inherent instability of imperialism was to either conquer and occupy a land or to leave it entirely. Later, Cromer accepted and began to justify a form of government without any precedent or even a name. Cromer just referred to it as the “hybrid form of government.” Cromer came to conclude that talented bureaucrats with talented staff and working without law or constraints was what the times and circumstances called for. The bureaucrat’s greatest passion would be for secrecy. Secrecy had the effect of not arousing much in the way of national aspiration in the lands the bureaucrats governed.

In South Africa, Cecil Rhodes, despite his personal megalomania, came to the same conclusion as Cromer. Rhodes hated publicity and raged when his name popped up in public from time to time. Regarding secrecy, Arendt comments: “Every growth of democracy or even the simple functioning of existing institutions can only be a danger, for it is impossible for a people to govern a people – the people of India by the people of England.” The drive for secrecy was necessitated by the idea of expansion, which envisioned an endless process (ending in self-destruction and starting anew), not a process of conquering one country at a time.

Regarding the essentially unlimited power of the bureaucrat, Arendt writes:

Then, as Rhodes was insane enough to say, he could indeed “do nothing wrong, what he did became right. It was his duty to do what he wanted. He felt himself a God – nothing less.”

Cromer, was more circumspect on this point, but was essentially in accord with the egomaniac Rhodes in calling the bureaucrats “instruments of incomparable value in the execution of a policy called Imperialism.” In this world, success was evidence lawfulness, and failure was someone else’s fault: “They were monsters of conceit in their success and monsters of modesty in their failure.” In essence, law and human rights were simply incompatible with imperialism.

Arendt concludes chapter seven with these observations on the later, less brutal, British imperialism, which paved the way to the loss of empire:

The happy fact is that although British imperialist rule sank to some level of vulgarity, cruelty played a lesser role between the two World Wars than ever before and a minimum of human rights was always safeguarded. It is this moderation in the midst of plain insanity that paved the way for what Churchill has called “the liquidation of His Majesty’s Empire” and that eventually may turn out to mean the transformation of the English nation into a Commonwealth of English peoples.

Insistence on human rights was from the ‘English Departments’ in London that colonial bureaucrats hated: “The ‘prayer’ which Cromer addressed to Lord Salisbury during his administration of Egypt in 1896, ‘save me from the English Departments’, was repeated over and over again, until in the twenties of this century the nation and everything it stood for were openly blamed by the extreme imperialist party for the threatened loss of India.”

Apparently, British imperialists took their ideology very seriously.

B&B orig: 1/15/19