On Defining Peoples Part 2 - Migrations
The migrations of “peoples” pose a difficulty for the modern anthropologist who, as Spengler puts it, feels an obligation to find a home from whence a people originated. This is because today peoples are assumed to not migrate but are native to their lands but, despite understanding this, primitive peoples migrated constantly as a matter of lifestyle. Consequently, Spengler demands a level of discipline when defining these ancient peoples, as they can get mixed up and thrown around the world very easily, as he cites the ancient Libyans who, despite speaking Hamitic, were presented by the Egyptians as Northern European in complexion.
Typical of the century before Spengler, the reasons for why these peoples moved around were plain and materialistic: that man is motivated by his stomach, he followed his food where it went. But Spengler retorts with his own view that mankind, even in its primitive form, is still motivated by his soul to do the things they did; Spengler details how ancient mankind would have been motivated by the promise of greatness and the fear of losing honour, “for deeds, for joy of carnage, for the death of the hero”. Thus for Spengler it was the strive for destiny that was the prime moving force of man to explore and expand.
There is also the question of how old reacted with new. When a new people migrate into a sparse land, the weaker one can generally avoid them. However, in later periods, particularly in civilisations, the weaker will invariably be forced to leave or defend their land against the outsider lest they lose it. The weapons once used on steppe prey now become used on fellow man and the necessity of war becomes unavoidable to shape and decide ownership of territory. Often one will find the spread of warrior bands to other regions and decimating the local rulers they will make themselves the new ones, taking the population already living there as a spoil of war. These newcomers will often be more well-formed than the formless populations that they conquer and so their identity takes precedence over the locals, such as language and culture. This poses problems once again for the anthropologist who wishes to categorize a people: the Race may not change but the culture, language and politics will; A people may retain a name that they only earned by being conquered by those that originally possessed it, only for that band of raiders to die out or diffuse into the local gene-pools, so to conflate the names and languages of a people, with the peoples and races itself is, by Spengler’s account, not an accurate measurement for groups.
How Spengler defines peoples is as “a unit of the soul” in the sense that they are consequences of history rather than causes of it. A people couldn’t produce the mona Lisa, but a people have since formed upon the Mona Lisa as the crystalized foundation of their identity, and, equally, peoples have since formed upon the political shifts, the civil wars and industrial advances of the last five hundred years.
“Even when the event is preceded by some grouping around or under a famous name, the fact that there is a people and not merely a band behind the prestige of that name is not a condition, but a result of the event. It was the fortunes of their migrations that make the Ostrogoths and the Osmanli what they afterwards were.”
Effectively we return to the original postulate Spengler makes about peoples: that for a people to be actual, they must feel inwardly that they are indeed a people, that there must be something fundamentally living within a group for them to become a people, and without it they become a formless mass of population, unmotivated. Small bands of people can make their appearance over large swathes of formless population, and by their energy and sense of self, project their identity onto the masses, which harkens back to the traditional conservative attitude to aristocracies. Spengler clarifies that Race in the scientific sense plays no part in how one sees their people or who they feel themselves to be, but to align peoples with races is acceptable in so far as we understand race in his sense, that is, the race of the land.
We can imagine for ourselves the Proto-Indo-Europeans who, expanding out from Southern Russia, were of a certain European type. It is well known that across the old world many places stretching from India to Ireland have taken on the name “Aryan” to describe themselves, however only a fool or someone brimming with malice would conflate an Irishman with a Persian. What happened was these nomadic horsemen would become the upper castes of the people they conquered, the warrior caste, and eventually they, as a people, assimilated into the local gene-pools, leaving behind their language and some cultural forms. Aryan is not a name that could unify indo-European territories in any conceivable sense, because the name has been given to the descendants of the stock that were effectively the spoils of war for the people who originally carried the name, sharing not a destiny nor greater will, nor common interests. With the same name, they cannot be said to be the same people.