The Ever-Interesting Barzun...
By way of preface, Barzun describes the myth of the American Indian as the "noble savage" and then relates it to how Roman historian Tactitus portrayed the Germanic tribes of the first century in such a way to shame the people of Rome...
The fine barbarians in Tacitus were used as models in Luther's Germany to stimulate resentment against the foreign authority of Rome, and these two attitudes, favoring the Indian and the German, combined to change the western peoples' notion of their origins. For a thousand years they had been the sons and daughters of the ancient Romans. Now the idea of different "races" replaced that of a single, common lineage. The bearing of this shift is clear: it parallels the end of empire and the rise of nations. Race unites and separates; We and They. Thus the English in the 16th century began to nurse the fetish of Anglo-Saxonism, which unites them with the Germanic and separates them from the Roman past. We shall see how a similar notion influenced politics in France up to and beyond the 1789 Revolution...
The conviction moreover grew that the character of a people is inborn and unchangeable. If their traits appear odd or hateful, the theory of race justifies perpetual enmity. We thus arrive at some of the familiar prejudices and hostilities of our time. "Race" added the secular idea of inborn difference to the theological one of infidel and Christian. -Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence
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