Wyndham Lewis and the Destiny of the White World

Wyndham Lewis’ Paleface: The Philosophy of the Melting Pot fell from the furnace of 1929, steel stamped with the scars of the Great War, an age when Europe bled into trenches and the White man stumbled, pale flesh shuddering against the weight of conscience. Lewis lifts the mask and declares: the destiny of the White Man must be seen in America, the mirror where Europe glimpses its racial future: Indians, Blacks, and Asian tides lapping at Pacific shores. The White man’s position, already shaking, stood as a moral drama. Every act a trial, every gesture weighed down by guilt, and every glance haunted by the Puritan preacher speaking of sacrifice.

Lewis begins with conscience. Conscience created chains more crushing than cannons. Protestants carried the Bible into battle and returned with bleeding hearts. They conquered the Red Man, enslaved the Blacks, carved empires on distant shores, and then drowned themselves in pity. The White man’s moral code birthed a strange weakness: a desire to kneel before the conquered. Guilt became a religion. The White skin, once a banner of triumph, became a badge of shame. Lewis laughs at the solemnity of professors measuring skulls and lips, yet his laughter carried a disheartening message: the White man had been blackened by his own priests.

The Indian, the Redskin, exists in Lewis’ imagination as a counterfactual destiny. If Red men had ruled, copper skin would shine as divine, every law praising Choctaw or Blackfoot superiority. There would be no debate, no confusion, only affirmation. Race consciousness is eternal. The White man alone allows conscience to corrode it.

Lewis dives deeper: race as a moral category. He turns philosophy against itself. T. H. Green’s ethics, born of Hegel, saturate the air with duty, universal brotherhood, and infinite responsibility. To Green, each man owes himself to every other man, each star in the heavens a new burden, each life another chain. The Greek sought beauty, balance, the pleasure of mind and body. The Christian moralist sought renunciation and the endless surrender of joy. Lewis shows how this Protestant inheritance shackled Europe. The White man sacrifices pleasures, powers, very existence itself, so that abstract humanity may rise. What rises, however, is decay.

This is the “moral situation”: a world governed by ethics, a world suffocated by righteousness. Lewis paints a picture of men crushed beneath impossible demands, ascetics ground into dust by endless responsibility. And through this haze of duty and guilt, another truth emerges: race, esprit de peau, the spirit of skin. Every society functions through the solidarity of flesh. Greeks and Brahmins guarded privilege through color and caste. Where privilege decays, race collapses. The Jew once carried stigma across Europe, yet intellect and resilience eroded that stigma. Race, Lewis argues, thrives only with power, privilege, and consciousness. Strip those, and the White man dissolves into a wage-slave, interchangeable in the machine.

From this Lewis sees the outlaw figure. Natural leaders of the White world have become exiles, stripped of authority and barred from public eminence. The law they embodied has collapsed, so they drift outside society, prophets of extinction. They see that the White man, unless transformed, merges into wider systems, his soul extinguished. This prophecy stings with Cassandra’s fire.

Then comes the second half of Lewis’ assault: the “cult of the primitive.” The literary fashions of the 1920s intoxicate themselves on Black rhythm, Indian mysticism, and savage vitality. Sherwood Anderson, D. H. Lawrence, and even the rising Hemingway flirt with this cult. Lawrence proclaims Whites as “creatures of spirit” yearning for primal blood-consciousness. Anderson romanticizes the “Dark Laughter” of Black America. For Lewis, this is poison: Whites praising alien vitality while denying their own essence. He sees in it both decadence and suicide. Student suicides, he notes, rise as Whites absorb messages of inferiority. When the soul of a race collapses, the body soon follows.

Lewis turns his satire against complexes. Whites receive an inferiority complex, Blacks a superiority complex, all delivered by liberal propaganda. The White man, once master, is recast as a slave. This inversion, Lewis claims, is deliberate: a reversal of hierarchies that abolishes dignity. He ridicules the fascination with Freud, impotence, and sentimentality. For Lewis, the sickness of modern literature lies in its sentimentality: sentimental primitivism, sentimental sexuality, sentimental politics. Sentiment weakens, sentiment dissolves, sentiment kills.

Machines thunder in the background. The machine age traps the White worker, while intellectuals dream of noble savages. Lewis scorns this schizophrenia. Class struggle and race struggle intertwine, and the machine devours both. Yet even here, he refuses despair. He proposes a new philosophy of the West, grounded in intellect, shorn of sentimentality, and armed with clarity.

The climax comes in the proposal: “a model melting pot.” Lewis shocks by seizing a term coined by Israel Zangwill, that Zionist dreamer of assimilation, and turning it upon Europe. The White man must mix, but only with himself. Swiss peasants, Swedish girls, English farmers, German workers — identical in flesh and spirit, yet taught to slaughter each other over imaginary differences. The Great War revealed the madness: brothers blinding brothers, cousins gassing cousins, kin turned enemies by illusions of nation. Europe must fuse, must become a single White Imperium. One speech, one government, one destiny. A melting pot of kin, not of strangers.

Lewis envisions Europe as America did: Germans, Irish, and Italians blending into one White race. He mocks the small dreams of nationalists clinging to parochial identities. The White man must rise beyond nationalism into civilizational unity. World War One was a fratricide that nearly destroyed the race. Another such war would finish it. Only a White melting pot, a European empire, can save the White man from extinction.

Lewis’ vision aligns with Oswald Spengler’s warnings. Spengler declared that non-European races had mastered technology and that catastrophe loomed. Lewis agrees with him: isolation for Europe is artificial, fortress walls cannot endure, the world presses in. The White man must face the global tide as a single block, or dissolve into fragments devoured by history.

Throughout, irony moves with conviction. Lewis mocks even as he affirms. He admits contradictions, refuses easy slogans, yet the thrust remains: White man, know thyself. White man, defend thyself. White man, fuse with thy kin or perish.

The legacy of Paleface is double-edged. Some read it as a racist tract, others as a satire on primitivism. Yet its essence transcends categories. It declares that race is real, that culture grows from skin, that survival demands solidarity. Lewis sees ideas as weapons, capable of annihilating entire races. He warns that the White man risks destruction not only from enemies with guns, but from ideas, philosophies, and illusions imported from abroad or born in guilty Protestant hearts.

He closes with a vision: if Whites had remained aloof, the world would look different. The Black man squatting by the Niger, the Delaware chasing buffalo, Europe intact and powerful as China. Yet aloofness is a fantasy. History advances through dreams and utopias. Out of utopia comes reality, out of exaggeration comes destiny. The White man must dream a new utopia: a White melting pot, an Imperium of Europe, a destiny of unity.

Paleface demands seriousness. It refuses comfort. It provokes, disturbs, and compels reflection. Lewis writes as a man ahead of his age, cursed like Cassandra, mocked by peers, yet seeing clearly the lines of collapse and the necessity of rebirth. He offers neither sentimental return to savagery nor liberal dissolution into humanity, but a radical path: create what you must become.

The White machine stands at the edge of history. Its leaders cast out, its conscience poisoned, and its identity dissolved in guilt and primitivist worship. Yet Lewis offers fire: melt, fuse, create. Out of the ruins of the Great War, out of the machines and the guilt, out of the ashes of conscience, the White man can forge a new Imperium. The question echoes across the century: will he?

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