The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c7.s16.t5: (e) The Race-Pessimism of Today Unjustifiable
The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c7.s16.t5
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(e) The Race-Pessimism of Today Unjustifiable
c7.s16.t5.1
In recent years the name of thinkers who preach the doctrine of mankind's decline is legion. From Spengler, the German author's *Der Untergang des Abendlandes* people have got the formula that the West is now in for decay. Romain Rolland has popularized the notion that Western civilization is doomed. In the Italian demographist Gini's analysis of "the parabola of evolution" the European races are all exhibiting senescence with the solitary exception, perhaps, of the Italians. Even American sociologists have been attacked by this decline-cult, and many of them like Hankins are anxiously discussing the question as to the decline in the natural fertility of the Eur-American population.
c7.s16.t5.2
All through the ages there has been a type of mentality that is interested in viewing the things of the world from what may be described in general terms as a pessimistic angle of vision. And the pessimism of Jeremiads appeals more or less to every man and woman. The reasons are obvious. First, there is no possibility of denying the fact that there is a certain amount or kind of misery and suffering always present, no matter how well-placed the individual or the group. And in the second place, every honest intellectual can find in the sceptical attitudes and warnings or rather the "divine discontent" of the pessimists undoubtedly some very powerful aids to self-criticism and societal regeneration. Indeed, it is to pessimism that the world owes many of the energistic adventures in the "transvaluation of values" and upward trends in civilization. The value of pessimism as a constructive force cannot by any means be ignored.
c7.s16.t5.3
In these discussions as in all others bearing on social life there is generally no difficulty about agreeing as to the fact of "social metabolism" or transformation going on around us. But it is, as a rule, while appraising the value of the transformation that the diversity of schools arises, each with its own shibboleth based naturally on personal equations. One thinker is convinced in his own way that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were more "creative" than the nineteenth and the twentieth; and another ignores the beneficial influence of social assurance and other modern legislation on the standard of living and welfare of the masses.
c7.s16.t5.4
But even those who admit that economic and cultural progress has been advancing from group to group and class to class fail very often to realize that a great deal of the transformations generally known as "class" or social revolutions are at bottom expressions of "racial"
c7.s16.t5.5
ups and downs. It is these replacements or absorptions of certain races by others that constitute the anatomical back-ground of world-culture. The eternal story of mankind is to be found in a nut-shell in the stone implements of the Palæolithic Ages, when the Mousterians had to give way to the Aurignacians and these latter were in their turn replaced by the Magdalenians and others. Migrations and race-contacts have always furnished the framework of organized societal existence.
c7.s16.t5.6
In historic times the subversion of the Roman Empires in Europe and that of the Hindu and other Empires in Asia have spelt likewise the ascendancy of certain racial elements at the cost of certain others. So far as modern Eur-Asia is concerned, the same process of race-mixture, race-submergence and race-uplift has been going on until we find that anthropologically the modern Indian’s affinities with the ancients of his land are perhaps as problematic as those of the modern European with the ancients of his continent.