Races and nations as functions of the world whole

of the word ‘function’ can arise in a biological and therefore living sense if the conception of the whole is as organism and not as a mere aggregate.

Today we live in a world where many and agonising problems arise out of misunderstandings between different races and cultures, but such problems are usually seen in terms of empirical facts. There is lacking a world view from which their meanings can be interpreted. Half a century ago Dimitrije Mitrinovié set out to show what the nature of such a world view could be. He did this in a long series of articles, called World Affairs, published in The New Age (then under the outstanding editorship of A. R. Orage) in 1920 and 1921. A further series, of ten articles, appeared in New Britain in 1933. Carrying out, through these articles, a searching enquiry which he describes as ‘investigations and studies’ or ‘more truthfully contemplations and travails’ concerning the factors affecting world affairs, Mitrinovié indicated the problems of race as one of four areas of human conflict, the others being the sexes, the ages, and the classes of Mankind. His way of looking at such problems differs from that of almost all who have published studies in these areas, because instead of starting with the observed facts and ascribing causes to them in their material context—such as explaining racial differences in terms of geography or history—he starts from a conception of the whole and considers races and nations as functions of the world whole, interpreting their significance by this criterion. Unfortunately the kind of thinking required for this approach has become more difficult the more we have come under the influence of a science which separates everything from everything else and has itself been disintegrated into countless specialisations. Thinking from a wider and more comprehensive outlook may seem too simple to ‘specialists’, but, as Mitrinovi¢ wrote in World Affairs,

“Unless there is and can consciously be conceived a nonarbitrary common world-responsibility, resting equally according to their respective genius, situation and history, upon every race and nation, nothing remains but to

1 ‘Anthropo-Biology’; L. R. Twentyman; 2nd Foundation Lecture, 1955, p-9.

2