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Presents
Volume 1705a
Themes And Variations
Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs
Part 2
by
R.E. Prindle

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2. Civilization And Its Discontents

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     The period of Burroughs’ life was one of those great pivotal times of civilization.  Civilization was in the midst of one of its great metamorphoses, scientific, politica and intellectual.  Changes which had been building up the last few centuries could no longer be absorbed by the existing religious structure.  That structure was no longer viable.  Its bursting mode was not only for the new Scientific Consciousness  but the increasing scientific examination of the past opened the way for the revival of forgotten forms such as the Matriarchy.  Thus along with the inevitable Patriarchal religious  reaction the Matriarchy  as well as suppressed occult religions forced their way through.

     The reaction from contacts between civilizations sent various alien religions and ideologies into the Western leaven.

     Confused with these intellectual challenges the agricultural basis of civilization evolved into a technological one.  In the mid-teens for the first time in the United States there were more urban residents than there were rural residents.

     New demands were placed on consciousness as more precision was required of the human mind.  Man had had little difficulty adapting his methods to cycles of the seasons but the adaptation tothe rigors of the assembly line caused him problems.

     That there was a backlash from this remendous succession of changes should take no on by surprise.  Adjustments were difficult and critical.  In 1930 the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, published what may be his most famous title:  Civilization And Its Discontents in response to this challenge.  His notion of who the discontents were and of what they were discontented about is vague, indeed undecipherable.

     In my estimation he doesn’t deal with the malaise at all.

     On the other hand Edgar Rice Burroughs not only dealt with the malaise but offered a reasonable solution to the problem.

     The malaise found many expressions.  On the political front the socialists, Communists and anarchists were the most prominent reactionaries.  Thier activities reached a fever pitch in the first two decades of the Twentieth Century resulting in the two phases of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and '17.  The institutionalized discontents had their homeland after the latter date.

     While Freud's discussion of Discontents sounds generalized by the way he writes he is actually talkiking about himself and the members of his own Jewish culture and their problems with Western Civilization.

     Thus Freud's notion of Discontents falls somewhere between a general malaise the discontent of the Communists.

     The Religious Conciousness of course faced a problem that could only be resolved by surrender or reaction.  There was no middle way.  The evolution into Scientific Consciousness completely invalidated the religious approach.  All religions are based on a false premise and Science exposed that falsity.

     The transition to the Scientific Consciousness must be difficult and demanding as so few attain it.  In my opinion this is because of the ongoing evolution of the brain.  The Scientific Consciousness can apparently only be grasped by the further evolved.  This doesn’t mean that those of a Religious Consciousness can’t work with scientific knowledge which require only basic intelligence and a scientific environment provieded by others but they are unable to envision advances.

     Thus they find themselves left behind intellectually.  It is the same as the difference between high and low IQ.  Nothing can be done about that.  However the Religious reaction is to attack those of the Scientific Consciousness to lower them to their own level.

     The problem was especially actue with Freud and his culture as Science per se invalidated all Semitic religious pretensions.  This means all Semites and not just Jews.  Neverthless as Jews were embedded in Western Civilization at that time and other Semites weren’t the Jewish culture was ‘discontented’ and was forced to negate science and the Scientific Consciousness.

     Led by the Semitic surge of both Judiaism and Moslemism the very serious attempt to bury the Scientific Consciousness through genocide might just succeed.

     As I point out in Part VII of The Deconstruction Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America the Jewish campaign to ‘abolish the White race’ should be taken very seriously.  Just because it sounds preposterous doesn’t mean it’s a joke.  A segment of Whites is the bearer of the evolved gene or genes oar combination of genes so that if this advance species were destroyed the wild religious reaction would succeed.  Sounds just like some science fiction movie doesn’t it?  Well, it isn’t.

     The Scientific Consciousness created its own malaise in the newly evolving species.  As literary and artistic types are always the monitors who pick up these trends first, if they don’t necessarily understand them, we shouldn’t be surprised to find a number of literateurs immersing themselves in the problem.  One of the big texts is H.G. Wells important but neglected novel:  The Food Of The Gods.  In this novel Wells postulates that the emerging scientific Consciousness is a new species of human beings.  As with the real religious reaction Wells’ predecessor people wish to kill the new species.  Isn earlier times when the world was less populated new or different species of human beings could move away from the old species.  Now, the question is what makes Homo Sapiens Homo Sapiens and makes it different from the Last Hominid Predecessor:  It is assumed by our scientific community that the Negro is the first Homo Sapiens species having evolved in Africa.  this means that the Negro evolved from some sub-human Homo Sapiens predecessor.  It’s easy, it has to be.  So far no one has been able to produce an example of the Last Hominid Predecessor.

     Now, the Negro was not the only, how shall we say, hominid species in Africa.  The Negro apparently orginated in West Africa.  The rest of Africa was inhabited by other species such as the Bushmen and Hottentots.  These peoples are not Negroes and originated in Africa so the question is are they predecessors of the Negroes who we are told are the first Homo Sapiens or are they Homo Sapiens who precede or follow the Negro in evolution.  Or, are they a separate non-Homo Sapiens species or are they the perhaps the Last Hominid Predecessor.  They are not Negroes so a place has to be found for them.

     In any event the Negro and Arab combined to produce a new race or sub-species known as the Bantu peoples.  The Bantus then invaded the territories of the Bushemn and Hottentots who ranged all of Africa South of the bulge so we are told driving the Bushmen before them.  As I understand it the Hottentots are now extinct while Bantu pressure on the Bushemen is driving them toward extinction.

     At the same time a newer hybrid of Black and Semite is driving the Bantu before it from its base in teh Northeast corner of Africa known as the Horn.

     So, Wells' novelistic problem was that there was no longer a place on Earth for his new species to isolate itself.  He was presented with the choice of his new species either displacing or killing off the anterior species or being eliminated itself much as the Hottentots and Bushman have been eliminated by the Bantu and as the Bantu and Negroes are being displacedand elminated by the new Black and Semitic Hybrid.

     So this was the problem c. 1900.  this solution was repulsive to the existing Religious Consciousness that was psychologically unequipped to deal with this impasse.

     As can be seen the Semitic special consciousness does not fear the problem  In Africa in Darfur and the South of the Sudan they are actively pursuing genocide.  In Euroamerica the Jewish Semitic culture is pursuing or advocating the same resolution of their problem with the White Euroamerican population.  Following Semitic actions in Africa it should be clear to American Black what is in store for them.

     So, Wells dealt with the problem in its political aspect.  the internal aspect, the split in onsciousness between the old and new was ably handled by a number of writers.

     For a good introduction to the contrast between the Scientific Consciousness compare Holmes and Watson in Conan Doyle’s stories.  In this essay I will concentrate on two others as well as Freud -- H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs.  Not coincidentally, I think, both writers place their most important work in Africa.  Haggard as the earlier writer rising to fame in Burroughs’ youth he quite naturally had a great influence on the younger man, although I think Burroughs would have written of Tarzan and Africa with or without Haggard’s influence.  The appeal of Africa is the contrast between the civilized White and the primitive Black.  I hope to tackle this problem in more detail in my next essay, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sigmund Freud And The Holy Grail.

     There was nothing clearer to the English explorers, as well one might note as to the Southern planters of the US, than that there was a gulf between the intellect of the African and that of the White man.

     Haggard expressed this difference in his novel Allan Quatermain. I’ve used the quote before but I will include it again here to keep the problem clear before us:

All this civilization what does it come to?  Full forty years and more I spent among the savages, and studied them and their ways, and now for several years I have lived here in England, and in my own stupid manner have done my best to learn the ways of the children of light, and what do I find?  A great gulf fixed?  No, only a very little one, that a plain man’s thought may spring across.  I say that as the savage is, so is the white man, only the latter is more inventive and possesses a faculty of combination; save and except also the savage as I have known him, is to a large extent free from the greed of moey, which eats like a cancer in the heart of the white man.  It is a depressing conclusion, but in all essentials the savage and the child of civilization are identical.

         The great Liberal H.G. Wells was also clear on this difference.  The nature of the gulf was the Scientific intellect of the White and the non-Scientific intellect of the Black.  The question is how large did these nineteenth century men perceived the gap to be.  Haggard in his Allan Quaterman, quoted above perceived the gap to be small while if one is to judge by the distance between Tarzan and the Africans Burroughs perceived it be not only large but insurmountable.  Haggard thought the gap easily bridged while judging from Tarzan Burroughs thought it unbridgeable.

. . . to be continued