HARMONIOUS INDIVIDUALS.
No matter how great is the role of passionaries in ethnogenesis, their number in the composition of the ethnos is always negligible. After all, in the full sense of the word we call passionarians people whose impulses are stronger than the instinct of self-preservation, both individual and species. In the overwhelming majority of normal individuals both these impulses are balanced, which creates a harmonious personality, intellectually full, efficient, coexistent, but not overactive. Moreover, the unrestrained combustion of another person, inconceivable without a passionate self-sacrifice, is alien and antipathic to such people. To this we must add that in developing ethnic groups most of the individuals have the same weak passionarity as in relict ethnic groups. The only difference is that in dynamic ethnoses there are present and active passionaries, who invest their surplus energy in the development of their system.
However, it should be noted that the intensity of development does not always benefit the ethnos. There may be "overheating," when passionarity goes out of control of reasonable expediency and turns from a creative force into a destructive one. Then harmonious individuals turn out to be the saviors of their ethnic groups, but only to a certain extent.
People of this kind are an extremely important element in the body of the ethnos. They reproduce it, moderate outbursts of passionarity, multiply material values according to already created patterns. They can do quite well without passionarians until an external enemy appears. Thus, in Iceland, the descendants of the Vikings gradually lost their passionarity. In the XII century, they stopped their overseas campaigns, in the XIII century, bloody feuds between families ended, and when Algerian pirates landed on the island in 1627, they met no resistance. The Icelanders allowed their houses to be burned down, their wives to be raped, their children to be taken as slaves, but they did not find the resolve to raise arms[22].
Let us assume that in this particular case other explanations could be found. The Algerians were professional thugs; they probably used a moment of surprise to cause panic; the Icelanders were completely without the help of the metropolis, Denmark, which at that time was embroiled in the Thirty Years' War and suffering defeats... And finally, according to our idea, the Icelandic passionate tension should have been lowered further. But did it? Let us look at Iceland two centuries later.
In 1809 there was a Danish garrison in Reykjavik, consisting of three dozen soldiers, a captain and the governor, who had a beautiful daughter. In June of that year a black-flagged brig appeared at the roadstead and demanded the surrender of the city. A Danish officer opened fire, but was wounded by a cannonball from the brig, and the soldiers laid down their arms.
The pirates landed, and their leader turned out to be an Icelander, formerly the well known watchmaker Jurgen Jurgenson, now a pirate. This scoundrel, as it turned out, was in love with the governor's daughter and demanded her for himself, and allowed his pirates to rob the inhabitants, declaring himself king of Iceland. Fortunately, the girl managed to fall seriously ill. But good Icelanders! No resistance was offered to a bunch of bandits. Thousands of descendants of fierce "froth of the sea", the conquerors of England, Normandy and Vinland, dutifully endured the outrages of a few dozen robbers, without resisting or even fleeing. And yet they were opposed not by the fierce Moors, who rivaled the royal fleets of Spain and France, but by a bunch of scum from the ports of the North Sea. Isn't that a drop in passionalism?
However, one should not identify the majority with everyone. Individuals did not lose their temper. Although they were unable to shake the general cowardice and powerlessness, they were able to save themselves. Among them was the bridegroom of a beautiful Danish woman; he escaped on a fishing boat and, running into an English frigate, asked for help. The English quickly approached Reykjavik, forced the pirates at gunpoint to surrender and put them in chains, and freed the governor and his daughter. The head of the brigands was tried by an English court and acquitted, as he had not affected the interests of British subjects[23]. And the Icelanders, after six weeks under the pirate king, returned to their own affairs, which only they were capable of as men of harmony, civilized, and harmless to all but themselves. For increased defenselessness is not always conducive to the prosperity of an ethnos.
"THE 'DEGENERATES', THE 'VAGRANTS', THE 'VAGRANT-SOLDIERS'
Finally, there is almost always a category of people with 'negative' passionarity within ethnoses. In other words, their actions are governed by impulses whose vector is opposite to the passionarity tension.
Icelanders have not lost at least the ability to work to feed their families and to preserve their sources of life: herring fishing grounds, eiderdown colonies where they harvested eiderdown, and small meadows among the rocks needed to feed their dairy cattle. But the sub-ethnic formations in the urban agglomerations of antiquity were far worse options. The decayed descendants of Roman citizens who had lost their parcels of land piled up in Rome in the 1st century. They huddled in quarters of five-story houses, breathed the stench of the "cloaca" - the ravine through which sewage was let down into the Tiber, drank wine from harmful lead utensils, but insistently and impudently demanded "bread and circuses" from the government. And they had to give, because these sub-passionate crowds could support any passionate adventurer who wanted to carry out a coup, if he promised them more bread and a more fancy show in the circus. And they could not and did not want to be able to defend themselves against their enemies, because it is difficult to learn the military.
The sub-passionarian assumes, according to his own unbreakable logic, that no one can foresee the future, because he, a bread ration recipient and spectator of circus performances, is not able to make predictions based on probability. Therefore, he divides the information he receives into two varieties: pleasant and unpleasant. He considers the bearers of the latter to be his personal enemies and destroys them at every opportunity.
The result was the capture of Rome by Alaric (410) and there were fewer Goths than combat-ready and enlisted men in the city limits of Rome, not to mention Italy. And even this disgrace did not teach the Romans anything. The Goths treated the defeated mildly and left. This gave reason for another complacency. But when the Vandal Genserich took Rome (455), declaring himself an avenger for the destruction of Carthage, he easily massacred the sub-passionarians, who, unlike the harmonious and harmless Icelanders, no one wanted to save. After the Vandal pogrom Rome had not recovered. But somehow we do not want to feel sorry for it.
A similar situation occurred in Baghdad, which was seized not by foreign barbarians, but Turkic slaves bought by the Caliph - the Gulams (mercenaries). In the ninth century, the Arab warriors were no more in existence. Their descendants preferred to engage in petty trade and chitchat in the bazaars. To guard the Caliph's person and sometimes the borders of the Caliphate, professional warriors were needed. Well, they were bought, (slaves) in the steppes of Central Asia and the deserts of Nubia. They turned out to be the only real force in Baghdad and began to remove the caliphs at will. And the population of the huge city cried, cursed and quipped, but preferred to live without working and die on their knees, just to avoid defending themselves. Such consequences and, accordingly, a change of ideal is given by the loss of passionary tension by the system. The slogan "life for yourself" is an easy path to black doom.
Passionarity of an individual person is paired with any abilities: high, small, medium; it does not depend on external influences, being a feature of human constitution; it has nothing to do with ethical norms, equally easily generating exploits and crimes, creativity and destruction, good and evil, excluding only indifference; and it does not make a person a "hero" leading the "crowd", because most passionaries are in the "crowd", determining its potency and activity degree at one or another moment.
The group of subpassionaries in history is most colorfully represented by "vagabonds" and professional mercenary senators (Landsknechts). They do not change or preserve it, but exist at its expense. Because of their mobility, they often play an important role in the destinies of ethnic groups, carrying out, together with the passionaries, conquests and coups. But if passionarians can manifest themselves without subpassionarians, and the “Subs” are nothing without passionarians. Alone they are capable of begging or robbery, the victims of which are the carriers of zero passionarity, i.e. the bulk of the population. But in this case, the "vagabonds" are doomed: they are hunted down and destroyed. However, they appear in every generation.
GRADATIONS OF PASSIONARITY
There is a temptation to compare passionarians with "heroes" leading the "crowd" and to call "vagrant soldiers" "led", but in fact the mechanism of historical action is not so simple. The Spanish Habsburgs and French Bourbons, with the exception of the founders of the dynasty, were mediocre men, as were most of their courtiers, among whom there appeared from time to time adventurous ministers like Fouquet and John Law or Manuel Godoy. But hidalgoes and chevaliers, negociants and corsairs, missionaries and conquistadors, humanists and artists - they all created such internal tension that the politics of 16th-century Spain and 16th-17th-century France, if portrayed as part of an ethnogenetic process, reflected the high passionarity of these ethnoses.
Therefore, despite the fact that passionaries often lead popular movements, it is more correct to call them not "leading" but "pushing", for without a sufficient number of them, who died in obscurity, it would be impossible to break tradition, i.e. the inertia of the masses. And the lines of an old Spanish ballad speak of this:
They sing of Oliviero, they sing of Rolan too.
Silent in Surrakine, the brave captain Rolan is sung, Oliviero is sung too.
They forget Surrakine, the dashing caballero.
Thus, we outlined three gradations of decreasing passionarity, although if necessary, the division can be more fractional. Therefore, the third characteristic type should properly be called "sub-passionarians". But the most important thing is not to confuse the marked types with class or class divisions. Any of the classes includes the three types, but in different combinations and with different dominants. The change of their relations, both numerical and vector, within the ethnos determines the process of ethnogenesis.
This thesis is so important that let us illustrate the concept of passionarity additionally, using for clarity not historical, but literary characteristics from the works of A.S. Pushkin, who came close to the problem.
Typical passionaries, but by no means "heroes" or "leaders," are: The avaricious knight, obsessed with greed; Don Guan, striving for love victories for the sake of victories; Salieri, who kills Mozart out of envy; Aleko, who stabs Zemfira out of jealousy. The Passionaries and leaders, though not heroes in Pushkin are Mazepa and Pugachev (very far from historical prototypes), and the heroes, but not the Passionaries, are Grinev and Mashenka Mironova, who risk their lives for the sake of duty. An example of a passionary and a hero, though a king, but not a "leader" is Charles XII, "a lover of brawling glory - for the helmet threw a crown, i.e. sacrificing the interests of his country to his own vanity.
The latter is contrasted with Peter the Great, a harmonious figure, doing his duty to Russia, much stronger than Charles XII, following his own whims. So - in Pushkin's interpretation, and it is close to reality, because, except for personal traits: excitability, child cruelty, etc., Peter was like his father, i.e. was a man of his time and continued one of the lines of Russian cultural tradition - convergence with Europe, which arose in the early 17th century under Mikhail Fedorovich. But at the same time Peter was surrounded by passionaries, such as Menshikov, Romodanovsky, Kikin, but they were neither leaders nor heroes. Neither according to Pushkin, nor in reality. Therefore, the comparison of passionaries with leaders is a speculation, the purpose of which is to reduce the description of one of the behavioral traits to a banal, long discarded theory.
And no less absurd is the other, opposite point of view, which reduces all motives for the actions of the most diverse people to the desire for profit, the latter meaning only money and equivalent values. This vulgar position of the sub-passionate philistine is often presented as materialism, with which, in fact, it has nothing to do. The philistine is usually devoid of imagination.
He is unable and unwilling to imagine that there are people who are not like him, driven by other ideals, and who do not pursue goals other than money. The concept of immediate gain has never been accurately formulated, because then its absurdity would be obvious, but as a self-evident implication it appears in reasoning on any occasion and even in scientific constructions, which is why it demands attention.
HANNIBAL AND CARTHAGE
Let us now consider from our point of view the behavior of Hannibal during the 2nd Punic War. The Barca family was one of the richest in Carthage. Hannibal's father Hamilcar increased his wealth by subduing Numidia and Spain, where his son Hannibal was effectively king. War with Rome did not promise Hannibal any benefits. On the contrary, the risk was extremely great. From the point of view of Hannibal's personal interests, war was not necessary for him, but it was inevitable for his fatherland - Carthage. After all, if a stray arrow hit the chest of the Carthaginian commander, his death would not compensate any spoils of war, especially since he did not need the money.
But perhaps he was doing the will of his fellow citizens! No, they did not ask him to fight, at the decisive moment they refused to send reinforcements, and hated him with all the passion of a philistine who feels that something must be done, not for himself, but for the common cause. In these cases, the sub-passionarian immediately begins to look for an excuse that would allow him to shirk any responsibilities. Of course, this is not far-sighted, but people are not always foresighted, which leads to disastrous consequences. In short, for personal gain, Hannibal should have sat in his Gades and enjoyed himself; the Carthaginian elders should have supported their commander with all their might; the Numidian horsemen should have deserted to avoid dying for the hated Phoenician colonists; the Spanish slingers should have rebelled and regained their freedom.
And it was the other way around! And because of what happened, the rich Punic literature of Carthage disappeared. The valleys in the gorges of Atlas were ploughed and abandoned, for that country had the duty of supplying bread to Rome of millions. The freedom-loving Berbers, fleeing the brutal Romans, retreated southward, and their herds trampled the still green plains of the Western Sahara, which began to turn into a stony desert. Indeed, in Hannibal's time there were rivers, elephants, and horses grazing in the Northern Sahara, and after two thousand years of anthropogenic influences of the Roman and Arab conquerors, all this rich fauna was replaced by a single camel.
But if we want to find the reason for such tremendous changes in ethnography and physical geography, it is clear: the sub-passionarity of the Barca family was weighed down by the sub-passionarity of the Carthaginian commoners. It is what led them first to the lost war, then to their death within the walls of besieged Carthage, then, as a consequence, entailed the conquest of Numidia, which was followed by the destruction of the landscape.
Could it have been any other way? Of course! A timely aid to Hannibal meant the destruction of Rome, the liberation of the Samnites and Cisalpine Gauls, the stopping of hyperbolized, artificial urbanization and, consequently, the preservation of the beech and oak forests of the Apennines, the vineyards around Capua and Tarenta, the Etruscan towns in the Arno Valley. The riches of Gaul and the art treasures of Hellas would have been saved for a long time, but there would have been no Appian Way, no Caracalla thermae, no Latin in the schools of the ages to come. But even in this situation the development of industrial relations would have gone its own way. Feudalism would have taken the place of ancient slavery, even if a little earlier or later. Passionary ups and downs do not influence the social development of mankind, if we understand the latter as a change of socio-economic formations. And how can emotions change anything in the element of consciousness-mind? And now we shall see why this is so.
XXVI. Fading Passionarity
FLASH AND ASH
Now we can say that the ✓"trigger moment" of ethnogenesis is the sudden emergence of a certain number of passionaries and subpassionaries in a population; ✓the rise phase - a rapid increase in the number of passionary individuals as a result of either reproduction or incorporation; ✓the acute phase - the maximum number of passionaries; the ✓nadromatic phase - a sharp decrease in their number and their displacement by subpassionaries: ✓inertial phase - a slow decrease in the number of passionaries; ✓obscuration phase - almost complete replacement of passionaries by sub-passionaries, who, due to the peculiarities of the warehouse of their mind, either destroy the ethnos entirely, or do not have time to destroy it before the invasion of foreign tribesmen from the outside do. In the second case, a ✓relic remains, consisting of harmonious individuals and entering into the biocenosis of the region it inhabits as the upper, completing link.
This intra-ethnic evolution has been done by all ethnic groups, which we consider primitive only because their unrecorded history is drowning in the darkness of centuries. But we observe the same picture in history, and it is especially clear on sub-ethnic units, such as the Siberian Cossacks.
In the 14th century, the descendants of the Russified Khazars changed the Russian name "brodniki" to Turkic "Cossacks". In the XV-XVI centuries, they became a threat to the steppe Nogai and, having moved the war to Siberia, finished off their last khan Kuchum. Having received reinforcements from the Moscow government, they passed through Siberia to the Pacific Ocean in one century. In need of reinforcements, they willingly accepted Great Russians into their detachments, but always distinguished those from themselves. All together they are commonly referred to as pioneers.
Russian pathfinders of the XVII century were stubborn, tough, unyielding people. They feared neither their superiors, nor the harsh northern nature. From 1632, when centurion Pyotr Beketov founded a winter hut on the Lena River to 1650, i.e. to the Anadyr campaign of Cossack Semyon Motora, they passed through the entire northeast of Siberia and obtained yasak sable furs worth as much as American gold gave to the conquistadors. "The Cossack conquerors” were men of indomitable courage and spontaneous initiative. They plunged tribe after tribe, and at times found themselves in the Arctic Sea on kochas sewn from roughly hewn planks with tree roots, as if destined for a shipwreck. But already at the end of the XVII century their character began to change and instead of campaigns there appeared reports: "Our ships are weak and the sails are small.” And we do not know how to make large ships, as in former times.
In the 18th century the Russian population of northern Siberia sort of crystallizes. Initiative and activity disappear without a trace, and the very courage is replaced by timidity[24]. Finally, in the XIX century descendants of the Cossacks were defeated by the Chukchi and became state serfs, powerless slaves of every official sent north from the south as punishment for misconduct in office.
Since the descendants of Spanish conquistadors, French colonists in Canada (except for that part that mixed with Indians), Portuguese and Arab merchants in the Indian Ocean basin, and the descendants of Vikings and Hellenes lost their passionarity the same way and within the same chronological terms, we can consider the described process to be logical. The wasted energy of passionarity leaves ashes first hot, then cold and damp on the place of its outburst.
It would seem that the greed of the conquistadors, the pride of Alexander the Great, the vanity of Sulla and the passionate conviction of Hus are phenomena unlike each other. Outwardly they are, but the underlying basis of them and many like them is one - passionarity, and that is why. In all the examples cited, it was stressed that the sign of passionarity, or the impulse for exceptional activity, was characteristic of a population, not just of a person. We have focused on individuals for a compositional purpose - to outline the trait itself in the most prominent way. In reality, the processes are more complex, though not to the extent that they are difficult to analyze - by applying a system and following it consistently.
At first it may seem that the higher the passionarity of a person or system, the richer the creative life of a social group, the more abundant the culture of an ethnos. And since the Renaissance in Italy abounds with talent, we can consider it as an acmatic phase in ethnogenesis. But in the 15th century, the Italian ethnos was going through a difficult period: the phase of breakdown. In Milan, the condottieri Visconti and Sforza established themselves; in Florence, the Medici; in Rome, the popes openly practiced nepotism and simony (blat and venality, selling positions); in Naples and Sicily, the Spanish, rude, warlike, and far from humanism, ruled. Everywhere, the tradition of urban republics, patriotism and valor that had once enabled Italians to free themselves from the brutal power of the German emperors disappeared. And on this general decay grew such flowers of art and science as the artists Beato Angelico and Botticelli, the humanists Giovanni Pontano, Lorenzo Balla, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola.
But the High Renaissance (first half of the 16th century), marked by the names of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael Santi, Michelangelo Buanorrotti, Titian, Ariosto and Machiavelli, took place against the background of a series of wars between Spain and France, where Italy was not a participant but an arena for struggling predators. These wars began with the French invasion of Italy in 1494, and until 1525. France claimed power in Italy. The victor, Emperor Charles V, after defeating the French at Pavia was forced to throw troops to suppress Italian resistance, which was accomplished in 1527 with the barbaric defeat of Rome.
No, it cannot be said that the Italians made no attempt to get rid of their tyrants, for which they sometimes used the appearance of foreign troops. For example, in 1494, when the French approached Florence, the Medici family was overthrown there and power went to the Dominican friar Savonarola. It did not become easier, even after Savonarola's death in 1498. The republic was reconstituted and showed complete impotence, and in 1512 the power of the Medici family was restored. A second attempt to recreate the republic was made with the great artist Michelangelo in 1527 and crushed by imperial troops in 1530. "The heroic age of Florence ended, and with it ended the culture of the Italian Renaissance."[25]
In the second half of the 16th century Italy found itself under the influence of Spain. The principles of the Counter-Reformation adopted at the Council of Trent in 1563, in essence a new Catholicism, met not popular resistance in Italy, but scattered intellectual protests. They were easily dealt with by Catholic reaction. After the burning of Giordano Bruno, the imprisonment of Campanella, and the abdication of Galileo, there was a complete decline that lasted about 150 years.
Italy's passionarity dried up. How can we explain the mismatch between the "blossoms" of passionarity and creativity?
PASSIONARITY IS WEAK. BUT ACTIVE.
Apparently, in addition to the vivid examples we have described, there must be variants, weaker expressed, in which the passionarius does not go to the bonfire or the barricade (Gus and Sulla), but sacrifices much for his goal. Creative Combustion.
Gogol and Dostoevsky, Newton's voluntary asceticism, Vrubel and Mussorgsky's supremacies are also examples of the expression of passionarity, for a feat of science or art requires sacrifice, as does a feat of "direct action."[27]
In the processes of ethnogenesis, scientists and artists also play an important role, although a different one from that of political history figures. They give their ethnos a specific coloring and thus either set it apart from the others, or contribute to inter-ethnic communication, thus creating super-ethnic wholes and cultures. The nameless builders of Gothic cathedrals, ancient Russian architects, composers of fairy tales, etc., who chose these difficult professions by an inner urge, belong to the passionaries, though of lesser tension. It is clear that talented chroniclers also belong to them, who fall into this section according to the classification we have adopted.
Let us pay attention to the relatively weak but creative degrees of the system's passionate tension. There are two of them: one on the rise to the system's "overheating," which we will call the ✓"acmatic phase," and the second at the breakdown, which marks the transition to the phase we call the ✓"inertial phase.
Figuratively speaking, both moments of interest are inflections of the growth curve (plus or minus) of the ethnic system's passionarity, and even with the decline there is still a long way to go before a complete loss of tension. At a relatively low level of passionarity the stereotype of human behavior and social imperative is not such as to push him unnoticed to voluntary death for the sake of an ideal or even illusory goal of his own choosing. But available in the ethnos of this period passionate tension enough to strive for this goal and at least slightly change the reality around him. This is where, if a person has the ability to do so, he or she indulges in science or art in order to convince and enchant his or her contemporaries.
Whether poems, paintings, or theatrical performances, all this has an effect on the people who perceive it and changes them, without us having to ask: for the better or for the worse. If one lacks these abilities, one accumulates wealth, has a career, etc. Historical epochs, where the given level of passionarity predominates, are regarded as the blossoming of culture, but they are always followed by one of two possible cruel periods: either during the rise of passionarity the already described "overheating" takes place, or during its slow decline the decline occurs.
Thus, the Renaissance (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) was succeeded by the Reformation (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), and following the horrors of the Thirty Years' War, the Huguenot Wars and Dragonades, and the ferocity of "In Engels' words, he combined Robespierre and Napoleon in one person, there was a relatively quiet period, the 18th century, which was similar to the Renaissance in the level of passionarity, but not in its vector. First, there was an increase in the level, and then, after the cataclysm, a decline. This means that the percentage of passionaries declined, and in their place came people who preferred security-risk, accumulation-quick success, a quiet and prosperous life - to adventure. They were neither worse nor better than the passionaries; they were just different.
This process has never been recorded by the sources, because it is evident only in broad comparisons of the characteristics of epochs and countries. Therefore, it can only be described by means of ethnology and within the framework of ethnic history.
But it is NOT possible to say that passionaries of lesser intensity - artists, poets, scientists, clerks, etc. - do not play a role in ethnogenesis, or that this role is less than that of generals, conquistadors, heresiarchs or demagogues. No, it is not less, but it is different. We have shown that an individual of even greater passionate tension can do nothing if he does not find a response in his fellow tribesmen. And it is art that is the instrument for the corresponding mood; it makes the hearts beat in unison. And so it can be argued that Dante and Michelangelo did no less for the integration of the Italian ethnos than did Caesar Borgia and Machiavelli. And it is not without reason that the Hellenes revered Homer and Hesiod on a par with Lycurgus and Solok, and the ancient Persians even preferred Zarathustra to Darius I Histaspes.
As long as passionarity penetrates an ethnos in different doses, there is development, which is expressed in creative achievements; but since there cannot be a poet without a reader, a scientist without a teacher and students, a prophet without a flock, and a commander without officers and soldiers, the mechanism of development lies not in these or those particular individuals, but in the systemic integrity of the ethnos, which has one or another degree of passionate tension.
The members of persistent ethnoses have many virtues, always noted and much appreciated by neighbors and travelers who extolled the "newly discovered" Indians, Polynesians, Eskimos, Tanguts, Evenks, and Ainu. Anatomically and physiologically they are full-fledged people, quite adapted to the landscape of their area, but their passionate tension is so low that the process of development of ethnoses fades out. Even when a passionate individual is accidentally born among them, he seeks application not in the homeland, but in the neighbors: for example in XV-XVIII centuries Albanians made a career either in Venice, or in Istanbul. Even lower is the passionarity of the modern Bushmen, Veddas, Hondas and descendants of the Maya in the Yucatan. And even lower - apathy, i.e. degeneration and death, but it is a theoretical extrapolation, because in practice the neighbors have time to deal with weakening ethnos before it dies.
It follows from the above said that the most difficult period in the life of ethnos is a breakdown - transition from the acmatic phase of passionarity glow to reasonable management of inertia, and then to thoughtless calm homeostasis. The goals and objectives are still the same, but the forces are waning. The percentage of harmonious and subpassionary people grows, reducing or even nullifying the efforts of creative and patriotic people, who are beginning to be called "fanatics. It is the lack of internal support for "their own" that determines the demise of ethnoses from the few but passionate opponents. "Fear the indifferent," said a 20th-century writer before his death.
It has already been said above that the death of an ethnos, whether by extermination or by assimilation, is preceded by the simplification of its internal structure and the impoverishment of the stereotype of behavior. The mediocrity, destroying extreme individuals in its environment, deprives the collective of the necessary resistance, as a result of which it itself becomes a victim of its neighbors, except in those rare cases when mountains or deserts serve as the last refuge for a relic isolate. There is a known, though not complete, analogy between phylogenesis and ethnogenesis, whereas progressive social development is subject to quite different regularities, described with exhaustive completeness in the theory of historical materialism.
BASTARDS (illegitimate, not consecrated)
If the process of the loss of passionarity as an extreme trait were to take place outside social conditions, it would be quick, demonstrable, and practically inconclusive. But in the complex collisions of ethnic history in constant interaction with socio-economic processes, the role and significance of the loss of passionarity is partly obscured. Therefore, let us return to history again and take an example from an era well-studied, in order to avoid misunderstandings based on incomplete material.
The Western European passions were ruined by colonial fever, for there were seldom any who returned from the East and West Indies, and by syphilis, which gave defective offspring. Syphilis affected people selectively. It affected sailors and soldiers most of all, who in those days were either volunteers, i.e., passionarians, or "roving soldiers," i.e., sub-passionarians. The inert part of the population in the cities and villages suffered less from these two evils, so that the passionary tension of the system was reduced. However, the process was slower than could be expected. There was a circumstance that prevented the reduction of passionarity.
The fact is that the passionarians, before dying in the war, had time to disperse their gene pool in the population through random bonds. The thirst for action, pushing a young man into a bloody fight, aroused in his peers enthusiasm, which they expressed in a way that was accessible to them. And in times of high passionarity, public opinion did not condemn the maidens too harshly for this; sanctimony came with the cooling of passionarity.
The word "bastard" was not offensive in the Middle Ages. The connetable of France under Charles V, Dunois, was called a bastard prince. And there were many like him. During the Hundred Years' War, the illegitimate sons of nobles and bourgeois girls won themselves knightly honors and estates as leaders of vagrant soldiers, that is, sub-passionarians who filled the "white units. These detachments "consisted of poor but unyielding, strong men who sought only their own advantage both in their own country and beyond its borders."[28] In 1431, in the war for Lorraine, the Duke of Burgundy Philip-the-Good employed bastards: d'Humier, de Brimain, de Neville and Robinet the Catcher, a bastard of the Schinderhannes family. These men ensured Philip's victory[29].
It was even easier in the East. The Arabs, Turks, and Mongols, practicing polygamy, considered "legitimate" all their children, even the children of captive slaves. The difference between children from the first wife and from concubines was only taken into account when inheriting the throne, but for the majority of the population it was insignificant. Women have the same gene transfer abilities as men and can be just as passionate. Therefore, the blurring of the primary gene pool in harems created variations in the level of the ethno-social systems' passionary tension more painlessly than in Europe.
This stereotype of behavior made the sign of passionarity wandering. This removes the view that passionarity is intrinsic to a particular class. If even an accidental coincidence can generate such correspondence, then in the next generation it will already be broken (even with a functioning moral police) by the appearance of so-called "illegitimate" children, who, finding themselves in other social groups, will behave according to their level of passionarity, inherited from actual rather than legal ancestors.
For example, in France before the 17th century nobility was not a closed caste. In fact, any vigorous person in the service of the king could become a nobleman. Richelieu's decree imposed some restrictions on this provision: when verified, after the Huguenot wars, a person claiming to be a nobleman had to specify several generations of noble ancestors. And so...? Under Louis XIV, almost all the ministers, a number of prominent military men, and all the great writers (except Fénelon, Larochefoucauld and Madame Sevigne) were not nobles, but bourgeois[30]. They took the leading role in the feudal kingdom because of their business qualities, which their "legitimate" ancestors obviously did not possess; otherwise they too would have been promoted under Philip the Beautiful or Charles the Wise, when in fact there were no class restrictions in the royal service. In fact, if the passionaries had accumulated in one social group, the first bloody war would have destroyed the entire population of passionaries and already in the first phase would have suppressed the process of ethnogenesis that had begun. And this, as we have seen, is not the case.
One often observes such a phenomenon as ethnic regeneration, i.e. the restoration of ethnic structure after the upheavals. And the saviors of the fatherland in this case exhibit passioiarity. similar to that possessed by the founders, and immeasurably greater than that possessed by their legitimate ancestors. Bastards have been present in all eras and among all peoples, although their appearance has rarely been noted by the sources, but this is no reason to consider them non-existent.
The mechanism of ethnic regeneration is as follows. Usually among the sub-ethnoses that form an ethnos, one is the most initiatory and, therefore, the leading one. In it, the passionarity of individuals is intensively transformed into deeds, and therefore the process of wasting passionarity goes quickly. It is replenished from other sub-ethnoses, but there is a reverse current: the passionary gene pool is dispersed throughout the population through extramarital relationships, in which the child remains in the environment of his sub-ethnos, more precisely, in the mother's family. Therefore, the dissipation of the system's passionarity slows down.
When the leading sub-ethnos, having exhausted its possibilities, collapses, one of the peripheral sub-ethnoses picks up the baton, and the process of ethnogenesis, ready to be interrupted, continues. This could not have happened in a regulated marriage relationship, because the child would have had to be taken by the parents into the furnace of human passions, where he would have to share in their doom. And at the cost of the loss of genealogy he was preserving life.
Of course, every regeneration of an ethnos entails a shift in cultural development, but - within a given system, thanks to which the ethnos extends the period of intense creative life, rather than wingless existence. However, this is enough to bless combinations of instincts that break rational norms of behavior. Nature is stronger than human intentions.
WHAT CEMENTS ETHNOSES?
Having answered the question about the nature of the dynamics of ethnic formation, or ethnogenesis, we come to an equally important problem: what is the cause of ethnic stability? After all, many ethnic groups exist in a relic state with such a weak passionarity that it can practically be considered equal to zero. Such are the Bushmen, Australians, Pygmies, Deccan Low Negroes, Paleo-Asians, etc. There are even more examples of fully-fledged ethnoses existing in the form of modern small nations, whose passionarity is so weakened that they only maintain their way of life, occasionally isolating individuals just as passionate as their ancestors were. The Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands are examples of this level of passionarity.
The established material base, management experience and other socio-technical factors counteract the tendency toward decline. Since the ethnos functions within a super-ethnic system throughout its life, there is an "energy" exchange with the elements of the super-system. This causes the level of passionarity to fluctuate. It follows that the functioning of the external system of connections of the ethnos can lead both to acceleration of development and to the decline and even death, if the value of the exchange exceeds some critical value, different in principle for different moments in the life of the ethnos.
Now we are entitled to pose the question: what exactly cements different people, often different from each other, into an integrity called ethnicity? In another system of reference - the social - this role is played by industrial relations, which have the capacity for spontaneous development. But for ethnoses there is another system of reference, and the historical science which studies events in their connection and sequence, perfectly describing the appearance and disappearance of social institutions, but cannot answer the question: why an Athenian was closer to his enemy, a Spartan, than to a Phoenician trading peacefully with him? He will note only that the Athenians and Spartans were Hellenes, i.e. a single, though politically fragmented, ethnos. And what is an ethnos and what are its members related to? - History does not answer this question. So we have to turn to nature.
We already know where lies the difference between ethnic history (the manifestation of the forces of nature) and the history of culture, created by the hands and minds of men. Life erupts and ends in death, which is perceived as a natural end to the process, even a welcome one, especially if it is timely and painless. That is why all processes of the biosphere are discontinuous (discrete): in continuous development there is no place either for death or for birth.
But in the history of culture it is the opposite. Palaces and temples are built for years: landscapes are reconstructed for centuries; scientific works and poems are composed for decades... all in the hope of immortality. This hope is justified:
Man's creatures are not granted death, but slow destruction and oblivion. In the created does not reside passionarity, but there are only its crystals, invested in the physical substance of the creators of form, i.e. people, more precisely, the burning of their feelings and passions. Alas, these crystals are incapable of development and transformation, for they have fallen out of the conversion of the biocoenosis. The right to die is the privilege of the living!
This is precisely why cultures created by ethnic groups and studied by archaeologists outlive the former and mislead the latter, forcing them to identify creation with the creator and to look for analogies between things and people. This temptation is all the more dangerous because when the passionaries leave the population, there remain many people, even more things, and a certain number of ideas. Thus culture, like the light of a fading star, deceives the observer who takes the visible as existing. But the transition from description to explanation of the phenomenon forces us to apply a different apparatus of research - a hypothesis, i.e. an assumption, not provable, but corresponding to all known facts and explaining their interrelations. Here we move into the field of natural sciences.
NOTES
[22] For more details see: Steblin-Kamensky M.I. Culture of Iceland. P. II.
[23] Tomsky A. King of Iceland// Nature and people.1912. - 13. С. 608-670. - 44. С. 684-686.
[24] Bogoraz V.G. New tasks of Russian ethnography in polar areas // Proceedings of the Northern Scientific-Fielding Expedition. Vol. 9. Pg., 1921. С. 20-21.
[25] Gukovsky M.A. Italian wars and High Renaissance of XVI century (till 1559) / / Essays on Italian history / Ed. M.A. Gukovsky. М., 1959. С. 125-152.
[26] Rolova A.D. Period of Spanish domination (second half of XVI - XVIII-th century) / / Ibid. С. 153-191.
[27] The term "action direct" is almost untranslatable. It expresses the indirectness in the manifestation of the impulse, in this case - the passionary impulse.
[28] The Archives of K. Marx and F. Engels. Т. VI. М., 1939. С. 347.
[29] Ibid. С. 348.
[30] Thierry O. Izbr. op. cit. p. 193.
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