Mechanically Correct Writing Skills. This Chamberlain\'s Ideas

¶ … mechanically correct writing skills. This Chamberlain's ideas disseminated within his text "The Importance on Race" are as rigid and as austere as the purity of race he describes in benign terms. One of the more interesting points about this work is that in many ways, his ideas can be understood as both a response to the bureaucratization of life and as an example of such bureaucracy. These interpretations largely hinge upon the author's compartmentalizing of people (and even animals) according to their race, which he actually traces to different groups throughout history.

As an example of bureaucratization, the author's notion of a pure race functions as the ultimate form of compartmentalization. He posits the viewpoint that only those whose bloodlines are quintessential and undiluted can truly accomplish noble tasks. His value for such people, which inevitably is used to justify the Teutonic peoples in Germany as the ideal master race, stems from the fact that he believes they possess a "sureness" of character, and that their actions are "marked by a certain simple and peculiar greatness" (Chamberlain).

However, the degree of exclusion which is required to maintain such a purity is the chief way in which this concept of the author's functions as an example of bureaucracy. Racial purity permits no exceptions in terms of outsiders, either via intermarriage or even in making claims to a land which belongs to a quintessential race. The disastrous consequences to racial purity that either one of these occurrences may bring is demonstrated in the subsequent quotation. "Is the race not as it were extinguished, as soon as fate wrests the land from its proud exclusiveness and incorporates it in a greater whole?" (Chamberlain). Thus, it becomes apparent that an extreme form of bureaucratization must be practiced in order to preserve racial purity, in order to eliminate all contact between outsiders and those of a pure race.

Nonetheless, Chamberlain's ideal of racial ideology can also be understood as a reaction to the bureaucratization of life. In this respect, the bureaucratization of life is simply the many different categories of races that are existent, and, in most cases, that are intermingling with one another. Via the means of procreation, even more categories of races are then created. An example of some of these new categories that are far from the pure ideal the author extols are "Jews of the Diaspora" such as the "Ashkenazim" and types of German Jews. It is because of the perceived dilution in the bloodline of these peoples, and the inherent weakening that Houston believes such dilution engenders, that the author proclaims "Race lifts a man above himself, it endows him with extraordinary -- I might almost say supernatural -- powers, so entirely does it distinguish him from the individual who springs from the chaotic jumble of peoples drawn from all parts of the world" (Houston). It is this reactionary tendency to the racial mixing of the time in which the author is writing, as well as in the many centuries that preceded this work, that his desire of a racial pureness can be considered an organic reaction to the compartmentalization and bureaucratization of life.

Still, it is important to understand the way in which "the consciousness of the possession of race" appeals to the ideals that Houston attributes to an undiluted race. The value that the author ascribes to individuals belonging to such a race is largely a matter of perception (his, of course), and is highly debatable as a result. All of the hyperbole he attributes to people of such a race in pre-modern times -- their "extraordinary" (Chamberlain) greatness and supernatural prowess (Chamberlain -- would be difficult to prove. For instance, his perception of the "poorest of the Sephardim from Salonici or Sarajevo (great wealth is very rare among them, for they are men of stainless honour" (Houston) as honorable men who are destitute merely seems a matter opinion. Additionally, his characterization that those of undiluted races are "the living sum of untold souls striving for the same goal" seems to be based on assumption. Just because individuals are of the same race does not necessarily mean that they want the same things; there is more to life than the desire to keep a race "pure."