14. Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere, Gumilev
Part Seven, 2nd section, XXIX. Passionarity and the sphere of consciousness
[I am missing several graphics below. I think that it doesn’t interfere, but perhaps I can search for them again and update, if I find them. the important graphic 5 is here.]
FRAME OF REFERENCE
If we take as a reference the impulse of the innate instinct of self-preservation (“I”), individual and visible, then the impulse of passionarity (P) will have the opposite sign. The value of the impulse of passionarity, respectively, can be either more, or less, or equal to the impulse of the instinct of self-preservation. Consequently, it is legitimate to classify individuals into passionaries (P>1), harmonious (P=1) and sub-passionaries (P<1). The ratio of these groups determines the level of passionary tension in the system, in our case ethnos. After a passionary jolt, it increases rapidly, followed by an "overheating," followed by a slow, gradual decline, often with delays. If you draw a curve, it will be a fixation of the inertial process. All values will be positive; in the limit, practically unattainable, is zero.
Undoubtedly, the overwhelming number of actions taken by humans is dictated by the instinct for self-preservation, either personal or species-specific. The latter manifests itself in the desire to reproduce and raise offspring.
However, passionarity has the opposite vector, for it makes people sacrifice themselves and their offspring, who are either not yet born, with no desire for a family, or are completely neglected for the sake of illusory desires: ambition, vanity, pride, greed, jealousy and other passions. Consequently, we can view passionarity as an anti-instinct or an instinct with the opposite sign. And since there is not and cannot be an ethnos that is not associated with a primary explosion of passionarity, it is a value that is commensurate for all ethnoses.
Consequently, we can classify all ethnoses according to the degree of rise and fall of the passionary tension of the ethnic field. The presence of fluctuations somewhat complicates this principle, but not too much, because the scheme - rapid rise of passionarity and slow loss - is valid for all ethnoses known to us. It cannot be an accident. Therefore, we can consider the triggering moment of ethnogenesis as a kind of push that gave the ethnic system the inertia that is lost in the resistance of the environment.
Both instinctive and passionate impulses lie in the emotional sphere. But mental activity also encompasses consciousness. Therefore, we should look for such a division of impulses in the field of consciousness, which could be compared with the one described above. In other words, it must be divided into a class of impulses aimed at the preservation of life, and another class of impulses aimed at sacrificing life to illusion (or an ideology). For ease of reference, we denote life-affirming impulses by the plus sign, and sacrificial impulses by the minus sign. Then these parameters can be expanded into a planar projection similar to the familiar Cartesian coordinate system, and note that positive ones do not mean "good" or "useful", while negative ones do mean "bad"; in physics cations and anions, and in chemistry acids and alkalis have no qualitative evaluations.
In general, it should be noted that only in the social form of motion of matter does it make sense to contrast progress with stagnation and regression. The search for a meaningful goal in the discrete processes of nature is an irrelevant teleology. Just as city formation is no "better" than denudation, and conception and birth are as much acts of organismal life as death, so in ethnic processes there is no criterion of the best. But this does not mean that ethnogenesis has no system, no movement, and even no development; it simply has no "front" and no "back”. In any oscillating movement, there is only rhythm and more or less tension (frequency).
Let's get specific about the terms. The positive impulse of consciousness will be only unrestrained egoism, which requires reason and “the will” for its realization-as a goal. By reason we will understand the ability to choose a reaction under the conditions that permit it, and by “will” we will understand the ability to produce an action according to the choice made. Consequently, all tactile and reflexive actions of individuals are excluded from this category, as well as actions performed under compulsion of other people or sufficiently weighty circumstances. But internal pressure, an imperative of either instinct or passionarity, also determines behavior. So, it should be excluded along with the pressure of the ethnic field and traditions. For "free" or "egoistic" impulses there remains a small, but strictly delineated area, the one where a person is morally and legally responsible for his actions.
Here again we encounter an impossibility to give a definition, and practically there is no need for one. The collective experience of mankind clearly distinguishes involuntary acts from crime. Murder in self-defense is different from robbery or revenge, seduction is different from rape, and so on. In the middle of the nineteenth century, attempts were made to identify such acts, but it was groundless resonance. Suffice it to recall Leo Tolstoy's hidden literary polemic with F.M. Dostoevsky. In our time it is obvious that no matter how reasonable a person's concern for himself, it does not give him reason to deliberately violate the rights of his neighbors or the collective.
"Reasonable egoism" is opposed by a group of impulses with a reverse vector. It is known to everyone, as well as passionarity, and has never been singled out in a single category. All people have a strange attraction to truth (the desire to make an adequate representation of a subject), beauty (what they like without prejudice), and justice (conformity with morals and ethics). This attraction varies greatly in the strength of the impulse and is always limited to a constantly acting "rational egoism," but in some cases it is more powerful and leads an individual to death no less steadily than passionarity. It is like an analogue of passionarity in the sphere of consciousness and, therefore, has the same sign. Let us call it "attractionality" (from Latin attractio, ionis, f. -attraction).
The nature of attraction is unclear, as is the nature of consciousness, but its correspondence with instinctive impulses of self-preservation and with passionarity is the same as in a boat the relationship between the engine (oar or motor) and the rudder. Equally correlated with them is "rational egoism," the antipode of attractionality.
Therefore, we can put our selected discharges of impulses on coordinates: subconsciousness on abscissa, consciousness on ordinate (see Fig. 2). But is such a complicated construction necessary, and for what purpose?
[Sorry I don’t have the figure two, try to visualize it.]
CORRELATIONS OF IMPULSE DISCHARGES
The biological nature of instinctive impulses can be in no doubt. Both the desire to live long and the urge to recreate oneself through offspring are biological traits peculiar to humans as a species. But if so, its magnitude, in the sense of influencing the actions of the individual, must be stable. This means that the human urge to live will be the same in all humans, those who have lived, live now and those who will live, in every single case. At first glance, this seems to contradict observable reality.
Indeed, there are any number of people who do not value life enough so they volunteer for war; there are cases of suicide; parents often abandon their children to their fate, and sometimes even kill them. And this is along with deserters who evade war; with those who endure insults to save their lives; with parents who give their lives for their children, often unworthy and ungrateful. A huge scattering of data! There seems to be no system in the sum of the observed phenomena.
[Missing]
Fig. 2. Classification of individuals according to the passionate-attractive principle
Legend: 1 - philistines; 2 - vagabonds-soldiers; 3 - criminals; 4 - ambitious people; 5 - businessmen; 6 - adventurers; 7 - scientists; 8 - creative people; 9 - prophets; 10 - nestorers; 11 - contemplators: 12 tempters.
Isn't this reminiscent of the view of the ancients that heavy bodies fall faster than light ones? Only Galileo's experience proved that the force of gravity equally acts on a lump and a nucleus, and the difference in the speed of fall depends on an extraneous phenomenon - the resistance of the air medium. The same is true of the subject of our attention.
Figure 2 depicts the reverse momentum, the passionarity. When added algebraically, its magnitude compensates for the magnitude of this or that part of the impulse depicted on the positive abscissa, and sometimes even all of it. The value of the impulse P can be less than the instinct impulse (a value that is conveniently taken as a unit), equal to it, and greater than it. Only in the latter case we call a person a passionarius. An example of P=1 is Prince Andrei Volkonsky from the works of Count L.N. Tolstoy; P<1 is Chekhov's intellectual: even lower is simply a philistine, followed by the subpassionary beggar from the early stories of A.M. Gorky. Still lower are the cretins and degenerates.
And if the passionary tension is higher than the instinctive tension? Then the point denoting the passionate (behavioral) status of the individual will shift to the negative branch of the abscissa. There will be conquistadors and explorers, poets and heresiarchs and, finally, initiative figures like Caesar and Napoleon. They are usually very few, but their energy allows them to develop a vigorous activity, recorded wherever there is history. A comparative study of the heap of events provides a first approximation for determining the magnitude of the passionaric tension.
We observe the same consistency in conscious impulses deposited on the ordinate axis. "Sensible egoism," i.e., the "everything for me" principle, has a stable value in the limit. But it is tempered by an attraction that is either less than or equal to unity (which we take the impulse of self-love to be), or greater than it. In the latter case we observe sacrificial scientists, artists who give up their careers for art, truth-seekers who stand up for justice at the risk of their lives, in short - a type of Don Quixote in various, so to speak, "concepts. So the actual behavior of the individual we have the opportunity to observe is composed of two constant positive variables and two negative variables. Consequently, only the latter determine the variety of behavioral categories observed in reality (see Fig. 2).
As a matter of fact, all of the impulses described fit into the accepted definition of "dominant" in psychology. However, for our task it is necessary to single out a few particular dominants and leave out others, such as libido, as having no significance for our topic. And even more important is to establish the vectorhood of the selected dominants, which makes it possible to catch their correlation.
APPLYING THE CONCEPT TO ETHNOGENESIS
For the study of the psychology of the individual, the proposed point of view and frame of reference yields very little. Since the level of passionarity is an innate trait inherent in humans throughout their lives, the correlation of values does not change. As for attractionality, it changes under the influence of other people: teachers, friends, students, and, therefore, its variability depends on the impact of the collective, not the individual. In the study of ethnogenesis, however, the principles of the proposed concept are very convenient, although at the present level of knowledge and possibilities the results can be expressed in conditional ratios. Obtaining numerical data is still beyond our capabilities. But even what we have is already very useful for analysis.
We know well that all ethnic groups go through a series of phases which are ideally or schematically uniform. Numerous deviations from the scheme, such as breaks in development or shifts due to extraneous interventions, can easily be accounted for and excluded from consideration of the basic pattern. Just as easily, they can then be taken into account in the synthesis, i.e. the reconstruction of the actual history of the people. Let us separate randomness from regularity.
Let us take for example a group of different people and assume that we know the passionarity and attractiveness of each of them. Then there will be a place for each of them not on the coordinate axes, but on the plane between the axes. In each quarter there will be a category of people of a special type, determined only by psychophysiological constitution (see Fig.2). As it is seen from the drawing, the moral criterion is not taken into account, which allows us to consider the offered classification as natural-historical, giving an opportunity of objective consideration of a subject.
Let us assume that we have data for plotting on the coordinate system not only one moment, but, say, ten at intervals of a hundred years. In this way we would get an expression of the variations of the passionary tension over the average period of the life of an ethnos. If we had the opportunity to measure the value of P and to express this value numerically, in this case we could simply construct a curve of variation of the passionary tension, and then find an equation describing the curve mathematically. But so far we have to limit ourselves to a phenomenological description (see Fig. 3).
However, this also provides quite a lot to investigate. The saturation of a time interval with events is always comparable to the saturation of another interval. These ratios are clearly expressed in such synchronistic tables, but did not draw the attention of historians, because the phenomenon of oscillating passionarity reflected in them was not taken into account. Now these tables have gained meaning and significance.
[Sorry I don’t have the figure three, try to visualize it.]
Figure 3. Idealized course of the function P, characterizing the process of ethnogenesis.
Legend: the solid line represents the limits of the P level variations; a, variations of the P levels in the acmatic phase; b, a sharp decrease of the P level due to an external displacement
THE PLACE OF PASSIONARITY IN THE HISTORICAL SYNTHESIS
It might seem that so much attention is paid here to the description of passionarity because the author gives the latter the significance of a decisive factor. But this is not the case. The doctrine of passionarity is involved only to fill the void left by the one-sided study of ethnogenesis. Not to replace the doctrine of the primacy of social development in history, but to supplement it with indisputable data from the natural sciences is the purpose of the theoretical introduction required for the historical synthesis [31].
It is now appropriate to show the relationship between the four groups of causal influences on ethnic processes. Two of these are of the highest rank, two are subordinate. In general terms this will be a scheme, but it is the scheme that is needed to separate the accidental from the regular, constantly intertwined in any of the historical [32] and geographical disciplines, for both study the variables that change over time and affect ethnogenesis.
✓The first and main factor in social development is the growth of productive forces, which results in a change in production relations and thus in the organization of society. This global process is comprehensively summarized in the Marxist-Leninist theory of historical materialism.
✓The second factor that determines not the impulse, but the course of the processes of ethnogenesis, the geographical environment, ignoring the role of which S. V. Kalesnik correctly called "geographical nihilism"[33]. But also ignoring the exaggeration of the importance of the geographical environment, i.e. "geographical determinism", which we have already mentioned, does not lead to positive results [34]. This was wittily demonstrated by G. V. Plekhanov in his polemic with A. Labriola, who remarked that "modern Italians (end of the XIX century) are surrounded by the same natural environment in which the ancient Romans lived, but meanwhile how little the "temperament" of Menelik's modern subjects resembles the temperament of the harsh conquerors of Carthage!" [35].
One could argue that anthropogenic influences over 2,300 years changed the landscape of Italy, but it is nevertheless clear that it was not the replacement of beech forests with lemon groves and maquis thickets that led the Italian army to defeat at Adua.
Combined, these powerful factors determine only the "general direction" of socio-historical processes, but not "the individual 'physiognomy' of events and some of their private consequences."[36] And it is precisely such trifles that often lead to the creation or destruction of consortia, sometimes to the preservation or dispersal of sub-ethnoses, rarely but nevertheless affect the fate of ethnic groups, and in exceptional cases can have an impact on the formation of a super-ethnos as well. Examples of such historical zigzags, compensated at given stretches of history, are given by G.V. Plekhanov in the cited work quite abundantly, although exclusively on the material of the history of Europe.
The reader will find similar data from the history of the Far East in our "Steppe Trilogy"[37].
Thus, it is possible to distinguish a factor of lower rank: the logic of events, where short chains of cause-and-effect relations, in themselves natural, but for the process of higher rank being accidents, are taken into account. In turn, these brief regularities, constantly interrupted in the course of history, depend on accidents of the second rank [38], etc.
It is possible to neglect these variations when considering global processes, for example, the change of formations, but for ethnogenesis their consideration is necessary. And it is here that the role of passionate explosions and fluctuations emerges, so relevant to the formation of the biosphere, as the logic of events - to the social form of matter movement. In other words, passionarity is not the only factor determining ethnogenesis, but it is mandatory. Without passionarity there is no ethnogenesis! Therefore, ignoring its influence will give a noticeable error, shifting the result. And whether the bullet missed the target in one millimeter or in five meters does not matter - the target is still not hit, so let's continue describing the phenomenon we have noted.
So far we have only described, using examples from the history of different periods, passionarity as a biological sign of heredity. Thus, we have seen that history as a science makes it possible to trace some of the regularities of natural phenomena. Consequently, history can be useful not only in itself, but also as an auxiliary natural science discipline. So far it has not been used for this purpose.
GENERALIZATION
All of the above observations and their generalization allow us to note the mismatch of social and ethnic rhythms of development. The former is a spontaneous continuous spiraling movement, the latter is discontinuous, with constant outbursts whose inertia fades with environmental resistance. Chronological social shifts - changes of formations and ethnogenetic processes do not coincide in any way. Sometimes an ethnos, like the Russian one, goes through two or three formations, and sometimes it is created and disintegrates within one, like the Parthians or Turkuits. The social development of mankind is progressive, while ethnic groups are doomed to disappear.
Now we can conclude. Ethnogenesis is an inertial process, where the initial charge of energy (biochemical, described by V.I. Vernandsky) is spent due to environmental resistance, which leads to homeostasis equilibrium of ethnos with the landscape and human environment, i.e. to its transformation into a relic, when it is in a surviving (persistent) state, devoid of creative powers. It is thanks to the high level of passionarity that the interaction between social and natural forms of matter movement occurs, just as some chemical reactions go only at high temperature and in the presence of catalysts. Impulses of passionarity as biochemical energy of living matter, refracted in the human psyche, create and preserve ethnic groups, disappearing as soon as the passionate tension weakens.
In conclusion it is necessary to clarify to what extent our proposed concept of ethnogenesis corresponds to the theory of dialectical and historical materialism. It corresponds to it completely. The development of social forms is spontaneous; the change of socio-economic formations is a global phenomenon, despite the uneven development in different regions; the movement of social form of matter is progressive; its direction is a spiral. Consequently, it is a philosophical theory about general laws of development, and therefore it is a whole order higher) than the anthroposphere taken as a whole, and two orders higher than the ethnosphere - a mosaic of ethnoses in time and space. In other words, ethnology is a particular case of the application of dialectical materialism, taking into account the specificity of theme and aspect.
As we know, all natural laws are probabilistic and, therefore, subject to stochastic laws. So, the higher the order, the more steadily the effect of the regularity on the object; and the lower the order, the more the role of randomness, and thus the degrees of freedom, increases. In the first case the limit is the galaxy, in the second the atom, for supergalactic and subatomic phenomena are investigated in other ways and are perceived differently by our consciousness. And in between lies a gradation of orders of phenomena. And each order requires attention and a special approach. The phenomenon of ethnos occupies an intermediate position within these limits. The type of movement in ethnoses is oscillatory, development is inertial and discrete, stability is ensured by systemic links, and uniqueness and creativity are ensured by the effect of biochemical energy of living matter - passionarity, refracted by psyche both at individual and population level.
This is, in our opinion, the definition of the concept "ethnos". It is an elementary concept, irreducible to either social or biological categories. This conclusion is an empirical generalization of historical and geographical facts.
THE CURVE OF ETHNOGENESIS
In all historical processes from microcosm (life of a single individual) to macrocosm (development of man as a whole) social and natural forms of movement sometimes coexist so bizarrely that it is sometimes difficult to grasp the nature of the connection. This is especially true of the mesocosm, where the phenomenon of the developing ethnos lies, i.e. ethnogenesis, which we understand as the process of ethnos formation from the moment of its emergence to its disappearance or transition to a state of homeostasis.
It is worth noting that this understanding differs from the one that existed in ethnography until recently: ethnogenesis is the origin of ethnos, i.e. the moment that ends with the appearance of ethnic self-consciousness.
In the geographical aspect, the basis for the emergence of ethnos is the population, which in the story that interests us can be considered as a group of passionate individuals, who adapted a certain landscape to their needs and simultaneously adapted to the landscape itself.
But the moment of birth is brief. The emerged collective must immediately organize itself into a system with a certain division of functions between its members. Otherwise, it will simply be destroyed by its neighbors. In order to maintain the integrity of the system, social institutions are established, the nature of which in each individual case is programmed by the circumstances of place (geographical conditionality) and time (stage of human development). It is the need for self-affirmation that determines the rapid growth of the system, territorial expansion and complication of intra-ethnic relations; the forces for its development are drawn from the passionarity of the population as such. The growth of the system creates the inertia of development, slowly lost by the resistance of the environment and the dissipation of free energy.
Even when the vitality of an ethnos falls below the optimum, social institutions continue to exist, sometimes outliving the ethnos that created them. Thus, Roman law took root in Western Europe, although ancient Rome and proud Byzantium have become a memory. But what can be set aside on the ordinate if time is set aside on the abscissa? Obviously, that form of energy that stimulates the processes of ethnogenesis, i.e. passionarity. It should be remembered that the maximum of passionarity, as well as its minimum, is not at all conducive to the prosperity of life and culture. Passionary "overheating" leads to brutal bloodshed both within the system and on its borders, in the regions of ethnic contacts. And vice versa, with complete inertness and lethargy of a country's population, when the level of passionarity is close to zero, resistance to the environment, ethnic and natural is lost, which is always the shortest way to death. Passionarity is present in all ethnogenetic processes, and this creates the possibility of ethnological comparisons on a global scale.
But we have not overcome another difficulty: we have not yet found a metric by which to measure passionarity. Based on the factual material available to us, we can only talk about the rise or fall, about a greater or lesser degree of passionarity tension (the frequency of events in the life of an ethnos), but how many times we do not know. However, this obstacle is insignificant, because the ratio of the order "more" to "less" is already constructive and fruitful enough in natural science to build phenomenological theories, and the accuracy of measurement of observed values and formalization of empirical sciences is not the only and not always convenient way of knowledge.
Therefore, the noted "difficulty" is not a shortcoming of the concept, but rather a property of it.
Nowadays, school education has accustomed the reader to two preconceived notions: belief in evidence and belief in the reality of natural numbers. Both views are not that they are wrong, but they are inaccurate.
The reliability of historical sources is now limited to historical criticism, the principle of which is doubt. Natural numbers are an abstraction, for in nature there are phenomena, but not numbers. Natural numbers are useful in accounting, not in natural history, where nothing is fundamentally equal or identical. The mathematical apparatus has long been used in physics, but one cannot "think that all phenomena accessible to scientific explanation will be subsumed under mathematical formulas... These phenomena, like waves against a rock, will be shattered by mathematical shells, the ideal creation of our mind."[39]
And Albert Einstein said even more emphatically, "If the theorems of mathematics are applied to a reflection of the real world, they are inaccurate; they are accurate as long as they do not refer to reality."[40] But the adoration of mathematics at the beginning of the 20th century turned into a kind of cult, which diverted a lot of energy from natural scientists and humanitarians.
To determine the phase of ethnogenesis it is necessary to identify the main parameters of the epoch under study, on the basis of the combination of which it is possible to give an unambiguous characteristic. These are the imperative of behavior, the moment of impulse and the logic of events. The logic of events reflects the milestones of biosphere fluctuations, including the ethnosystem's passionarity[41]. Any ethnic system is hierarchical, i.e. a super-ethnos includes several ethnoses, an ethnos includes sub-ethnoses or consortia, etc. An increase in the number of lower-ranking taxons is always associated with an increase in passionarity, and vice versa. Thus, a comparison of the values of passionarity is not directly, but indirectly possible, although a calculation of the number of taxa can only be carried out by the method of expert evaluations. It is this method that allows us to make a generalization of those changes in the level of passionary tension of super-ethnic systems, which had different local ethnogenesis. Graphically this is presented in Fig. 4.
[Sorry I don’t have the figure four, try to visualize it.]
Fig. 4. Changes in the ethnic system's passionary tension (generalization).
On the abscissa axis in Fig. 4 time in years, where the starting point of the curve corresponds to the moment of the passionary push, which caused the emergence of ethnicity. On the axis of ordinates the passionary tension of the ethnic system is plotted in three scales:
1) in qualitative characteristics from the level of P2; (inability to satisfy lusts) to the level of P6 (sacrifice);
2) on the scale "number of sub-ethnoses (ethnos subsystems) indexes n+1, n+3, etc., where n is the number of sub-ethnoses in the ethnos, unaffected by the shock and being in homeostasis[42];
3) on the scale "frequency of events of ethnic history" (an event in our understanding, coinciding with the interpretation first proposed by K. P. Ivanov, is a process of breaking ethnic ties). Depending on the taxonomic rank of the ethnic system: Convixia (or consortium) - subethnos - ethnos super-ethnos, we can talk about the scale of the event. To construct the curve of passionary tension, we distinguish events of ethnic scale: the collision of two or more sub-ethnoses. The dotted curve marks the qualitative course of changes in the density of subpassionarians in an ethnos. The names of the phases of ethnogenesis correspond to the intervals on the time scale. This curve is a generalization of 40 individual ethnogenesis curves that we have constructed for different super-ethnoses that emerged as a result of different shocks. For each shock the qualitative characteristics of the level of passionate tension are the same and they change in the indicated sequence from inability to satisfy lust to sacrifice. However, these characteristics should be regarded as a kind of averaged "physiognomy" of the ethnos. At the same time there are representatives of all the types marked in the figure, but statistically the type corresponding to the given level of passionate tension dominates.
Unusual in its appearance in the curve of passionarity manifestation does not resemble a line of the progress of productive forces - an exponent, nor a sine wave, where rises and falls rhythmically change, repeating itself as the seasons, nor a symmetric cycloid of biological development. The curve we propose is asymmetric, discrete and anisotropic in the course of time. It is well known to cyberneticists as the curve describing the burning of a fire, the explosion of a powder warehouse, and the withering of a leaf. Let us limit ourselves to the first example.
A campfire erupts from one edge. The flames cover the boughs in a circle and quickly absorb the oxygen inside the campfire. The temperature drops and the surrounding air oxygen bursts inside the woodpile, causing the wood to flare up again. After a few flashes, the embers remain, slowly cooling and turning to ash. To repeat the process, a new firewood and a new flash of flame are needed. In the same way, if you push a balloon, it moves at first, accelerated by pushing force; then it loses inertia from environment resistance and stops or, more exactly, comes to equilibrium with the environment, which in mechanics is called a quiescent state.
The processes of ethnogenesis, as well as those described above, are caused by explosions, or shocks, external to the anthroposphere, which due to these impulses turned from monolithic to mosaic, i.e. became ethnosphere; the single humanity became a diverse, ever-changing combination of individuals and micro-populations, some similar to each other and some different, mainly - by behavior stereotypes.
Only mutations, or rather, micro-mutations, which affect the stereotype of behavior, but rarely affect the phenotype, can be the cause of jolts. As a rule, a mutation does not affect the entire population of its range. Only some, relatively few individuals mutate, but this may be enough for new "breeds" to emerge, which we record over time as the original ethnic groups. The areas of ethnogenesis explosions, or passionate shocks, are by no means connected with certain regions of the Earth [43] (see Fig. 5).
In Fig. The Roman numeral indicates the serial number of the impulse, and the Arabic numerals number the ethnic groups that emerged as a result of this passionate impulse.
Each ethnic group is given its historical or conventional name, followed by the name of the geographical or ethno-cultural area of its emergence, which corresponds to the point on the map, in parentheses. In some cases a brief description or the most important events of the rising phase are given. After the number in brackets the date of the impulse is given.
The zones of passionate shocks are narrow strips, about 300 km wide in the latitudinal direction and somewhat larger in the meridional direction, about 0,5 of the planet's circumference. They resemble geodesic lines[44]. Shocks occur rarely - two or three per thousand years, and almost never pass through the same place. For example, for a thousand years B.C. two shocks are clearly traced: in the 8th century. - from Aquitaine, through Lacium, Hellas. Cilicia, Pars to India, and in the 3rd century through the steppes of modern Mongolia and Kazakhstan.
Ethnogenesis and the biosphere of the Earth. 7. Axes of zones of passionate shocks
Fig. 5. The axes of the passionary thrust zones
Note; Please copy/paste the Legend to the map of the passionate shocks on a page, so you can read it while looking at the map.
* I (18th century BC). 1. Egyptians-2 (Upper Egypt). Collapse of Ancient kingdom. Conquest of Egypt by the Hyksos in the seventeenth century. Capital at Thebes (1580) Change of religion. Cult of Osiris. Cessation of construction of pyramids. Aggression into Numbia and Asia. 2) Hyksos (Jordan. North Arabia). 3) Hittites (Eastern Anatolia). Formation of Hittites from several Hatto-Hurite tribes. Rise of Hattusa. Expansion into Asia Minor. The capture of Babylon.
* II (11th century BC). 1) Zhouzi (North China: Shaanxi). Conquest by the Zhou princedom of the Shang Yin Empire. Appearance of Heaven cult. Termination of human sacrifices. Expansion of the area to the sea in the east, Yangtze in the south, desert in the north. 2) (?) Scythians (Central Asia).
* III (8th century B.C.). 1) Romans (central Italy). Emergence of a diverse Italian (Latino-Sabino-Etruscan) population in place of a Roman community-soldier. Subsequent dispersal into middle Italy, the conquest of Italy, ending with the formation of the Republic in 510 BC. Change of cult, organization of the army and political system. The appearance of the Latin alphabet. 2) Samnites (Italy). 3) Acquas (Italy). 4) (?) Gauls (southern France). 5) Hellenes (middle Greece). Decline of the Achaean Cretomicene culture in the eleventh to ninth centuries BC. Oblivion of writing. Formation of Doric states of Peloponnese (8th century). Colonization of the Mediterranean by Hellenes. Appearance of Greek alphabet. Reorganization of the pantheon of gods. Legislations. The polis way of life, b) Lydians. 7) Cilicians (Asia Minor). 9) Persians (Persis). Formation of the Midians and Persians. Deioq and Akhemen, founders of dynasties. Expansion of Midian. Partition of Assyria. Rise of Persia in place of Elam, ending with the creation of the Achaemenid kingdom in the Middle East. Change of religion. Cult of fire. Magi.
* IV (III a. B.C.). 1) Sarmatians (Kazakhstan). Invasion of European. Scythia. Extermination of the Scythians. Appearance of heavy cavalry of the knightly type.
The conquest of Iran by the Parthians. Emergence of classes. 2) Kushans-Sogdians (Central Asia). 3) Hunnish (southern Mongolia). Formation of Hunnish tribal union. Confrontation with China. 4) Xianbi. 5) Pu°. 6) Kogur° (southern Manchuria, North Korea). Rise and fall of the ancient Korean state of Joseon (III-II centuries B.C.).
Formation of the mixed Tungus-Manchur-Korean-Chinese population of tribal unions that later grew into the first Korean states of Goguryeo, Sidla, and Baekje.
* V (1st century AD). 1) Goths (southern Sweden). The resettlement of the Goths from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea (2nd century). Extensive borrowing of antique culture, ending with the adoption of Christianity. Creation of the Gothic Empire in Eastern Europe. 2) Slavs. Widespread expansion from Precarpathia to the Baltic, Mediterranean and Black Sea. 3) Dacians (modern Romania). 4) Christians (Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine). The emergence of Christian communities. Break with Judaism. Formation of the institution of the church. Expansion beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire. 5) Judea-2 (Judea). Renewal of the cult and worldview. Appearance of the Talmud. War with Rome. Widespread emigration outside Judea. 6) Axumites (Abyssinia). Rise of Axum. Extensive expansion into Arabia, Nubia, access to the Red Sea. Later (4th century) adoption of Christianity.
* VI (6th century A.D.). 1) Muslim Arabs (Central Arabia). Unification of the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. Change of religion. Islam. Expansion to Spain and the Pamirs. 2) Rajputs (Indus valley). Overthrow of the Gupta Empire. Destruction of Buddhist community in India. Complication of caste system with political fragmentation. Creation of the religious philosophy of Vedanta. Trinitarian monotheism: Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu. 3) Bots (southern Tibet). Monarchical coup with administrative and political reliance on Buddhists. Expansion into Central Asia and China. 4) Tabgachi. S) Chinese-2 (northern China: Shaanxi, Shandong). Two new ethnic groups emerged to replace the nearly extinct population of northern China: the Sino-Turkic (Tabgachi) and the Medieval Chinese, which grew out of the Guanlong group. The Tabgachis created the Tang Empire, impoverishing all of China and Central Asia. The spread of Buddhism, Indian and Turkic mores. Opposition by Chinese chauvinists. Demise of the dynasty. 6) Koreans.
War for hegemony between the kingdoms of Silla, Baekje, and Koguryo.
Resistance to Tang aggression. Unification of Korea under the rule of Silla.
Adoption of Confucian morality, intensive dissemination of Buddhism.
Formation of a unified language. 7) Yamato (Japanese). Coup of Taika. Emergence of central state headed by monarch. Adoption of Confucian morality as state ethics. Widespread adoption of Buddhism. Expansion to the north. Cessation of barrow building.
* VIIth (8th century A.D.). 1) Spaniards (Asturias). Beginning of Reconquista.
Formation of kingdoms: Asturias, Navarra, Leon and the county of Portugal based on a mixture of Spanish-Romans, Goths, Alans, Lusitans, etc. 2) Franks (French). 3) Saxons (Germans). Splitting of Charlemagne's empire into national feudal states. Reflection of Vikings, Arabs, Hungarians, and Slavs. The split of Christianity into orthodox and papist branches. 4) Scandinavians (southern Norway, northern Denmark). Beginning of the Viking movement. Emergence of poetry and runic writing. Pushing Lapps to the tundra.
* VIII (11th century AD). 1) Mongols (Mongolia). Appearance of "people of long will". Unification of tribes into a people-army. Creation of Yasa legislation and written language. Expansion of the ulus from the Yellow Sea to the Black Sea. 2) Chzhurchens (Manchuria). Formation of the Jin empire of a semi-Chinese type.
Aggression to the south. Conquest of northern China.
* IX (13th century AD) 1) Lithuanians. Creation of the rigid princely power.
Expansion of the Duchy of Lithuania from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
Adoption of Christianity. Merger with Poland. 2) Velikorosses. Disappearance .
Ancient Russia captured by Lithuanians (except Novgorod). Rise of the Moscow principality. Growth of the service class. Wide mestization of Slavic, Turkic, and Ugrian population of Eastern Europe. 3) Ottoman Turks (western Asia Minor). Consolidation of the Ottoman beylik active Muslim Population of the Middle East, captive Slavic children (janissaries) and sea vagabonds of the Mediterranean (navy).
Military-type Sultanate. Ottoman Porta. Conquest of the Balkans, the Near East and North Africa to Morocco. 4) Ethiopians (Amhara, Shoa in Ethiopia).
Disappearance of Ancient Aksum. Coup of the Solomonites. Expansion of Ethiopian orthodoxy. Rise and expansion of the kingdom of Abyssinia in East Africa.
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As we already mentioned, the same shock can create several centers of increased passionarity (and as a consequence several super-ethnoses) if its zone overlaps various physio-geographical regions. Thus, the shock of the 6th c. A.D. covered Arabia, Indus valley, South Tibet, North China and Middle Japan. And in all these countries peer ethnoses emerged, each with an original stereotype and culture. Their neighbors were Byzantium, Iran, and the Great Steppe; the Ainu were older. In the twelfth century the Jurchens and Mongols appeared; they were the youngest. Western Europe, which lay in ruins after the Great Migration of Peoples, was renewed in the ninth century, and Eastern Europe in the fourteenth century.
That is why Russia and Lithuania are not backward compared to France and Germany, but just younger ethnoses. Russia, however, is more correctly called a super-ethnos, for Moscow united many ethnicities around itself without resorting to conquest.
The curve presented in the Fig 6. If necessary, the curve can be applied to consortia, convictia, sub-ethnos and ethnos, changing the time scale accordingly, taking into account the influence of ethnic contacts. At the super-ethnic level, when synchronizing ethnogenesis, we will see the dynamics of ethno-cultural systems (see Figure 6) and their contacts, which can be both bloody and peaceful, economic, ideological and aesthetic. In different historical collisions, climatic variations against the background of declines and rises of passionarity, the results of the collision are different. These contacts are the subject of ethnic history.
Clearly, the relative duration of ethnogenesis is different. The whole rise phase lasts about 300 years; the growth process is very intensive. The acmatic phase is roughly the same in duration. It is in this period that the ethnos's complex uniqueness is formed, its expansion ends and super-ethnic cultural formations are created for formation. The overturning lasts for a shorter time and takes from 150 to 200 years. The phases of inertia and obscuration vary greatly in their duration. It depends both on the intensity of the internal processes of ethnic decomposition and on the historical destiny determined by the degree of development of the material basis accumulated for the preceding period, the physical-geographical conditions of the area and the state of the adjacent ethnic groups. Finally, the positivity of the homeostasis phase, in which the historical relics exist, depends entirely on the historical and geographic features of the territory that accommodated the remnant of the broken ethnos. If these conditions are favorable, it becomes an isolate and exists indefinitely long, i.e. until its land is invaded by neighbors. Thus, the whole cycle of ethnogenesis takes from the moment of formation of the ethno-social system to the transformation of an ethnos into a relic about 1,200 years, of course, in the absence of external displacement, which can disrupt the process of ethnogenesis in any phase.
[Sorry I don’t have the figure six, try to visualize it.]
Figure 6. Dynamics of ethnocultural systems of Eurasia I-XV centuries.
HISTORY AND ETIOLOGY
The ethnogenesis diagram is illustrative and facilitates the study of ethnic history, but only as an auxiliary mnemonic device. It relates to the historical narrative, as a library catalog to the contents of the book repository, or the old Moscow plan to the current city, where the alleys have been preserved, but the houses have been replaced. One has to live not in the plan, but in the city, although having a plan is very helpful in navigating streets that have been changed beyond recognition.
In contrast to the science of ethnogenesis, ethnic history is a multifactorial phenomenon. Along with geographical and biological factors, socio-political, historical-psychological and cultural factors are involved as accomplices in a variety of fragmentary processes. The exceptional significance of passionarity is only that it is a measure of the potentialities of competing ethnic systems and therefore determines the balance of power in a given era, although it does not determine the outcome of events. But the advantage of ethnology as a science of a biospheric phenomenon, ethnos, is that it allows a multitude of contingent factors to be reduced to a small number of measurable variables and makes the problems, unsolvable for the traditional historical approach, now become elementary. Its methodology relates to traditional historical methodology as algebra does to arithmetic. It is less labor-intensive, and therefore allows for an equal amount of effort to cover a larger region and a longer era, which, in turn, allows for a number of refinements by comparing distant facts, seemingly unrelated to each other. Moreover, just as an algebraic formula can always be tested arithmetically, so can ethnological conclusions be tested by the traditional methods of historical science. But ethnology is by no means a substitute for social history, although it uses history in the broad sense of the word, history as a "search for truth. After all, history, like the two-faced Janus, is only humanitarian where the subject matter is the creations of human hands and minds, that is, where buildings and factories, ancient books and folklore records, feudal institutions and Greek polities, philosophical systems and mystical heresies, pots, axes and painted vases or paintings are studied.
At the same time, the use of ethnological methodology requires a conscious rejection of aberrations of distance and aberrations of proximity and related habitual perceptions, so widespread that they have become obligatory.
The average person is accustomed to believing that ancient man was so much more untalented than the modern inhabitants of industrial cities that he only gradually - through the succession of dozens of generations - accumulated abilities and introduced inventions. On this very shaky basis emerged the notion, shared by scientists as well, that time, i.e. development in the past, was slower than it is now, and therefore the Paleolithic, for example, appears to historians as a single epoch, like the protracted Renaissance. This is an aberration of distance, much like a child's certainty that the sun is no bigger than his fist. However, the ancestors of modern Polynesians, although they did not have iron tools, were able to cross the Pacific Ocean on balsa rafts in the same time frame as T. Heyerdahl. The ancestors of the Maya, unaware of modern breeding and genetics, bred a cultivated species of cotton by doubling the number of its chromosomes, which cannot be done gradually, and the North American Indians, using obsidian arrowheads, tamed feral Spanish mustangs and mastered the prairies in less than 60 years.
It seems to amateurs that ethnic history is "life without beginning or end," and a kaleidoscope of "accidents" does not fit into any scheme, if only because different observers see different sides of any phenomenon. Yes, contemporaries never noticed the passionate impulse. Everything that was happening seemed natural to them, had always been there. The ancient Romans did not notice for three hundred years that the republic had been replaced by an empire, and only when Diocletian changed court etiquette did they discover that they had a monarchy. Such are the consequences of the aberration of proximity, compounded by ignoring parallel processes, such as the history of the landscape or climate. The latter are generally perceived as something constant, although they change sometimes more rapidly than political forms of power.
But the ethnologist, being at a proper distance from the subject, sees the changing "color" of time, even making allowances for the smooth transition from one epoch to another. However, he departs from the usual technique - retelling the sources, because instead of living accounts of chroniclers, he receives a chain of dry information about the events. He has to discover the logic of events, as a paleobiologist or geologist, only of different processes and on different time scales. But this is a departure from the methods of the humanities. Is such a violation of the law permissible when it comes to the study of man? Yes! It is not only admissible, but necessary. It is customary to think that the humanities are those which study man and his deeds, while the natural sciences study nature: living, dead and dormant, i.e. that which has never been alive.
Table 3: Sequential approximations to the subject when studying the processes of ethnogenesis
Degree of approximation Observations from... Seeing... Problematics and methodology
[Table 3 missing]
Biospheres Ethnosphere Geographic
Ethnospheres Superethnoses Cultural
Superethnos Ethnologies Ethnological
Ethnos Subethnoses Politico-historical
Subethnos Consortia (people and ethnographic families)
Consortia (families Episodes Biographical or biographies of figures)
Episodes Evidence Philological sources
But this trivial division is unconstructive and full of contradictions that make it meaningless. Medicine, physiology, and anthropology study humans, but they are not humanities.
Ancient canals and ruins of cities transformed into hills, anthropogenic metamorphosed relief, are in the sphere of geomorphology, a natural science. Conversely, geography before the 16th century, based on the legendary, often fantastic stories of travelers passed down through the tenth hands, was a human science, just as geology was based on stories of the Flood and Atlantis. Even astronomy before Copernicus was a humanitarian science, based on the study of texts by Aristotle, Ptolemy, or even Cosmas Indykoplov. People preferred to live on a flat Earth surrounded by the Ocean, rather than on a ball hanging in infinite space, the Abyss. These views still prevail today, despite universal secondary education.
Proceeding from the above said, it is easy to conclude that the division of thinking patterns, and thus the sciences, by the subject of study is inappropriate. It is much more convenient to divide them according to the way of acquiring primary information. Here two approaches are possible: reading, listening and communicating the fruits of free thought - mythmaking, or observation, sometimes with experimentation, i.e. research-natural science in the direct sense of the word [45].
Under this division, ethnology, based on empirical generalization of observed facts, becomes a part of natural science, and the role of experiment in it is performed, as in criminalistics, by expert examination, which does not allow contradictory testimonies of sources. After all, even in the investigation of a crime, a comparison is made of the evidence, rather than simply believing a witness, who is often very interested in having their version accepted. Why, then, should the chroniclers be considered impartial?
As long as history was a kaleidoscope of isolated facts, always unremarkable, for only such facts were noted by contemporaries, the possibility of constructing an "empirical generalization" was unrealistic. A single observation is not perceived critically. It can be random, incomplete, distorted by the circumstances of the observer and even by his personal well-being. And all these shortcomings are compensated only by a large number of observations, when the inevitable error becomes so small that it not only can, but must be neglected in order to formulate a conclusion.
It is by taking into account all ethnic groups known in historical time (the principle of completeness) and by following the principle of actualism, according to which the laws of nature observed now also acted in the past, that we discovered the laws of ethnogenesis, which testify to the birth and death of ethnic groups against the geographical environment. And yet the accumulated material has not been used by either legal historians or structuralists. For both studied statics rather than dynamics.
NOTES
[31] For an evaluation of the proposed approach, see: Voprosy philosofii. 1971. - 1. С.158.
[32] Plekhanov G. V. On the Role of the Person in History // Essays: In 24 Vol. Т. 8. M.; L.; 1923. С. 273-306.
[33] Kolesnik S.V. General geographical regularities of the Earth.
[34] Isachenko A. G. Determinism and indeterminism in foreign geography // Vesn. un. 1971. - 24. С. 85- 96; 1972. -6. С. 85- 95.
[35] Plekhanov G. V. On the Materialistic Understanding of History //Proc. Vol. 8. P. 254-255.
[36] Plekhanov G.V. On the Role of Personality in History. С. 298.
[37] Gumilev L.N. 1) Ancient Turks; 2) Hunnu; 3) Quest of imaginary kingship.
[38] Plekhanov G.V. To the Question of the Role of the Person in History. С. 294.
[39] Vernadsky V. I. Selected works on the history of science. М., 1981.
[40] Economic and Social Geography: Problems and Prospects. Ed. О. P. Litovka. Л., 1984.
[41] Gumilev L.N. Biosphere and the impulses of consciousness // Nature. 1978. - 12. С.97-105.
[42] Ivanov K.P. Mechanism of ethnogenesis - an instrument of ethnocultural researcher / / Problems of studying and protection of cultural monuments of Kazakhstan / Edited by R. Suleimanov. М., 1983. С. 79-80.
[43] The data on geography of passionary shocks were specified by K.P. Ivanov (see: Gumilev L.N., Ivanov K.P. Ethnosphere and Space //Cosmic Anthropoecology: technique and research methods. Materials of the Second All-Union Conference on Cosmic Anthropoecology. Л., 1984).
[44] Ibid. The author expresses his deep gratitude to K.P. Ivanov for his help in preparing Fig. 5 and 6 and their descriptions.
[45] Gumilev L.N. Humanitarian and natural science aspects of historical geography // Economic and social geography: problems and prospects. С. 42-57.
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