18. Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere, Gumilev

Part Eight, 4th section, XXXIV. Phase of Inertia

[This section has some very interesting historical examples, the development of capitalism, and a lot about the decline of Rome. I’ll probably have two more uploads to complete this text. There are also 10 pages of an explanatory dictionary of concepts, which I should have uploaded long ago.]

THE 'GOLDEN AUTUMN' OF CIVILIZATION.

After the upheavals they have experienced, people want peace, not success. They have already learned to understand that individuals who wish to manifest themselves in all originality pose the greatest danger to their neighbors. But it can be avoided by changing the social imperative. It is enough to invent or imagine an ideal bearer of the best stereotype of behavior, even if it has never existed, and to require everyone to imitate it.

In the Ancient World this was the basis for the cult of the king as a god. This worldview began as early as Alexander the Great, to whom the Egyptian priests explained that he was the son of the god Amon, whom the Hellenes identified with Zeus. Alexander liked it, but his generals flatly refused to accept such a version as insulting to Alexander's parents: Philip and Olympias.

The idea stalled, however, only for a while. It revived under the successors of the Diadochi and especially in Rome after Augustus. Rulers began to demand for themselves the honors that were supposed to be paid to the gods. This meant that the image of the ruler, not even his individual qualities, but those associated with his position, were deified. In so doing, they became a role model, obligatory for all subjects.

The Romans were well aware that scoundrels, murderers and liars who deserved only to be stabbed in the stomach as human beings were coming to the throne, but they made the principle of "Caesar's divinity" a prerequisite for decency and loyalty to order. And the memory of the bloody centuries of brokenness was so terrible that any guarantee of order seemed desirable. In modern times-the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. - a similar principle was embodied in the image of the "gentleman," an honest and well-mannered man that was supposed to be imitated to the best of his ability. Evasion of imitation was condemned not even by law, but by public opinion. This social pressure was enough.

In the East, it was often suggested that one should follow the example of some revered hero of antiquity. This did not change the matter. In short, all forms of identity were persecuted in the name of mediocrity, which became an ideal. But the process was slow. For people who did not want to give up their originality, there were areas of art and science, which seemed harmless. Therefore, those who in the 16th century grasped the sword, in the 18th century sat at home and wrote treatises, valuable - if the author was talented, and meaningless - if he was a graphomaniac. And since the latter are always more prevalent, then they created a huge library full of books, with not one and no reason to read. And this is called "growth of culture"!

A similar situation occurred in the Far East, which entered an inertial phase in the 10th century. In China it was the Song era, which left a huge number of objects of art, not as brilliant as those that survived from the Tang era, but even more masterly executed. In Tibet the monasteries were filled with books translated, and more often rewritten, from the ancient originals.

Of course, against this background, geniuses appeared: thinkers, scholars, poets, but there were not more of them than in the violent acme phase. But they had good disciples, and their concepts resonated. For example, the "yellow faith" of the teacher Tsongkhawa (1355-1418) intellectually enriched not individual consortia or sects, but whole nations: the Mongols, the Oirats, and some Tibetans. In Byzantium, the same role was played by the Athonite elders of the 14th-15th centuries whose ideas, not accepted in demoralized, doomed Constantinople, found echoes in Great Russia.

But enough examples. It is clear that the inertial phase of ethnogenesis is a decline in the passionarity of the ethnic system and intensive accumulation of material and cultural values. Let us check our conclusion on the neutral indicator - the change of the stereotype of behavior at the level of the Romano-Germanic super-ethnos.

FROM A "CHRISTIAN" WORLD TO A "CIVILIZED" WORLD

It would be surprising if such a grandiose phenomenon as a change in the stereotype of behavior on the scale of a super-ethnos would not have been noticed or described so far. No, both have been done, although from completely different positions than ours, and in a different system of concepts and terms. Not a problem! The terms of another frame of reference can always be translated into our own, and direct observation does not lose value from this.

Werner Sombart wrote his Etudes on the History of the Spiritual Development of Modern Economic Man, where he posed the question: how did "pre-capitalist man," i.e., "natural man," turn into the philistine, the philistine observed everywhere today? Before the advent of capitalism, according to Sombart before the 12th and 14th centuries, "the starting point of economic activity is the need for goods; as much as a man spends, so much should he take in. Only a fool can accumulate more.

There are, however, two classes: the rich seniors and the mass of the people. But the difference between them is not so great. The liege lord, constantly risking his life, gets a lot of goods and immediately spends them on lavish hunts, feasts, and beautiful ladies. There's no need to save money.

There's no need - they'll kill him in the next war anyway, and if not in that one, then in the next one. So the days when the lord is alive and well, he spends in pleasures. The peasant has as much land as he needs to feed himself and his family. The artisan "has the common sense not to work more than is necessary to earn a cheerful living. Such people, if they saw Rockefeller, would consider him insane.

But medieval Europeans did not consider the owners of silk dresses and gold jewelry crazy. They valued treasure and did not spare their lives for it, either their own or others'. But they valued beautiful gold, not money, which they began to be fond of only from the twelfth century onward. Greed took hold first of the Catholic clergy, then of the townspeople and finally of entire countries, but not in equal measure and in different variations.

Sometimes it was carried out by plundering overseas countries, sometimes by trading, which was also risky; sometimes the way to wealth was through "despicable usury," sometimes through obtaining lucrative positions, and so on. But always the guiding stimulus of activity was an unconscious desire for enrichment, which had almost not been observed before that time.

One might assume that greed arises when the opportunity to satisfy it arises. Sombart rejects the thesis that "the capitalist spirit is created by capitalism itself. He also disagrees with M. Weber that there is a connection between Protestantism and capitalism. Instead of all this, Sombart sees the cause of the development of "the capitalist spirit... in mental propensities inherited from ancestors," i.e., translated into the scientific language we are accustomed to, these propensities are an inherited trait. So there are special "bourgeois natures," which Sombart divides into "entrepreneurial" and "bourgeois. The former are daring adventurers, the founders of capitalism; the latter are dull, moderate and tidy clerks, filling with their bulk the void left by the demise of their predecessors.

According to Sombart, the "predisposition" toward capitalism can be seen not only at the level of the person or organism, but also at the level of the ethnos. This convinces him of the biological nature of the phenomenon. Ethnoses "with a weak capitalist disposition" include the Celts and the Goths, lower only than the Spanish Iberians, who "were strangers to the allure that gold has for almost all peoples.

Ethnoses bent on capitalism are divided into two varieties: "peoples of heroes" and "peoples of merchants. To the former, Sombart includes the Romans, Normans, Lombards, Saxons and Franks, and thereby the English and the French; to the latter, the Florentines, the Scots-Lowlanders and Jews, as well as the Frisians, who "in the earliest epoch were considered intelligent, shrewd merchants. This last is needed by Sombart to explain the haggling of the Dutch and Scottish Lowlanders, for there is a suggestion that Lower Scotland was inhabited by the Frisians, among others.

He does not consider the Slavs and Greeks, evidently considering them, unlike the Jews, as non-European peoples. This shows that his field of vision is not a geographical region, but a super-ethnos. This peculiarity makes his analysis interesting for our theme, for he describes essentially the phase of the breakdown as a transition from the acmatic phase to the inertial phase, but, considering peoples (ethnoses) as stable systems, subdivisions of races, is forced to explain the triumph of the "bourgeois spirit" in Tuscany by the admixture of Etruscan "blood", although Etruscans disappeared in the 4th century B.C, Already this omission of 2 thousand years is alarming and makes us proceed to the criticism of the concept.

I believe that Sombart's observations are correct, but their interpretation is unsatisfactory. Iberians are the most ancient stratum of Europeans, who were already in homeostasis in Roman times. Seeing only the final phase of ethnogenesis, it is impossible to judge the preceding ones. The descendants of the trading Etruscans are the Corsicans. They long ago lost the skills of their ancestors and, as late as the nineteenth century, preferred vendetta to trade. About the Celts we wrote above. But the merchant peoples enumerated by Sombart all have one thing in common, a high degree of mestization (ethnic mixing). Tuscany lay north of Rome. It was only after the 10th century that the Swabians-Hibellines, Angevin Guelphs, Spaniards, French and Austrians passed through it. And all dispersed their gene pool through the Tuscan population. The Scottish Lowlands - a contact zone between the Scots, the Angles, the Viking Normans and the French barons, who were put there by the English and Scottish kings, for there was a turbulent frontier. The lower Rhine, the area of the Frisians, was also a place of ethnic contact between Germanic, Romanic, and Celtic populations. This is the only sign that is common to all the "merchant peoples", but it is enough. We can add to their number southern Italy and Andalusia, which Sombart apparently just missed. The picture will not change.

The difference between "seniors" and "entrepreneurs" is not so great. Both are passionate, but in different modes. The former are vain, the latter are greedy, but these differences are insignificant. And what is important, both are sharply different from the bourgeois, the clerks, the true carriers of the "capitalist spirit," which, in our opinion, is merely the impoverishment of the original creative tension that always arises with the passionate upsurge. The "petty bourgeois" condemn the "seniors" only because they would like to be, but cannot be the same. They are the descendants of the creative upsurge, of which they have only a "passion for profit," i.e., they are harmonious and even sub-passionary individuals. But this means that we are facing a usual entropic process, similar to the cooling of hot gas, turning it into water, and then into ice (which can be understood as a state of homeostasis, the limit of any ethnogenesis process).

And now let us put Sombart's observations into the scheme of ethnogenesis that we have proposed above. In the IX-XI centuries, when there was no "capitalist spirit" in Europe, there was no active ethnic mestization. People lived in small ethnic groups, formed recently and preserving their identity. The fact that these newborn ethnoses were composed of different racial components did not matter. Their stereotypes of behavior were original. The tasks faced by this or that ethnos were common to each of its members. Passionarity manifested itself equally in all strata of the population, as a consequence of which social states were fluid: cowardly feudal lords died, and valiant villagers became either knights or free townsfolk.

In the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries there is division. In the monolithic ethnic groups, social systems are becoming more complex, enlargement into kingdoms, throwing excessive passionaries into crusades or into neighboring countries (Hundred Years' War). And in the areas of ethnic contacts "merchants" appear and get rich. In the acmatic phase, and even more in the phase of fracture, they live at the expense of strife, enjoying the patronage of the rulers. But gradually they gain strength and make the second transition - to the inertial phase, the most convenient for them. They like this phase so much that they invented an honorary name for it - "civilization" state, in their opinion, endless.

As we already know, any change in the aggregate state of the environment requires a large expenditure of energy, in our case - passionarity. Like all energy, passionarity operates at a difference of potentials. This difference can arise either due to the passionary push, a natural phenomenon, or due to close interethnic contact, where the passionarity of one ethnic group exceeds the passionarity of the other. The results will be different: the destruction of natural landscapes is noted only in the second variant, which has been shown by a number of examples.

At the same time it should be noted that destruction in anthropogenic landscapes is by no means the rule, but a sad exception, fortunately, quite rare. After all, if it were otherwise, all geobiocenoses would have been destroyed during 50 thousand years of Neoanthropus existence, and the man himself would have died of starvation on the depopulated Earth.

Consequently, it must be recognized that human impact on the biosphere goes in two opposite directions: life-affirming and life-negating. In the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The "cooling down" of the Romano-Germanic super-ethnos is proceeding rapidly. Passionarians leave for the colonies and either perish there or return sick. Harmonious individuals work hard at home, in their fields, workshops, clerkships, university classrooms. They have no time to fight for advantages that are almost onerous to them. And it is here that the place vacated by the passionarians is taken by "bargainers" - Florentine moneychangers, obliging diplomats, intriguers, adventurers. They are alien to the local ethnic group, but that is why they are extremely convenient for the Viennese, especially when they have no homeland at all.

And suddenly, for their benefit, Watt builds a steam engine, and all sorts of technical improvements follow. Cities enlarge, become multi-ethnic. Man begins to live without connection to his ethnic group, sometimes only in distant contact with it. This is where the "capitalist spirit" of the European, so well described and spit upon by Sombart, comes into play.

But why did it succeed so easily? Only because, figuratively speaking, "the water has cooled and is freezing. That is, when it freezes all, i.e. when the phase of obscuration comes, the peddlers, the bacteria devouring the insides of the ethnos, will die, and a relic can still be left of the ethnos.

CIVILIZATION AND NATURE

The understanding of ethnogenesis proposed here would be subjective if we did not have a scale for comparison. But there is one - it is the history of anthropogenic landscapes, that is, the history of the interaction of technology and nature through a mechanism called "ethnos. In the described phase, people's relation to their natural environment changes dramatically, again at the expense of a decrease in the passionary tension of ethnic systems.

No matter how ferocious the passionaries may be, the triumphant philistine is a far more pernicious phenomenon in relation to the nature that feeds us. In this phase, no one needs the risk, for the necessary victories have all been won through the massacre of the defenseless begins. And what is more defenseless than the bountiful biosphere?

It is proclaimed that "man is the king of nature," and he began to take tribute from it calmly and systematically. Cotton plantations covered the once green hills of Dixieland (southern U.S. states) and, in a known, rather short time, turned them into sand dunes. The prairies are plowed and the crops are enormous, except that dust storms come and go, destroying the gardens and crops of the eastern states as far east as the Atlantic. Industry is booming and making enormous profits, and the Rhine, the Seine and the Vistula have turned into sewage ditches.

This is now, but it was the same before. There were no deserts on Earth 15,000 years before Christ, and now everywhere you look is a desert. We've already shown that it wasn't the raids of Turkic and Mongolian noblemen that turned the banks of Etzignol, Khotandarya, and the Lob-nor Lake into sand dunes. This was done by the systematic work of farmers thinking about this year's harvest, but not beyond. The same laboring peasants have loosened the soil of the Sahara and allowed the Samumans to disperse it. They, on the other hand, litter the outskirts of their settlements with industrial waste and bottles, and release poisonous chemicals into the rivers. No Passionarians would ever have thought of such a thing, and it is impossible to explain it to harmonious people. And is it worth it? After all, this is not the last phase of ethnogenesis.

And in the same way ethnoses, which have a huge layer of culture accumulated by their ancestors, behave. Any technical achievements on their own, without human participation, do not entail any progressive development, though they can be destroyed by the constant impact of pernicious time. Egypt of the Ancient Kingdom and Sumer had a higher culture of agriculture than Egypt of the New Kingdom and Assyria, which conquered Mesopotamia. Apparently, it is not a matter of things, but of people, or rather, of the stock of their creative energy - passionarity. Therefore, technology and art can be seen as indicators of ethnic processes, a kind of crystallization of the passionarity of past generations.

But perhaps we have abused political history in a geographical treatise? After all, it is commonly believed that history and natural history are so far apart that comparisons between them are unwarranted. John Stuart Collins, in The All-Conquering Tree, writes: "St. Paul was right to invoke the wrath of God on the heads of the inhabitants of Antioch. Other prophets were also right in cursing the cities. But in doing the right thing they were guided by false motives. The essence of sin was not in its moral aspect; it was not in its theology, but in its ecology.

Excessive pride and luxury would not have brought punishment; green fields would have continued to bear fruit and clear waters would have cooled; however much immorality and lawlessness had reached, the high towers would not have staggered and the solid walls would not have collapsed. But men have betrayed the earth that God gave them to live on; they have sinned against the laws of the earth, they have ravaged the forests and given open space to the elements of water - that is why there is no forgiveness for them, and all their creations have been swallowed up by the sand.

Brilliant, but wrong! The immorality and lawlessness in the cities is a prelude to the massacre of the forests and fields, for the cause of both is the decrease in the level of the ethno-social system's passionarity. With the previous increase in passionarity, the characteristic feature was harshness to both themselves and their neighbors. With a decline - characterized by "humanity," forgiveness of weaknesses, then neglect of duty, then crime. And the habit of the latter leads to the transfer of the "right to outrage" from people to landscapes.

The level of morality of an ethnos is as much a phenomenon of the natural process of ethnogenesis as is the predation of wildlife. Because we have grasped this relationship, we would be able to write a history of the anthropogenic, i.e., human deformed landscape, for the paucity of direct characteristics of nature management in ancient authors can be made up for by descriptions of the moral level and political collisions of the epoch under study. It is the dynamics of the described relationship that is the subject of ethnology, the science of man's place in the biosphere.

In fact, we have described the manifestation of a micro-mutation, which can be characterized as the restoration of equilibrium disrupted by a passionate push. The latter affects the nature of the region no less than the people inhabiting it. A surplus of energy leads to the emergence of new needs and, consequently, to the restructuring of the host landscape. Examples of this have been given above; we now need to summarize them and determine their direction.

As a rule, the first phase is characterized by the pursuit of beautification. People living in the initial phases of ethnogenesis do not imagine that their system will also end; and if such an idea occurs to someone, no one wants to listen to him, so there is always a desire to build for ever, without sparing strength.  The riches of nature still seem unlimited, and the task is to establish their unhindered obtaining. Sometimes this leads to predation, the lax order established and maintained restricts the initiative of private individuals. After all, if the kings of England and their sheriffs had not imposed harsh laws against poachers, who in the Middle Ages were called "Robin Hoods," there would not only be no deer left in England today, but most likely not a single uncut tree or trampled lawn. Perhaps it is more appropriate to admire not the heroes of English folk ballads, but their enemies, although both were carriers of the growing passionarity of which, alas, the slaughtered beasts were deprived. For the latter, the benefit was the Hundred Years' War, which claimed many human lives, but alienated the natural demise of Old England and Beautiful France.

Such conflicts have arisen more than once, but they have not been catastrophic, for nature changes sometimes faster than history. As already mentioned, the process of obscuration of Western Europe was interrupted by the passionate push of the ninth century, but the wounds inflicted on the biosphere during this time did not heal. In Gaul and Britain, thanks to increased humidity, forests and meadows recovered; in Italy and Andalusia, lemon and orange groves were cultivated, but in dry North Africa, desert reigned. Whereas in the second century Roman cavalry obtained horses from the myriad herds grazing on the southern spurs of the Atlas, the Arabs began to breed camels there as early as the eighth century. There were no changes in the climatic conditions here, as it is a zone of the stable anticyclone - the tropic maximum. But in these natural conditions, it is impossible to restore a thin layer of humus for a few centuries. The Romans from the II century BC to the IV century AD were systematically pushing the ancestors of the Tuaregs, the Numidians, to the south.

They departed with their herds, which gradually turned dry steppes into a stony desert Sahara. On the eastern fringe of the continent the role of the Romans was played by the Chinese, who pushed the Huns northwards and turned the wooded slopes of the Inshan into the margin of the rocky Gobi desert, and the steppes of Ordos into the chains of sandy dunes. Frankly speaking, here with anthropogenic processes are combined climate variations associated with heterochronicity of increased humidification of arid and humid zones (47), but it is easy to make a correction for this phenomenon to make sure that it does not change the conclusion (48).

One is tempted to assume that natural processes: droughts or floods, are as destructive to the nature of the region as the activities of man, armed with the technology of his time. But they are not! Natural processes create reversible changes. For example, the repeated aridization of the Great Steppe in Eurasia caused dry steppes and semi-deserts to move north and south from the stony Gobi. But the subsequent humidification led to the opposite process: deserts were overgrown with steppe grasses, and forests moved over the steppes. And in parallel, anthropocenoses were restored - nomads moved together with sheep "for grass and water".

However, the ethnogenesis is a natural process, hence, by itself, it must not create irreversible changes in the biosphere, and if it creates them, then, obviously, some other factor is present here. What is it? Let's find out.

In the Great Steppe during the historical period, ethnogenesis started three times. In the V-IV centuries BC it affected the Huns [49]"; in the V-VI centuries AD the Türks and Uigurs [50]; in the XII century the Mongols [51], and next to them, in the Sungarian taiga, the Manchus [52]. All these renewed ethnic groups were descendants of the aborigines, their predecessors. They spent their excessive passionarity not on changing nature, for they loved their country, but on creating original political systems: the Hunnish clan power, the Turkic "Eternal El," the Mongol ulus, and on campaigns against China or Iran. In this aspect, the nomads were similar to the Byzantines. And it is no coincidence that both are quoted from a Eurocentric position as "secondary" or "inferior, although, for example, the need to protect the environment Europeans and Chinese should have learned from the Turks and Mongols.

But the worst thing about the civilization phase is the stimulation of unnatural migrations, or more precisely, the migration of entire populations from natural landscapes to anthropogenic landscapes, i.e. to cities. Although every city, regardless of its size, subsists on natural resources, it accumulates such a large technical base that it can be inhabited by aliens from very different countries. In an urban landscape, they are able to feed themselves at least through the exploitation of the natives who created and maintain this artificial landscape. And the most tragic thing in this collision is that the migrants are in a reciprocal relationship with the natives. They begin to teach them, to make technical improvements suitable for the migrants' native landscapes, but not necessarily suitable for the countries to which they mechanically transfer them. Sometimes this projection is correctable, but other times blooming countries turn not even into deserts, but into bad lands, where the destructive effects of technology are irreversible. 

This was the fate that befell the Tigris-Euphrates River Bifurcation due to the vicissitudes of historical destiny. Here the Sumerians turned the swamp into "Eden," and the Semitic Akkadians built the city called "Gate of God" (Bab-eloi), Babylon. Why is there nothing but ruins in its place now?

WHO DESTROYED BABYLON?

It seems incredible that a city that for a thousand and a half years was the cultural and economic capital of the Middle East, and died without any real reason. So what are these reasons, and what is the mechanism of their destructive effect? There is no answer to this question in the literature.

The great city was founded by the Amorites in the 19th century BC and conquered by the Assyrians in the 7th century BC. The conquest was bloody, and the uprisings were fiercely suppressed. Neighbors intervened in the war: the Elamites and the Chaldeans, one of the tribes of eastern Arabia. The Chaldeans defeated Assyria in 612 BC and became masters of Babylon, whose population reached a million, but included very few descendants of the ancient Babylonians[53]. However, the culture and economy of the city outlived its creators, and the system with new ethnic content continued to function. Despite all the bloodletting, the steady anthropogenic landscape was not disturbed until the 6th century BC.

The Babylonian economy was based on a system of irrigation between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, with excess water discharged into the sea across the Tigris. This was reasonable, for the waters of the Euphrates and Tigris carry a lot of sediment from the Armenian highlands during floods, and it is not advisable to clog the fertile soil with gravel and sand. But in 582 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar sealed the peace with Egypt by marrying the princess Nitokris, who later passed to his successor, Nabonidus. Her retinue of educated Egyptians arrived in Babylon with the princess. Nitokris proposed to her husband, evidently not without consultation with his courtiers, to build a new canal and increase the irrigated area.

The Chaldean king accepted the project of the Egyptian queen, and in the 1960s B.C. the Pallukat canal was built, starting above Babylon and irrigating large tracts of land outside the river floodplains[54]. What came of it?

The Euphrates began to flow more slowly and the alluvium was deposited in the irrigation canals. This increased the labor cost of maintaining the irrigation network. Water from the Pallukat, which passed through dry areas, caused salinization of the soils. Farming was no longer profitable, but the process dragged on for a long time. In 324 B.C. Babylon was still such a large city that the romantic Alexander the Great wanted to make it his capital. But the more sober Seleucus Nicator, who took Babylon in 312 BC, preferred Seleucia on the Tigris and Antioch on the Orontes. Babylon was deserted and in 129 B.C. and became a prey to the Parthians. By the beginning of A.D. it was a ruin in which stood a small Jewish settlement. Then that disappeared too (55).

But could a single capricious queen have ruined a huge city and a prosperous country? Evidently her role was not decisive. If the king of Babylon had been a local resident, he would have either realized by himself of the disastrous consequences of ill-conceived land reclamation, or consulted with his countrymen, and among them there would have been intelligent people. But the king was a Chaldean, his army consisted of Arabs, his advisers were Jews, and all of them did not even think about the geography of the conquered and exsanguinated country.

The Egyptian engineers, on the other hand, transferred their reclamation techniques from the Nile to the Euphrates mechanically. After all, the Nile carries fertile silt in floods, and the sand of the Libyan desert drains any amount of water, so there is no danger of salinization of soils in Egypt. The most dangerous thing is not even a mistake, but the lack of raising the questions where they should be raised. To the new inhabitants of Babylon, who replaced the murdered and dispersed Babylonians, everything seemed so clear that they did not want to think. But the consequences of another "victory over nature" ruined their descendants, who also did not build the city, but simply settled in it. That is the difference between "population geography" and ethnology. The first deals with the bare statistics, while the second deals with the problem of the relationship between the ethnos and the landscape in the different phases of ethnogenesis.

Even the descendants could not correct the consequences of reclamation in Dvurech'e. The Arabs in the 7th-9th centuries had huge sources of cheap labor. They received negro slaves from Zanzibar, which is why they called them "zindji". They were forced to collect salt crystals around the ruins of Babylon in baskets and take them away. The idea of improving the soil in such a way was not feasible, as small crystals are not visible to the common eye. And the work was terrible, downright murderous. Under the scorching sun, with salt-encrusted hands, with no hope of rest!

The desperate Negroes revolted. It lasted from 869 to 892 and ended, as was to be expected, with the death of all these unfortunate people. But not enough of this: sacrificing their lives, which no longer pleased them, the Zingjis ruined the Baghdad Caliphate, for the viceroys of Egypt and Khorasan fell away from Baghdad, the outlaw Yakut Saffar came to the walls of the capital, and the sectarians of Bahrain the Karmati achieved their independence.  All this happened because all the Caliph's forces were thrown on the Zinjas, and all the funds were used to hire Turkmens to replenish the thinning army.

These militant steppes, seeing that they were the only real force in Baghdad, began to change caliphs at their own discretion and to suppress by force the outrages of their employers, the Arabs. They managed to expel them only with the help of the Highlanders - the Bund, the Shiites, the enemies of everything Arab, who turned the Caliph into a puppet.

That was the price of the second reclamation attempt, ill-conceived and as frivolous as the first.  No, one should not think that any land reclamation is destructive. It becomes so only when it is not thought out, the terrain is not studied, and consequences are not taken into account. In ancient times, this happened when newcomers took up this work. They had no time to study, they had to act immediately... and here are the results! In the other way the people who belong to ethnos which is part of the host landscape act, they work during its reorganization without coming into conflict with the course of natural processes. In this way a stable biocenosis is maintained, where plants, animals and people find their ecological niches. Usually the creation of such an ethnolandscape system is timed to the initial phase of ethnogenesis, for ethnogenesis is a natural process that fits into the natural formation of the Earth's landscape shell.

WHAT IS "CULTURAL DECAY"?

That we have turned our attention to epochs that are cruel, gloomy and poor in the remnants of art objects is no accident. Epochs that are colorful, rich in masterpieces, have been described many times, and there is no point in repeating their descriptions. It made more sense to find out why light periods of cultural history are succeeded by dark ones.

Medieval thinkers sincerely believed that they lived in an age of decline, expressed in the constant loss of the inheritance of antiquity - the Roman Empire and apostolic Christianity. Only in the fifteenth century did this feeling disappear, and so the century was called the Renaissance.

It is curious that the Chinese who bemoaned the culture of the Han period[57], the Persians who sang of their history[58], the Bedouins in Arabia who opposed orthodox Islam with the teachings of the biblical prophets: Adam, Noah, Moses, and the kings David and Solomon numbered among them, held the same views. All of them had no knowledge of history, but simply put their thoughts into the mouths of historical characters to give these often delusional ideas credibility, for which they sometimes sacrificed authorial priority. So powerful was their protest against the reality that surrounded them, bleak and depressing indeed.

There is no need to argue about the validity of these judgments. They were rooted in a sense of the epoch, which in itself is a fact, and if it is global, it is a historical fact. And as soon as it is so, it can and should be understood scientifically.

First of all, we should ask ourselves the question: the decline (as well as the rise) of what? There are ups and downs in ethnic processes and in the history of culture, but they do not coincide with one another in phases. And this is no accident. The passionate explosion that initiates the process of ethnogenesis is usually devastating for the preceding culture. Ancient Christians smashed masterpieces of ancient sculpture; the Goths, Vandals and Franks burned cities with magnificent monuments of architecture; the Arabs destroyed the libraries in Alexandria and Ctesiphon, plastered over the frescoes of the cathedrals of Carthage and Cordoba. Art suffered terrible, irreparable losses, but this cannot be called a decline, for the creative impulse as such was respected, and only the cultural dominant was changed.

Conversely, the classical era of decline-the Roman Empire of the second to fourth centuries-is characterized by the increased production of statues and frescoes, the construction of temples and theaters, and the construction of triumphal arches and mithreums. Here, however, is characterized by a decline in aesthetic standards, as we would say quality. The images of emperors are stenciled, the busts of matrons are inexpressive, for both of them are a given to the requirements of propriety, as it was understood at that time. Even worse with architecture: in order to build Constantine's Triumphal Arch in time, the Arch of Trajan was dismantled. This is no longer craftsmanship, but simply hackwork. Roman apartment buildings were built so badly that they often collapsed, burying their occupants under the ruins. Rome was no longer living creatively even before the Gothic and Vandal pogroms. That is why the Eternal City was not defended by its inhabitants at the time.

But was it? After all, even in those cruel ages there lived authors of immortal works: Lucian of Samosata, Ammianus Marcellinus, Sidonius Apollinarius, not to mention the pleiad of Christian philosophers and neoplatonists who were close to Christians in spirit.

Yes, that is true, but let us remember that the later the author lived, the fewer readers he had. Sidonius Apollinarius complains bitterly of spiritual loneliness. The philosophers Proclus and Hypatia lived lonely and abandoned. The latter was not even protected by her disciples from the Alexandrian mob. Individual fragments of later statues, executed to a high standard, can be found, but their number, compared with the artisanal ones, is negligible. This decline in taste and the substitution of style for eclecticism is the true decline of art.  And whether or not it is combined with catastrophic destruction is a detail of historical processes and ethnic migrations.

This is the case everywhere. In fourth-century Byzantium, the poet John Chrysostom appears as a rival to the all-powerful empress, and after his death is venerated as a saint. And in the 11th century all influence is concentrated in the hands of the synclite (high officials), who ruin the heroes by intrigues – the defenders of the motherland. There are no poets at all. In the Arab Caliphate scientists were respected and monuments were not destroyed, but the Shubiya creative interpretation of the Koran ~ gave way to dogmatic admonition. The Sung dynasty in China, where all religions were banned and only Confucianism was allowed, did the same work against intellectual diversity. Obviously, the decline of culture is an all-pervasive process.

Now we can move on to a generalization. In the phase of ethnic inertia, the ability to expand one's range declines, and it is time to affect the landscapes of one's own country. The technosphere grows, i.e. the number of necessary and unnecessary buildings, products, monuments, utensils - we mean, at the expense of natural resources. Some of these changes are relatively harmless distortions of nature: ditches, fields of monocultures, huge herds of cattle. Left unattended, they return to natural geobiocenoses. But where natural materials are enclosed in the fetters of strict forms, self-development ceases, being replaced by slow but steady destruction, which is often irreversible.

Such ruins are only needed by archaeologists. They study the traces of ethnoses that are not growing, but are going extinct, leaving to the ages shards of fired clay crockery, fragments of Babylonian cuneiform tablets, pyramids and the Baalbek platform, ruins of medieval castles and ancient Mayan temples in the jungles of the Yucatan. The biosphere, able to feed people, is unable to satiate their desire to cover the surface of the planet with junk taken out of the biocenosis conversion cycle. In this phase, the ethnos, like Antaeus, loses touch with the soil, i.e. with life, and the inevitable decline sets in. The appearance of this decline is deceptive. It wears a mask of well-being and prosperity, which contemporaries seem eternal, because they indulge themselves with the illusion of inexhaustible natural wealth. But this is a comforting self-deception that dissipates after the last, and this time the fatal, phase transition occurs.

The last phase of ethnogenesis is destructive. The members of the ethnos, unable to return to contact with the biosphere due to the law of irreversibility of evolution, turn to predation, but it does not save them. There is a demographic decline, after which peripheral sub-ethnoses, minimally connected to the main line of ethnogenesis, remain. They either wither away as relics, or create new ethnic groups with different behavioral dominants. Then the process resumes, of course, if the next passionate push occurs.

XXXV. The phase of obscuration.

THE "TWILIGHT" OF ETHNICITY.

The distinctive feature of "civilization" is the reduction of the active element and complete contentment of the emotionally passive and hard-working population. However, one cannot omit the third option - the presence of people who are both uncreative and non-laboring, emotionally and mentally inferior, but who have higher requirements for life. In heroic epochs of growth and self-expression, these individuals have little chance of surviving. They are bad soldiers, no workers, and the path of criminality in austere times led quickly to the scaffold.

But in the mild times of civilization, with general material abundance, there is an extra piece of bread and a woman for everyone. "Life-lovers" (pardon the author's neologism) begin to multiply without limit and, because they are individuals of a new breed, create their own imperative: "Be like us," that is, do not strive for anything that cannot be eaten or drank. All growth becomes an odious phenomenon, industriousness is subjected to ridicule, intellectual joys inspire rage. In art there is a decline in style, in science original works are supplanted by compilations, in public life corruption is legitimized, in the army soldiers hold officers and generals in submission, threatening them with revolts. Everything is corrupt, no one can be trusted, no one can be relied upon, and in order to rule, the ruler must employ the tactics of an outlaw: to suspect, hunt down and kill his associates.

The order established in this phase, which can best be called "obscuration," can in no way be considered democratic. Here, as in the preceding stages, groups dominate, only the principle of selection is different, negative. What is valued is not ability but its absence, not education but ignorance, not firmness in opinions but unscrupulousness. Not every average citizen is able to meet these requirements, and so the majority of the people find themselves, from the point of view of the new imperative, inferior and, therefore, unequal. But here comes the retribution: the philistines are only able to parasitize on the fat body of the people who have been fed up with "civilization”. They themselves can neither create nor preserve.  They corrode the body of a people like the cells of a cancerous tumor in the human body, but, having overcome, i.e., having killed the opponent, they themselves perish.

Indeed, even the preservation of the family and the education of children require very different qualities from those that have been so carefully cultivated; otherwise, the children will dispose of their parents as soon as it suits them. So, after the triumph of obscuration its bearers disappear like smoke, and there remain the survivors of all the troubles of the original carriers of the static state, who on the ruins again begin to teach their children to live quietly, avoiding conflicts with neighbors and with each other. Anatomically and physiologically they are full-fledged people who have adapted to the landscape, but their passionate tension is so low that the process of ethnos development does not proceed. Even when a passionate individual is accidentally born among them, it seeks application not in their homeland, but in their neighbors (for example, Albanians made a career either in Venice or Constantinople). There are two possibilities: either the survivors eke out a miserable existence as a relic ethnos, or they fall into the melting pot and, under some favorable conditions, a new ethnos, only vaguely remembering its origins, for it is much more important the date of its new birth, it is smelted out of several wreckages. And again the process goes through the same stages, if it is not accidentally interrupted by extraneous influence.

There are fewer illustrative examples to illustrate the phase of obscuration than for the other stages. The peoples of Europe, both Western and Eastern, are not so old as to fall into a state of marasmus. We must therefore look to antiquity for examples.

FROM PROSPERITY TO DECLINE.

Let us begin with the clearest, the Mediterranean in the fourth century B.C. It was then that the aggression of the warlike Celts, who a century earlier had conquered lands in Spain and Italy and inflicted heavy damage on the growing Etruscan culture, which was slaughtered. In the same century the military and economic power of Carthage blossomed and the complex state system of Rome, freed from the Etruscan yoke, took shape. But the main role was played by Hellenes, who had already lived their brilliant century and turned from a mosaic ethnos into a super-ethnos.

The Hellenic super-ethnos, which included Macedonia, spread eastward to India, westward to Spain (Sagount) and Gaul (Massilia), suppressing the rival ethnoses of Punic and Etruscan - Carthage and Etruria. Although both the latter retained their independence, they lost their hegemony at sea. However, the outflow of the passionate element to the outskirts, along with the wars experienced in recent times (Peloponnesian, Thebanian and Macedonian), made Hellas less resistant, as can be seen from the fact that the initiative of Athens and Sparta began to be taken over by the half savage highlanders of Epirus, Aetolia and the humble peasants of Achaea. Not that they gained any particular power, but with the isolation of the former centers of passionarity their strength proved sufficient for them to enter the struggle for hegemony with the hope of success.

The same process that took place in Italy elevated the outlaw republic on the seven hills that became the Eternal City. Here, too, is an important observation. The main rivals of the Romans, the Samnites, who were as brave as they were, used to send their young men as soldiers for hire to Carthage, then to the Hellenic cities of Tarentus, Syracuse and so on. Naturally, most of those who left in search of adventure and wealth perished, and if they returned, they were already broken and exhausted. The Romans, on the other hand, kept their young people at home, even though it caused them a lot of trouble. In this way they kept a passionate fund and used it in the wars with Pyrrhus and Hannibal, which gave Rome power over the Mediterranean.

Nevertheless, this active fund was melting away, which led to the reform of Gaius Marius - the formation of a professional standing army, in which iron discipline made it possible to use sub-passionarians as privates. The structure of the Roman ethnos disintegrated and two subsystems emerged: the senate and the army. The army won under Caesar, and won again after his death under Octavian and Antony. For the next three centuries the army drew in all the passionate population of the Roman Empire, and civil wars were fought between military factions staffed by representatives of different ethnicities that were part of the same super-ethnos - the Roman world (Pax Romana).

The first war broke out in 68, when Julius Vindex, proprétor of Gaul, a descendant of the Acquitan kings, led a revolt of his fellow tribesmen who wanted to be free from the power and oppression of Rome. The Spanish legions joined the revolt, proclaiming Servius Sulpicius Galba emperor. But before Galba crossed the Pyrenees, the legions standing on the Upper Rhine clashed with the Aquitanians. The leaders of both armies thought nothing of fighting, but the legionaries did not obey them; 20,000 Aquitanians fell in the battle, including Vindex.

Galba entered Rome at the head of the Spanish legions and seven months later was killed by Praetorians, natives of Italy, who proclaimed as emperor Othon, one of the fellow-beings of the dead Nero.  But the legions of the Lower Rhine rebelled, forcing their leader Aulus Vittelius to march with them to Rome. In 69 these provincials defeated the Praetorians. Othon plunged a dagger into his chest. But the Syrian and Egyptian legions did not agree to recognize Vittelius and forced their commander Vespasian to lead them in the struggle for power.

They were joined by legions standing in Mysia, Lannonia, and Illyria to avenge Vittelius on Ogon. In vain the commander of the Germanic legions, Cecina, tried to surrender. The soldiers chained him up and went into battle. At Cremona Vespasian's troops were victorious, terribly looted the city and slaughtered all the inhabitants, for they were Roman citizens and could not be sold into slavery. Vittelius abdicated, but the soldiers who were in Rome did not accept his abdication, attacked the Capitol, killed the prefect of Rome, Vespasian's brother, and fought until they were slaughtered. And the people of Rome passed over to the side of the next victor.

From this list of atrocities it can be seen that the Roman professional army separated itself from the Roman people and became directly hostile to the senate. But it, too, did not form a coherent whole, splitting into several territorial consortia. The stereotypes of legionary and civilian behavior diverged and continued to diverge, especially since this army accepted provincials who severed ties with their families and tribesmen for the sake of soldiering life.

The thirty legions possessed by the empire in the year 70 were replenished not only through recruitment and influx of volunteers, but also through natural increase. In peacetime, legionaries worked plots of land for their own needs, and although they were not allowed to marry, they made girlfriends whose children automatically became soldiers. Thus, soldiers formed an independent sub-ethnos in the Roman Empire, whose importance grew with each passing year and whose stereotype of behavior changed in accordance with the conditions of lifelong military service.

No matter how badly the Roman citizens treated their standing army, and no matter how much the soldiers massacred civilians at every opportunity, it must be said that it was thanks to the legions that the provinces became rich and the capital entertained itself. It entertained itself in vile ways: with gladiatorial fights, animal trampling, executions of Christians, mockery of prisoners, and the sale of slaves and slave girls, but such was the Roman stereotype that fascinated lovers of classical antiquity.

Still, for all the horrors described, the imperial era of Rome should be considered an inertial phase of ethnogenesis. The Roman people spent their own passionarity to maintain their political system. If in the II-1st centuries BC the excess passionarity tore the rigid social system through civil wars, and at the turn of our era there was as much passionarity as needed to maintain order and peace of the system, then by the end of the I century there was a need to supplement the army with combat-ready, i.e. passionarians provincials. This was the beginning of the end.

What happened? Were the legions weaker or the empire's neighbors stronger? Probably both at once. This is what matters to us.

Of course, that part of the Roman ethnos (which at that time coincided with the ancient Greco-Roman super-ethnos)) which was part of the legions was losing passionate tension faster than it should have been due to the losses on the battlefields. At every coup, of which there were many, the soldiers took out grudges on the junior command staff, i.e., they exterminated those officers who maintained discipline. This means that the most responsible, enterprising, executive and loyal to duty people were extirpated, and their places were taken by the unprincipled and venal. With regard to the moral and cultural level of "soldier" emperors this degradation is noticed and described, but for our topic it is more important to note that it affected all strata of the army, at that time drawing in all the passionate element of the Roman ethnos, for only in the army an ambitious young man could make a career, although at risk to life.

The inertia sustained the system until the end of the second century and ran out. Then it was time for a new phase.

THE BLOODY DARK.

The phases of ethnogenesis transition from one to another so smoothly that they are usually imperceptible to contemporaries. But it is clear to the historian that the transitions coincide with important events, the significance of which can only be seen at a distance.

The decisive turning point in the fate of the Roman ethnos occurred in 193, after the insane Emperor Commodus was slain.

These events are worth focusing on. The porphyrogenous fiend had dropped a plaque in the bed of his beloved with the names of those condemned to death. Her name was on it. She showed it to the other intended victims, and a specially invited gladiator, Narcissus, finished off the villain. The senate appointed the venerable old man Pertinax as emperor. The Praetorians recognized him, for he was known as an honest, brave and efficient administrator, a benevolent, fair and gentle ruler. 

Innocent convicts were released from prisons and returned from exile, informers were punished, order in judicial and economic affairs was restored. Pertinax halved the expenses of the court and sold the slaves and slave girls with whom Commodus had debauched. It seemed that the country was reborn in only three months.

But one day a crowd of Praetorians approached the palace. The guards let them in. They killed Pertinax. The people wept. This was the end of the attempt to save the fatherland.

The praetorians offered to give the throne to the highest bidder. The wealthy senator Didius Julianus, who had been governor of distant provinces for a long time and had made a lot of money, bought the throne. His power had no foothold: the senators and horsemen hid their feelings, and the crowd scolded. There was no hope for the Praetorians. They were no longer the valiant legionaries who in '69 had defended their leader Ogon from the terrible frontiersmen of Vittelius. In 124 years the Praetorians had decayed to the point where no one trusted them and no one respected them.

The Roman legionnaires were immediately opposed by the provincial proconsuls. In Britain, Clodius Albinus, "who concealed under the cloak of the philosopher all unnatural vices", a friend of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, offered his warriors the restoration of freedom. In Syria, Pescenius Niger, popular in his province and in Rome, a sensible and affable ruler, had many chances of success. In Pannonia, Septimius Severus, a Roman horseman, a native of Africa, ambitious and secretive, seized the initiative. He took advantage of the speed factor: being close to Rome, he entered the Eternal City without a fight. Didius Julian, abandoned and betrayed by the Praetorians, was killed in his palace.

But the Praetorians, who came out to meet the usurper with laurel branches, miscalculated. Septimius the North ordered his hardened warriors to disarm them, and then dispersed them among the various provincial cohorts. Thus the once subjugated Illyria and Thrace defeated Rome. After the bloody victories over Niger and Albinus, won thanks to the courage of the Thracian-Illyrian legions, Septimius Severus relieved the soldiers and enlarged the army with natives from the eastern provinces: Illyrians, Thracians, Galatians, Moors, Gentiles, Arabs, etc. As a result, by the beginning of the third century almost the entire Roman army was manned by foreigners. This shows that the Roman ethnos, which ceased to supply voluntary defenders of the homeland, lost its passionarity. The structure, language and culture of the empire still held on by inertia, at a time when genuine Romans numbered a few families even in Italy, which was populated by natives of Syria and descendants of prisoners of war, the Colonnians.

The military dictatorship of the Severus extended the Roman system for forty years, and then it began. In 235, soldiers killed Alexander Severus and his clever mother, Mammea, handing the throne to the Thracian Maximinus. The proconsul of Africa, the native Roman Gordian opposed him with his son, and both were killed. In 238 the soldiers killed Maximinus and the Praetorians killed the two consuls, Pupienus and Balbinus. Gordian III was killed by Philip the Arabus, prefect of the Praetorians, in 244, and this one by Decius in 249. After Decius was killed in a battle with the Goths, the soldiers betrayed and killed Gallus, then Aemilianus. To his rival Valerian, at a decisive moment, the army refused to obey and demanded that the emperor surrender to the Persians. He died in the "tower of silence." The empire was divided into three parts: Postumus, a usurper, ruled in the west; Odinatus, the king of Palmyra, repulsed the Persians in the east; Gallienus, Aurelius, Claudius II, Quintilianus, who reigned for 17 days, and Aurelianus, who brought order and unified the empire in 270, were consecutively assassinated in Rome, before he was killed in 275 by the freedman Mestius, who in turn was killed. Then the elder consulor Tacitus, his brother Florian, the Pannonian officer Probus, Carus, Numerian, and Arius Apros were murdered in turn. It was not until September 284 that Diocletian, who took advantage of the fact that his rival Carinus (son of Carus) had been killed in 285 by his associates, was proclaimed king.

This long list of murders of kings allows us to understand the course of ethnic development, if we take into account that there were many more murders of common people. We are facing a phase of obscuration, when a sensible warlord, trying to restore discipline for the sake of victory, is seen as the worst enemy, worse than the enemy. Instinctive reactions: irritation, greed, laziness, having no counterbalance in the lost passionarity, made the Roman army a hoard of villains and traitors. And it is not that in half a century there was not a single strong-willed commander or intelligent diplomat. There would have been enough of these in a vast country; but there were few faithful executors. And as their numbers kept dwindling, because they were killed along with the emperors, the stereotype of behavior changed. The Roman ethnos died and rotted away before the barbarian invasion.

Diocletian realized that only a backward province could save him.  He divided the care of guarding the borders with three companions, set up his residence in the Asia Minor city of Nicomedia, far from Rome, and surrounded himself with troops of Illyrian, Thracian and Mesian highlanders who had not yet lost their fighting ability. He created a bureaucracy because he did not trust, with good reason, the corrupted society. He erected a persecution against the Christians and Manicheans, because these communities lived according to their own laws and not his. In short, he used the inertia not of the ethnos, for that had dried up, but of the culture created by previous generations. But he, too, capitulated to the force of things, for he became not head of the republic (princeps), but king of the state (dominus).

Diocletian's state was Roman in name only. It was essentially an amalgamation of all the countries of the Mediterranean basin, with complete disregard for the ethnic principle. Most of the empire's population was involved in the tornado of obscuration, i.e., they lost their ethnic affiliation to the super-ethnos. These people were bound only by cultural tradition, expressed in skillful administration. This meant that sincere patriotism was replaced by obedience to the magistrates, who were appointed from among random people who had connections and had lost their conscience. Such a system could not be strong. But it survived in spite of its own population, because viable consortia emerged. They were hostile to the traditions of the Roman ethnos, but not to the dominant, despite the fact that the latter was not fond of them. And soon after the demise of the first dominus, these new forces galvanized the corpse of ancient Rome.

CHANGE

Still, despite the tragic situation, the Roman army held the frontier along the Rhine, the rampart along the Tidus, and did well against the Numidians and Moors. It was harder in the east. Gothic ships penetrated the Aegean Sea, Persia, with 50 times fewer resources, successfully waged war in Mesopotamia, and the defeat of the Dacians and Jews in the P. C. AD required a strain on all the forces of the Roman Empire. In fact, in the 3rd century the empire was saved only by the Illyro-Thracian units and their leaders who became emperors, from Aurelian to Diocletian. Among them belonged the famous general Aetius, who has been called "the last Roman." But this is not a simple matter.

Obviously, those who joined the legions from Thrace and Illyria belonged to the same type of people as those who joined the Christian communities. Their dominance was, of course, different, but for our analysis this does not matter. The important thing is that by interpolating the passionary impulse, we capture just those areas of the Balkan Peninsula where it theoretically should have taken place, and we obtain a confirmation of the theory. Hence, Aetius, as well as his legionaries, should be considered not "the last Romans", but "the first Byzantines".

So, we state that since the II century AD in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, in some territories located from them to the north, there is a rise in population activity. Outside the empire is the beginning of ethnogenesis of new peoples: Goths, Antes, Vandals. Within the empire, the rise of passionarity acquired an original dominant feature - the creation of confessional communities on a mixed ethnic basis, both Christian and Gnostic and pagan (Neoplatonists).

It is commonly said that Christianity is the religion of slaves. This is partly true, but it overlooks the fact that slaves were overwhelmingly made up of prisoners of war. Marriages between heterogeneous slaves were permitted by their masters, while marriages with non-believers were forbidden by the leaders of the Christian communities, which we may dare to call consortia. Thus, hybrids were grouped together in Christian consortia, which are known to be highly labile, (volatile). Usually such forms are unstable and disintegrate in two or three generations, but here there was an additional factor that gave Christian communities stability an enormous passionate tension. Thanks to incomparable sacrifice, despite severe persecution, by 313 the Christian community, already organized (the church), was replacing the imperial power.

The Christians were Diocletian's most loyal subjects and the most disciplined soldiers, but when they performed pagan sacrifices in the camps, which legionaries were obliged to attend, they crossed themselves, which Diocletian believed destroyed the power of the rite. In 303 he began the persecution of Christians, which was the last such persecution in the Roman Empire. It lasted only two years, for in 305 Diocletian abdicated power and went to his home in Illyria, where he had a house the size of the city of Spalatro. He died in 313, after learning that his wife and daughter had been brutally murdered and that he was about to face something worse than death.

Diocletian was a bureaucratic genius. He saw that it was impossible to run a country from the Euphrates to Gibraltar to Tweed without an executive administration. Knowing the value of his staff, he chose three of the most sensible and gave them the titles of second Augustus and two Caesars, making these positions interchangeable.  After his abdication, Galerius, the initiator of Christian persecution, became Augustus of the East, and Constantius Chlorus, the humane and meek son of Constantine, became Augustus of the West. In Gaul and Britain the persecution of Christians ceased, for Diocletian's decrees were simply not enforced.

In 306 Italy revolted against Galerius; the leader of the revolt was the son of Caesar under Diocletian, Maxentius, a rude, untalented and debauched man. But Galerius was defeated in his attempt to subdue Italy and died in 311, leaving to his friend Licinius power in the provinces of the Balkan Peninsula. In Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, Maxentius' brother, Maximinus, ruled.

Both brothers were such that it seemed as if these are the days of not even Nero, but Caligula, Commodus and Caracalla. And both were burning with hatred for Constantine and Licinius. The war broke out in 312 and 313. The victors were those who were helped by the Christians: Constantine and Licinius. Maxentius and Maximinus had the power, the numerical superiority, the economic resources and even the influence of ancient traditions. They died, however, and it happened this way.

In 312. Constantine crossed the Alps with 40,000 soldiers, mostly Gauls, against an opponent who had a fourfold numerical superiority, Constantine won several battles in the Po valley, reached the Tiber and here faced the army of Maxentius. Constantine raised a banner with a shining cross on it. His Gallic cavalry overturned Maxentius' Roman cavalry on both flanks, and the veteran frontiersmen chopped up the Praetorians. Maxentius drowned in the Tiber while fleeing.

Licinius married Constantine's sister, and both Augusts issued an edict of religious tolerance in Milan granting Christians freedom of worship. Then Licinius went to the East, where Maximinus invaded Thrace from Syria. Licinius' Illyrian soldiers were more efficient than Maximinus' motley Syrian legionnaires. At Heraclea in 313. Licinius was victorious, while Maximinus died during his escape, and having been poisoned.

After his victory Licinius showed the same cruelty to people who were in no way guilty before him, but who found themselves in his power. In 315 he conspired against Constantine and had Constantine's statues overthrown in the frontier city of Emona. Constantine went to war and twice defeated the troops of Licinius, after which he asked for peace. Constantine took Macedonia and Greece from Licinius, leaving him the rest of the East.

The clash between the two rulers was delayed, but both knew it was inevitable. Constantine had the strong support of Christians throughout the empire.

What was left for Licinius to do, who, fighting with Maximinus, also promulgated the Edict of Milan in his own dominions? Thanks to this, his soldiers at the battle of Heraclea called for the help of "the highest god" and received it. But since Constantine's mother, Helena, was a Christian and he himself an acknowledged leader of the Christian party, all that was left for Licinius to do was to renew the persecution. In 324 the troops of the pretenders to a single power collided at Adrianople, and the Thracian-Illyrian legions of Licinius, renowned for their courage, which outnumbered the enemy in numbers, were utterly defeated. A second battle was lost on the other side of the Bosporus, at Chrysopolis. Licinius surrendered, having received a promise of mercy, and after a few months he was strangled (325). There is no need to feel sorry for him; he himself killed innocent people. He should have shared the fate of the soldiers who died for him, not hidden behind the skirts of his wife, Constantine's sister.

This war was not a reflection of the rivalry between the old, pagan and the new, Christian, but a battle for supremacy between the two sub-ethnoses of the already established ethnos from which Byzantium had grown. As for the descendants of the Romans, who had not yet dissolved into the renewed ethnic system, the phase of obscuration was over for them, and the time had come when they could no longer act. All they had to do was remember.

AND ALSO SO:

The above material is enough for us to draw a conclusion, which more examples will not change. Passionarity of the ancient, or Helleno-Roman super-ethnos was fading, crystallizing into a civilization, able to withstand the pressure of their neighbors due to the accumulated inertia. This system was exploded from within by a powerful excess, or passionate push, which took place in the region of Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Asia Minor and Syria. This localization shows that the described phenomenon has nothing to do with the social crisis of the slave system and is not the fruit of the conscious activity of people who were dying, not understanding why they suddenly became so bad.

Neither the bureaucratic genius of Diocletian, nor the political dodginess of Constantine, nor the military talents of Theodosius, could have held the country together. In the East, where a new ethnos, conventionally called Byzantine, was formed, the barbarians are reflected, in the West they simply replace the disappeared Roman citizens.

The same process took place in Byzantium under the Angels and ended with the fall of Constantinople in 1204.  The outbreak of patriotism in the Nicaea Empire revived the crumbling country for a time, but the process of ethnic disintegration continued, and even the courage of John Cantacuzin could not stop it. The Byzantine nation had disappeared, dissolved, deformed long before the Ottomans invaded a defenseless, or rather - it had no will to defend, Constantinople (5 May 1453).

The Achaemenid empire perished in an outside attack, and the obscuration in the Middle East came later. It facilitated victory not for Alexander the Great, but for Sulla, Lucullus and Pompey, Titus and Trajan, as well as for the Sakyan leader Arshak, who founded the Parthian kingdom on the ruins of ancient Iran.

In medieval China, obscuration crept up quietly. In the middle of the seventeenth century.

China's medieval China, the perverted Ming bureaucracy capitulated to Li Zicheng's peasant militia and the latter was swiftly defeated by a handful of Manchus newly united by the Nurhati prince[58]. After that China was in catalepsy, (dream-like trance), for two hundred years, which gave reasons for European observers to regard temporary lethargy as an inherent property of Chinese culture. In fact, it was not the disease of a growing culture, but the natural aging of an ethnos that had lived for more than a thousand years (581-1683).

Strangely enough, the phase of obscuration does not always lead an ethnos to death, although it always causes irreparable damage to the ethnic culture. If obscuration develops quickly and there are no predatory neighbors nearby who seek to invade, the imperative: "Be like us" meets a logical reaction: "The day, yes is mine!". As a result, the very possibility of maintaining ethnic dominance and any collective activities, even destructive ones, disappears. Directed development degenerates into a kind of "Brownian motion," in which elements - individuals or small consortia that have preserved, at least partially, the tradition, get the opportunity to oppose the trend toward progressive decline. In the presence of even a small passionary tension and inertia of everyday norms developed by the ethnos in the preceding phases, they preserve separate "islands" of culture, creating the deceptive impression that the existence of the ethnos as a coherent system has not ceased. This is self-deception. The system is gone, only individual people and their memories of the past survive.

The obscuration phase is terrible because it is a series of abrupt changes in the level of passionarity, although insignificant in absolute value. Adaptation under such rapid and constant changes in the environment inevitably lags, and the ethnos dies as a systemic integrity.

Thus, it is clear that passionarians do not displace anyone from the ethnos, but due to their excess energy create diversity, making the ethnic system more complex. And complex systems are more stable than simplified ones. Such is the mechanism of ethnogenesis, a natural process. And it is clear that neither Augustine's idea of the City of God, nor Hegel's predilection for the absolute, nor Jaspers' philosophical existentialism are applicable to explain this phenomenon.

XXXVI. After the end of the

MEMORIAL PHASE.

The memory of the past experiences is the inertia of passionate impulses, but individuals are unable to hold on to it. Their efforts do not meet the support of their contemporaries, although they are not unfruitful. Compositions of poets are preserved as folklore, masterpieces of artists become motifs of folk art, history of deeds of homeland defenders turns into legends or bylinas, where the accuracy of descriptions is contrary to the genre.

Such a picture we see in the Altai. There are six tribes, of which three northern ones are Ugrian, and three southern ones are remnants of the ancient Turks. The Telesyans are descendants of the Turkic tribes, the Telengits and Teleuts are tribes of the Telesy group, to which the Uigurs also belonged, and the Altai-Kizhi are a branch of the Naimans, who came to Altai in the 12th century. They all have rich epics, many subjects of which go back to the times of the Turkic Kaganate of the 6th-8th centuries, which died in the struggle with the Tang empire[59]. The Turks that escaped from slaughter, took refuge in the valleys of Altai Mountains, waited there for their revival and did not wait for it[60]. They passed into a state close to homeostasis, but preserved their heroic poetry as a memory of the past.

The same memory of the events, not only ancient, but also comparatively recent, were preserved by the Kyrgyz of the Tien Shan, the Dzungar Oirat (about the war with the Chinese in the XVII century), the Pueblo (Teva) Indians and many other once mighty ethnic groups, transformed into small "tribes." Crystallized passionarity - art saved them from being dissolved among their neighbors, from assimilation and the humiliation associated with it. Ethnoses in this phase of ethnogenesis have always aroused a sense of deep respect among scientists and ethnographers and among "harmonious" (in the sense of the degree of passionarity) colonists, who found a common language with the aborigines. But sub-passionarians and predatory passionarians had a wild irrepressible hatred, which excluded the possibility of peaceful contact. This is especially clear in the history of North America.

Most of the Indian tribes between the Atlantic coast and the prairie survived their dynamic period even before the emergence of Europeans. The exceptions were the Iroquois, who migrated to the Lake Ontario basin from the west shortly before Europeans arrived, and possibly the Seminoles. Both retained some passion and were fiercely hated by the white colonists. But the Algonquin, the ancient inhabitants of the region, and the cultured Natchez, who were mercilessly exterminated by the French in Louisiana, the Mandan, Cree, became a model of courage, honesty, loyalty and other good qualities in European literature.

Fenimore Cooper and Chateaubriand painted them as such. But as soon as Europeans encountered the passionate Indians: the Apaches, the Navajas, the Comanches... the image of the Indian dimmed. And the quiet, hard-working Pueblo Indians were not appreciated at all. European writers were more interested in their traditional architecture than in them. And this is no accident. Indian farmers are a very ancient people, much of their culture wasted. The Algonquin preserved much, but could not preserve the passionate tension, without which it was impossible to remain independent, so they had to be friends with the French and the English. And the Iroquois knew how to stand up for themselves; they were only ruined by division during the rebellion of the colonies. Some of them stood up for England, some for the Americans and they were slaughtered by both.

One can find a lot of isolated ethnoses remembering and appreciating the former culture, but it turns out that there are sub-ethnoses which are detached from the progressive movement by the vicissitudes of historical destiny and consciously prefer to preserve the household stereotype, just to keep the dear memory of the "beautiful past". At the beginning of the 19th century, Old Believer communities in the Russian Empire lived the same way. Under Catherine II, Old Believers were spared persecution for the faith and were able to keep the rites they considered "old".

The latter was a sincere delusion. They kept not the customs of the time of Andrei Rublev and Nil Sorsky, but those which developed by the middle of the 17th century, when after the Time of Troubles and the Polish-Swedish intervention the reaction to everything foreign became very strong. But. having fixed this very moment of the intellectual and aesthetic life of Russia, they did not want to give it up. And they could have lived this way indefinitely, had they not been washed away by their environment - the living, raging reality, the really ongoing processes of ethnogenesis.

Opponents of the founders of Old Belief - skomorokh turned out in the same position. Expelled in the 17th century to the North because their songs, dances, masquerades, and stories of bylinae distracted people from fasting and church ceremonies, these unfortunate artists passed on their art to children until folklorists stumbled upon them, i.e. until the middle of the 19th century. Many things had time to be recorded and published.  Thus, thanks to the encounter with a small convention (not even a sub-ethnos) in the memorial phase, we know that our ancestors were not savage, not illiterate, not dullards waiting for enlightenment from Europe. For illiteracy came later, with the supplanting of the old tradition with semi-education, i.e. in the 19th century.

The examples given show that after the end of the dynamic phases of ethnogenesis, the survivors do not at all become worse, i.e. weaker, stupider than those who until now constituted the overwhelming majority of the ethnos. It is not the people who change, but the ethnic systemic integrity. Previously, there were passionate "yeasts" next to the majority, stirring, disturbing many, but giving the system, i.e. the ethnos, resilience and a desire for change. The ideal then, or rather the distant forecast, is development, but now preservation. Aggressiveness of the ethnic system, of course, disappears, resistance decreases, but the law of passionate entropy continues to operate. Only instead of gains come losses. And much depends on the nature of the ethnic environment.

A sub-ethnos that has lost its inertia of development, of course, is doomed, but the people who make it up, have the opportunity to mix with other sub-ethnoses within their ethnos. Here they are their own, and they will not be killed. But when a defenseless ethnos is surrounded by representatives of other super-ethnoses, it creates a picture that makes the blood run cold. The British did not consider the Tasmanians to be human beings and rounded them up. The Argentines "shot" the Teulches (Patagonians) and sold blankets infected with smallpox to the Fire-Earthmen. The Bantu Negroes trapped the Bushmen to use them for hard labor, and they themselves were enslaved by the Boers. To fight off a ruthless enemy, the ethnos had to expend the rest of its passion; it was the bravest, i.e. the most energetic, who fought back. And the sub-passionarians hid as best they could, prolonging their lives, but without any hope of victory. This is the mechanism of tragedy of ethnic groups, which evolutionary ethnographers have dubbed "primitive.

But even if these islets of culture in a sea of ignorance and ferocity are able to endure and not sink into self-destructive chaos, they are powerless against the last relict phase that precedes homeostasis, where the descendants of members of the most sluggish convictions, who long ago lost their passionate tension, are guided by the imperative "Be pleased with yourself, troll," for they are no longer members of the ethnos as a system, but like the trolls that dwelled in the bushes and gorges according to the beliefs of the ancient Norwegians. The phrase is taken from Ibsen, because it fits here very well. It means: "Try not to disturb others, don't bore them, but don't be sad and don't regret anything."

The extermination of such nice harmless people, honest, hospitable and friendly, like the murder of children, is a crime for which there is no justification.

GOING NOWHERE

It would seem that another outcome is possible: isolation. One would like to think that under favorable conditions, without external pressure, an ethnos could preserve its original culture and its tried-and-true stereotype of behavior indefinitely. Let everything around crumble into dust or be crushed by passionate shocks, it would be peace and the ethnos would reproduce itself. So think many naïve people.

But the fact is that, together with the memory of the past, the people of the last phase of ethnogenesis lose their sense of time, first outside their individual or family biography - "living chronology"[61]. In the final stages they are limited to stating the seasons and even just day and night. The author himself observed the latter in the Chukchi: the change of seasons was beyond their attention. At the same time, the Chukchi are excellent hunters, have a well-developed mythology, and are very brave and savvy. The absence of chronology does not prevent them from living.

A similar picture is drawn by the Europeans, who closely communicated with the Pygmies of Central Africa. A pygmy does not know how old he is because a year is too long for him to count, and because he has no need to count his years. Otherwise, pygmies are very intelligent, perfectly oriented in the rainforest, where not only Europeans, but also Bantu immediately lose their direction.

The latter live in close contact with pygmies, using them as guides, for which they supply them with articles of iron, for the Bantu are excellent smiths. And here is what is important to our subject: paying the Pygmies for their services must be done immediately, without offering an advance, for they work only to satisfy a pressing need or whim.

Here is a clear example. Pygmies know what no one else knows how to do, to build bridges over wide rivers out of lianas (vines). You can cross a narrow river, but it's dangerous to swim across a big river - crocodiles. And so they had to build a bridge, and the material - vines and two trees - on one bank and on the other. So that's what the Pygmies do: they tie a liana to a palm tree on the bank, and a guy grabs hold of it, and they swing him so that he reaches the second bank and grabs another palm tree there; if he misses, the liana will rush back, and he may be killed by a tree trunk.  It's a very dangerous job, but the pygmies are great at it. Then they stretch out the first vines and make a great suspension bridge. An American cameraman wanted to film this and asked a pygmy he knew. The American promised to pay well. But the Pygmy replied, "No, I won't do anything, I don't want anything from you, I've already worked for you, you gave me a knife - got a knife, you gave me a pot - got a pot, you gave me another chisel - very good, thank you. And I don't need anything else, so why would I risk it?" - "All right, in reserve." -

"What? What stock, I don't understand what you're saying, you silly white man." Then the American figured it out after all. He found out that this pygmy wanted to get married, and that the wife had to be ransomed. A Pygmy woman is a value, she must be paid for, she must be cared for, and a woman is a big deal. He said, "I will buy your bride back, but you must make a bridge." And he made him a bridge and got a bride.

But the notions of "reserve" and "future" are alien to pygmies, as well as the past before this pygmy was born. Both are simply of no interest to him. Contact with the Bantu supports the Pygmies, stimulates them, while not depriving them of their usual geographical environment, because no one has ever encroached on the tropical wilds. Thanks to this symbiosis, the Pygmies have lived for centuries.

Thus it turns out that ethnic groups that have lost their former passionarity can exist at the expense of the neighboring ethnic group's passionarity, transmitted not even in a natural way, but through systemic connections. Symbiosis is a complex system that benefits both sides. The only danger here lies in attempts to translate ethnic contact into the mode of assimilation, but this is always the age-old disease of the final phases, when people, instead of studying the surrounding reality, begin to invent it. No one has yet been able to find a better version of it than is found in nature.

So, even for the final phases of ethnogenesis we need passionarity, at least borrowed. That's why passionary shocks not only destroy, but also save the ethnoses that are in the vicinity of the shock's area.  But if the ethnos of this phase is in complete isolation and the passionate push passes by its habitat, then comes the end, even more sad. Let's turn to the facts, because no one wants to believe in logic.

On the Lesser Andaman, in a wonderful climate, in the midst of luxuriant nature, lives a small negroid tribe of Ongkhi. No one has ever harmed them. There is a nature reserve, and they don't even let tourists in. The inhabitants are peaceful, friendly, honest and very clean. They feed themselves on gathering and fishing. Diseases are rare there and if anything happens, the management of the reserve helps. It would seem that it is a paradise, but the population is decreasing. They are simply too lazy to live. Sometimes they prefer to starve rather than seek food, women don't want to give birth, children are taught only one thing - to swim. The adults want only one thing from the civilized world - tobacco[62]. For all this, the Ongkhi are very sensitive to justice and cannot bear offence. Their women are chaste, and when a visiting Burmese tried to court them, they killed him, and then reported it to their chiefs, but not as their fault, but to restore order; of course, there was no question of punishing them. And rightly so! There was no need to meddle with someone else's ethnicity.

But here's the strange thing. The director of the department of anthropology, an educated Hindu, Chowdhury told the author of the essay: "...the Ongkhi live like mankind lived 20 thousand years ago. Nothing has changed for them. They eat what nature gives them, and the sun and the fire give them warmth.

This is the power of hypnosis of the uncritically accepted evolutionary theory of ethnogenesis. And how, in the opinion of the Indian scholar, did the ancestors of the Ongkhi get to the Andaman Islands? After all, they must have known not only coasting: and it is unlikely they sailed the Indian Ocean, a very rough ocean at random. Bows and arrows must also have been invented or borrowed from neighbors. Marriage customs prohibiting remarriage even in the case of early widowhood and restricting marriages to close relatives are by no means primitive. The language of the Ongkhi is unknown because Indian ethnographers have not yet learned it. But when they do, it will surely turn out that the Ongkhi have memories of their ancestors, myths and tales not yet completely forgotten. But the vital tone of the Ongkhi is low. A quarter of young women are infertile. If this was the case 20,000 years ago, the ancestors of the Ongkhi would have been extinct long ago.

No, the Onghis and similar ethnic groups are not children, they are old men. Without passionarity, humans are less adapted to life on Earth than animals are. Those in stable and favorable conditions do not die out. Even crocodiles in those same Andamaks, when hunters with rifles appeared, learned to hide. They were not afraid of the natives with bows [64].

At this level of passionarity, ethnogenesis ends. But besides the direct processes of ethnogenesis, which lie in the biosphere and therefore do not initiate the phenomena of destruction, there are developmental disorders, in which irreversible simplifications of ecosystems arise. On these we will focus special attention.

NOTES

[45] Sombart W. Bourgeois. M., 6. d. P. 7-9. - Further references are given in the text.

[46] Quoted from: Douglas W. O. Tricentennial War. С. 161

[47] Gumilev L.N. Heterochronism of humidification in Eurasia in the Middle Ages // Bulletin of Leningrad State University. 1966

[48] Gumilev L.I. Huns in China. С. 12, 115-117,

[49] Gumilev L.N. Xunnu.

[50] Gumilev L.N. Ancient Turks.

[51] Gumilev L.N. Search for an imaginary kingdom.

[52] Vorobyov M.V. Ethnos in the Middle Ages (on the material of the ethnogenesis of the Churchens) // Reports of Departments and Commissions of the All-Union Geographical Being of the USSR. Vol. 3. 1967. С. 58- 73.  [The Jews brought to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar were a very large group, many of whom, after the end of the captivity, could not prove their Jewish ancestry and remained in Babylon. Babylon in the 6th century B.C. was transformed from the capital of mono-ethnic Akkad into an urban agglomeration (a zone of ethnic contact) (see: Belyavsky V. A. Ethnos in the ancient world // Reports of Departments and Commissions of the All-Union Geographical Society of the USSR. Vol. 3. 1967. С. 24-27)

[54] Belyavsky V. A. Legendary Babylon and historical Babylon. MOSCOW, 1971, PP. 96- 97, 174.

[55] Ibid. С. 298-299.

[56] Konrad N.I. West to East. С. 119-151.

[57] Ferdowsi. Shahnameh: In 2 volumes / Edited by D.E. Bertels. Т. 1. М., 1963. Т.

2. М., 1962. See: Osmanov M. N. Ferdowsi. Life and work. M., C. 191

[58] Manchus, an ethnic group of the Tungus group, started the conquest of China in 1644 and finished in 1683, which ended the independent existence of the Chinese national state. Until 1911. The middle plain, which we call China, was a province of Manchuria, and the people who lived there - the Chinese, were disenfranchised and oppressed. There is no reason to consider the Qin dynasty Chinese, as is constantly done.

[59] Gumilev L.N. Ancient Turks. С. 346-348; Zhirmunskiy V. M. Tale about Alpamysh and Bogatyr tale. M., 1960; Malchi Mergen: The Altai heroic epos / Prepared by N.U. Ulagashev. 1947; Umgashev N. Altai-Buchai. Novosibirsk, 1941; Graf A., Kuchiak P. Altai tales. М., 1939.

[60] Gumilev L.N. Altai branch of Tugyu-Türks // Soviet archeology. 1959. - 1. С. 105-114.

[61] For more details see: Gumilev L.N. Ethnos and the category of time / / Reports of the All-Union Geographical Society of the USSR. Vol. 15. 1970. С. 143-155.

[62] Vaidya S. Islands flooded by the sun/ On land and sea. М., 1968. С.325--351.

[63] Ibid. С. 326.

[64] Ibid. С. 346, 350.