Race ideology turned the inner self into a site of historical conflict
Evidence
The inherent irresponsibility of romantic opinions received a new stimulant from Gobineau’s mixture of races, because this mixture showed a historical event of the past which could be traced in the depths of one’s own self. This meant that inner experiences could be given historical significance, that one’s own self had become the battlefield of history. “Since I read the Essai, every time some conflict stirred up the hidden sources of my being, I have felt that a relentless battle went on in my soul, the battle between the black, the yellow, the Semite and the Aryans.” Significant as this and similar confessions may be of the state of mind of modern intellectuals, who are the true heirs of romanticism whatever opinion they happen to hold, they nevertheless indicate the essential harmlessness and political innocence of people who probably could have been forced into line by each and every ideology. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 464
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- XREF: The ‘self as battlefield of history’ prefigures how racialized/religious identity becomes internalized — a direct scaffold for the construction-of-the-Other toolkit and contrasts with the collective imagined community in Anderson.
- DEEPTHINKING: Internalizing world-historical racial conflict into the psyche is a dense, paradigm-shifting notion of how ideology attaches to personhood.