Spanish Individualism
In few books have I found so much food for reflection upon our Spain and us Spaniards as in Martin A. S. Hume’s “The Spanish People: Their Origin, Growth and Influence.” It is written by one who knows and esteems us. It impresses us at a first glance as an excellent compendium of the history of Spain, but on closer examination it is found to be also an excellent psychological study of the Spanish people.
In the tenth chapter there is to be noted a very happy and graphic phrase—“the introspective individuality of Spaniards.” And it is indeed true that we are much given to this direct contemplation of ourselves, a practice which is certainly not the best method of getting to know ourselves, of fulfilling the precept “Know thyself” in its collective and social sense. Introspection is very deceptive and when carried to an extreme produces an actual vacuity of consciousness, like that into which the Yogi falls through perpetual contemplation of his own navel. For a state of consciousness which consisted purely and simply of consciousness contemplating itself would not be a state of consciousness at all, being void of all content. This supposed reflection of the soul upon its own self is an absurdity. To think that one thinks without thinking of anything concrete is mere negation. We learn to know ourselves in the same way that we learn to know others, by observing our actions, and the only difference is that, as we are always with ourselves and scarcely anything that we consciously do escapes us, we have more data for knowing ourselves than we have for knowing others. But even so, we seldom know all that we are capable of until we put ourselves to it, and often we surprise ourselves by achieving something which we did not expect of ourselves.
Hence the utility of a people knowing its own history in order that it may know itself. And Hume studies us in our history.
In one of his books the American humorist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, speaks of the three Johns: the John as he himself thinks he is, the John as others think he is, and the John as he is in reality. And as for every individual, so for every people there are three Johns. There is the Spanish people as we Spaniards believe it to be, there is the Spanish people as foreigners believe it to be, and there is the Spanish people as it really is. It is difficult to say which of the first two approximates most nearly to the last; but it is certainly right that we should compare them together and see ourselves both from within and from without. However much we may lament the injustice or the superficiality of the judgments that our foreign visitors pronounce upon us, it is possible that we are no less unjust or superficial in our own judgment of ourselves.
Havelock Ellis, in a book published not long ago, “The Soul of Spain,” spoke of the unity of our race. Spaniards have generally regarded this view as absurd, but it may very well be that the differences that separate the inhabitants of the various provinces of Spain are no greater than those which exist between the inhabitants of the different districts of other nations which we suppose to be more unified than ourselves, and that our lack of solidarity, our separatist instinct, our kabylism, as it is called, proceeds from other causes than from differences of race. Little notice need be taken of certain ethnological assertions, not so much based upon scientific investigation as inspired by sentiments which, whether creditable or not, furnish no basis for arriving at the truth. Thus, if a writer asserts that the Catalans are Aryans and all other Spaniards Semites, it is obvious that he is using the terms Aryan and Semite without a proper understanding of them; and as the distinction between Catalans and other Spaniards is one of philology rather than ethnology, it would be interesting to know what language the ancestors of the present Catalans spoke before Latin penetrated into Cataluña, for the supposition that they are descended from Greek colonists is too nonsensical to be taken seriously.
Before proceeding further in this review of Hume’s study of the psychology of the Spanish people, I should like to indicate a distinction which I am in the habit of making between individuality and personality, a distinction which appears to me to be of great importance.
All my readers know what is meant by “individual” or “indivisible,” a unity that is distinct from other unities and not divisible into unities analogous to it; and also what is meant by a person. The notion of person refers rather to the spiritual content, and that of individual to the containing limit. Great individuality, that which separates an individual strongly and emphatically from other analogous individuals, may have very little that is peculiar and personal to itself. It might even be said that individuality and personality are in a certain sense opposed to one another, although in another wider and more exact sense it may be said that they afford one another mutual support. Strong individuality is scarcely possible without a respectable dose of personality, neither is a strong and rich personality possible without a considerable degree of individuality to hold its various elements together; but the vigour of a vigorous individuality may very easily contain only the minimum of personality and the richness of a rich personality may be contained within the minimum of individuality.
I will endeavour, as is my wont, to make my meaning clearer by means of metaphors.
In gases, according to the physicists, the molecules are in a certain state of disassociation, moving rectilinearly in all directions—it is this which produces the phenomena of expansion—a state that is chaotic but not in reality very complex; and it is a well-known fact that very complex bodies are not as a rule found in a gaseous state, but only those that are simplest and least complicated. In solids, on the other hand, the molecules are ordered according to relatively fixed orbits and trajectories—especially in the case of crystals; and their individuality is maintained by a principle of intense cohesion, their surfaces being in direct contact with their environment, capable of affecting it and being affected by it. A middle term is presented by liquids. And thus we may compare certain strongly individualized natures with gases enclosed in a bottle or shell with rigid sides, while there are others, with flexible contours, in a free give-and-take contact with their environment, which possess great internal complexity—in other words, a high degree of personality.
Or we may compare the former with crustaceans, enclosed in hard shells which give them rigid and permanent forms, and the latter with vertebrates, which, since they carry their skeleton within themselves, are capable of considerable external modification.
Individuality refers rather to our external limits, it exhibits our finiteness; personality refers principally to our internal limits, or rather to our inward unlimitedness, it exhibits our infinitude.
All this is somewhat tenuous and perhaps fails to meet the demands of strict psychology, but it is enough if it has helped to make my meaning clearer.
My idea is that the Spaniard possesses, as a general rule, more individuality than personality; that the vigour with which he affirms himself before others and the energy with which he creates dogmas and locks himself up in them, do not correspond with any richness of inward spiritual content, which in his case rarely errs on the side of complexity.
In his preface Hume states that the Spaniards spring from an Afro-Semitic race, that “the keynote of this primitive racial character is overwhelming individuality,” and that to this root-cause is to be attributed all that we have accomplished in the world, our transient imperial greatness and our permanent tenacity. This feeling of individuality lies deep down in the root of the race and cunning politicians have turned it to the advantage of their ambitions.
In speaking of the Arab domination he says that “the Berber, like his far-away relative the Iberian, was a man of strong individuality, with an obstinate reluctance to obey another unless he spoke in the name of a supernatural entity.”
At the conclusion of the ninth chapter in which he treats of our epoch of greatness in the middle of the 16th century, he writes the following notable lines:
“Each unlettered boor and swaggering soldier felt in an undefined way that he was a creature apart by reason of his faith; that Spaniards and the Spaniards’ king had a higher mission than was accorded to other men; and that from among the eight million Spaniards alive the particular Juan or Pedro in question stood out individually, in the sight of God and men, as pre-eminently the most zealous and orthodox of them all. To this had the policy of Fernando and Isabel brought the mass of the Spanish people.”
And in corroboration of this he draws a striking portrait of Philip II, the idol of our traditionalists:
“Intense individuality in him, as in so many of his countrymen, was merged in the idea of personal distinction in the eyes of God by self-sacrifice.... At heart he was kindly, a good father and husband, an indulgent and considerate master, having no love for cruelty itself. And yet lying, dishonesty, cruelty, the infliction of suffering and death upon hosts of helpless ones, and the secret murder of those who stood in his path, were not wrong for him, because, in his moral obliquity he thought that the ends justified the means, and that all was lawful in the linked causes of God and Spain.” “He was blind and oblivious to all but the blood-boltered Christ, before whom he writhed in a maniacal agony of devotion, sure in his dark soul, as were so many of his countrymen, that the divine finger pointed from glory alone upon him as the one chosen man who was to enforce upon earth the rule of the Most High, with—as a necessary consequence—Philip of Spain as his viceregent.”
I know that many who look upon this portrait will come forward with the familiar objection that this Philip II is the Devil of the South of the Protestant legend, and will advance the counter-legend—equally legendary—which is being built up out of a mass of minute data by historians who combine the method of Dr. Dryasdust with the spirit of rabid partisanship.
What interests me in Hume’s description is his statement that every Spaniard regards himself as an individual apart, specially and personally chosen by God. This recalls Pascal’s claim that Jesus Christ in dying shed a drop of blood for him, Blaise Pascal, who was destined to live in France in the middle of the 17th century. There is a certain characteristic common to all those whom we call geniuses or great men and other heroes. Each of them has a consciousness of being a man apart, chosen very expressly by God for the performance of a certain work.
In this respect we Spaniards are inclined to think ourselves geniuses, or rather we have a very robust conception of the Divinity—we think of Him not as the frigid and exalted God of the French Deism of the 18th century, nor yet as the good-natured and easy-going God of good people that Béranger depicts, but rather as a God whose attention and care extends to the very last ant, regarded as a separate individual, as well as to the very greatest and most splendid of suns.
In actual fact all these claims to singularity and to being one apart from the rest may become reprehensible, but it is at least understandable that an orator, for example, or a writer, or a singer, should regard himself as the best orator, the best writer, or the best singer. What is not understandable is that a man who is neither orator, writer, painter, sculptor, musician, nor man of business, that a man who does nothing at all, should expect by the mere fact of his presence to be reputed a man of extraordinary merit and exceptional talent. And nevertheless here in Spain—I do not know how it may be elsewhere—there are many examples of this curious phenomenon.
I know of the man who is ready to admit that others may be handsomer, smarter, stronger, healthier, wiser, more intelligent, more generous, than he, that in each and all of their endowments they have the advantage over him; but nevertheless he, Juan Lopez, the individual in question, is superior to everyone else just because he is Juan Lopez, because there is no other Juan Lopez exactly like him and because it is impossible that all the qualities, good, bad and indifferent, that make him him, Juan Lopez, should ever be assembled together again. He is a unique individual, he cannot be substituted by anyone else—and he is in a measure right in thinking so. He can say with Obermann: “In the universe I am nothing; for myself I am everything.”
This violent individualism, combined with very meagre personalism, with a great lack of personality, is a factor that explains a great deal of our history. It explains that intense thirst for individual immortality which consumes the Spaniard, a thirst that lies hidden beneath what is called our cult of death. Homage to this cult of death is rendered no less by the most furious lovers of life, by those in whom the joy of living is unable to extinguish the hunger for survival. It appears to me a very great error to assert that the Spaniard does not love life because he finds life hard. On the contrary, it is because his life is hard that he has not arrived at the tædium vitæ, the Weltschmerz of the satiated, and that he has always aimed at prolonging it indefinitely beyond death.
In the third part of the “Ethics” of Spinoza, a Jew of Spanish origin—or Portuguese, which amounts to the same thing—there are four admirable propositions, the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth, in which he lays it down that everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its own being; that the endeavour wherewith a thing endeavours to persist in its being is nothing else than the actual essence of that thing (conatus, quo unaquæque res in suo esse perseverare conatur, nihil est præter ipsius rei actualem essentiam); that this effort or endeavour involves no finite time but an indefinite time, and that the spirit endeavours to persist in its being for an indefinite period and is conscious of this its endeavour. It is not possible to express with more precision the longing for immortality that consumes the soul.
This strong individualism, the individualism of an individual who endeavours to persist, has led the Spaniard to follow always the path of conduct and will, and this is the reason of Schopenhauer’s admiration of Spaniards, whom he deemed to be one of the peoples most fully possessed of will—or rather of wilfulness—most tenacious of life. Our indifference to life is only on the surface and really conceals a most dogged attachment to it. And this practical tendency is manifest in our thought, which ever since Seneca has inclined to what is called moralism and has evinced but little interest in pure metaphysical and speculative contemplation, in viewing the world as a spectator.
It is this imperious individualism that has led us to the dogmatism that corrodes us. Spain is the country of those who are more papistical than the Pope, as the saying is. Spain is the chosen and most propitious soil for what is called integrism, which is the triumph of the maximum of individuality compatible with the minimum of personality. Spain was, in short, and in more than one respect continues to be, the land of the Inquisition.
Of the Inquisition and inquisitorialism, Hume writes very aptly. “Innate cruelty, individual pride, a vivid imagination long fed with extravagant fables, religious and secular, and lust for unearned wealth, all combined under the eager blessings of the Queen [Isabel] and the Church to make the Spaniards, as a race, relentless persecutors of those who dared to think differently from themselves.” Beneath the manifest and not inconsiderable exaggeration, there is here a large basis of truth. Spaniards could do no wrong “because they were working for and with the cause of God.” “The bureaucratic unity of the Romans was no longer possible [in the time of Fernando and Isabel], for out of the reconquest had grown separate nations; but at least the various peoples, the autonomous dominions, the semi-independent towns, might be held together by the strong bond of religious unity; and with this object the Inquisition was established, as a governmental system, to be developed later into a political engine.... Thus it is that Spain appears for the first time in the concert of modern European nations a power whose very existence in a concrete form depends upon its rigid doctrinal Catholicism.” This last assertion appears to me so doubtful and I am so far from believing it to be just that I shall have to devote a special study to its refutation.
This Spanish individualism has undoubtedly been the cause of another characteristic feature of our history, a feature to which Hume pays very particular attention. It is known as cantonalism or kabylism. I refer of course to our tendency to disruption, to separate into tribes. Hume alludes to it at the beginning of his history in the following notable lines: “In any case, what is known of their physique seems to negative the supposition that they [the Iberians] were of Indo-European or Aryan origin; and to find their counterpart at the present time, it is only necessary to seek the Kabyl tribes of the Atlas, the original inhabitants of the African coast opposite Spain, who were driven back into the mountains by successive waves of invasion. Not alone in physique do these tribes resemble what the early Iberian must have been, but in the more unchanging peculiarities of character and institutions the likeness is easily traceable to the Spaniard of to-day. The organization of the Iberians, like that of the Atlas peoples, was clannish and tribal, and their chief characteristic was their indomitable local independence. Warlike and brave, sober and light-hearted, the Kabyl tribesman has for thousands of years stubbornly resisted all attempts to weld him into a nation or subject him to a uniform dominion, while the Iberian, starting probably from the same stock, was blended with Aryan races possessing other qualities, and was submitted for six centuries to the unifying organization of the greatest governing race the world ever saw—the Romans; yet, withal, even at the present day, the main characteristics of the Spanish nation, like that of the Kabyl tribes, is lack of solidarity.”
This fundamental idea appears all through Hume’s book like a refrain or leitmotiv.
Out of all this, two questions now emerge: the first, what is the origin of this individualism? and the second, what is its cure?—the one ethnological, the other therapeutical.
As I indicated at the beginning, in quoting the opinion of Havelock Ellis, I am not at all disposed to believe that kabylism or cantonalism, the separatist tendency, proceeds from differences of race. If Cataluña or the Basque provinces could be forthwith removed and isolated in the middle of the Atlantic, we should very soon see them torn by internal dissensions, by separatist tendencies, and conflicts for supremacy would arise between the various dialects of the Catalan and Basque languages. In the Basque provinces such internal dissensions are beginning to be patent even to the least acute observer.
There is one capital sin that is very peculiarly Spanish, and that sin is envy. It is a result of our peculiar individualism, and it is one of the causes of kabylism. Envy has crippled and still cripples not a few of the best minds of Spain, minds that are in other respects vigorous and exuberant. We are all familiar with the famous simile of the greasy pole. Deep down in our racial character there is a certain sediment of spiritual avarice, of lack of generosity of soul, a certain propensity to consider ourselves rich only in so far as others are poor, and this sediment requires to be purged away.
Spanish kabylism and individualism both appear to me to be effects of one and the same cause, the cause that also produced picarism. In his book entitled Hampa, Salillas showed very clearly how the poverty of the soil, its failure to serve as a basis for the support of the people, was responsible for the seasonal migration of flocks and herds together with the vagabond life that resulted therefrom. It appears to me more concrete and more historical to say that it obliged the Iberians to be herdsmen. Hume expresses it exactly when he says that the pure Spaniard has always been “an agriculturist by necessity and a shepherd by choice,
The spectators, so far from encouraging or applauding the competitors, are said to pull them back and generally hinder them from securing the prize.
when he was not a soldier.” I believe that a consideration of this pastoral character of our people would help to explain a great deal of our history and to modify accepted verdicts. At bottom the expulsion of the Moriscos, an industrious people of agriculturists and gardeners, appears to me to have been due to the traditional hatred which those whom I will call Abelites, the spiritual descendants of Abel, the keeper of flocks, bore towards the descendants of Cain, the tiller of the ground, who killed his brother. For the Hebrew legend of Cain and Abel presents one of the most profound intuitions of the beginnings of human history.
And what is the cure for this individualism? The first thing is to see whether it is an evil, and if it appears to be one, to see if it may not be converted into a good, for it is evident that vices and virtues proceed from the same stock and a single passion may be turned either to good or to evil.
The exigences of life in past ages made our remote ancestors herdsmen; being herdsmen, they acquired all the qualities that pastoral life tends to develop—they were idlers, they were wanderers, and they were disunited. The lapse of time, civilized and urban life, the necessities imposed by industrial and commercial competition—progress, in short—will modify this basal character. Can this process be accelerated, and by what means?—But that is another question.