On Defining Peoples
Following laying out the ground work for the premises of Race and Language, Spengler moves on to define another set of ideas that exist outside the comings and goings of civilisations: that being what makes a “people” a people.
This is why it was so important to clarify what Race truly meant to Spengler, because today, as in his time, “race” and “peoples”, “nations”, “tribes” and varying other groups are all used synonymously without systematic analyses, arguably even prompting some level of post-modern deconstruction of these words having been confined to the realm of poetry and intuition long ago.
Today our identities are considered intersectional with a lot of things and often are defined against something other to ourselves, I might identify from a region of South-West England, defining myself against the Northern English, I might do so again as an Englishman against Scots and Irish, or perhaps as British against Europeans or European against American, finally arriving at a wider Western identity as a whole; which identity gets to be a “people” and which do not? What component defines the people; are peoples united by religion or blood, land or values, or some civic/cultural customs I subscribe to?
“But “People” is a linkage of which one is conscious. In ordinary usage, one designates as one’s “people” – and with feeling - that community, out of the many to which one belongs, which inwardly stands nearest to one. And then he extends the use of this concept, which is really quite particular and derived from personal experience, to collectivities of the most varied kinds.”
When Caesar felt that the Arverni were a civitas, and we feel that the Chinese are a nation, we are basing those judgements upon our cultural understanding of what a people represent, but the actualisation of a group into a people is done so by feeling that it exists and that one or many are connected to it. No one felt themselves to be “proto-indo-european” and as such it is a placeholder name for our understanding of what those people were, it is artificial and a product of our intellect, just so when our mind tries to forge new peoples by force, be it Alexander attempting to unify Greeks and Persians, or even today in the minds of technocrats, but proto-indo-european descendants, in the form of the Goths, the Athenians and the English, among others, felt themselves as true unities. It may very much be said that for a people to exist, a group simply has to feel that way about themselves.
When studying long since dead peoples, their names can result in a great deal of misinterpretation as to what the people was forged through. Peoples can have many names, names which carry significances that unless the proper context comes with it, can prompt errors such as identifying two separate groups when there was one. The Franks, Alemanni and Saxon names supersede the names belonging to the German tribes of the Augustan period, without knowing better, and only possessing the names, it could be mistaken that the old tribes were wiped out by these new ones when really the names are all that changed. Migrations result in a special kind of confusion, as names are taken along by groups as they travel, but how they feel about the designation is more nuanced than presented. Were a historian only to look at the names of peoples, they’d find a mismatch of curses thrown everywhere, such as the French calling the Germans “Allemandes” in 1814, “Prussians” in 1870 and “Boches” in 1914; are all these names to be assumed as different peoples, because without the necessary context they would certainly be regarded so.
And what of language as a unifier of peoples, as many attempt has been made to define nations on these terms? Afterall if the Haitians and French both speak the same tongue, they must have been one people at a time. Does the migration of Hebrew out from Palestine to Eastern Europe constitute a migration of peoples? Did the English replace the natives of India because it is now a common tongue there?
Improper systematisation of these terms can lead to confusion about the nature of identity. Spengler sums up his frustration with a criticism of the idea of a Dorian people:
“’Doric’ is a dialect designation – that we know, and that is all we know. No doubt some few dialects of this group spread rapidly, but that is no proof of the spread or even of the existence of a human stock belonging with it.”