The World Knows or Thinks it Knows

Radio Record, Volume VI, Issue 24, 23 December 1932, Page 7

The World Knows or Thinks it Knows

that Scotsmen are mean. The Irish are improvident. Welshmen are untrustworthy. Englishmen are reserved. But .... oes It’s all Wrong! Read what Dr. C. E. Beeby said on the subject from 3YA

FEEL that I am on . dangerous ground tonight. « When. one talks about the differences between the mentalities of different nations, it is easy to make sweeping statements. The only trouble is that they are generally wrong. All the world knows, for ixistance-or thinks it knows-that the Stottish are mean, that the Irish are improvident, that you can only trust a Welshman as far as you can see him, and that the typical Englishman is silent and reserved and hides himself behind a newspaper in a railway carriage. As a basis for funny stories, these generalisations are quite satisfactory, but I’m afraid that they don’t work in practice. We have all known plenty of generous Scotsmen and plenty of

thrifty Irish, and not a few-reliable Welshmen. And as tor the Englishman’s strong, silent, Clive-Brookishness, I have had too many railway journeys ruined by his constant chatter to-place much faith in his

silence. JI remember once starting on te deck of a steamer at Rarotonga watching the behaviour of the passengers getting off the gangway into the lighter, and of the natives working the boats. Somehow one always thinks of natives of any kind jabbering and fussing. But on this occasion the English and American tourists were squawking and squealing like so many magpies. The natives stood as rigid and solemn as Clive Brook himself, perfect public schoci Englishmen to the backbone. That’s the trouble with all generalisations about natural character. There are too many exceptions for any sweeping generalisation to mean much. And yet, of course, there are very real differences between the haviour and outlook of different nations. When arguing with my economist friends T sometimes take the example of the Mexican peasant to show that economic laws depend upon the character of a people. . The American owners of silver mines in Mexico considered that the output per man was not great enough. So they doubled the wages of the Mexican peasants who had been persuaded to work in the mines, For the first week all went well. But in the second week nobody turned up at the mines. Why should they? They had enough in the first week to keep them for two weeks and so they spent the second week in feasting. From then on they worked only half-time. Now that is a point of view that is almost

inconceivable to the average New Zealander. Most of us would have shifted into a larger house, or paid a deposit on a radio, or bought a car, or put the extra money in the bank. Not so the Mexican peasant. Utterly devoid of ambition, of any real money sense, or of desire to hoard possessions, ' he wants to earn just enough to live on. To work for anything further is to him sheer madness. But there again, you see, you are up against a difficulty. Even the generalisations that I have been malking about Mexicans are probably utterly wrong as regards some of them. There are almost ceftainly ambitious Mexicans just as there are lazy and improvident New Zealanders. That is, we can’t say that every New Zealander is more energetic and more

ambitious than every Mexican, At the very most we can only say that there is a tendency for New Zealanders to be more energetic than Mexicans. In the same way the Scottish may possibly tend (although

1 daren’t say it here) to be more careful on money matters than the English, but there still remain many generous Scots and many mean Englishmen. A*® OTHER trouble is that we don’t know how far the Mexicans’ laziness and the Scotsman’s. carefulness depend upon some inborn character and how far upon the climate and traditions of the countries in which they live. Might a Mexican be more energetic if he lived in a harder climate, and a Scotsman more careless of money if he lived in a softer one? Take a single example: There are fairly well recognised differences between the characters of the English and the French. Now suppose every English baby were spirited away at birth and changed with a new-born French baby. In a generation or two all the inhabitants of England would he of French extraction. But would they behave like Englishmen or like Frenchmen? It’s a pretty problem. I, for one, don’t know the answer. Tor one thing they would all speak English. But would they remain chiefly Protestant instead of Catholic? Would they drink their wine at pavement cafes in Piccadilly or would they fight pitched battles over Prohibition like true Englishmen? Would their music-halls be as pure and dull as ours, or as cheekily attractive as Folies Bergere? That is to say, how much of the (Continued overleaf.)

} The World Knowsa ts ~ (Continued from page 7.) @imglish character depends on a dull gold. climate and a stern tradition, and how much on actual racial peculiari‘ties, inherited from hundreds of generations? When you get into the psycho‘ogy. of race, xyou find yourself in a fine mess. It’s a subject of which it is very hard to be unbiased. It is very difficult not to believe that your own particular type is the highest thing in greation. There seems to be among all geoples jp desire to believe one’s racially pure. One constantly hears such phrases as "pure British stock,’ : untainted English blood," and the. like, The fact is, of course, that there isn’t such a thing as a drop of pure ‘British blood in the whole world. That s, if we mean by "pure British blood" @ person who ig descended from one unmixed British race. The British, fas I think Professor Shelley pointed eut from 3YA a few weeks ago, is a vace of mongrels in a thoroughly mongrel world. There is, in ‘our blood, elements from almost every corner of the world. ‘The point is, of course, that, racially speaking, there is nothing to be ashamed of in being a mongrel. Rather the reverse. The Tasganian aborigines were a fairly pure ‘race, and their culture was one of the lowest in the world. ; You can never understand the men‘tal characters of nations unless you ‘know the racial mixtures of which jthey are composed. Take Wurope iglone, There is no nation in Europe which is racially pure, or anything like jat. ‘But there are in Europe three great separate races, All the Euronations are made in the main of these three races, mixed in somewhat different proportions. You have coming down from the [North of Europe the Nordic race, a te@l, fair-haired, blue-eyed mnarrowfaced, and narrow-headed people. If you think round among your friends you. will probably pick on one who fits ‘in with this description more or less. But you can be pretty sure that even he is far from being a pure Nordic. ‘The Swedes are probably the nearest to pure Nordics. ‘Then, from the south ‘of Burope, from the shores of the (Mediterranean come the Mediterramean race. They were short, slim, dark, and narrow-headed. The nearest thing to a pure Mediterranean type is now to be found in Sicily. Sandwiched in between these two races we find a third race, the Alpines, who were short, dark, thick-set, and with heads sometimes almost as broad as they were jong. Now, since the Nordics came from the north of Europe, it is only to be expected ‘that we should find a greater proportion of Nordic blood in the northern countries than in the southern, and mR corresponding preponderance of short, dark Mediterraneans in the gouth of Europe. This is actually the case, It is usually estimated, for instanee, that the people of the British Isles are, very roughly, 60 per cent. Nordic, 80 per cent. Mediterranean, and 10 per cent. Alpine. The. people of France are supposed to be 25 per cent. Nordic, 50 per cent. Alpine, and 25 per cent. Mediterranean. The people of Spain. and Southern Italy are mainly ‘Mediterranean. A These proportions, of course, are not

much more than guesses. But you do certainly find a much greater number of tall, fair people in, say, the north of England, than you do‘in the south of France. BHiven in France itself, as you work southwards, you find the people getting shorter and darker. These physical’ differences are of no great importance for our purpose, The interesting thing is that there seem to have been very marked mental and temperamental differences between, say, the Nordics and the Mediterraneans. These differences seem to have passed on to their modern descendants. Take the case of suicide, for example.

I have said that as you move -northward through France the people become fairer and taller. But as they become fairer they also. become more liable to commit suicide. The yearly suicide rate in the south of France is under 50 per million in-. habitants, In some parts of northern France it is over 350 per million. It almost looks as if fairness of hair were a cause of suicide. The difference, of course, is due to the fact that the fair Nordics are more liable to suicide than the dark Mediterraneans. You tind exactly the same state of affairs -in England. The suicide rate is over 100 per million in the North of England, : where the Nordic blood predominates. It is less than 40 per million in Wales and Cornwall, where ‘the old Alpine and Mediterranean blood of | the ancient Britons is still strong. It is lowest of all in Ireland, which has more fights and fewer suicides than almost any part of Europe. The Irish have very little Nordic blood in them. The differences between Nordic. and Mediterranean in this respect are really striking. The suicide rate in. Denmark, 2 yery Nordic country, is 268 per million; in Southern Italy it. is 26 per million, or exactly one-tenth. It becomes all the more interesting when we find that the higher the suicide rate the lower the murder rate. Apparently the less inclination you have for killing yourself the more inclination other people have to kill you. Southern Italy used to have the highest murder rate and the lowest suicide (Continued on page 24,)

The World Knows (Continued from page 8.) rate in the world, It may now be rivalled by Chicago, but it is significant that most of America’s gangsters are Southern Italians. ; It would seem then that Nordics ar relatively prone to suicide but not to murder, and Mediterraneans are prone ‘to murder but not to suicide. The key | to the puzzle is found in the mental | attitude of each to his fellow men. The typical Nordic has rather a shut-_ in type of mind. He is unsociable, not very friendly, and tends to brood over his troubles. He is what psychologists eall, in their jargon, an introvert. That is, he is in-turned. He is more interested in what is going on in his own head than in mixing with other people. He bottles up his feelings. He is often cold and stiff as a result. The typical Mediterranean is just the reverse. He is an extrovert, out-turn-ed. He is sociable. He is passionate and excitable. He loves to live his life in public. He will flare up in a sudden rage and strike you: he will seldom brood over his troubles to the extent of killing himself. These differences are seen right throughout the national life of, say, the English and the French. The ‘religion of the Frenchman, for instance, ig Roman Catholicism, a sociable, public and ritualistic form of worship. It is your typical Nordic in, say, the North of Pngland who locks himself in his room with his Bible and worships in private. He is essentially an individualist, that is, a Protestant.

Only the Nordic has split into a thousand different creeds and wandered halfway round the earth in search of a place where he may worship his God in his own way. It is just the same mental attitude that makes him hide behind his newspaper in a train, while the Frenchman will insist on sharing his lunch and his life history with you. Just the same racial differences show

themselves in the colonisation of the British and the French. I believe it is a fact that no French colonist in Canada ever built his house out of sight of his nearest neighbour’s. His warm, sociable, Mediterranean blood wouldn’t let him. The British colonist, with his introverted Nordic mind, will march weeks into the wilderness and settle happily with his own thoughts, It took a predominantly Nordic race to invent the very idea of home as a place where you could retire with your family and slam the door. So one could go on, with one mentui quality after another. And if one were anything like three-quarters right in any statement one would be lucky. There are no clear-cut lines, no unqualified statements when one is deal ing with national character. The whole pretty scheme is so cut about by racial crossings and interbreeding. You cannot tell either a man’s race or his character by his size and the colour of his hair. His ancestry is as mixed as his temperament. Probably the most useful lesson we can learn from a study of race is that mongrels we ure and mongrels we shal] remain. Some day we may even learn to be proud of the fact, and to strengthen our relations with other nations accordingly.