15. Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere, Gumilev
Part Eight, 1st section, THE AGES OF ETHNICITY DESCRIBES THE SCHEME OF DEVELOPMENT OF ETHNIC UNITS AND EXPLAINS WHY... ETERNITY IS CONTRAINDICATED IN THEM.
XXX. The mode of scientific inquiry
TIME AND HISTORY
History is the study of processes over time, but no one knows what time is. There is nothing surprising in this. Fish probably don't know what water is because they have nothing to compare it to. And when they get to air, they don't have time to use the comparison of air to water.
В. Vernadsky defined death as the separation of space and time,[1] for, in his opinion, the dormant matter is timeless. He may be right, but historians deal only with the processes of dying, in which the being becomes the past. But is the past real? On this question there is no unity of opinion among modern scientists. Let us take a closer look at some of the opinions we have already mentioned.
There is a widely held opinion that the past is not real at all. Giovanni Gentile writes: "In the past people were born, thought and worked... But they are all dead, like the flowers whose beauty they enjoyed, or the leaves which turned green before their eyes in spring and, turning yellow, crumbled in autumn. The memory of them lives on, but the world of memory, like the world of fantasy, is nothing; and the memory is no better than the dream..." "The historian knows that the life and meaning of past facts cannot be discovered in charters, inscriptions, or any actual remains of the past; their sources are in the historian's own personality." [2].
It is impossible to agree with this, but let us wait to argue: there are other authors who have written on this topic. Even more categorical are W. Dilthey, P. Gardiner and B. Russell. All of them virtually deny history, arguing that its conclusions are unreliable because historians are inevitably subjective and therefore cannot be impartial. "The primary element of the historical world is experience, in which the subject is in active vital interaction with his environment," wrote W. Dilthey. "There are no absolute real causes waiting to be discovered by historians writing at different levels and from different distances, with different purposes and interests, in different contexts and from different perspectives," P. Gardiner argued. The value of history is that it provides knowledge "of human beings in circumstances extremely different from our own - not strictly analytical scientific knowledge, but something like the knowledge a dog lover has about his dog," Russell declared.
It seems that the material for the pessimistic conclusions was given to these thinkers by contemporary historians, the same ones whom Anatole France successfully described: "Do we 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" ("Penguin Island"). I do not want to defend this position, but in fact the dispute is about it. So let's make it clear.
Had it begun, the argument would have been based on a philological misunderstanding. History is now called a whole series of occupations, although related to each other, but very different:. 1. The publication and translation of ancient sources-occupation necessary, but yielding only raw materials. 2. Historical criticism, sifting out the conscious and sometimes unconscious lies of ancient authors-getting a half-finished product. 3. Comparison of the extracted material with that previously accumulated and is already a product, but not yet an object of consumption. 4. Interpretation of data in terms of the problem posed. 5. Setting up new problems, emerging at the junction of sciences.
The above-mentioned philosophers, and many others close to them, were essentially upset by the fact that they did not get a custom-made souvenir out of the raw material without any intermediate processing. This is indeed impossible, but there is and will be no other way. The philosophers are right about something else: not everyone can follow this path.
The most seemingly simple generalizations require such a mental lift and heat of feeling, in which the thought melts and takes a new form, first striking and then convincing the sincere reader. And it's not about which course of thought or selection of arguments proves the thesis; this is the kitchen of scientific craftsmanship, which one must know, of course, but knowledge alone is not enough. The point is why one sometimes manages to find and prove a new thesis. This is the mystery of the psychology of creativity, which the ancient Greeks attributed to the muse of history, Clio. This muse tells us that the skepticism of the philosophers is unjustified, that the past is not a personal experience or a dream. For the present is only a moment instantly becoming the past. There is no future, for no deeds have been committed that determine one consequence or another, and it is not known whether they will be committed. The future can only be calculated statistically, with a tolerance that makes the calculation worthless. But the past exists; and every single thing 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.
And talk of the unreliability of subjective perception is philistine chatter. Credibility is always needed within certain limits, beyond which it becomes meaningless. It is impossible to calculate the distance from Moscow to Leningrad to the nearest millimeter, nor is it necessary. It is the same in history, but it has its own specificity of formulating the problem.
It makes sense to study not the nuances of the feelings of historical figures, but the processes: social, ethnic, and cultural. When collecting primary data the degree of accuracy is small, but when thinning out the long running process random errors are mutually compensated for, so you can get a description that meets the practical task - understanding the era. And the wider the coverage, the higher the accuracy. With this way of doing things, there is no point in increasing the number of minutiae beyond what is necessary, because they create cybernetic "noise". And the principle of data selection is prompted by the task at hand.
Having established that ethnos is a biophysical phenomenon, that passionarity is an energy effect of the biosphere's living substance, and that consciousness and the related cultural history play a rudder rather than an engine, we have not solved the problem; we have only outlined the way to solve it. Let us not hurry, however, and see if the science of today has the same formulation of the problem. Yes, there is! Jaspers offered his own solution. Let us take a look at him.
In Western Europe (and only there) the philosophical-historical concept which viewed the historical process as a unified line having a beginning and an end, i.e. its semantic conclusion, has dominated since the 5th century A.D., from Augustine to Hegel. From this concept was born first the religious understanding of history - as the pursuit of the Absolute, and then the atheistic "religion of progress. The newest version of this theory is the views of Jaspers.
Jaspers distinguishes from the whole of history an "axial time," when between 800-200 B.C. in China, India, Persia, Palestine and Hellas spiritual movements arose in parallel, which formed the type of man that supposedly exists today. In China it is Confucius and Lao-Tzu, in India - Upanishads and Buddhism, in Iran - Zarathushtra, in Palestine - prophets, in Hellas - Homer and great philosophers. All the world's religions and philosophical systems come from here, while other peoples, like the "pre-axial" ones, are historical and can be "enlightened" only by "axial" peoples and their successors, for in "axial time" the "awakening of the spirit" occurred and the "last questions of existence" were raised: about mortality, finitude, tragic guilt and the meaning of human existence. "Axial time" is, as it were, the root of all subsequent history.
Jaspers does not explain where and how the parallelism he noted in the development of cultures independent of each other arose. Neither the invasions of the nomadic Aryans in China, India and Europe, nor the social conditions in these countries can provide a satisfactory solution. The question of the genesis of the phenomenon remains open, but the fact of the emergence at this time and in these regions of the "philosophical faith," which, according to Jaspers, provides a genuine link between peoples and cultures, cannot be questioned. The genuine connection is a spiritual connection, not generic, not natural, not social, and it is achieved only in the face of "absurd situations," "last questions," when people communicate on an existential level.
Here we will stop because the philosophical part of the doctrine of existentialism, the reasoning about the present and the future and the attempt to explain the meaning of history can be interesting only if the foundation of the construction is sufficiently reliable. And this seems to be doubtful.
First of all, this "axis" is very broad. Six hundred years is a period, which can squeeze in a lot, and if you compare the sections of history to 800 BC and 200 BC, we see that in this time there were some dramatic changes with different results for different countries. For example, China was united by the Han dynasty, and Hellas and Persia were conquered by "unhistorical" barbarians: the Macedonians and Parthians. Something is not right here.
Next we read carefully. The author compares "the end of the period of progressive development": the Qin Empire in China (221-202 BC), the Maurya Empire in India, the Roman Empire and the Hellenistic states. But in the 3rd century B.C. the diadoch kingdoms in Egypt, Syria, Macedonia, and Bactria were by no means powerful, and Rome was exhausted in the 2nd Punic War. The Maurya kingdom in India collapsed after the death of Ashoka in 226 B.C. It doesn't work! In the West there is disintegration, but in China there is integration. If we compare China to the age of Augustus, the chronological tolerance reaches 300 years. Isn't that a lot?
The idea of "axial time" as a source of spiritual life is refuted by the history of ancient America, while the Maya, Toltecs and precursors of the Incas in the Andes (Tiwanaku culture) were not inferior to the ancient Chinese, Indians, Persians, Jews and Greeks. And it is not at all true that China held back the onslaught of the nomadic Mongols, rather the opposite.
One can find other reasons for bewilderment, but that is not the point. Jaspers' conception is the most reasonable attempt to understand history as a benefit rendered to the primitive savages by those five peoples who created a "breakthrough," or leap, as if born again. This is the framing of the views not only of Augustine, whose ideas served as the primary source of all the heresies of the Middle Ages, but even of the ancient Jewish thinkers who created the doctrine of their Godhood. Based on the doctrine of ethnogenesis as a ubiquitous process, one cannot agree with Jaspers, but disagreement alone is not enough. Let us try to apply the ad absurdum proof, not through academic parsing of trivialities in which any argument is easily drowned, but through a visual review of historical reality during the millennium following the "Axial Time".
To begin with, let us say that the parallelism of the development of several cultures of antiquity noted by Jaspers did take place, but it was neither unique nor so fruitful as to single out the Chinese, Hindus, Iranians, Jews and Greeks as a special category of people[4]; and it faded, like other passionary explosions of ethnogenesis. Such is our counter-thesis. And now let us move on to the statement of it.
FROM HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY TO ETHNIC PSYCHOLOGY.
Just as outside the ethnos, it is bad for man to live outside the familiar natural conditions, adjusted by ancestors to his needs. We have described the mechanism of emergence of anthropogenic landscapes and its connection with the phases of ethnogenesis. This rather rigid connection also depends on the collective mood of the ethnic system forming the ethnocenosis, whose development is connected, as we now know, with the level of passionary tension, as well as with the nature of adaptation in the landscape and the presence of this or that ethnic dominant. With such an approach to the subject of research, the Eurocentric idea of the superiority of technical civilization over the development of another type disappears on its own. Indeed, why should the agricultural cultures of India or the hunting cultures of the Eskimos of Canada be considered less perfect than the way of life of the inhabitants of urban agglomerations? Is it because the latter are familiar to most of our readers?
However, if we break away from philistine subjectivism, we will need a reliable criterion for comparing ethnicities and super-ethnic cultures, because they really cannot be considered quite equal to each other. For this purpose we should again turn to the consideration of the peculiarities of ethnogenetic processes and, going beyond simple descriptions, give an interpretation on the basis of the passionarity we have discovered, where the phases of ethnogenesis and the change of states of anthropogenic landscapes will be corrections for each other.
The fact that the difference of ethno-psychological stereotypes is determined by the climate, relief, flora and fauna of the ethnic locales was known long before Montesquieu. These ideas appear in the Arab geographers of the X-XIV centuries, being the foundation of geographical determinism, the incorrectness of which was not in the falsity, but in the insufficiency of the explanation of the observed phenomena. Geographers of this direction did not take into account the main thing - the dynamics of ethno-psychological warehouses, changing over the centuries in a uniform and regular way. Let us explain this by vivid examples from Russian literature and history.
Russian, or rather Great Russian ethnos has existed for a very long time. If not even to take mythical Rurik with not less mythical Oleg and Igor, anyway, our direct ancestors were recorded already after the Tatar invasion, somewhere at the beginning of the XIV century. No, not like that at all. For example, Pushkin, when he was offended, began to shoot himself in a duel. After all, none of us, when he is slandered, scolded, or bad things said about his wife, will fight in a duel. Are we a different ethnos in relation to Pushkin's contemporaries, because we behave differently? As if that should be answered in the affirmative... Or maybe not? Because our intuition tells us that Pushkin was as Russian as we are. And the change of the stereotype of behavior seems to us quite natural.
After all, three hundred years before Pushkin, in the era of Ivan the Terrible, when there were no duels and generally they were not known, for example, how behaved the merchant Kalashnikov, whose wife offended the oprichnik Kiribeyevich? Lermontov described it quite accurately. The merchant seized a moment and in a fair fist fight dealt his opponent a dishonest blow to the temple. He killed the offender, sacrificing his own life for it. From the point of view of Pushkin and Lermontov, this was great meanness. That's no way to do it! If you went out for a fair fight, fight fair. But from the point of view of the merchant Kalashnikov's contemporaries, he did absolutely the right thing, and even Ivan the Terrible himself said: "I will execute you, because the murder was despicable, and I will order the executioner to dress up and call all over Moscow, and your relatives to sell without charge and duty free, because you had reason to kill my faithful servant."
But even 200 years earlier in such cases no one at all tried to kill his offender, especially if he had a high social status: if he was an appanage prince or an influential boyar. The offended druzhinnik, priest, or peasant simply went to another principality. Once in Moscow, he was treated badly he went to Tver. And if in Tver was treated badly - went to Suzdal, and if in Suzdal did not like it - went to Lithuania. Completely different reaction to offenses, a completely different stereotype of behavior. Consequently, according to our accepted principle, in this case we are talking about entirely different ethnic groups. But we know that it is one ethnos and that we encounter a phenomenon not fixed in statics, but processes of regular changes; each phenomenon must be taken with its past, with the perspective of its future. It may be questioned that nuanced behaviors such as reactions to resentment are relevant to geography, but there are equal phenomena, albeit less vivid, that actively shape the anthropogenic landscape.
We have already established that different ethnoses treat nature differently, but even the same ethnos in equal phases of its ethnogenesis conducts its economy in different ways, and thereby affects the host landscape differently.
Moreover, the architecture not only of cities, but also of individual settlements, even of houses with manor houses, is an integral part of the anthropogenic landscape. And the fact that it depends on the nature of the activities of the people of a given ethnic group is clear without evidence.
Thus, the so-called "national character" is a myth, because for each new epoch it will be different, even if the sequence of the phases of ethnogenesis is unbroken. For example, Ilya Ilyich Oblomov and his servant Zakhar are lazy. However, their ancestors wrested rich lands from the Tatars of the Trans-Volga region, started a profitable economy on them, and built themselves comfortable and beautiful houses, filling them with books and paintings. Ranevskaya's ancestors planted a cherry orchard, which she let go to the wind. The merchants in Ostrovsky's plays spend the capital their grandfathers had amassed. So what is characteristic of the "Russian" psychological type: strict hoarding or cheerful, carefree wastefulness? Apparently, both, but depending on the era, i.e. the phase of ethnogenesis. These changes go on steadily, being functionally connected neither with modifications of the geographical environment, nor with changes of socio-economic formations, although they constantly interact with both. But this is the interference of "independent variables" conjugated in the historical process.
CONTRARY TO
If we consider history as a function of time and abandon all the biases associated with it, we find that time does not behave uniformly. This judgment is so unaccustomed that it is necessary to condition the terms, because the definitions proposed here concern only "historical" time, but do not touch the mathematical concepts of Newton or Einstein and "biological" time, calculated by the change of generations of the species under study. It is not necessary to apply the peculiarities described below to the processes of geological time either, because cosmic matter has its own regularities. Let us confine ourselves to the specificity of man and his character of formation. This, too, is not insignificant.
Historical time, unlike physical (extended), biological and relative (continuum), reveals itself through the saturation of events. What we call "time" is a process of equation of energy potentials, sometimes disturbed by explosions (shocks) that recreate inequality of energy potentials, i.e. diversity. Impulses arising in the biosphere due to these impulses are the material basis of creativity, which manifests itself in striving for beauty - art, for truth - science, for justice - morality, for power - due to this impulse states are created, for victory - whether it is conquering a foreign country or a fleeting success of an opera tenor, etc. These impulses can be positive, i.e., life-affirming, sparing all living things and appreciating everything created by human hands, and negative, dividing energy, information and the substance in which information finds its shelter. The negative impulse takes quanta of energy beyond the boundaries of time... and that is the true end of the process. But the positive impulse reunites energy with matter, accepts information - and the world continues to exist anew. Everything unique and beautiful disappears when the energy charge is lost. This is why loss is so great in eras saturated with deeds, but it is Memory that stands against destruction; and the collective memory of ethnic groups is the history of culture.
UPS AND DOWNS.
According to the theory of progress, there are neither ups nor downs. It has become customary, and not without some reason, to believe that the western peninsula of the Eurasian continent is of particular importance in human history. As evidence, they cite the flowering of classical Hellas, the campaign of Alexander the Great, the creation of the Roman Empire, the brilliant painting of the Renaissance, the "great discoveries," and the colonial conquests of the 16th and 19th centuries. However, it overlooks the fact that these "blossoms" were episodes, not only against the background of world history, but also in the history of the Mediterranean basin. The heyday of Hellas was, in fact, the short-lived hegemony of Athens. Alexander's victories provoked retaliatory strikes from the Parthians, the Saxons, and the Hindus, and the collapse of Macedonian independence. Rome... but we'll talk about it on purpose. As for the victories of the Spanish, French and English over the red, black, swarthy and yellow overseas ethnic groups seized in unawares, it is already clear how short-lived the conquests of conquistadors, adventurers and mercenaries were.
Much longer were the epochs of timelessness, of which European historians do not like to write, but which will be the subject of our analysis. Cultural decadence is as important a phenomenon of history as its rise. Whence come entire centuries without art, literature, or philosophy? Let us explain.
At the time of frequent relocations of entire peoples to other countries, with mutual rejection of foreign cultures and with contacts on a super-ethnic level, the conditions for the preservation of art monuments were extremely unfavorable. The legacy of Roman antiquity was preserved only underground, from where it began to be retrieved by humanists in the 15th century. The wondrous icon-painting of the period of the rise of Byzantine culture became a victim of the iconoclasts. The magnificent gold and silver adornments of the Ugric, Alan, Rus' and Khazar peoples were poured into coins and ingots, which were scattered all over the Far East. Wonderful embroideries, fine drawings on silk, rich brocade clothes, Turkic poems written on birch bark decayed with time, and heroic tales and myths about the origins of cosmos were forgotten along with languages recited by rhapsodes. That is why the era of the first millennium A.D. has been called "gloomy," "timeless," "cultural stagnation," and even "savagery"!
The roundabout way - through the study of the history of events - showed that the epoch described was creative, intense, and tragic, and that it was not the barrenness of soul and mind that determined the observed emptiness, but the burning of hearts and passions that incinerated whatever could have burned.
In embarking on a study of the global patterns of ethnic history, one must at once renounce the principle of Eurocentrism, which many perceive as requiring no proof. Indeed, from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, European peoples conquered half the world through colonial operations and the other half through the importation of goods or ideas. The latter, too, brought in considerable revenue.
The superiority of Europeans over other peoples was in the nineteenth century so obvious that Hegel built his philosophy of history on the principle of world progress, which was to be realized by the Germans and Anglo-Saxons, for he believed that all the inhabitants of Asia, Africa, the natives of America and Australia were "non-historical peoples." But only a century and a half passed ... and it became clear that European domination of the world was not a path of progress, but an episode. America and Australia, as the overseas extensions of Europe (Western), are directly related to the same line of regularity, and similar lines have already been traced to the peoples of antiquity, where they reached their natural end. In other words, those peoples commonly referred to as backward peoples are simply relics that have survived their heyday and decline. It can be said that the Black Australians, the Bushmen, the Mundruku, and even the Eskimos are old ethnoses. That is why their material culture is so poor and their spiritual culture so fragmented. Ethnogenesis is a discrete process, and therefore ethnoses are characterized by the concept of "age".
A great deal has been said and written about the aging of peoples, but historians have perceived this terminology as an artistic metaphor. In fact, children are born, therefore generations are renewed, so what can grow old? This is what we will try to show, proceeding this time not from general considerations of taxonomy, but from concrete ethnopsychology, obvious for any historian or ethnographer with wide outlook.
PRINCIPLES OF REFERENCE
It is advisable to base the age classification of any ethnos on a point without which no system can do without: the relation of the collective to the individual. Any collective limits the freedom of each of its members by the need to reckon with the other members separately and with the interests of the collective as a whole. Ethnos is no exception to the general rule, but the nature of the impact on its constituent persons changes over time, and there is a definite pattern to the changes.
For an ethnos, which is in a static state, it is characteristic of striving to conserve the relations between its members. In a tribal society, for example, there is the rigid despotism of tradition, which tells every newborn child his place in life and the limits of his capabilities, without taking into account the level of his personal abilities. For example, if a hero or genius is younger than a cretin, he should still be considered inferior to him in social status and may not even live to see his talents used by the collective, unless extraordinary disasters like a brutal war with neighbors or an infection when dying tribesmen must be cured come to the aid of the younger one. But even then an exception is made only for the rescuer of the temeni, and the principle of seniority itself remains inviolable.
This attitude to the individual does not exist only in the tribal system. In a developed class society it finds a vivid expression in the caste system or weakened - in the system of estates. In any of these variants, the collective indicates to the individual his place and demands from the individual only one thing:
Contentment with oneself and one's position, for contentment is the basic psychological condition for the preservation of relationships. It would seem that this position deserves neither approval nor admiration. However, let us not jump to conclusions.
The same principles guide the static ethnos in relation to the nature around it. It feeds it by giving it surplus wealth, and it dictates to its members not to demand from it more than is due. In the forest, 10% of the trees die each year by natural selection and struggle for existence; so it is possible to cut down that 10% for fuel and construction, but no more. It is also possible to kill the growth of a herd of ungulates for food, but without damaging the producers.
And how precisely the Sioux or Blackfeet tribes were able to define these norms in relation to the bison! Hunting was for them a public affair, and any self-will was suppressed by the most brutal measures. This ensured that the ethnos and its surrounding landscape were in a state of dynamic equilibrium (homeostasis), allowing people, animals and plants to exist together indefinitely. But we know that this equilibrium in any landscape, be it in Africa, Australia or Greenland, is the result of the earlier process of ethnogenesis, its final phase.
Alas, history is useful only to those who have learned it. Otherwise, commonplace "common sense" proclaims the destructive concept of the conquest of living nature. In 1894 the American geologist and anthropologist W. J. McGee wrote: "In subduing wild animals, man preserves only those that can be tamed; the rest must be destroyed."[5] And the most remarkable thing is that only the Sioux Indians were opposed to the concept, stating, "What the Spirit of the earth creates is indivisible; with all things we are bound by ties of kinship."[6]
The conclusion is unambiguous, the Sioux were guided in their practice by the concepts of "geobiocenosis" and "biosphere", although they called them otherwise, while the civilized scientist, who was at the level of the views of his time and in their captivity, preached that man showed his power by "changing the face of nature, making it better than before, helping useful animals and plants to survive and destroying harmful ones, protecting the aging planet from the ravages of time and from infirmity"[7].
The American scientist and his contemporaries were strangers to the idea that they themselves, because they had bodies, were an integral part of that nature whose face they had so cheerfully changed and about which their grandchildren now yearn. The Power of Man, then celebrated in 1948, is described by F. Osborius in another way, "In fact it is the history of human energy, reckless and uncontrollable. By this energy, or passionarity of system, not only plants and animals have been destroyed, but also those Indians whose way of life and behavior was incomprehensible and antagonistic to carriers of passionarity[9]. That is why Americans considered as "savages" those whose natural philosophy was 300 years ahead of their own development. And as a consequence, the Indians, who had managed to find an ecological niche in the biocenoses, died together with their smaller brothers, because they were rightly treated as part of nature to be remade.
As soon as the new species created a new ethnic integrity, they put forward a new principle of coexistence, a new imperative of behavior: "Be what you have to be. The king must behave as the king, the vigilante as the vigilante, the servant as the servant, because without rigid co-subordination, the new system would collapse when confronted either by an external enemy or by fellow tribesmen who usually preferred the old order.
It might seem that the difference between the first and second principles is not so great, but it is not so. In the formation of the dynamic ethnos, the category of duty to the collective plays the first role, not the birthright, as it was before. A king who does not live up to his position must be disowned or killed and replaced by a worthy one, a bad knight banished, a bad servant flogged. There are no rights, there are duties for which there is a reward. The latter varies; sometimes it is money (beneficiaries), sometimes the right to occupy a profitable position, sometimes the opportunity to share power with rulers, but in one way or another the decisive factor in achieving prosperity is the business principle, not the birthright.
If they are strong, the system crashes against their resistance, if they are weak, the system triumphs, and the process of ethnogenesis proceeds quickly. But it is here that the danger lurks, not so much for the individuals of the new type, as for the principle that leads them to victory over their tribesmen and neighbors. More precisely, victory itself is the greatest threat. Once most of the tasks have been accomplished, duty begins to weigh on people and a new (third) principle takes the place of the former principle: "Be yourself."
When a vigilante wants to be not only the squire of a prince, but also Romuald or Bertrand, a monk does not simply recite texts of scripture or serve Mass, but comments on what he read at the risk of being accused of heresy, an artist signs a painting, a merchant not just seeks new trade routes, but establishes a firm under his name, a peasant not only asserts the rights of the community, but declares: "When Adam plowed and Eve spun-who was a gentleman then?", then a generation emerges that breaks the shackles of the imperative of duty, just as the fetters of the right of birth were broken before these.
In the place of the power of duty comes the right of force, limited only by the need to consider that the neighbor is just as strong and no less aggressive. The trial of power between neighbors, who have changed from collaborators to rivals, inevitably leads to bloody clashes, complicated by the irritation of the mainstream, which has not kept pace with development and does not want to be the object of the ambitious aspirations of the new generation.
The accumulated surplus of wealth and the solution of urgent foreign-policy tasks relieved a certain number of people of a considerable part of their duties, and then begins the strengthening of individualism, tacitly formulated by the collective in this period as an imperative: "Be not only a tribune performing his duties, but also Gaius Gracchus, not only a knight, but Pierre Bayard, not only a member of the Boyar Duma, but also Basil Shuisky", i.e., now individual characteristics are even more manifest than participation in public affairs. Previously, however, these people had put all their energies into serving a cause defined by cultural dominance.
However, the development of individualism leads to a clash of active individuals, mostly bloody. Within the ethnos or at the level of the super-ethnic community ("culture"), a fierce rivalry emerges, absorbing forces that have hitherto been directed to external tasks. For example, in Europe in the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the "Christian World" passionarity entered an acmatic phase. As a result, the repulsion of the Hungarians, the defeat of the Normans and the Reconquest were replaced by the Guelph war with the Ghibellines and the Crusades, which was very unfavorable for culture and even statehood. The war of the Guelphs with the Ghibellines led to the death of the chivalrous Hohenstaufen and the "captivity of Avignon" of the popes, i.e., the collapse of the empire and the humiliation of the church.
The Crusades, i.e., the first attempt at colonial expansion, ended in grand defeat on all fronts. The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Latin Empire generally disappeared from the map of the world at that time, and the Livonian Order survived, but it changed from a springboard of the European knightly advance into a small feudal possession in a territory which neither Lithuania nor Russia contested.
More often than not, such a "blossom" causes a reaction, i.e. a desire to limit strife and murder. This is aided by the fact that the representatives of individualist generations so intensively exterminate each other or perish in external wars, beckoning them rich booty, that their percentage is steadily decreasing. It is true that in the acmatic phase, the general decline in passionarity occurs in a peculiar way. Periods of rise alternate with periods of passionate depression, when the level of passionariness sharply decreases, and then again follows a period of growth. But the subsequent rise no longer reaches the level of the previous one.
The mechanism of such alternations is clear: since there are many passionaries in this phase, the dispersion of their gene pool is large. Their legitimate and, to an even greater extent, illegitimate descendants lead the system out of the state of disintegration, which it comes to after the death of fathers and older brothers in internecine wars. However, a general decline does take place, and one day the stock of passionarity in the system becomes insufficient to bring it out of another depression. The decline becomes steady, and its monotony opens the door to a new phase of ethnogenesis.
The passive majority of ethnos members, having suffered enough from the ambitious aspirations of their fellow citizens, forms a new imperative: "We are tired of the greats!" and amicably refuses to support fellow tribesmen who want to be heroes. Under these conditions, the passionary decline accelerates, social restructuring inevitably lags behind the needs dictated by ethnic dynamics.
The urgency of the situation and the rather significant, though decreasing, reserve of passionarity determine the desire for radical solutions. Some see the ideal in a return to the "good old times" (the acmatic phase), while others see the civilized life observed in their neighbors (the inertial phase). Everyone understands that it is necessary to live differently, but everyone prefers to force the other to live his or her own way rather than seek a compromise. Divergence becomes inevitable. The surviving passionarians join either one or the other grouping and thus exterminate each other in civil wars, which are an inevitable attribute of the fracture phase.
However, when the passionaries destroy each other once more, they remain in such numbers that, for lack of strength and resources, the civil war cannot be continued. And then one of them, the victorious one, slightly modifies the principle of dormitory, declaring: "Be like me. This means: "I am great, and you (addressed to everyone) are obliged to imitate me, for to refuse to imitate is a heresy or an outrage; but you cannot and dare not surpass me, nor compare with me, for that is an outrage and an impudence; nor dare you not try to resemble me, for that is laziness and, ultimately, also an outrage. And treachery has no place in a newly organized collective, because the epoch that has just passed has so compromised violence that the vast majority prefers any regulation that allows them to hope for protection from the arbitrariness of the strong.
Sometimes the victor and legislator is a real person, such as Octavian Augustus and his successors, but often it is an abstract ideal of a man to be imitated and emulated. In either case, the meaning of the case does not change, and variations in the relationship between physical and moral coercion are immaterial to ethnological analysis.
"The blossoming" and the subsequent situation, commonly referred to as "civilization," are different phases, not stages, of the same phase. According to the principle expressed above, which must be consistently observed, the phase of development is determined by the predominance of a generation of individuals with a new behavioral makeup, which is what we observe.
"Civilization" (as an inertial phase of development) is a time favorable to the accumulation of material culture, the ordering of everyday life, the erasure of local ethnographic features inherited from past epochs. This is the time when the industrious Roman philistine "golden mediocrity" of Augustus begins to flourish. The type of philistine is found at all stages of ethnic development, but at the early ones it is suppressed by knights and indivdualists, while here it is cherished, because it does not get anywhere, does not achieve anything and is ready to honor masters, just to be left alone.
A healthy "philistine" cynicism follows the rebellious era inevitably. In Europe it found verbal embodiment in the thesis Cuius regio, eius religio, when Catholics and Protestants ceased to distinguish between each other, and this was the ultimate expression of indifference. In Byzantium such "fatigue" occurred under the Macedonian dynasty and the Dukes (11th century). Then the empire, protected by brave Slavic Varangians [10] and capable Armenian officers, became rich, fat and... declining. In the culture of Islam the age of civilization is the age of the Timurids, the Safavids and the Mughals; in China the time of the Yuan and Ming dynasties, in Rome the principate, crowned by the reforms of Diocletian.
As can be seen from this brief, far from complete list, the phenomenon of "civilization" in the above sense is peculiar to all peoples who have not perished before reaching this age.
It would seem that the system described should be extremely stable, but historical experience shows just the opposite. It was the "civilized" kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar that the prophet Daniel likened to a metallic colossus on clay feet, and this image has become a classic. All of the above "civilized" empires fell with amazing ease under the blows of small and "backward" enemies. It is possible to find local causes for each individual case, but obviously there is something common, which does not lie on the surface of the phenomenon, but in the causal depths of it. Let's look into it.
Indeed, there was no shadow of agreement in Christendom. Kings ignored papal bulls. The feudal lords fought each other, disregarding the "peace of God" declared, i.e. the truces decreed by the Church. In the cities, the Manichean Cathars preached. In the villages, pagan rituals were observed. And each fought for himself, not for proclaimed and uncontested principles.
However, this integrated mass of different aspirations formed a single ethno-cultural dominant, manifesting itself not within the super-ethnos, but at its borders, in the struggle against infidels and schismatics.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the attitude to the environment became effective, but as soon as the passionarity of the system decreased further, there came another simplification of the system that erased the temporal boundary. In the 19th century, the leading feature of the behavioral stereotype was the elementary thirst for enrichment, a kind of vulgarized greed.
The conquistadors and corsairs took deadly risks, and only a few survivors brought home the gold, and that only to scatter it in the pubs. In the nineteenth century, risks were avoided, and the proceeds were put in the bank. Huguenot wars with Ligists were replaced by voting in Parliament and duels became safe because they were stopped at the first wound. Wars had already in the eighteenth century become political actions of rulers and concerned only the military. Stern made his famous journey through France in the midst of its war with England; and it never occurred to anyone that he, a writer and thinker, had anything to do with military action. Even Napoleon's conquest of Europe met with popular, i.e. unconscious, impulsive resistance only in the "backward" countries: Spain and Tyrol, where medieval traditions had been preserved. And Russia, where the passionarity of the system was high, won the victory in 1812, despite the threefold superiority of the enemy in the number of troops.
But the decline in passionarity gave unprecedented opportunities for the organization of weak-passionary and sub-passionary individuals. Legality and order were established in Europe, maintained by custom rather than force. Thanks to the orderliness achieved at this stage, the colonial conquest of all America, Australia, India, Africa, except Abyssinia, the economic subjugation of China, Turkey and Persia became possible.
Technical civilization, based on the achievements of science, was extremely developed, and the arts and humanities were considered a necessary luxury for which little money was spared. In short, in place of the disappeared Pax Romana arose Pax Eurepaica with its transoceanic extensions, and the reason for the flourishing of both civilizations was the reduction of passionarity from the maximum to the optimum, up to the breaking point, after which the movement towards the minimum.
Here we interrupt our excursus, because, according to the condition set at the beginning of the study, we avoid the aberration of proximity, in which the recent events appear more significant than the older ones, i.e. the scale, without which any study would be meaningless. In doing so, it is advisable to compare only the values of similar, i.e., super-ethnic systems with super-ethnic systems. Therefore, in the process of presenting the concept, we have repeatedly turned to Antiquity and the Middle Ages for examples, and there is no need to repeat ourselves.
Let us now turn to a detailed description of the phases of ethnogenesis, which we figuratively call "the ages of the ethnos. [In sections 2 - 4 of PART 8]
NOTES
[1] Vernadsky V. I. Chemical structure of the Earth and its environment. С. 135.
[2] Here and below the statements of idealistic philosophers of the West are quoted in; Kon I. M. Philosophical Idealism and the Crisis of Bourgeois Thought. М., 1939. С. 156. - Hereinafter references to this book are given in the text.
[3] Jaspers K. Vom Urspning und Ziel der Geschichte. Zurich, 1949.
[4] In essence, K. Jaspers singled out a fact which he understood as the emergence of a special breed of people who had acquired the ability for intellectual development in contrast to the others who had remained at the level of semi-animal "primitives". He caught the similarity of the acmatic phases of ethnogenesis, but neglected the historical and geographic diversity of different regions.
[5] Douglas W. O. The Three Hundred Year War. A Chronicle of Ecological Disaster. М.,1975. С. 153 [6] Ibid. С. 33.
[7] Ibid. С. 153.
[8] Cited from: Dorst D. Before Nature Dies. С. 45.
[9] Gumilev L.I. Ethnogenesis in the aspect of geography // Vestnik LGU. 1970. - 12. С. 89.
[10] Varangi (Varyags in Russian) - foreigners hired for military service.
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