By Mike du Toit
Racial instinct is the instincts inherited by a genetically related group of people. This type of instinct is therefore not the product of individual experience or conditioning. The type of memories that are involved in racial instincts are not memories of specific events either, but rather the collectively inherited collection of memories of a genetically related group of people that make individuals of the group react in a certain way to certain stimuli.
Richard Semon
The realization that there is such a thing as a racial instinct can be traced back to the German zoologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Wolfgang Semon (1859 – 1918). Just like Lamarck, he believed that the acquired characteristics of an individual can be passed on to his offspring.
Semon believed that every psychological state is accompanied by adjustments in the nervous system. He outlined his idea of the Mneme (based on the Greek goddess Mneme, the muse of memory) in his work “The Mneme” (1921). The Mneme represents the memory of an external-to-internal experience. The resulting “mnemic legacy” (memory trace in the brain or an “engram”) is then called up again when an element corresponding to a component of the original complex stimuli is experienced. Semon’s mnemonic principle was therefore based on the assumption that certain stimuli easily leave a permanent written or engraved record on certain substance and in this case on cellular material that is biologically susceptible to such an inscription.
Carl Jung
However, the idea of a racial instinct only really took hold with the research of the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961). Unlike Semon, Jung did away with the Lamarckian approach and linked the race instinct to the collective unconscious.
According to Jung, the human psyche can be subdivided into a conscious (the conscious perceptions, memories, thoughts and feelings of an individual), a personal unconscious (the repressed and forgotten memories, thoughts and traumas of an individual) and a collective unconscious. In his work “Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious” (1959), Jung postulates that the collective unconscious is collective, universal and impersonal in nature. The collective unconscious contains inherited feelings, thoughts and memories which he calls basic images or archetypes. The collective unconscious is not like the conscious and personal unconscious dependent on the individual’s personal experiences and therefore cannot be “built up” either – on the contrary, it precedes the individual.
Jung unequivocally states that the basic ideas or archetypes are not culturally transmitted, but that they are inherited. He links archetypes to psychological urges and instincts and says “because the brain is the seat of human thought, the collective unconscious is directly linked to the evolutionary development of the human brain.” These biological facts are responsible for differences in the collective unconscious of the different human races. Jung further says that although the deepest level of the collective unconscious is universal in all people, with the beginning of racial differentiation essential differences developed in the collective unconscious of the different racial groups. Consequently, he distinguishes, among other things, between an Aryan, Semitic, Hamitic and Mongoloid collective unconscious or “mentality.” According to Jung, there is therefore a direct connection between a racial group and its mentality, i.e. the archetypes in the collective unconscious of that specific racial group.
Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious largely corresponds to Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s use of the concept of “collective representations,” the idea of ”mythological motifs,” Marcel Mauss’s “imaginative categories” and Adolf Bastian’s “elementary ideas.” The idea of the collective unconscious also shows similarities with Ludwig Clauss’s “racial psychology,” Sigrid Hunke’s organic religious views, the historian Oswald Spengler’s idea of the “cultural soul” of a High Culture (civilization) as well as the historical views of Francis Parker Jockey and Sameul P. Huntington.
Recent Research
In recent research, Dr. Daniel G. Freedman, professor of behavioral sciences at the University of Chicago, subjected newborn infants of the Caucasoid, Negroid and Mongoloid (Asian and American Indian) racial groups to certain similar stimuli. He got different reactions from the babies of the different racial groups on a fixed basis. The results are consistent with the characteristics traditionally attributed to each of the racial groups. For example, the Mongoloid babies were the least excitable and also more passive than the other babies. Furthermore, the Asian and American Indian infants responded in the same way to the same stimuli, which can be attributed to their relatively closely related biological ancestry.
These results were published in the January 1979 issue of “Human Nature” entitled “Ethnic Differences in Babies”. With this research, Freedman proved the existence of an innate racial temperament. To move from an innate racial temperament to an innate racial attitude and an innate racial mentality or instinct is very slight.
Further research in support of the principle of a racial instinct, as recently as September 2004, indicates that brain dyslexia in Mongoloids and Caucasoids is caused in different parts of the brain.
The idea that the so-called “nonsense information” found in eukaryotic DNA can play a role in the transmission of racial or ancestral memory is currently being investigated.
The principle of a racial instinct is being researched today in a new and original way by the biologists Stuart A. Newman and Gerd B. Müller. Both researchers have published several scholarly articles and books, of which their joint work “Origination of Organismal Form (2003) is certainly the most important.
The Meaning of a Racial Instinct
First, race instinct is the basis on which certain behaviors are based. It therefore influences human actions unconsciously. So for example, some people will instinctively be afraid of snakes or heights without ever having had to deal with them before or being told this. In the animal kingdom there are many similar examples. Birds are instinctively frightened by an artificial raptor shadow, even if they have never seen or dealt with a raptor. Birds not raised by their own species still exhibit the behavior and song of their own species.
In the second place, there is a correlation between a racial group and its cultural expressions, even its way of thinking; since his cultural expressions and way of thinking are an expression of the basic ideas or archetypes that are based in his collective unconscious. There is therefore such a thing as cultural expressions that are unique or alien to a particular racial group.
In the third place, the correlation that exists between a racial group and its cultural expressions is also reflected in its life and worldview beliefs, its myths and finally also the values carried by its beliefs and myths. For example, the Caucasoid racial group has an aristocratic way of life, a heroic attitude towards life’s challenges and a deep sense of respectability.
Finally, the fact that a different part of the brain causes dyslexia in Mongoloids than in Caucasoids opens up the possibility that it can be proven that the ability to learn a language also has a genetic basis. Although anyone can learn any language, it is possible that language is in some respects just like mathematics or music, in that the ability to learn or compose music or to do well in mathematics is hereditary.
