Races and nations as functions of the world whole

races; for it is contrary to both reason and justice that the brain should dictate what the other organs do not find it easy and natural and proper to carry out, namely their own highest functions.’

While, then, we can see the failure of Western culture and civilisation to do enough to make their necessary contribution to the ordering of the world, and, as he says, ‘If Europe does not solve these problems, no other race will or can’, we must allow also for the fact that an over-developed superior function of intellect means the risk of explosions from the neglected inferior function of feeling. So we see in the world, as with an individual, ‘if any part of the unconscious is . . . denied its place in the sun’ it sets up ‘psychological revolts of a pathological character, and the conscious itself . . . forfeits the access of intelligence that would certainly come to it from the wise acceptance of the offer or demand of the unconscious’.

The result could be that

‘the unconscious, refused recognition, breaks all conscious restraints and emerges in its untransformed character as madness, lust, revenge, and devilry’.

By now the world unconscious has been dangerously provoked by two world wars. It is still worth considering Mitrinovié’s view, expressed between the wars, that a world order on any other than a European basis would reduce the possibility of individual freedom and self-consciousness. Yet in spite of all its technology, it is not at all impossible for the West to be overwhelmed by the South and the East, for science and technology, as Mitrinovié wrote, are ‘easily learnable’.

Christianity implied egoic consciousness and individual responsibility, but the rationality evolved in Europe as part of the Christianising process has indeed been too much identified with power and domination. We in the West have much to learn from Asia and Africa—and from Africa’s Caribbean descendants, many of whom now live amongst us—and that this is an educative necessity can be seen in the light of a psychological view of the world. Moreover such a view cannot be totally strange, un-