10. Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere, Gumilev
Part Five, NATURE WITHIN US, WHICH SHOWS WHICH PART OF MAN BELONGS TO NATURE AND WHICH DOES NOT, AND WHICH PART OF THE WORLD OUTSIDE HUMAN BODIES IS OUTSIDE OF NATURE.
BIT IT DOES NOT YET SOLVE THE PROBLEM OF ETHNOGENESIS
XVIII. Ethnos and population
ETHNOS IS NOT A POPULATION.
Sometimes mundane phenomena provide the ground for scientific conclusions whose prospects go beyond the schoolroom. Much has to be rethought in the science of ethnicity and much has to be abandoned.
To the untutored reader it might seem that we liken ethnos to an organism with purely biological functions. However, the resemblance here is external and the differences are fundamental. The ethnos establishes colonies and sometimes exists in dispersion, while the hand or ear, when separated from the body, extinguishes itself. An organism necessarily produces similar offspring, and in an ethnos (each) is unique, and tradition does not transcend the boundaries of super-ethnic wholenesses. The organism is bound to perish sooner or later, whereas there are ethnos-per-systems, etc.
By no means should we equate the ethnos with the population, which (among animals) can be regarded as an analogue of the ethnos. The difference here is much deeper than the similarity. A population is an aggregate of individuals of the same species inhabiting for generations a certain territory within which free interbreeding takes place and which at the same time is separated from neighboring populations by a certain degree of isolation. An ethnos, as we have seen, is not a collection of similar individuals, but a system consisting not only of individuals diverse both genetically and functionally, but also of the products of their activities over many generations: technology, the anthropogenic landscape, and cultural tradition. Dynamic ethnic groups are also characterized by a sense of historical time, which is fixed by calendars with a variety of reference systems. But the absence of the sense of historical time as an ethno-psychological category in ethnoses in the homeostasis phase, it does not give them the right to be considered only as populations. Even static ethnos can rather freely, though within certain limits, change its area, migrating when the geographical environment changes in search of habitual conditions. Interbreeding within an ethnos is regulated either by class relations, or by traditional prohibitions on incest, or by the rules of law and religion. When these prohibitions are weakened, which sometimes happens, it is always a symptom of the approaching disintegration of the ethnos.
Finally, the nature of ethnic isolation from its neighbors is not related to territory. If a territorial combination of two populations occurs, they immediately merge into one, and two or more ethnic groups can coexist in the same territory for centuries, forming either a super-ethnos or a zone of ethnic contact at any level. Conversely, the struggle between ethnic groups is a frequent phenomenon, although inexplicable in terms of the struggle for existence, because this struggle is often not caused by the overpopulation of the region. And the struggle between populations as discrete (corpuscular) systems is impossible, because the goal of an individual in a population is to survive itself and give offspring.
The gregarious forms of existence of populations of higher mammals, at first sight, are similar to elementary ethnic groups. But this similarity is imaginary. Packs are family units, monogamous, polygamous, or seasonal. They disintegrate as soon as the male leader weakens and loses influence over his own children. Ethnos, on the other hand, grows out of a consortium, i.e. a group of people united by a common destiny. If they are men alone (warriors), they get wives on the side, and family relations emerge in the second or third generation. Family ties cement the emerging ethnos,[1] but they are not obligatory, because there are cases of wide exogamy, especially evident in the composition of harems.
Thus, ethnos is not a zoological population, but a systemic phenomenon peculiar only to man and manifesting itself through social forms, in each case original, for the economy of a country is always connected with the feeding landscape, the level of development of technology and the nature of industrial relations. This, of course, does not mean that an ethnologist is obliged to ignore population genetics, but we should remember that it reflects only one, and not the main side of the process we are studying. Therefore, we will try to extract from it data useful for further analysis.
It is very important to note that each population includes many different genotypes. The concentrations of genotypes are different in different populations, but each group of populations contains almost all genotypic combinations found in a given species[2]. However, small populations lose some or other genotypes, so their degree of variability decreases and their ability to adapt decreases accordingly. This is called degeneration. According to the principles of population genetics, most populations are in a state of dynamic equilibrium, varying in size, structure and genetic composition. An imbalance occurs under the pressure of evolutionary factors, mutational process, quantitative fluctuations or "waves of life", isolation disorders and natural selection. As a result of these influences there is either expansion or reduction in the number of both genotypes and entire populations, and in some cases mutation or fluctuation leads to speciation[3]. Since, on the other hand, an ethnos is within a species, a negligible (relative to the species) mutational pressure, with relatively little isolation and little change in fluctuations, is sufficient for its formation. Therefore, ethnoses emerge more often than species, but also exist for much shorter periods of time, due to which these processes are fixed by history.
MONOMORPHYSIS .
Observing ethnic history, it is easy to see that in a seemingly continuous process of transformation, periods of stability are found associated with the ethnos reaching a maximum adaptation to certain landscapes. This observation coincides with the conclusion made on the basis of population genetics by the ichthyologist Y.P. Altukhov and the anthropologist Y.G. Rychkov, who supplemented the thesis with an indication of adaptivity at the interspecific level of hereditary variability, which has adaptive value within the species. Hence it follows that "actual movement is transformed into stability,"[4] this is what maintains isolates indefinitely. But if there were no counter-processes, even if not constantly acting, then it would be impossible neither speciation in the animal world, nor the emergence of new ethnoses, displacing the isolates. To this the authors offer the following answer: "A change in unique species properties must mean, on rare occasions, the birth of a new species. But this can only be imagined as an isolated event involving reproductive isolation of individuals, not as a continuous probabilistic process playing out at the popular level."[5] After all, the conception of a cub also occurs in the womb at the speed of light.
If we apply this thesis to ethnology, it would be the concept of excess, i.e. the push, the results of which are able to appear only in especially favorable conditions of increased lability of the environment. In other situations the inertia of the push will be extinguished and "individuals" will die at the hands of their tribesmen. It makes no difference whether the ethnos, accommodating these dissimilar people, is in a state of persistent rest - homeostasis, or it is carried by the stream of ethnic formation through all the various phases. In both cases, it will destroy those whom it will rightly (from its bell tower) call freaks. And yet new ethnicities do emerge. This means that there are conditions that allow "individuals" not only to survive, but also to win.
Obviously, these are environmental conditions, both landscape and ethnic, by which we mean, simply put, the nature of the relationship between the neighbors of the individual under study. But if it is very difficult for us to trace the biographies of ancient people who did not have time to prove themselves due to the envy, stupidity and eloquence of their tribesmen or fellow citizens, then by moving on to the study of systems standing several orders of magnitude higher, i.e. ethnic groups, we will get the data we need, which will allow us to substantiate the concept of excess as the trigger moment of ethnogenesis. And the higher the rank of the system under study, the smaller the necessary tolerance and the magnitude of the error will be.
It is obvious from the above that ethnoses are biophysical realities, always clothed in one social shell or another. Consequently, the argument about what is primary in the emergence of a new ethnos: the biological or the social? - is akin to arguing about what is primary in an egg: the protein or the shell? It is clear that one is impossible without the other, and therefore the debate on this subject is pointless.
In fact, not only within large collectives - ethnoses directly affecting terrestrial landscapes [6] and, therefore, existing not as abstractions, but quite real, but also within a single human individual there is a constant conjugation of all forms of matter movement. Even if we consider that all details of human behavior are dictated by his social environment, the genetic code of the embryo is a biological phenomenon, and the reduced release of adrenaline is a chemical one. But both have a great influence on the nature of human activity along with social factors.
Speaking about human interaction with the natural environment, any superficial observer, who ignores history, remains faithful to the principle of simplification. It seems obvious that where there were favorable conditions conducive to a rapid increase in productivity and population growth, the progress of human society was faster, and where this was not the case, slower. And what conditions are considered favorable? Andalusia has a milder climate than England and Castile, but Granada was conquered by the Castilians in 1492 and England was queen of the seas for 500 years.
The conditions of Norway in 2,000 years did not change, but the Vikings ploughed the waves of the ocean only from the ninth to the twelfth century. Norway was stagnant until the ninth century, and afterwards, since the Union of Kalmar, fell victim to Danish occupation. Why?
All this description is made for one purpose only: to show that outbreaks of ethnogenesis are connected not to the culture and life of peoples in development or stagnation, not to their racial composition, not to the level of economy and technology, not to climate variations which change the ecology of an ethnos, but to certain conditions of space and time. The landscape itself does not generate new ethnoses, because they, sometimes, do not arise in one or another, even if very convenient, place for thousands of years. The regions of ethnogenesis are always changing. Here and there begins a process of interest, which means that it is not caused by those terrestrial forces that have already been accounted for by us, but something else, which we must find.
BACKGROUND AND FACTOR.
The analysis of the interaction of the ethnos as an independent phenomenon with the landscape has shown that they are interdependent, but neither ethnos is a constantly acting landscape-forming factor, nor the landscape without extraneous influence can be a reason of ethnogenesis. The correlation of ethnic and social regularities excludes even an inverse relationship, because the Earth's ethnosphere is only a background, not a factor, for social development.
Not only productive forces and technology have their own pattern of development, but also such areas as science and art. Their beginnings lie in antiquity, but the continuity reaches our days and will not be interrupted as long as human beings remain on earth.
Even when there is a protest against tradition, this protest is also traditional, because long ago the epochs of imitation were replaced by periods of searching for the new and original. But if this principle is stable, then every single creation, whether it be an invention, a scientific discovery, a work of art, is new, for it is impossible to make an exact copy. But could it be that the recognition of the eternity of the principle of cultural development determines the actions of an ethnos? No!
Polish writer and philosopher S. Lem in a special work writes: "Culture is determined by factors of a physical, biological, social, techno-economic nature. If all these determinants are expressed by values, is the space for "purely cultural variation" equal to zero or is there still some band of freedom? Anthropological comparativism shows that such space exists and a purely cultural variability of forms and meanings is already manifested in it"[7]. But what is the "band of freedom" filled with?
Obviously, by the actions of individuals possessing the right and ability to choose their decisions. Let it be so, but the actions themselves, which are work in the physical sense, need energy refracted through the psychophysiology of an individual. So, if we liken the social and biological aspects to the sides of a coin, heads and tails, then this energy and its manifestations will be the very metal on which these and other figures are imprinted.
With direct observation, we have access only to a description of these images, as, obviously, not reflecting the essence of the filling they cover (for example, the percentage ratio of the elements of the alloy from which the coin is cast).
Cognition of the underlying phenomena can only be achieved by "empirical generalization”. Therefore, the argument about what is more important: heads or tails (in our case, "unified" geography or comprehensive sociology?) is pointless. Moreover, it is not constructive, since in both cases there is an unconscious tendency to simplify the task set for scientists, i.e. a kind of profanation in which the research itself loses its meaning, because its result will be obviously incomplete and, therefore, wrong. But analysis is necessary to achieve understanding. Therefore, we will not discard the components of the phenomenon that do not fit into the Procrustean bed of a preconceived idea, but try to understand the place and role of each of them, which will eventually lead to the goal of research - synthesis, after which it will become clear that the contradiction between the social, biological and geographical approaches is imaginary.
Let us take the simplest example, a single human being. Anatomy, physiology and psychology in man are intertwined closely and are so dependent on each other that there is no need to dissect these aspects of human existence in our analysis. It is clear that man is a social creature, for his personality is formed in direct communication with other people and with the objects created by the hands of his ancestors (technology). So, what about the spermatozoon? This "persona" is purely biological, evolving according to the laws of vertebrate evolution. However, the connection of the human person with his own embryo is undeniable, and consequently, the human body itself, including the higher nervous activity (psyche), is a laboratory where the social and natural forms of movement of matter are combined.
But even after emerging from the incubation period and fully incorporated into the social environment, the human individual is subject to certain natural laws. Periods of puberty and aging depend not on the stage of social development, but on the heredity of traits developed in the process of intraspecific evolution: for example, in tropical peoples puberty comes earlier than in northerners; responsiveness of negroids is higher than in europeoids and mongoloids; resistance to some diseases, such as measles, in Polynesians is lower than in Europeans, etc. These peculiarities have nothing to do with social development, but they do affect the behavior of people of different countries. The origin of these differences is undoubtedly related to the adaptation of the ancestors of certain populations in different geographical conditions and the formation of ethnic groups, both past and present. It is the accumulation of traits resulting from long processes of adaptation that creates ethnic diversity when mankind passes through the same stages of development - socio-economic formations. But social forms do not exhaust the complexity of the problem of ethnogenesis. After all, then ethnography would be simply a section of sociology, and the behavior of people living in societies of the same formation, let us say slave-owning, would be the same. But Chinese antiquity has differences not only with Hellenic, but also with Japanese, Indian or Egyptian. Social similarity does not destroy ethnic originality.
COMPLIMENTARITY
However, can the idea that ethnos is a biological quantity be accepted? No, this is not a solution either, since ethnic processes take place in a monomorphic species.
Nevertheless, some biological features of the human species seem to play a role. Let us assume that ethnogenesis as a global phenomenon is only a particular case of general evolution, but this "particularity" is extremely important, because, posing the problem of the primary origin of ethnic integrity from individuals (people) of mixed origin, different cultural levels and different features, we have the right to ask ourselves: what attracts them to each other? Obviously, the principle of conscious calculation and the pursuit of profit is absent, as the first generation faces enormous difficulties - the need to break established relationships in order to establish new ones in their place, meeting their needs. This undertaking is always risky, and the starters seldom manage to reap the benefits of victory. Nor is the principle of social proximity suitable, since the new ethnos destroys the institutions of the old. Consequently, a person, in order to enter a new ethnos at the moment of formation, must completely renounce the familiar old one. This is how the wolfish tribe of Quirites, who became Romans; the confessional communities of early Christians and Muslims; the Viking bands who settled in Scotland, Iceland, Normandy and England, and the feudal lords who repulsed them; the Mongols in the 13th century; and everyone else we know. It is more appropriate to apply another principle, complimentarity, associated with the subconscious mutual sympathy of individuals. Love marriages are based on this principle, but we should not limit complimentarity to the sphere of sex, which is only a variant of the manifestation of this principle.
In the formation of the primary collective, the embryo of ethnos, the main role is played by the unconscious attraction of people of a certain type to each other. There is always such a pull, but when it intensifies, it creates the necessary prerequisite for the emergence of ethnic tradition. And after that, social institutions emerge.
Thus, the birth of any ethnic tradition and the social institution connected with it is preceded by a germ, i.e. an association of a certain number of people sympathetic to each other. Having begun to act, they enter the historical process, cemented by their chosen goal and historical destiny. Whatever their destiny may turn out to be, it is a "condition without which one cannot begin. Such a group might become a pirate band of filibusters, a religious sect of Mormons, an order of Templars, a Buddhist community of monks, an Impressionist art school, etc., but what is common here is a subconscious mutual engagement, even to argue with one another. This is why we have called such "germinal" associations above consortia. Not every consortium survives; most will crumble in the lifetime of its founders, but those that do manage to survive become part of society's history and immediately take on social forms, often creating a tradition. Those few whose fate is not cut short by blows from the outside, survive to the natural loss of increased activity, but retain the inertia of attraction to each other, expressed in common habits, worldviews, tastes, etc.
We have called this phase of complimentary unification conviviality. It no longer has a force of influence on the environment and is subject to the competence not of sociology, but of ethnography. because this group is united by everyday life. Under favorable conditions, convictions are stable, but their resistance to the environment tends to zero, and they scatter among the surrounding consortia.
The principle of complementarity also appears at the level of ethnicity, and it is very effective. Here, it is called patriotism and is in the competence of history, because one cannot love a nation without respecting its ancestors. As a rule, intra-ethnic complimentarity is useful for the ethnos, being a powerful protective force. But sometimes it takes an ugly, negative form of hatred of everything alien; then it is called chauvinism.
Complimentarianism at the level of the super-ethnos can only be speculative. Usually it is expressed in arrogance, when all strangers and people who do not resemble themselves are called "savages”.
The principle of complimentarity is not a social phenomenon. It is observed in wild animals, and in domestic animals it is known to everyone both in a positive (the attachment of a dog or horse to its master) and in a negative form. As we have seen, this principle plays a leading role only in the absence of social forms of being a collective, but it retains a subordinate role in the presence of stable social institutions. This circumstance prompts us to turn to human biology, fortunately sufficiently developed.
BIOLOGICAL LINES OF INQUIRY
Let us agree on terms. Biological disciplines include not only anatomy and genetics, but also those sciences that study the manifestations of the organism in relation to its environment: reflexology, ecology, biocenology, and ethology (the science of behavior). We believe that not everything related to the activity of the organism is social in nature. In addition to humans, cubs are raised and trained by animals and birds. All herd animals have a system of signals, regulation of sexual relations in the herd, and sex-age specialization in defense against enemies. Males protect females and cubs. Can we call this kind of relationship social in the sense of social movement of matter?
In the abbreviation adopted in Soviet science, no, because social development is based on economic development and connected with the development of productive forces. Social relations, therefore, are always connected with this or that formation. This is the accepted terminology in Soviet science, and to change it would confuse the reader and oneself. But collective forms of existence of the species were peculiar to our remote ancestors. Before man became a social animal, he was a herd, which is not at all an affront to human dignity.
The impact of the collective on the physiology of the individual is now well studied. Even in a mouse you can cause hypertension if you tease it, but you can hardly call a composition of a mouse, a laboratory assistant and an experimenter social in the sense of the word accepted by us.
"But it is better to avoid unfamiliar and unnecessary terminology”, which is also irrelevant to our readers. So how does biology help us in our work? Let us begin with the obvious. Collective forms of dwelling are common in many terrestrial animal species: anthills, herds of ungulates, flocks, etc., but each species has its own character of collective formation. For Homo sapiens, such a form is ethnos, but this in no way means that it is analogous to an ant colony or herd. Just as humans differ from other vertebrates, and they differ radically, so ethnoses are not like the collectives of other animals.
There are many differences between animal collectives and ethnoses, but for the purposes of analysis we will limit ourselves to an elementary scheme, which we need in developing the problem of the role of cultural tradition. Let us imagine a tribe with common ancestors, living in a strictly delimited territory and clearly differentiated from its neighbors in terms of life, customs, religion, and occupation. In this situation, marriages are more likely to be between members of that ethnic group, since it would not be advisable to accept into the collective a person who does not have the labor and household skills necessary to keep the family well-to-do. Other skills associated with different conditions will be inapplicable. The cultural appearance of an isolated ethnos without the powerful intervention of outside forces (conquest) is relatively stable, because each new generation seeks to reproduce the life cycle of the previous one, which is the cultural tradition of that ethnos.
It would seem that tradition can by no means be attributed to biology, but the mechanism of interaction between generations was uncovered by Professor M.E. Lobashev on the basis of his study of animals, in which he discovered processes of "signal heredity,"[8] which is simply another name for tradition. In the animal world, individual adaptation is accomplished through the mechanism of a conditioned reflex, which provides the animal with an active choice of optimal conditions for life and self-protection. These conditioned reflexes are transmitted by parents to their children or by older members of the herd to younger ones, due to which the stereotype of behavior is the highest form of adaptation. This phenomenon in humans is called the continuity of civilization, which is provided by the "signal of signals" - speech. This continuity includes skills of everyday life, thinking techniques, perception of art objects, treatment of elders and relations between the fellows, which ensure the best adaptation to the environment and are transmitted by signal heredity. In combination with endogamy, i.e., isolation from neighbors, which stabilizes the composition of the gene pool, tradition serves as a factor that creates the stability of the ethnic collective.
Finally, and of no small importance are anthropogenetics and anthropology, which consider populations of Homo sapiens in biological time, i.e. in the succession of generations. The life of an ethnos is a superimposition of biological time and historical time, the change of generations into a chain of events in a causal sequence. This superimposition is carried out without ruptures of causal regularity due to the combination of genetic memory with historical continuity, so that the ethnos exists as a whole.
However, even more important is the emergence in the population of a trait that we metaphorically call "factor X," because it is, thanks to this trait that the processes of ethnogenesis, which subsequently fade out, are initiated. Having identified this characteristic, we will solve the problem, but it is difficult to find it and to look for it sequentially.
XIX. Phylogenesis or attogenesis?
HUMAN PROGRESS AND EVOLUTION
According to the generally accepted theory of evolution, the genus Homo appeared in the early Quaternary period in several different forms of hominids, possibly following one another, although perhaps sometimes coexisting. Like their presumed ancestor, the Australopithecus, hominids were large carnivores, not alien to cannibalism, and thus occupied an upper ecological niche in biocenoses. By the end of the last glaciation, all branches of this genus had become extinct except for only one species, Noscho sapiens, i.e. modern humans. However, the latter spread over the entire land surface of the planet, then in the historical period mastered the surface of the hydrosphere and made such changes on the Earth that nowadays the entire landscape shell of the Earth is rightly called anthropogenic. With the exception of polar ice, there is no area without archaeological sites of the Stone and Iron Ages. We find paleological sites in today's deserts and jungles, Neolithic sites in today's tundra and taiga. Of course, climatic conditions have changed in various regions over the past 17-20 thousand years but the fact remains that the Nomo sapiens species, unlike other vertebrate species, was not confined to a certain habitat and managed to adapt to a variety of environmental conditions, which rightfully places it in a special place in vertebrate ecology.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, technological advances allowed the predation of natural resources, and this seemed to be the way of progress. Today, there is not enough fresh water for industry, flora is oppressed, dust storms in the United States retaliate for the destruction of prairie biocenoses, the air in large cities is depleted of oxygen, 110 species of vertebrates have disappeared from the face of the Earth in the last 300 years and another 600 species are threatened.
Until recently, this process was called the noosphere and a victory over nature. Now it has become clear that we are witnessing a phenomenon of an entirely different (not social) order: the increased adaptability and aggressiveness of the Homo sapiens species, a component of the biosphere of planet Earth.
The first question arises here: how well does the above phenomenon fit in the framework of the evolution of vertebrates, to which Homo sapiens belongs? And the second, not less important: does man, after he created tools and learned to use fire, remain in the biocoenosis as the upper, concluding link, or does he move into some other sphere of relationship with nature, involving there the same domesticated animals and cultivated plants? This is all the more essential because, according to the law of the irreversibility of evolution, animals and plants, changed by the influence of man beyond recognition, cannot return to independent life, since, with a few exceptions, they are unable to withstand competition with wild forms[9]. Thus, a special layer has been created within the biosphere. Are the principles of natural selection active within it?
Many proponents of the evolutionary theory, [including Ch. 10] Others doubt it, citing the following grounds: "The gradual weakening of the struggle for existence inevitably led to the withdrawal of man from the biocoenosis”. This slow process led to the fact that natural selection for man first weakened and then ceased altogether... But the absence of natural selection was tantamount to the cessation of a factor of evolution... and human biological evolution had to stop. This happened about 50,000 years ago, when the Cro-Magnon man took shape."[11]
Я. Я. Roginsky and M.G. Levin wrote in 1955 that in the person of modern humans, the process of biological evolution created a possessor of such species properties, which resulted in the damping of evolution[12]. Consequently, it seems as if there can be no doubt that human evolutionary development stopped long ago. But since modifications within the species continue. The subject of study is not exhausted even with this formulation of the problem. However, a new aspect and a new methodology are necessary for the continuation of the study, because only by describing the peculiarities of the phenomenon it is possible to adhere to one or another point of view[13].
REGIONAL MUTATIONS
Four years after the publication of A. P. Bystrov; G.F. Debitz published a paper with a stunning conclusion. The massive bones of the skull are thinning (gracilization), and it is not gradual, but jerky, and not globally, but by latitudinal zones[14]. Thus, in the subtropical zone the skull gracilization took place in the 6th millennium BC, and in the temperate forest zone in the 1st millennium BC. With these dates G.F. Debets compares the dates of transition from hunting to agriculture, pointing out that "it is possible to assume that the transition to agriculture led to a change in the structure of the skull.
However, it is equally possible that the changed man acquired a new occupation. But his other point is quite true: "...neither comparative anatomy nor ethnography give us the right to assume that within the species Homo sapiens the gracial forms are more perfect". Correct! However, it is well known that modification of one trait affects not only human anatomy, but also human behavior. G. F. Debitz concludes "that it is a matter of changes having a biological essence. Consequently, under the conditions of historical existence, biological processes continue to run in human communities, stimulating even changes in the skeleton. But then there must also be variations of a smaller range reflected in physiology and behavior. These are more difficult to uncover, but the assumption of their presence, now precedent-setting, allows us to begin our search for a factor of human activity operating alongside the well-known social. Could it be intraspecific evolution that has taken a peculiar form under the influence of the social beginning - the spread of the species beyond its original range? Or maybe it is something new, still to be studied? Let us see.
The main material for evolutionary theory is provided by paleontology, but it should be remembered that its annals are incomplete and the question of the origin and extinction of species is still the subject of controversy. The chronology is particularly difficult to follow, with the assumption that the appearance and disappearance of species can sometimes be dated back more than millions of years. Similar difficulties are encountered in some of the somatic divisions of Homo sapiens, namely the formation of races of the first order: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Australoid, and Negroid; hence, a purely biological approach to the problem, even when limited in time, gives us no advantage. In addition, it should be noted that race has nothing to do with the increased adaptability that has allowed man to change the face of the planet; and finally, the great races are such undefined communities that anthropology has various classifications based on certain external features: skin pigmentation, cranial structure, etc. The most important thing is that the vast majority of individuals have as their ancestors representatives of different races, if not of the first, then of the second order, and consequently, the actually existing and directly observable human communities are always heterogeneous. And it is precisely these, known to us as nationalities or ethnicities, that are the collective forms of existence of the species Homo sapiens, interacting with the landscapes of the regions inhabited by them, i.e. elementary ecological intraspecific taxa.
BIOCENOSIS CONVERSIONS AND SUCCESSIONS
We have already mentioned that the relic ethnos poses no threat to either its neighbors or its landscapes. Now let us try to explain the reason for this in a little more detail. If ethnos is the upper and final link in the geobiocenosis, then it also enters the cycle of its conversion. This last notion needs a comment.
Let me explain.
English biologist T. Huxley formulated the following thesis: "Conversion cycle is a mechanism ensuring circulation of energy among plants and animals of one habitat; in other words, it is an exchange of substances in an ecological community characteristic of a given habitat. The circulation of energy must be maintained and intensified in order to preserve the habitat."[15] The latter is extremely important for us. Natural increase in a relic ethnos in the past was usually limited by high infant mortality, and the greatest accumulations of a mating couple by old age are usually sufficient only to keep the ethnos in balance with the environment and are some insurance against exogenous influences: wars, epidemics, natural disasters. The normal efforts of an isolated community are spent on overcoming these constantly arising difficulties. It is always devoid of aggression and incapable of changing nature. Obviously, such an ethnos cannot be the cause of cataclysms that distort the nature of the regions it occupies.
But other, diametrically opposite collisions often arise. F. Osborne wrote in 1948: "The history of the nation (American) over the past century in terms of the use of natural wealth is unparalleled... in fact it is a history of human energy, reckless and uncontrolled."[16] But it is also so in terms of ethnic conflicts! The extermination of the Indians, the slave trade, the takeover of Texas in 1836-1848, the massacre of the French-Indian Métis in Canada in 1885, the takeover of California and Alaska by gold prospectors-all these events were carried out in an unorganized and uncontrolled manner. The U.S. and Canadian governments then only sanctioned the facts that had already occurred and profited from them.
But the Arab invasion of East Africa and the movement of Dutch settlers into the Cape and on to the Orange River were carried out on the same principle. In the same way Russian explorers conquered Siberia, and the Chinese conquered the lands south of the Yangtze. The Hellenic colonization of the Mediterranean and the Viking campaigns do not differ from these phenomena. And, apparently, the same in character were the campaigns of the Celts and the seizure of northern India by the Aryans. Consequently, we have stumbled upon the often repeated phenomenon of the transition of an ethnos or part of it into a dynamic state, when its aggressiveness and adaptive abilities increase to an enormous degree, allowing it to adapt to new, hitherto unusual, conditions of existence.
All the actions described and similar to them require from their participants colossal work (in the physical sense), equally muscular, intellectual and emotional. Any work, in order to be produced, requires a corresponding expenditure of energy, which needs to be taken from somewhere. So what is this energy, clearly not electrical, mechanical, thermal, or gravitational? And where do people who take deadly risks get it from? And do they need such a harmful pastime? But if they nevertheless expend this energy, dying more often than winning, then it is legitimate to ask: doesn't the described phenomenon have something to do with the "factor X" that we are persistently looking for? It might. But first, let us clarify the problem statement.
ANTHROPOSUCCESSION
We should not extend the noted peculiarity of certain events of history to all its phenomena. This would be as erroneous as reducing all manifestations of human activity to social principles. "The great rule” - is to distinguish, not to mix, for the reduction of variety does not yet lead to truth. Unfortunately, mediocre minds are prone to monotony. “Monotony is so convenient! If it distorts everything, at least it resolves all questions with courage," writes bitterly Oposthen Thierry[17]. And how right he is! It is so ridiculous to reduce, say the Seven Years' War or the Napoleonic conquest of Prussia to spontaneous processes. Events of this order are perfectly explained by the conscious calculations of political men, dictated to them by the social conscience, not by instincts. This is the criterion for classification, as clear as the psychological classification of an individual's actions into conscious and subconscious.
The indicator here is the presence of freedom of choice when making a decision, and, consequently, the moral and legal responsibility for one's actions. In the practical activities of people, these two lines of behavior are never mixed. Thus, falling in love in adolescence is rightly considered natural, while hooliganism and prostitution are punished as conscious acts of will; loss of hair and teeth in old age is not blamed on a person, but does not justify, say, participation in official intrigues, although the latter can to some extent be explained by the presence of sclerosis. The similar approach to differentiation of different phenomena of history can be carried out in the scientific analysis that we have already shown once on a private example of different character of movements of nomadic peoples of Eurasia, depending on a degree of moistening of a steppe zone [18]. Now we simply note that a similar relationship takes place for the entire Homo sapiens species.
The relocation of peoples to habitual conditions is a desire to preserve oneself as an ethnic system and to keep the nourishing landscape from destruction. Anthroposuccession, i.e. the invasion of areas that cannot and should not always be inhabited, but which can be conquered, is migration with the opposite sign. And worst of all: the victors suffer no less than the vanquished, because in order to realize their successes they must adapt to the new conditions, and this means a radical break in their own nature. It is clear that only the young, the most plastic and labile, i.e. unstable, are capable of such a shaking.
But at the beginning of the process (succession or aggression - as the reader likes) these elements play only subordinate roles. For the leading individuals, unleashing a chain of bloody events is neither expedient nor desirable. But since anthroposuccessions do occur, apparently their causes lie beyond what is controlled by human consciousness. But then the dynamics and statics of ethnogenesis are equally legitimate, and the categories of guilt and responsibility are absent. No! This thesis does not entail forgiveness! Individuals, of course, are to blame for the crimes they commit regardless of this or that phase of ethnogenesis. But ethnic laws are much higher, and both statistical law of large numbers and Newton's third law of motion apply to them: action equals counteraction - the victors perish together with the vanquished or a little later, but not in the sense of physical death, but in the sense of ethnic restructuring. Ethnoses are not like snakes: they change not their skins but their souls.
XX. When immortality is more terrible than death
PHYLOGENY IS TRANSFORMED INTO ETHNOGENESIS
The dispute over what is man: beast or God? - which agitated the minds of romantics and nihilists, has fortunately lost its significance. It has become apparent that man is not only an animal, but also a beast, and this does not diminish his dignity in the slightest. And that is why it lives in collectives - ethnoses, specific communities. And for our theme it is important to establish the place of ethnos as a specific phenomenon within the species Homo sapiens, to understand what maintains the relative stability of ethnos, and to understand the reasons for its disappearance (which is easier) and its emergence (a matter of questions).
At the same time, we should state that it is ethnic collectives that adapt to certain local conditions, and the stages of development-formation are global, and their connection with the geographical environment is mediated by the mosaic anthroposphere, i.e. the ethnosphere accessible to the observation of the naturalist. Encountering a large number of events, we can group them according to the principles of similarity and causal sequence, i.e. we can apply the methodology of natural sciences to historical material. And then we get a firm conclusion: ethnoses emerge and disappear regardless of the presence of certain perceptions of contemporaries. This means that ethnoses are not the product of the social consciousness of individuals, although they are related exclusively to forms of collective human activity... Social development imposes its imprint on all other forms of movement of matter as they are related to people. But no one has ever attempted to interpret gravitation or electrical conductivity, epidemics, death or heredity in social terms, for this is the domain of natural science. The "shocks" described above, as well as some similar phenomena, we are entitled to consider as anthropogenic successions. But we will analyze the perplexities and doubts arising in this case a little later, when we understand their cause, i.e. the mysterious "factor X". For now let's continue the description of the phenomenon.
Over the past five thousand years anthropogenic changes in the landscape have occurred repeatedly, but with different intensity and always within certain regions. When comparing with history a clear link is established between the anthropogenic changes in nature and the epochs of formation of new ethnic groups.
Just as the emergence of an ethnos and the reshaping of the landscape according to its new aspirations, so the migration of large numbers of people with weapons and implements is work in the physical sense; so they require the expenditure of energy. Moreover, the maintenance of an ethnos as a system also cannot do without the expenditure of energy to overcome the constant resistance of its environment. And even the decline of an ethnos, i.e. the slowing down of its development, is linked to the moment of application of force, the cause that causes a plus or minus on the acceleration.
This thesis, as formulated by me[19], was supported by Yu. К. 20], and then by Bromley, who attributed the authorship to Y.K. Efremov,[21] in which the latter, according to his sincere personal statement, is not guilty. But even more surprising is the fact that Bromley, admitting "the role of bioenergetic source" in ethnic processes, suggests that this energy "depends on the specific and historical conditions of their (ethnic communities) existence." It seems that the law of conservation of energy does not need to be defended, and it is inappropriate to enter into an argument about it. But the fact that the presence of a certain kind of energy to do the work necessary for ethnogenesis as a process is recognized as already good.
A characteristic of this specific form of energy is contained in the remarkable book by V. I. Vernadsky: "All living things represent a continuously changing, consisting of the most diverse closely interconnected living substances, a set of organisms subject to an evolutionary process in the course of geological time. It is a kind of dynamic equilibrium tending to change in the course of time into a static equilibrium... The longer its existence, if there are no equivalent phenomena acting in the opposite direction, the closer to zero will be the free energy", i.e. "the energy of living matter, which manifests itself in the opposite direction to entropy. For the action of living matter creates the development of free energy capable of producing work."[22] Consequently, the structure and stereotype of ethnos behavior are dynamic quantities, which are determined by the presence of intra-ethnic evolution, which are equally unlike social and biological evolution.
Translating this conclusion into the language of ethnology, we can state that the fate of all ethnoses is a gradual transition to ethnolandscape equilibrium. The latter is understood as a situation in which an ethnic collective, such as a tribe, enters the biocenosis of a particular region and population growth, which is limited by the possibilities of the biochorus, ceases. In the above aspect, ethnic groups find their place in geobiochemistry: the stable state of an ethnic group is the case when all the energy received from the natural environment is entirely spent on maintaining processes within the system, and its output is close to zero; the dynamic state is the suddenly emerging ability to capture more energy and give it away outside the ethnic system in the form of work. It causes a gradual loss of the ethnogenetic trait's ability to absorb more energy and to produce it purposefully in the form of work, which is accompanied by a simplification of the ethnos's structure.
The fact that every relic ethnos (in persistence) exists only because it was once formed and thus lived through a dynamic phase of development. During its stay in a dynamic state any ethnos constantly passes through excruciating breakage not only of the nature of the regions captured by it, but also of its own physiology and ethology (behavior), which is expressed in adaptation of its organism to new conditions. However, the withdrawal associated with the transition to a dynamic state is not always possible. As we have seen, they occur in some relatively rare epochs of spontaneous migrations of peoples, and then for a long time the traditional system fixed on the ethnographic maps is established. So, biological evolution within the species Homo sapiens is preserved, but acquires features not peculiar to other animal species. Phylogeny (evolutionary history of a group) is transformed into ethnogeny.
EVOLUTION AND ETHNOGENESIS.
Of course, we should not equate ethnogenesis with phylogeny, since new ethnoses remain within the species. The analogy we have noted is fundamentally incomplete and because of this, it explains the difference between macro - and microevolutionary processes. But recognizing the existence of biological evolution of modern man, ethnologist cannot agree with the predictions of our Western contemporaries about the purposeful development of the brain, which should change the entire human appearance.
J. Holden drew a portrait of a new kind of hominid - Homo sapientissimus,[23] obviously paying tribute to the tastes of his audience, who want to see progress and only progress in the future. But if that were the case, people who lived 2-5 millennia before us would have had marked somatic differences with us. One may recall the gracilization (skull thickness) discovered by G.F. Debitz, but even this proponent of race variability stated: "Individual 'primitive' and 'progressive' traits are found in all races, but none of them is distinguished by a 'primitive' or 'progressive' set of traits, unless they are considered as such in advance. If to accept the anthropoid ape skull or at least the Neanderthal skull as a criterion of primitiveness, the proto -European type of the Eneolithic epoch of the Russian plain by the sum of features will not be more primitive, than the type of ancient Slavs or modern Ukrainians "[24].
In fact, the development of mankind followed the line of a real expansion and the increase of the number of intraspecies variations, i.e. ethnic groups. A part of the latter dies leaving the descendants material or literary monuments, some remain in the form of relics, some have disappeared without a trace, but there was no case that the subconscious actions of the population with a single stereotype of behavior led to purposeful changes of their own nature, no matter what conditions were created for such a collective.
It turns out that sometimes people prefer valiant death to voluntary self-destruction for the sake of preservation of life, which in this case loses any attraction for them. This peculiarity of the intraspecies psychological stereotype limits the possibilities of ethnogenesis as a local process and calls into question the analogy of ethnogenesis with evolution.
As strange as this conclusion is, it is consistent and correct, for the ethnos, acquiring social forms, creates political institutions that are not natural phenomena. The Romans created the senate, the consulate, the tribunate and the system of law; the Franks created feudalism; the sixth-century Turks created the “el” as a combination of tribal alliances and military associations (hordes); the Incas created a complex construction of enslavement of Indian tribes and their own hierarchy, etc. But all these institutions were the work of human hands and in this sense are like temples with colonnades, palaces, axes, and garments, which, as already mentioned, having no possibility of self-development, can only deteriorate from the effects of time.
Forms created by genius and human labor resist the gradual disappearance of things, but any sufficiently strong outside influence can break the form and condemn its contents to decay. And after such a tragedy has occurred and no immediate regeneration follows, the ethnos turns into an amorphous population, a component of the geo-biocenosis. And only a new explosion of ethnogenesis will bring it out of the deadlock, force it to mix with its neighbors and proclaim a new ethnic dominance. But then it will be a new ethnos.
CREATIVITY OR LIFE?
At first glance, this cruel conclusion is strikingly pessimistic, but it is only at first glance. Let us consider whether people need an eternity of vegetation, "without deity, without inspiration, without tears, without life, without love"?
Isn't the best thing that exists in human beings the capacity for creativity? But it entails an irreplaceable expenditure of the human body's vital energy. And if we are talking about a system of a higher order, an ethnicity, the pattern is the same. Victory over a powerful enemy in a war of liberation or conquest takes away many heroes and the genes embedded in them; but should such a sacrifice be preferred to shameful slavery?
The transformation of the landscape, the discovery of new countries and, in our time, of planets, the grueling work in the laboratory or library, not by duty but by conscience, tear people away from their families or prevent them from creating them at all. But after all, we honor the names of Columbus and Magellan, Przewalski and Livingston, Evariste Galois and Henri Poincaré, Oposten Thierry and Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, who burned out in their work.
And the artists? Rembrandt and Van Gogh, Andrei Rublev and Mikhail Vrubel! And poets, and composers, and certainly the heroes who fought for their country, you can not even list, as such examples are known to everyone. Many of them did not leave a trace in the gene pool, but with this sacrifice they erected buildings of culture, which to this day delight the descendants.
But after all, some of these people had families, and their children did not show the talents of their parents. Doesn't this contradict our conclusion? Let's look into it.
Ability alone is not everything. Great achievements require a fervor that pushes people to sacrificially serve an ideal, real or imaginary. It is this fervor that can be seen as a trait, apparently recessive, for it is not always transmitted. If people of the described type had a hundred children each, it would probably be possible to calculate the percentage, and thus the probability of transmitting the trait. But, alas, with respect to man, the methods of research that are suitable for peas and flies are not applicable. History, on the other hand, has material that summarizes the characteristics of the activities of different ethnoses at different, strictly dated epochs. Ethical history and analysis of different ethnogenesis allow us to establish the following interdependence: the intensity of ethnogenesis is inversely proportional to the duration of an ethnic system, which nevertheless cannot exist indefinitely.
First of all, the monotony of dull existence reduces the vitality of people to such an extent that there is a tendency toward drugs and sexual perversions in order to fill the resulting mental emptiness. And this always weakens the ethnos as a system. Secondly, by eliminating extreme genotypes from life, the ethnos simplifies by reducing diversity and this, in turn, reduces the resistance of the ethnic collective as a whole. Under calm conditions it is insignificant, but in collisions with the biological environment, mainly with neighbors, the absence of active specialized and sacrificial elements is felt extremely painfully. To consider this process as conscious, as S. M. Shirokogorov does, believing that the ethnos tends to "intellectual leveling” and reduction to the average level of individuals who have gone ahead, “guided by the consciousness (or instinct) of self-preservation"[25], is hardly true.
No ethnos made conscious decisions to destroy thinking and valiant people, and they perished according to the logic of events not controlled by the will of their participants. So it was in imperial Rome where during the soldiers' mutinies, the most disciplined centurions became their victims and the legionaries were easily defeated by barbarians; in Byzantium where in 1204 and in 1453 the population refused to go to the walls and defend their homes, letting the brave defenders perish without help; in China in XII-XIII centuries where both the population and the government surrendered to the Jurchens and Mongols, etc. But this only happened in the epoch of decline, when the logic of historical events by vector coincided with biological degeneration and social crises. And since every ethnogenesis ends with the death of the system, the teleological principle seems absurd. Is it possible to strive for one's own terrible end? One can only courageously admit its inevitability!
Thus, neither Darwinist, nor anti-Darwinist, nor the new synthetic concepts of evolution are suitable for explaining ethnogenesis. This is natural, for ethnology is not a biological but a geographical science and, therefore, has its own specificity, albeit related to the behavior of new organisms and the environment in which they inhabit.
THOUGHTS OF S. I. KORZHINSKY
Still, there is one concept suitable for our subject, of course, with corrections and purification from the bias of individual theses.
In 1899 S. I. Korzhinsky published his book "Heterogenesis and Evolution" in St. Petersburg. In his opinion, the struggle for existence and natural selection are the factors that organize the formation of new forms and transcend the accumulation of variations because they promote the survival of average types, i.e. maintain the status quo. The emergence of new forms occurs due to rare "jump variations" in certain geographical regions. The evolutionary process leads to the formation of a sex barrier (non-breeding) between the new race and its ancestor and the emergence of new heterogeneous variations[26].
The emergence of a new geographic race is drawn as follows: "Among the offspring descended from normal representatives of a species or race and developing under the same conditions, there suddenly appear separate individuals, more or less deviating from the rest and from their parents. These deviations are sometimes quite significant and are expressed in a number of traits, but more often they are limited to a few or even a single difference. But it is remarkable that these traits have great constancy and are invariably inherited from generation to generation. Thus, at once a new race arises, as solid and constant as those which have existed since time immemorial.
Apparently, K. M. Zavadsky, who noted that S.I. Korzhinsky's hypothesis refers to race or speciation, but passes over the problem of expediency and does not raise the question of the relationship between speciation and adaptiogenesis. Consequently, this hypothesis has no direct relation to evolution understood as the formation of expedient traits[27].
I am not judging whether S.I. Korzhinsky's conclusions with respect to the formation of species are correct, but if we are talking about ethnogenesis, a process standing several orders of magnitude lower, they apply in their entirety: the processes of the formation of ethnoses are not evolutionary processes. This is the difference between ethnogenesis and anthropogenesis.
EXCESS AND INERTIA IN ETHNOGENESIS.
The concept of heterogenesis removes almost all perplexity about the nature of ethnogenetic processes. Natural selection stabilizes the ethnic system, which leads to its inevitable simplification. And this circumstance, in its turn, speaks of the necessity to recognize the concept of excess, i.e. impulses-micro-mutations arising from time to time and disturbing the natural course of energy level changes connected with the emergence of ethnos.
If the described processes were not counterbalanced by the other processes of the same power but having opposite sign, the new ethnoses wouldn't arise. Then mankind in Paleolithic would have turned into an amorphous mass of anthropoids, similar to each other and inhabiting the same climatic zone. These bipedal carnivores would have multiplied extremely slowly, for they, like all other animals, would have been limited by the amount of food. And they would not need reason, because having reached the optimum of adaptation to their usual conditions, they would not feel the need to change. In short, they would all live like the current insulae-peristents.
But in fact, from time to time there are outbreaks of ethnogenesis, entailing the expansion of the range and reshuffling of many elements of the hypersystem called "humanity". And, as was shown above, these outbreaks are unexplainable by social development, for they are by no means progress-oriented and so rarely coincide with changes of formations that these coincidences should be considered accidental. So we must return to the concept of the biological evolution of Homo sapiens. It is accepted that after the formation of a truly human society in the Upper Paleolithic, "selection as a speciation-forming force was overcome" and "in comparison with the high development of speech and thinking, other features of Homo sapiens were not decisive, although, of course, they were not indifferent"[28]. This last caveat suffices.
In order for an excess that does not change human physiology and anatomy, but only deforms a stereotype of behavior to occur, it does not have to be strong. Even on the contrary, only a weak excess will leave untouched the background - geographical, physiological and social, on which in this case the outlines of a new psychological attitude will be clearly marked. And the initiator of such an excess, or impetus, can only be the "X factor," already repeatedly mentioned above.
XXI. The sum of the contradictions
UNTIL AN ANSWER IS FOUND
Seeking to get a consistent explanation of the essence of ethnic phenomena, we have turned to different sciences and everywhere have received some answers, but never exhaustive. It is not that we did not need these answers, on the contrary, they were necessary, but they enlightened these or those conditions of ethnogenesis and not its real reason which, according to the task, should be invariant, i.e. be always present and influence the phenomena unambiguously. Explanation,
Racial or intra-racial shifting of ethnoses by exogamy or by assimilation sometimes generates new ethnoses, sometimes gives a scattering back to the original forms, and sometimes leads to degeneration of the population up to its extinction. Obviously, there is an unaccounted for trait in these processes that fundamentally biases the results.
Isolation through endogamy often preserves ethnic groups, but sometimes weakens them so much that they lose their resistance to the environment, both natural and ethnic. Then the ethnos disappears, being displaced or exterminated by its neighbors.
Adaptation in different landscape conditions sometimes leads to ethnic divergence and sometimes does not; even in different climatic zones ethnos can remain monolithic, of course, at a given level of mosaicism.
And vice versa, the similarity of landscape conditions of the territory, where two or three ethnic groups have been abandoned by migrations, sometimes leads to mutual assimilation, and sometimes ethnic groups coexist without merging. And it is clear that the reason is not in the nature of the region, but in something which is in the ethnic groups themselves, but which is still subject to disclosure and description.
The combination of two or more landscapes is a necessary condition for the beginning of a local ethnogenetic process, but it is not enough. The ethnoses do not always arise under the described conditions. This means that an additional factor should be sought.
The spread of a single type of culture, such as a religious system, sometimes leads to the fusion of ethnoses, and sometimes has no effect on the independence of the ethnic development of new converts. Similarly, the similarity of material culture either brings peoples closer together or pushes them into rivalry, or is irrelevant to their relations. The same must be said of the division of cultural types. When a new sect or doctrine emerges, its adherents are sometimes singled out as a distinct ethnicity, and sometimes remain in the old one, retaining their beliefs. Intolerance is not characteristic of all eras and peoples.
Similar social conditions may accompany the assimilation of ethnicities, but this is not necessarily the case. It also often happens that in one ethnos, some people live under the customary conditions of tribal life, some live under feudalism, and some group practices capitalist relations. This phenomenon is known and is called "multiformity.
Maybe the global historical process leads to the formation of huge ethnic values? Sometimes it does, sometimes ethnicity is divided into two or three parts, from which new ethnic groups emerge and can either migrate or coexist on the same territory. Again an opportunity, not a pattern.
Since all the aspects listed here are still important for the course of ethnogenesis within one or another ethnos, it seems right to take them into account, but not as factors, but as parameters, because only by excluding local variations can a true "factor X", the one for all ethnogenesis, be discovered, in order to solve all the listed perplexities by discovering it.
ETHNOGENESIS AND ENERGY
The common features for an ethnos as such, i.e., any ethnos, are:
1) opposition of self to all others, hence self-affirmation;
2) mosaicism, or rather, infinite separability cemented by systemic links;
3) a uniform process of development from the triggering moment, through the acmatic phase, to dispersion or transformation into a relic. Since we have established that ethnos is not an "amorphous state," not a "social category" and not a "complex of communities of language, economy, territory and psychological structure," but a phase of the process of ethnogenesis, the key to solving the problem lies precisely in the third obligatory feature.
Let us draw the conclusion that begs to be drawn. Both the starting point and the acmatic phase, as well as the regeneration, require the ability of the emerged population into supertension, which manifests itself either in the transformation of nature or in migrations, etc. This is the "factor X" (super tension) we are looking for! Almost all ethnoses known to us are grouped into peculiar constructions - super-ethnic unities. Spreading of ethnoses is connected with the place of their origin, with migrations, with victories and defeats in the struggle against natural cataclysms and neighbors, and ordinal tensions are not enough to avoid their death. Any aggregate state of the medium is inert, and in order to break it, an additional expenditure of energy is required, similar to the "latent heat" of melting or vaporization. But after the extra effort is made, the inertial process begins, which is only damped down due to the medium resistance. There are two types of movement: homeostatic, where the life cycle repeats over generations, and dynamic, where the ethnos undergoes the aforementioned phases of development, having homeostasis in the limit. Movement is observed in both cases, but in the first case it can be metaphorically called rotational, and in the second, oscillatory, the intensity being measured by the amplitude. Progressive movement is social progress, but we have already shown its difference from ethnogenesis.
In answer to the question: what is moving? - we answer: an ethnic system within the Earth's biosphere. To the question: where is it moving? - answer: nowhere, because notions of "forward" and "backward" are inapplicable to the oscillatory motion[29]. To the question: is it possible to find mathematical expressions for ethnogenesis, which would greatly facilitate the analysis? - in a single word, it cannot be answered. Let us try to explain in detail.
When setting any problem concerning ethnological problems we have the same difficulties as when trying to solve by means of modern computer techniques any technical problem formulated in an implicit form. In both cases, numerical methods are unsuitable.
However, both here and there the solution can be obtained by applying known modeling methods. A model of the process, reflecting the totality of our views of the process, is created and corrected on reliable facts. This model is then used both to identify the rest of the set of facts and events and to draw predictive conclusions about the characteristics of the future or past unknown state of the process. Each decision we recognize as correct based on a heuristic evaluation, as a result of confirmation by new purposively found factors (a plausible decision is known) refines and develops the model.
Finally, we know that all current ethnic groups were created relatively recently, rare relics have survived from the ancient ones, and none of the primordial ones remain. This shows that ethnogenesis is an ongoing process, similar to other natural phenomena, though correlated with sociogenesis, which generates rigid type systems.
We have already said that any restructuring of this or that type of system requires work, i.e. energy input. Of course, this energy is neither electromagnetic, nor thermal, nor gravitational, nor mechanical alone. Push, bursts of this energy are also conditioned by anthropogenic successions, which are damped down due to the resistance of the natural environment[30].
DISCRETENESS OF ETHNIC HISTORY
The discreteness of some of the processes of history were already noted by ancient historians. Sima Qian formulated this law very succinctly: "The path of the three kingdoms ended and began again"[31]. This idea is present in many historians, from Ibn Khaldun and Giambattista Vico to Spengler and Toynbee. It is incorrect when applied to the social history of mankind, inaccurate when developing the history of individual states, but applicable when studying the processes of ethnogenesis, of course, with significant amendments.
First, the "end" does not always mark the emergence of the "beginning”. Ethnoses and superethnic cultures emerge not only when the preceding cycle of development ends, but sometimes a considerable period of time after its end. The desire to see a strict rhythm is not supported by the facts. For example, the Byzantine ethnos emerged in the heyday of the Helleno-Roman ethnos, and they coexisted for several centuries. The Muslim super-ethnos forced both the Byzantine and the Romano-Germanic to squeeze, simultaneously absorbing the Middle Persian (Sassanian Iran and Sogdiana). And between the Huns and Turks, the Turks and Mongols there were centuries of timelessness, when the steppe was populated by relict ethnic groups. Apparently, the case is more complicated, or, rather, the cause of ethnogenesis is not in the rhythm of the ethnoses' history.
Secondly, the usual division of the process into three stages - rise, blossom and decline - does not answer the simple question: rise or decline of what? The standard of living fluctuates irrespective of these stages, flourishing cultures do not coincide with favorable economic or political conditions, the power of the state is not always an indicator of easy life: under Napoleon the French had a very hard time - there was neither sugar, nor coffee, nor woolen fabrics. In short, qualitative assessments are inevitably subjective and cannot be taken into account when describing natural phenomena, to which ethnogenesis belongs.
Finally, where is the boundary between the social and the biological in both the individual and the social collective? It lies, on the one hand, within the human body and, on the other hand, far beyond it. Anatomy, physiology, reflexology, the genetic code - all this is not social but biological, biochemical and even biophysical. Conversely, the nature of the development of state relations, political inquiries, ethical and aesthetic ideals are not reducible to biological and geographical factors, but are the fruit of social development. The combination of the study of these two lines of development makes it possible to reconstruct the history of individual ethnoses, and if we add to this the history of landscapes and the history of culture, it will already be an ethnic history.
WHERE IS THE "X FACTOR"?
And now that the phenomenon of ethnogenesis has been described in various aspects, it is possible to pose the question: what is the cause of these inertial processes? Since no action can take place without the application of force, we should obviously look for the kind of energy that directly affects people's behavior, and the effect of this energy that can be detected in the human psyche. It must be an impulse powerful enough to overcome the instinct of personal and even species-specific self-preservation, which is inherent in any organism, i.e. it is expressed as sacrifice, extending even to one's own offspring, which is not observed in any of the animal species. But animals do not have ethnoses either; their communities are deprived of the social form of motion of matter and self-developing institutions. Hence, the "factor X" we are interested in is projected into the sphere of the human psyche[32].
In the search of the factor generating and destroying ethnic groups it has to be kept in mind that it operates at the background of: 1) changing geographical environment; 2) evolutionary processes of social development; 3) historical peripetias; 4) growth or decline of culture. Of course, in the study of any of the above subjects, ethnogenesis is among the background subjects. Consequently, not the sum of the sciences, but their system, determined by the task at hand, is the key to the solution of any problem posed, i.e. scientific synthesis. That is why a long description of the phenomenon of ethnos and its interactions with nature, society and cultural traditions, inherited from the distant past, precedes the presentation of the main plot.
It is quite obvious that all attempts to discover this "factor X" by analyzing the behavior of individuals are doomed to failure. First of all, in isolated cases we can never distinguish the private and accidental from the species-wide and regular. But once the statistical law of large numbers comes into force, small deviations from regularity are mutually compensated, and systems of connections are found with tolerable plus or minus deviations, which do not distort the picture at all. However, individual examples have the clarity necessary to grasp the principle, and so we will not neglect them. But it must be remembered that, however necessary illustrations may be, they are never a substitute for meaning.
CLIO VERSUS SATURN.
Now let's talk about history, for there is something to be said. It was not only in the skeptical nineteenth century that profane people called history an idle pastime, an entertaining read, a fad of rich idlers, a way of propaganda, or even "politics turned to the past." Recently an attempt has been made to understand history as a function of time, which supposedly in its flow releases the energy required for great and even small achievements. But this concept is also untenable, because historical processes that do run on the course of time are entropic and inertial, and therefore do not arise thanks to Chronos devouring his children, but in spite of him.
But if this is so, then the science of history is a struggle with time, which the Hellenes personified in a terrible deity - Saturn, who had scoped his own father Uranus and was overthrown by Zeus, the lord of lightning. Yes, but lightning is energy, in our language - anti-entropic impulses, which, when they occur, disturb the processes of death - the entropy of the Universe. The cause force that causes acceleration is what saves the Cosmos from turning into Chaos, and the name of this force is Life.
But in the eternal war of the primordial elements Saturn's servants, the giants or asuras (Sanskrit) have nothing to lose. Chronos transforms their appearance every second, and thus deprives them of their personal qualities and traits. But the paladins of Cosmos, the ordered Universe, are such by nature that they acquire forms, and therefore personality, in each case unrepeatable. And in the struggle with Chaos they meet their death, which V. I. Vernadsky viewed as the separation of space from time[34].
For those who die, be it a microbe or a baobab, a human being or a germ, time disappears, but all organisms of the biosphere are connected to each other. And the passing of one is a loss to the many, because it is a victory for the eternal enemy of life, Chronos.
To accept the loss means to surrender the position, and against Death stands Memory, a barrier of entropy of consciousness and not of existence. It is memory that divides time into past, present and future, of which only the past has really happened.
In fact, the present is only a moment instantly becoming the past. There is no future, for no deeds have been committed, determining this or that consequence, and it is not known whether they will be committed. The future can only be calculated statistically, with a tolerance devoid of practical value. But the past exists; and everything that exists is the past, since any accomplishment immediately becomes the past. This is why the science of history studies the only reality that exists outside of us and apart from us[35].
They say, and not only profane people, that knowledge of the past is useless for our practical life. In ancient times such people went to fortune-tellers and astrologers to divine the future.
And those fortune-tellers were, at times, surprisingly accurate. But how did the fortune-tellers succeed? By studying the past, checking possible options and refining predictions, because the number of options in a given situation is always limited. So a good chess player calculates a game many moves ahead thanks to the fact that he didn't wish the energy to study hundreds of etudes and games played long before he was born. The history of the chess game allows him to make the most probable, and therefore almost correct predictions, and then win in tournaments and matches. The known past translates into the present, i.e., into success.
Every experience of a physicist or chemist, observation of a geologist or botanist, consideration of a theorist or calculation of an economist, when written down, becomes a historical source, i.e. a fixed past which enables us, if skillfully handled, to find the best options of behavior to achieve goals in the ghostly future.
Finally, is understanding oneself and one's place in the world only a means to make money? No, for many respectable people it is the goal! Is not gratitude a duty, to the ancestors who built the cities in which we live, who discovered new countries to which we now travel with ease, who created the paintings we admire and who wrote the books from which we learn, a duty for everyone who has not lost his or her human sensibilities? Is admiration for the heroes of the past who gave their lives for the sake of their descendants a prejudice? No! It’s the glory of history!
But history is a search for the truth, for the information of ancient sources is spattered with lies like stinking mud. The past ceases to be real when it is replaced by fiction, or distorted by an incomplete rendering, or laden with an unnecessary tinsel of meaningless details. The father of lies whispers to gullible ignoramuses that there is no truth in history, but only personal perceptions,[36] that its phenomena are not a chain of events causally linked together,[37] but a meaningless kaleidoscope that cannot be remembered, that texts should be understood literally,[38] as if the chronicler wrote them not for contemporaries but for descendants, and, finally, that all migrations of ethnic groups, their ups and downs, their glory and doom are a play of moonlight on the ripples of lake water[39].
For if this is so, then there is no need to teach history, and the former, disappearing from memory, becomes not the former, and Chaos takes the place of the Cosmos.
I recall that at the end of the 8th century in Tibet the Mahayana Buddhist preachers taught that the world is an illusion, salvation is immersion in nirvana, and the way to it is not to do evil or good deeds, for "black clouds and white clouds equally block the sun from us". To this the Tibetan Shen, priest of the Bon religion, addressing the people, said: "Don't listen to the Mahayanists' chatter: your heart will tell you where there is black and where there is white." Hindsight and intuition lie on the border between science and art. This is why history has its own muse, Clio.
No, we are not talking about the right to baseless, almost always nonsensical statements, as if prompted by intuition, or obvious as the rotation of the Sun around the Earth. Deception is also possible when it rests on self-deception. Clio assists her admirers in another, far more important thing: finding evidence for correct theses, uncovering errors in primary data collection, and catching irregularities in logical constructions. It all seems simple, but in fact every, even small, approximation to historical truth is a feat.
The most seemingly simple generalizations require such a mental lift and the heat of feelings, in which the thought melts and takes shape, first astounding and then convincing the sincere reader. And it is not a question of which course of thought or selection of arguments proves the thesis; this is the kitchen of the scientific craft, which one must know, of course, but knowledge alone is not enough. The main question is why does one sometimes manage to find and prove a new thesis? This is the mystery of the psychology of creation, which the ancient Greeks attributed to the muse of history, Clio.
Yet a poet once uttered: "But what shall we do with the horror that the running of time once dubbed?" Saturn's scythe cuts off any personal manifestation of life, though it does not touch the regularity of socio-economic formations. Only they follow the path of progress, and all the uniqueness and beauty of past centuries is a loss. This is why ethnogenesis is not evolution, but a list of losses, diminished by Clio's constant intervention. For even that which is lost but survives in memory is not dead.
But Clio can not only keep the remnants of the past, covered with the ashes of Time and the ashes of Lies. She can take prey from these predators, and she does it before our eyes and our hands. The ruins of Troy have been found, the Tower of Babel has been excavated, the treasures of Tutankhamun's tomb have been saved, the Mayan hieroglyphs have been read, the forgery of the annals committed by Ivan the Terrible has been exposed, and the black legend of the Mongols has been removed. The list of resurrections, though not of personalities, but of their great deeds could be endless, for here and there great and small discoveries are made.
Is this not a victory over Saturn? Is this not the resurrection of the ancestor ethnoses? And now we can pose the central question: why do ethnicities arise and why is the end of them inevitable?
NOTES
[1] Bromley Yu. V. Ethnos and endogamy // Soviet Ethnography. 1969. - 6.
[2] Chetverikov S. S. On some moments of evolutionary process from the point of view of modern genetics. M., 1926; Timofeev-Ressovsky N. V. Microevolution // Botanical Journal. 1958. - 3.
[3] The formulation belongs to S. S. Chetverikov and N. V. Timofeev-Ressovsky.
[4] Altukhov Y.P., Rychkov Y.G. Genetic monomorphism of species and its possible biological significance // Journal of General Biology. 1972. N! 3. С. 282.
[5] Ibid. С. 296.
[6] Kalesnik S.V. General geographical regularities of the Earth. M., 1970; Gumilev L.N. The place of historical geography in oriental studies // Peoples of Asia and Africa. 1970. - 1.
[7] Lem S. A Model of Culture //Voprosy philosophii. 1969. - 8. С. 51.
[8] Lobashev M.E. Signal Heredity // Studies in Genetics / Edited by M.B. Lobashev. Л., 1961.
[9] Bystroe A.P. Past, Present, and Future of Man. Л., 1957. С. 300.
[10] We omit consideration of anti-Darwinian concepts (force of inertia A. Doderlein, orthogenesis T. Eimer, nomogenesis by A. S. Berg, aristogenesis by X. Osborne), because the mechanical transfer of natural laws of a general character to a private case relative to the whole fauna will entail errors, at least simply because of the disproportionality of scales; the details that are important when studying evolution in general, when studying one species on a limited time interval turn out to be either very important or irrelevant to the subject, in our case - mankind for the last 5 thousand years.
[11] Bystroe A.P. op. cit. p. 299. - A.P. Bystroev's chronology needs correction. According to the new data, C14 Cro-Magnon Man in Europe is dated by about 20,000 years, and Homo sapiens in North America by about 37,000 years (See: Mochanov Yu.A. On the initial epochs of New World population // Reports on ethnography of the VGO. Vol. 4. Л., 1966. С. 34).
[12] Roginsky Ya. Ya., Levin M. G. Fundamentals of Anthropology.
[13] For the history of polemics up to 1957 see: Levin M.G., Bystrova A.P., op. cit: Bystroe A.P. op. cit. p. 277.
[14] Debitz G.F. On some trends of changes in the structure of modern humans //Soviet ethnography. 1961. - 2. С. 9-23.
[15] Cited from: Dorst K. Before nature dies. С. 350.
[16] Ibid. С. 45.
[17] Thierry O. Izbr. op. p. 210.
[18] Gumilev L.N. 1) Sources of rhythm of nomadic culture of Middle Asia //NarodiAzii i Afriki. 1966. - 4. С. 85-94; 2) The role of climatic fluctuations in the history of the steppe zone of Eurasia //History of the USSR. 1967. - 1. С. 53- 66.
[19] Gumilev L.N. Ethnogenesis and ethnosphere // Nature. 1970. - 2. С. 49-60
[20] Efremov Y.K. Important link in the chain of connections of a man with nature // Ibid. 1971. - 2. С.79.
[21] Bromley Yu. V. Ethnos and ethnography. М., 1973. С. 163.
[22] Vernadsky V. I. Chemical structure of the Earth's biosphere and its environment. С.284-285.
[23] Bystroe A.P. op. cit. p. 292.
[24] Debitz G.F. On some directions of... С. 19-20
[25] Shirokogorov S.M. Ethnos: Research of the main principles of changing ethnic and ethnographic phenomena. Ethnic and ethnographic phenomena / / Izv. of Oriental faculty of Far East University (Shanghai, China). Univ. 1923. XVIII. VOL. I. С. 130.
[26] Zavadsky K. M. The development of evolutionary theory after Darwin. Л., 1973. С. 223-225.
[27] Ibid. С. 225
[28] Roginsky Ya. Ya., Levin M.G. op. cit. p. 314
[29] The fluctuating movement of an ethnos is a transition from one equilibrium state to another. This type of movement was known in Ancient China, where it was called "the law of vicissitudes. In the 6th century Princess Da Yi of the House of Cheng wrote in an elegy about her sad fate:
The cup of wine is not drunk forever, The lute strings ring and fade.
Perversity is on earth from time immemorial, Examples you'll find Wherever you look!!!
And the song that was sung in years gone by, A banished man's heart is ever troubled.
(Per. L.N. Gumilev)
[30] Gumilev L.N. Ethnos as a phenomenon / Reports of Departments and Commissions of VGO. 3. Л., 1967. С. 106
[31] Cited in: Konrad N.I. West and East. С. 76.
[32] Gumilev L.N. Ethnos and categories of time // Reports of VGO. Vyl 15. Л.,1970. С. 143-157.
[33] Kozyrev N.A. Causal Mechanics and the Possibility of Experimental Investigation of the Time Properties (manuscript).
[34] Vernadsky V. I. Chemical Structure of the Earth's Biosphere and its Environment. С.135
[35] The opposite point of view is expressed by Giovanni Gentme: "In past times people were born, thought and worked... But they are all dead, like the flowers whose beauty they enjoyed, or the leaves that turned green before their eyes in spring and turned yellow before their eyes in autumn. The memory of them lives, but the world of memory, like the world of fantasy, is nothing; and memory is no better than a dream" (quoted from: Kon I. С. Philosophical Idealism and the Crisis of Bourgeois Thought. М., 1959. С. 155). This is beautifully said, but, alas, the people involved in history are neither flowers nor leaves. It is harder for people, but they are richer and wiser.
[36] The primary element of the historical world is experience, in which the subject is in active vital interaction with his environment" (quoted from: Kon I.S. op. cit. P. 112).
[37] There are no absolute real causes waiting to be discovered by historians who write at different levels and from different distances, with different aims and interests, in different contexts and from different perspectives" (quoted from: Kon I.S. op. cit., p. 192).
[38] Anatole France wrote about these things in The Island of Penguins: "Do we really write history? Do we try to extract from any text or document even the smallest particle of life or truth? We simply publish texts. We stick to the letter... Thought does not exist.
[39] The value of history is that it provides knowledge "of human beings under circumstances extremely different from our own, not strictly analytic scientific knowledge, but something like the knowledge that the dog lover has of his dog" (op. cit. from Kohn, Ibid. op. Cit. 176).
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