Re: Gobineau, the "Bayreuth Circle" and Schemann

A bit more on Wagner and "master race" theories 

There's another quote from the _Diaries_, a Wagnerian comment that
comes close to touching on the idea of Master Races.

Friday January 21 1881
"R. then looks at the map, and as he is doing so I recall what he said
today at lunch - that among the peoples of the earth it is always the
stupidest tribes which are destined to rule over the others, the
strongest arrogantly placing their paws over everything: the
Macedonians in Greece, the Moors among the Arabs, the Prussians among
the Germans, the Turks in Asia."

It's an off-the-cuff remark, but it shows that Wagner's attitude was
the opposite of Gobineau.

Gobineau admired ruling peoples. To him the fact that a group of
people was in power was proof enough that they must be superior,
including in a racial sense, to those they rule. By contrast Wagner
despised power and those who held or wanted it. To Wagner the fact
that a group had assumed power only showed that they are arrogant, and
that they are arrogant only showed that they are stupid. This is why
rulers tend to be stupid, and the stupid are more likely to enter
politics.

There are times I suspect Wagner was right; but I've never felt any
urge to agree with Gobineau.

(The point of the earlier citation I gave, in which Wagner compared
Walter Scott snobbery towards the ruling classes to that of Gobineau,
was that Wagner noted and did not admire Gobineau's adulation for
people in power, especially power by birth.  But this citation makes
the point even more clearly.)
 

5       Degeneration through miscegenation

I've noted earlier in this thread that the idea that racial mixing
leads to degeneration was widely held in Europe and America in
Gobineau's time and earlier. The idea predated Gobineau by at least
300 years.

However it is probably correct to credit Gobineau with contributing an
original application of this idea. Gobineau's predecessors warned of
the dangers of racial interbreeding since it would lessen the racial
purity of white people. It would make it harder to claim that the
races are separate and distinct. Many of the justifications offered
for the institution of slavery, and the practice of colonisation,
depended on that supposed distinctness. Racial intermixture was
therefore a threat to white privilege.

But Gobineau's version of the idea that racial intermixture was
harmful was rather more ruthless, and much less useful to defenders of
white privilege. Gobineau argued that the white races were already
mongrelised, as were all other races. It was already too late: racial
intermixing had already happened to such an extent that all higher
qualities had been bred out of humanity, except for a few doomed
aristocratic remnants, and so humanity was doomed to mediocrity,
brutality and finally to extinction. Gobineau actually predicted that
humanity would be extinct, because of loss of racial purity, within
3,000 years. This is not a view calculated to give much comfort to a
19th Century American slave owner, or a 19th century general marching
an army to plant the British or Belgian or French flag in some part of
Africa.

In fact Gobineau's vision was so original that not only was he the
first to say that humanity was doomed because of the interbreeding
that had already occurred, he was also more or less the last. This
doctrine of Gobineau's had almost no influence, and the more virulent
racists who later made use of Gobineau's work passed over this aspect
of his ideas in silence.

However he did influence one person, at least for a time. Gobineau's
vivid account of the end of the humanity had a certain tragic
grandeur, within its own terms. It was not calculated to appeal to
politicians or practical men of the world, but it was well suited to
appeal to tragic poets with a taste for doom-laden visions. This is
the one area where it seems that Gobineau did have a profound, if
temporary, affect on Wagner.

It's always been hard to evaluate Wagner's reaction to this idea. The
usual three reasons apply:
* The impenetrability of some of Wagner's prose, and the even greater
impenetrability of the only available English translations;
* Apparently wilful misrepresentation by some commentators; 
* Self-contradiction by Wagner.  

Here the most significant difficulty may be the self-contradictions,
Wagner's conflicted reaction to Gobineau's ideas.

Cosima records Wagner dismissing Gobinist ideas:
Friday June 3, 1881: 
"At lunch R. is downright explosive in favour of Christian theories
rather than racial ones."
This was at a lunch while Gobineau was the Wagners' guest, so Wagner's
"explosive" rejection of racial theories was directed at Gobineau
himself, no doubt with all of Wagner's legendary tact.

And she records him accepting Gobinist ideas:
Monday April 3, 1882
"'Oh,' he says, 'I am becoming more and more Gobinistic.'"

We also see this conflict in the two essays written directly in reply
to Gobineau: "Know Thyself" and "Heroism and Christianity". Both are
answers to Gobineau, and both find ways to reject Gobineau's
conclusions and his ethics. But the two approaches are mutually
incompatible.

"Know Thyself" argues that Gobineau's theories are wrong. The German
peoples are not a race, and yet they seem to do quite well for
themselves based on their language and their culture. Moreover, we
should look past race, and focus instead on the things that are common
to all of humanity: the purely human in all of us. That's a clear
rejection of Gobineau.

"Heroism and Christianity" takes almost the opposite tack. It appears
to accept that what Gobineau said was true, or at least the part about
racial intermixing bringing humanity to its doom, and then goes on to
outline a response to that.

The question of whether "Heroism and Christianity" actually endorsed
Gobineau's ideas about racial intermixing, or whether Wagner merely
described them, has been intensely fought over. Having looked again at
Wagner's essay, and at some of the things he said at around the time
he was writing it, I'm going to suggest a compromise answer. But
before that I want to look at Wagner's response to the picture that
Gobineau described.

The first half, or more than half, of "Heroism and Christianity"
consists of an outline of Gobineau's ideas, with the selection and
some of the interpretation arising from Wagner's own preoccupations
rather than Gobineau's.  The definition of "heroism", for example, is
characteristically Wagnerian. Rather than meaning courage in any
martial sense, Wagner ascribes to "heroism" the following four
characteristics:
* "Strength of awareness of suffering", that is, Schopenhauerian
compassion [page 277];
* Ability to withstand suffering themselves ("we seldom, indeed hardly
ever, find the hero in any state other than one of suffering") [page
277];
* Complete integrity: "A lie was inconceivable to them" [page 278];
* Service to others, with a lack of interest in taking power or
property for themselves ("the accident of their becoming masters of
the Latino-Semite realm [ie the Roman Empire] was fatal to them";
"pride and honour ... were expressed in the custom that a man who
happened to obtain riches would be ashamed of this and quickly share
them out") [page 278].

Moreover, Wagner said, the early Christian saints had these qualities
even more than the classic heroes such as Herakles and Siegfried.
Because of their renunciation of the world, the Christian saints were
able, even more than earlier heroes, to "endure suffering, and offer
themselves to others" [page 279].
 
There seems to be no more such heroism, Wagner says; this kind of
human greatness is gone. It no longer arises out of race. It no longer
exists in the church, a "semitic-latino institution" that once had
greatness, but which has long since lost it through its pursuit of
worldly pomp.

I'll stop here before even getting to Wagner's response to these
ideas, because this is long enough.

Cheers!


Laon