"Primitives"
The New Statesman and Nation, August 8, 1936, pp. 190–92
Paul Robeson
When discriminating racially, popular opinion lays emphasis on the Negro's colour. Science, however, goes deeper than that and bases its arguments on the workings of the Negro mind.
Man, say certain of the scientists, is divided into two varieties—the variety which thinks in concrete symbols, and the variety which thinks in abstract concepts. The Negro belongs to the former and Western man to the latter.
Now the man who thinks in concrete symbols has no abstract conception of such words as "good," "brave," "clever." They are represented in his mind by symbolic pictures. For instance, "good" in a concrete mind is often represented as a picture of a woman with a child. The drawing of this picture would be the way of conveying an idea of goodness to a person of the same mentality. Such pictures become conventionalised into a kind of written language. Now to the Western mind this may seem a clumsy way of going about things, but it is a method which has given the world some of the most delicate and richest art, and some of the profoundest and most subtle philosophy that man has ever known.
For it is not only the African Negro, and so-called primitive people, who think in concrete symbols–all the great civilisations of the East (with possibly the exception of India) have been built up by people with this type of mind. It is a mentality that has given us giants like Confucius, Mencius, and Lao-tze. More than likely it was the kind of thinking that gave us the understanding and wisdom of a person like Jesus Christ.
It has given us the wonders of Central American architecture and Chinese art.
It has, in fact, given us the full flower of all the highest possibilities in man–with the single exception of applied science. That was left to a section of Western man to achieve and on that he bases his assertion of superiority.
Now I am not going to try to belittle the achievements of science. Only a fool would deny that the man who holds the secrets of those holds the key position in the world. I am simply going to ask–having found the key, has Western man–Western bourgeois man (the reason for the distinction is made clear later)--sufficient strength left to turn it in the lock? Or is he going to find that in the search he has so exhausted his vitality that he will have to call in the cooperation of his more virile "inferiors"--Eastern or Western–before he can open the door and enter into his heritage?
For the cost of developing the kind of mind by which the discoveries of science were made has been one which now threatens the discoverer's very life.
The reason for this lies in the fact that Western man only seems to have gained more and more power of abstraction at the expense of his creative faculties. There is not much doubt that the artistic achievements of Europe, as abstract intellectualism penetrated deeper and deeper into the people, have steadily declined. It is true that this decline is partly obscured by an output of self-conscious, uninspired productions, which have a certain artificial grace; but discriminating people have little difficulty in distinguishing these lifeless imitations from the living pulsing thing.
It may be argued that preference for live art over dead imitation may be simply a question of taste and is of no fundamental importance. Neither would it be if the change was something confined to that small minority usually described as artists, but unfortunately what shows amongst these is only a symptom of a sickness that to some extent is affecting almost every stratum of the Western world.
To understand this you need to remember that by "creative ability” one means something more than the capacity of a few individuals to paint, to write, or to make music. That is simply the supreme development of a quality that exists in the make-up of every human being. The whole problem of living can never be understood until the world recognises that artists are not a race apart. Every man has some element of the artist in him, and if this is pulled up by the roots he
becomes suicidal and dies.
In the East this quality has never been damaged—to that is traceable the virility of most Eastern peoples. In the West it remains healthy and active only amongst those sections of the community which have never fully subscribed the Western values—that is, the exploited sections, plus some rebels from the bourgeoisie. For the rest, mathematical thinking has made them so intellectualised, so detached and self-conscious that it has tended to kill this creative emotional side. The result is that as Western civilisation advances its members find themselves in the paradoxical position of being more and more in control of their environment, yet more and more at the mercy of it. The man who accepts Western values absolutely, finds his creative faculties becoming so warped and stunted that he is almost completely dependent on external satisfactions; and the moment he becomes frustrated in his search for these, he begins to develop neurotic symptoms, to feel that life is not worth living, and, in chronic cases, to
take his own life.
This is a severe price to pay even for such achievements as those of Western science. That the price has not been complete, and its originators have so far survived, is due to the stubborn persistence, in spite of discouragement, of the creative side. Though European thought, in its blind worship of the intellect, has tried to reduce life to a mechanical formula, it has never quite succeeded. Its entire peasantry, large masses of its proletariat, and even a certain percentage of its middle class have never been really touched. These sections have thrown up a series of rebels who have felt rather than analysed the danger and cried out loudly against it.
Many of these have probably been obscure people who have never been heard of outside their immediate circle, but others have been sufficiently articulate to rise above the shoulders of their fellows and voice their protest in forms that have commanded world-wide attention. Of such persons one can mention Blake and D. H. Lawrence. In fact one could say that all the live art which Europe has produced since the Renaissance has been in spite of, and not because of, the new trends of Western thought.
I do not stand alone in this criticism of the Western intellect. Famous critics support me. Walter Raleigh, when discussing Blake, writes:
“The gifts with which he is so plentifully dowered for all they are looked at askance as abnormal and portentous, are the common stuff of human nature, without which life would flag and cease. No man destitute of genius could live for a day. Genius is spontaneity-the life of the soul asserting itself triumphantly in the midst of dead things.”
In the face of all this can anyone echo the once-common cry that the way of progress is the way of the intellectual? If we all took this turning should we not be freeing ourselves from our earthy origins by the too-simple expedient of pulling ourselves up by the roots?
But because one does not want to follow Western thought into this dilemma, one none the less recognises the value of its achievements. One would not have the world discount them and retrogress in terror to a primitive state. It is simply that one recoils from the Western intellectual's idea that, having got himself on to this peak overhanging an abyss, he should want to drag all other people--on pain of being dubbed inferior if they refuse--up after him into the same precarious position.
That, in a sentence, is my case against Western values.
It is not a matter of whether the Negro and other so-called "primitive" people are incapable of becoming pure intellectuals (actually, in America, many have), it is a matter of whether they are going to be unwise enough to be led down this dangerous by-way when, without sacrificing the sound base in which they have their roots, they can avail themselves of the now-materialised triumphs of science and proceed to use them while retaining the vital creative side.
One does not go so far as to say that the West will not share in this new progress. Perhaps, even yet, it will find a way to turn the key. Perhaps the recognised fact that over-intellectualism tends towards impotence and sterility will result in the natural extinction of that flower of the West that has given us our scientific achievements, and the rise of the more virile, better-balanced European, till now derided and submerged. Some people think that in the European proletariat this new Western man is already coming to birth.
It is some such solution as this which I imagine will solve the problem of the further progress of the world.
We, however, who are not Europeans, may be forgiven for hoping that the new age will be one in which the teeming "inferiors" of the East will be permitted to share.
Naturally one does not claim that the Negro must come to the front more than another. One does, however, realise that in the Negro one has a virile people of many millions, overwhelmingly outnumbering the other inhabitants of a rich and undeveloped continent.
That, when he is given a chance, he is capable of holding his own with the best Western Europe can produce is proved by the quality of his folk music both in Africa and the Americas–also by the works of Pushkin, the Russo-African poet; or by the performances of Ira Aldrich—the actor who enslaved artistic Europe in the last century. Even a writer like Dumas, though not in the first rank, is a person who could hardly have been fathered by a member of an inferior race.
To-day there are in existence more Negroes of the first rank than the world cares to recognise.
In reply, it will of course be argued that these are isolated instances—that the Negroes as a whole have never achieved anything. "It may be true," people will say, "that the African thinks as Confucius thought, or as the Aztecs thought; that his language is constructed in the same way as that language which gave us the wonder of Chinese poetry; that he works along the same lines as the Chinese artist; but where are his philosophers, his poets, his artists?"
Even if this were unanswerable, it would not prove that—since he has the right equipment–-the African's golden age might not lie ahead. It is not unanswerable, however. Africa has produced far more than Western people realise. More than one scientist has been struck by the similarity between certain works by long-dead West African artists and exquisite examples of Chinese, Mexican and Javanese art.
Leading European sculptors have found inspiration in the work of the West African.
It is now recognised that African music has subtleties of rhythm far finer than anything achieved by a Western composer. In fact the more complicated Negro rhythm cannot be rendered on Western instruments at all.
Such achievements can hardly be the work of a fundamentally inferior people. When the African realises this and builds on his own traditions, borrowing mainly the Westerner's technology (a technology—he should note—that is being shown not to function except in a socialist framework) he may develop into a people regarding whom the adjective "inferior" would be ludicrous rather than appropriate.