Race Consciousness Will Conquer Death

The author discusses the possibility of a transformation in consciousness that would shed much of what Western man has cultivated in the individual for centuries. He repeatedly references “species” consciousness, but his exploration of this idea applies equally, if not more so, to the possibility of an emergent racial group mind.

The increasing rationalization of social life in the 19th and 20th centuries did for the masses what 18th-century rationalism had done for a part of the elite. But to drive it completely into the subconscious is not merely to fail to destroy the irrational, it is to offer it an impregnable stronghold from which it can counter-attack while enjoying immunity from direct intellectual criticism. A society which ceases to purge itself of the irrational by means of ceremonial enthusiasms puts itself increasingly at the mercy of the irrational; failing to understand their real import, it rationalizes irrational manifestations which become all the more dangerous for being believed to be the opposite of what they really are. So once again, as in the past, historical complexes are able to mobilize psychological energy and get control of individuals, instead of being controlled by them; and the energy thus concentrated produces, wherever the resistance to it is weak, an effective equivalent of the gods and supernatural powers which are supposed to have been consigned to oblivion forever. The national and social collective passions of the 19th century hardened in the 20th into secular religions; but it happened so gradually that no one was aware at any given moment of a transition from the profane to the sacred. The communist believer of today is under the impression that he weighs the pros and cons of a question like any other man; but one of the scales will always be the heavier, even with nothing in it.

The first intimations of this mystique of the Species date from the 18th century. The Stoic phrase caritas generis humani was used to express the new aspirations, and it was for the human race that the French Revolution proposed to legislate. In the same century the word ‘philanthropy’ came into its own. Emancipation was the order of the day, and since all men were to be emancipated it really meant the emancipation of the Species. Thinkers later described as socialists, namely Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, were thinking of Humanity, Man, and Society, all of which are myths of unity. For some of the romantics the People began to mean the entire human race. 

The question arises whether all this is leading to a decisive modification of the conscious human psyche. Could there be a revolutionary psychological change which would endow the Species [or Race] itself with consciousness? A disintegration and reintegration on such a scale would not be without precedent, for the Roman world was the scene of an equally revolutionary and total shift of emphasis when the city cults were replaced by the universal religion of the individual. Nineteenth-century man had the choice of two great religious ways: a return to the cult of the limited group, which was foreshadowed in the claims of national particularisms, or an advance towards a religion of the Species, which corresponds, perhaps, to even older archetypes.

Viewed with detachment and in the light of scientific progress, the position of man in Christianity appears utterly contradictory. Aspiration for eternal life is aspiration for life. We are, however, endowed with a very long—if not eternal—duration; but we possess it as a species and not as individuals. And the individual desires for himself this eternity, or rather this very long duration, which belongs to the species. His deep aspiration would be satisfied if individual consciousness were replaced by species-consciousness. But consciousness pertains to the individual and duration pertains to the species; and it seems that consciousness is essentially linked with finitude. By progressively shifting the accent away from the individual, by discovering in history something other than the individual, and by emphasizing this discovery, Western thought seems to be obscurely groping towards an end which appears absurd, although there are really no grounds for pronouncing it impossible: namely, to deprive the individual of consciousness, that is to say, of his purposes and his aspirations of fulfilling them, and to transfer it to the species.

This would solve the tragic and fundamental dilemma by which man is racked and crucified: his aspiration as an individual to the endless life which he feels himself to possess as a species. Christianity came to protest against the idea of a life of misery ending in blank nothingness; it gave human life a meaning, and introduced the impossible, perhaps, to overthrow the absurd. The problem is to release what must die from its longing to survive. A consciousness of the species is almost inconceivable, but to declare it impossible would be a lapse from intellectual integrity. If such a psychic revolution occurred its aim would be the same as Christianity’s: to conquer death.

Is it impossible for the species to rediscover consciousness? It may be that the individual only appeared when the species had reached a certain stage of evolution and had already a long history behind it. From the scientific point of view the individual is a function of physical and chemical relations which can be mathematically expressed; he is an equilibrium bounded on each side by disequilibrium. And within these boundaries which he cannot transgress without ceasing to exist he is perpetually changing. If he is revived and resurrected, what will it be that lives again?

Would it be possible, by an asceticism probably more rigorous than any hitherto known to humanity, to pry away from the individual his consciousness and his human perspective and transfer them to the Species? And what result would this kind of asceticism and discipline produce? It would not be a dialectic of ideas, like Plato’s, which promotes the soul of the beautiful body into a beautiful soul, and thus leads it to its goal which is the Good. The new religion we are discussing is not a dialectic of ideas; it is a dialectic for reducing the flesh itself, the living flesh of man.

The elements of a religion of the species seem already to exist in suspension in the societies of today, just as the elements of Christianity existed in the mediterranean world while it was being unified by Caesar. And the problem has not changed, it is the conquest of death. Christianity solved it by making death no longer a death. It turned death into the true life. The life of this world, it said, was shot through with death, whereas the fife of the beyond, for those who achieved salvation, was Life.

Ever since the 19th century it would appear as though western Europe, faced with the same problem, the decline and ruin of the sacred (only in this case it was the death of God and not of a god), were dimly groping towards a new answer. Now that humanity is ceasing to believe in the great hope of the individual after death (since the 19th century what has become of the belief of the best Christians in hell?), the problem is to prevent the consciousness of death, the consciousness that ‘it is I who die’, from arresting humanity’s progress.

And the answer which is beginning to be obscurely formulated is one that has been made before and elsewhere, but in other forms. It is that the barriers of the individual must be destroyed, for it is only the individual who dies. Thus, if consciousness could cease to be confined to the limits of the individual, if the individual could attach himself to the supra-individual, then death would not matter. It would be the death only of what is mortal. It would be simple mortality. For what is tragic in our destiny, both particular and universal, is that we are exposed to what seems to us to be an original injustice. We can accept that what is mortal should die, but its death seems to involve also the death of what ought not to die; for we are no longer able to believe that what we most value is immune from death.

But other religions have taught that the valuable must be kept separate from the perishable; and in this the ‘living Buddhas’ have succeeded, so Buddhism asserts. The asceticism inspired by this faith endeavors to negate the most certain properties of the living being. The ‘voluntary centers’ aspire to a dominion (which modern science has not yet conceded them) over the sympathetic system; the adept claims to check the flow of his blood, to postpone and choose the hour of death, to defy the law of gravity. But these can only be accessory phenomena, exploiting the field of the magician (or the technician). Romanticism was the last echo of outcast individualism; and the ‘existentialist’ philosophies in their turn are the last echoes of romanticism. (True to their origin, they are literary to the core.) All of them are caught in the impasse of death. For if the individual has no future—until his death—except to be an individual, then freedom is nothing but the freedom to revolve in a closed circle, galloping round and round like a circus horse until death brings the turn to an end. But Christianity broke the circle by teaching men to die joyfully because this life was nothing but a preparation.

Disillusioned with the individual, Western thought since the 19th century has been tentatively seeking some other solution than the Christian. It is tending towards an integrally new religious ‘alienation’ by which the death-doomed individual is stripped of his value. To speak of a reintegration of man’s nature is to abandon history for eschatology. Man is not static or stable; it is not in his nature to let himself be. Irredeemably bestial, and yet an indomitable creator of gods, his withdrawal into himself must be either a resort to eschatology, which means mysticism, or a lapse into animality; or else, unfortunately, the two together and both of them unconscious.

Like Christianity and like Buddhism, the still inchoate aspiration towards a religion of the Species undoubtedly demands an almost superhuman asceticism; and if men were to attempt it they would have to follow a different road from that of Christianity and the Christian civilization. Such a new departure might seem to us to be a violation of the very nature of man, and so it would be; but the same is true of Christianity itself, and no doubt it is in the nature of man to do violence to himself. There would be no such thing as history unless man had been incessantly questioning and violating his own nature. There are inventions in religion as in other things; and whether we call it a transference, a displacement, a reversal, or a conversion of energy, a new mode of life is always a new mode of life.

-excerpted from “The Sociology of Communism” by Jules Monnerot (1949)