IV. Race and History

This, a chapter that could not be written today, obviously informs Dick’s non-racial view of his mystical experiences, despite the fact that he suggests that it might have been a blood memory rising within him. The authors start out by presenting in seriousness the cartoonish and parochial view of Comte Joseph—Arthur Gobineau and Madison Grant of civilization as being unique and exclusive to Nordic Europeans, despite them being among the last to embrace its toxic charms. They then ruthlessly dismantle the view that only “white” races have been civilized. Yet they have no way of knowing that Grant was absolutely correct, when, as they quote, he predicts that the white race will fall from world power in the year 2000, which was 1 to 8 years within its actual occurrence, depending on how one defines the fall.

They do go on to admit that civilization is not a strictly racial phenomenon, and politely avoid pointing out that half of the six major human faces have failed to create a civilization. The reality blinders can be seen to have been voluntarily donned by the historians in the very same year [1968] that it became a federal crime for a paleface to defend himself against a person of color. In this instance, as a man in the street, this reader can plainly see, that on this front, the historians, in their ivory tower, as eloquent as they might be, failed to equal the wisdom of the man in the street.

They fail to marshal the abundant evidence that what the Arуans gave was not civilization but a vital barbarism superior to civilization on contact, a fact that had not entirely slipped Dick’s mind even as he slowly lost it, with his admission that something in his “blood” [genetic programing] may have been rising within to counter his dissolution.

In this worst chapter of the effort, the authors present their belief that “a broad education” [somehow administered to an increasingly ineducable population] was intrinsic to saving civilization and that the civilized soul had to regard every human, no matter how uncivilized, as a contributor to civilization. This reader further suggests that civilized and soul are concepts at some odds from one another. They do blindly stumble upon this domesticating facet of civilization when they so eloquently write, “…it is not that he is creating his civilization there anew, but that he acknowledges its mastery over his soul.”

In such things the historian proves inferior to the pulp writer, Howard, of the 1920s and 30s, who wrote with clarity and verve as to the hold civilization had upon the human soul and that it was a grp that always loosened in a civilizations elder age.

They have writ doom small and large and predict if not acknowledge the crisis of identity that was the metaphysic crisis of Phillip K. Dick which began 6 short years after their effort to draw a polite curtain across an impolite stage.