Not too long ago, people used the word “race” very differently. By race, they didn’t mean the clustering of groups according to some genetic code residue. Neither did they mean some arbitrary cultural construct. Rather, a race had a character, a mythological background, a destiny. Races looked a certain way, did things a certain way: they had a vibe. They were, in other words, more than the sum of their parts. They formed a living, organic whole: something you can’t rigidly define; yet everybody knew what they were talking about. Indeed, analysis means dissection, and dissection means death to any living thing: death to the organic.

You can see the word used that way even in the first half of the 20th century, although the more biological-reductionist meaning had already gained ground by then, thanks in large parts to Darwinian and scientific-reductionist thinking. In pre-Hitler Germany, the more holistic understanding of race was widespread, jiving well with the overall trend of Lebensphilosophie which emphasized the organic, the living, the whole, as opposed to the mechanistic, the parts, and the dead stuff. This was sort of the baseline on which different thinkers built their ideas: from ascribing a mystical dimension to blood to more open approaches emphasizing the importance of a race’s culture. Indeed, the supposed racial superiority of Germans, in much of the nationalist thought at the time, was tied to the idea of a uniquely German culture that should enlighten the world, which meant it was open to non-ethnic Germans as well—without the compulsion to rigidly disentangle and analyze to death the different, sometimes contradictory aspects of the concept.

It is perhaps harder for Americans to see race in such a holistic way, given that they, due to their unique history, tend to literally think in black and white terms about it: the emotionally charged atmosphere around slavery, Jim Crow, civil rights, America’s short history, the high mobility of its populations for a very long time, and the integration of many waves of immigrants tend to muddy the waters.

In Europe, it is a bit different. Despite attempts to impose American “passport identity” on us, and the French tradition of ideology-nationalism, we Europeans still have a much more intuitive understanding of these issues. When we talk about Germans, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Poles, and so on, despite the dogmas of political correctness messing with our heads, we still think and feel along the lines of the old meaning of the word “race:” the organic unity of all those things that the analytic mind seeks to isolate: culture, mythology, biology, history, visible features, characters, inner attributes and so on. We are talking about historically distinct communities of people here, or peoples. Although the German word Volk has gotten a bad name ever since mustache man, it is still used in many contexts, and perhaps captures the idea better than the more sterile English “people” or “population,” although today it is slightly more biologically connotated than it used to be.

We can see the devastating effects of losing this intuitive understanding of the issue on both sides of the debate around race. The globalist, universalist left tells us that our heritage can be reduced to a passport, outrageously turning our rich ancestry and, dang it, lived experience into a bureaucratic checkbox, which is such an affront to reality that it’s hard to believe we have accepted it for so long. It also logically leads to a negation of the very idea, because passports can be changed on a whim. (That it used to be quite difficult to do so speaks to the preservation of the concept even in the face of deadening bureaucratization.) On the other end of the spectrum, the race-essentialist, IQ-stats-peddling right tries to sperg its way back to common sense, but by doing so, leaves the stale taste of abstract, gene-reductionist, technocratic managerialism in our mouths, missing the point that the whole is, again, more than its parts. This goes for races and institutions alike.

And so, the debate around “meritocracy” and university admission is reduced to numbers: standardized sort-of-IQ tests for one side, racial quota for the other. This should tell us all we need to know about the current state of academia, regardless of one’s opinion about race, gender and whatnot. If you think you can measure something like academic achievement, or diversity, then you already presuppose a machine-like system churning out stuff according to definable parameters. And if you think that IQ should be the chief factor for some blind, systemized admission process because it predicts better aggregate “life outcomes,” or that diversity should be decisive because you can maximize morality along an axis, this means you are out to manage, construct bureaucratic interventions, and invent new one-dimensional systems bound to clash with basic humanity.

Contrast this with the story of famous German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s “admission process” to the University of Munich in the 1920s: a tale of professors’ dogs doing the assessment, of intellectually curious exchanges leading to clashes or sympathy, and of hand-selecting students for seminaries. (You’ll find the part from Heisenberg’s autobiography in the footnote.)

Now this is the reality of it: the admission to a team, an institution, a group with a certain leadership, is always based on an intuitive vibe. Accordingly, when you talk to someone about academic ideas, you will very soon discover whether this relationship will be fruitful. You will gauge the other holistically: you can tell whether he’s intelligent, a good cultural fit, a good sport, or maybe just a good hang which might be exactly what you and your buddies need for your academic project. Or maybe you just find talking to the person inspiring, which might actually be the one parameter you should care about.

Given this picture, it really isn’t surprising that people from a different race (in the holistic sense) are less likely to be a “vibe fit.” No mystery there. Hence it should have been entirely predictable that a standardized test-based admission process will be rigged to conform to this reality, and that people find a way to limit Asian students, for example, as famously happened at Harvard. Because for all the talk about meritocracy and some abstract test result as the ultimate judge, common sense knows that if half the class is Asian, while something might be gained in terms of different perspectives and ways of doing things, something is also inevitably lost if we simply ignore the vibe issue. Neither is it surprising that people rail against diversity quotas, and use the admission test argument as a technocratic proxy for choosing better vibe fits. Reality’s gonna reality.

Speaking of technocratic proxies, similarly, most Europeans are not really afraid of being knifed by Muslim gangs on the town square. It’s rather that migrant crime stats, too, are used as a substitute to express the inexpressible: that we don’t like it when the town square feels dominated by complete strangers. That something in our soul hurts because of it. That, again, something is lost here—something that can’t be captured using some statistic, some measurement. We have lost the ability to express these things, and ourselves, not only due to the straight jacket of political correctness, but also because of our scientific-materialist-reductionist mindset that prevents us from recognizing the hidden world of souls, of collective vibe, of spiritual connection to our ancestry and heritage: something that can’t even be talked about without using vague metaphors and religious language, much less rigorously defined. Quite the opposite, such thoughts are immediately destroyed and ridiculed once you switch on the analytic mind. No matter what you say, people will call you an esoteric far-right race mysticist, a science denier, a subjectivist feel-gooder, a white supremacist, or whatnot. They will demand rigid definitions and utilitarian parameters where there is only a deeply expressive sigh; they will argue you to death when all you can do is send them a look ripe with meaning, hoping you be understood. No, it’s not about crime stats, economic needs, supposed advantages of multiculturalism, or IQ graphs. Not really. As much as the analytic mind craves for rational justifications for one’s perceptions, it can never bridge the gap between those with a highly developed perception and those with a poor form of perception, for these are rooted in the quality of one’s being, in one’s soul.

If you simply can’t bring yourself to not choose between the two poles of the race debate, then maybe Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic fields can be a bridge. Ultimately, however, scientific models are more like metaphors than hard facts, and I don’t think we can ever precisely define what’s going on with whole-part relationships that seem to transcend our world; but those models can be useful and help us to get closer. So keep that in mind.

In a nutshell, Sheldrake starts from the observation that genes simply don’t contain anywhere near the amount of information needed to “construct” a living being. This whole thing is rather mysterious: how does a cell “know” how to specialize, and what kind of organ it should build? All of this information needs to be somewhere. There are various theories out there to solve such problems, like claims that the information is really in the entire system of gene expression, in the interplay between genes and their control mechanisms, perhaps featuring some form of autonomous intelligence in the cell… Sheldrake’s solution, however, in a move towards a more holistic understanding, bravely discards some of the core materialist tenets in that he theorizes the existence of a morphogenetic field “out there” that communicates with our biological systems. For example, it can “cause microtubules to crystallize in one part of the cell rather than another, even though the subunits from which they are made are present throughout the cell.” But not only that, he generalizes this to his concept of “morphic fields” and talks about “habits of nature” more broadly—habits that get stored in a morphic field and in turn facilitate those habits in the organisms with the correct “hardware” to plug into them, such as a species, via a process he callse “morphic resonance.” He thinks that even physical laws are like that: habits of nature, but with very little wiggle room in the case of physics. These morphic fields have a certain teleological “pull” and are probabilistic in nature. And they exist in nested hierarchies: groups, societies, species, and so on.

Sheldrake makes his case by referring to all kinds of experiments and data. For instance, it seems that if you train a rat population in a lab, another rat population in a lab on the other side of the planet will learn the same things faster, without having been in contact with the first population. Which is really rather mind-blowing in its implications.

You can see where I’m going with this. An understanding of biology like that opens up a very different take on race that leaves much more room for the oldshool holistic view than the reductionist approach that either proclaims culture or genes to be the primary features. In that picture, genes are perhaps more like “antennae” plugging into an information field, and consciousness is the transceiver that “tunes in” the information—by modulating the signal, so to speak. It can also add to and change the field by creating new “habits,” weakening existing ones, or perhaps even tune into a different field if the “antennae” (genes) make the connection possible.

At the very least, such a model would jive well with our intuition and experience: for example, when meeting people from completely foreign places, we sense that there is something deeper going on than merely different cultures; there’s something connecting us, and them, to our respective ancestry which can’t quite be captured simply by talk about education or traditions. At the same time, there seems to be something wrong with the gene-obsessed view as well: we know people who look entirely different from us who are perfect “vibe fits”, or who rapidly integrate into our own culture, indeed, whose very being seems to adapt. But not everyone—with some people it seems as if genes have the upper hand, and they will forever remain foreign in their ways. And while the statisticians may detect average patterns for definable parameters, there are infinite individual “vibe fit” differences that are hard to even put into words, and impossible to measure.

With Sheldrake’s theory, we may suspect all kinds of scenarios: perhaps a race can “evolve” (i.e. change) more rapidly than we think by changing its habits and therefore its corresponding “morphic field.” Or, if we think of morphic fields as not entirely bottom-up, but as partly archetypical forms created long ago (or in the distant future, or indeed beyond our Kantian perception of spacetime), it might be possible for a particular group to get under the influence of a different one—a different pathway, a different destiny. Genetics and culture, or the holistic expression of one’s group more broadly, might be much more tightly interconnected than the materialist paradigm would allow—which can play out both ways: certain hard-coded cultural expressions that seem almost unchangeable, but also rapid changes in culture, which might then also be reflected in DNA. Also, when living among a different people, perhaps it is possible for some individuals to “tune into” the corresponding field so well that they almost literally, even biologically in a way, become a member of the new group, perhaps aided by some genetic quirk, or because they were attuned to certain elements of the other people’s character to begin with. (Curiously, there are those who profess they always felt “French” or “German” or whatever even though they are not.) Whereas in other cases, an individual might never fit in, even if he grew up among the new people, because he simply can’t, for biological or other reasons, tune into the corresponding field. The same could be true for different groups of migrants. Another implication is that due to the nested nature of these morphic fields, we might “vibe” much better with some individuals from an entirely different background than with our cousin—because we might share a crucially important morphic field with that other person.

In Sheldrake’s picture, it’s not just species that have a “field,” but smaller groups as well. We might say that even an institution such as a university has a morphic field, storing its non-definable yet very real culture—that which is more than the sum of its parts: its deep-rooted, living vibeworld. It certainly is more than the added IQ points of its members. So, a WASP university with a WASP history and a distinct set of habits, rules and so on might have some WASPiness about it that runs deeper than merely superficial traditions: there is a teleological pull, a co-creative interplay between the field and the participating individuals. If they can tune in, that is, which might also have something to do with their WASPiness—ancestry, culture, and all—they bring to the table from the start. Otherwise, they might feel pushed away instead of pulled along. So the same scenarios described above might apply.

Of course, such fields can also be abandoned, perhaps even destroyed—a process of something subtle flickering out that we might feel as a great loss, manifesting in an aching longing we can’t quite put our finger on. Whereas other fields, well, good riddance.

What I like about Sheldrake’s approach is that it leaves considerable room for individuals and groups to adapt, change and integrate with other groups, co-creating their fate, while also not leaving out the hard facts about certain patterns that seem unrelated to culture or upbringing—all that while also allowing for individual variability as to how these factors play out. I think this mirrors real-life experience well, and satisfies both our intuitions: that our group is more than the sum of its parts and more than some arbitrary culture that could change at any moment, but that it’s also not biologically “fixed,” needing millennia to change via natural selection. That our ancestors still live on within us, including their ways and their very being, but that we can also tune into other groups, whose morphic “pull” might change us considerably, down to the biological level perhaps, while we bring something back into it from our own heritage. It also leaves room for older ways of thinking about all that involving teleology, vitalist biology, fate, spiritual-civilizational cycles, and more.

The best—and perhaps scariest—part is that in this picture, our habits, our thoughts, our ways of doing things and approaching reality, our being all contribute to the overall groups we are a part of, even in a biological sense, and make it easier for others to follow the path we established or reinforced. Which also means there could be evolutionary breaking points where a new equilibrium snaps into place, rattling and changing us and those of us tuned into the same way of being to the very core, potentially freeing us from the collective mess we’re in.

Such a path may be open to all races—that is the universalist perspective—without implying that we are not different, that our paths won’t be different, or that we have to free ourselves from our heritage. Rather, the journey is both individual and collective, both transcending and embracing biology, both determined by our ancestry and by our choices, a ladder rooted both in relativism vis-à-vis our people and universal principles. Which diminishes neither of these aspects, but rather makes all of them all the more important and far-reaching.

And while this view doesn’t magically make the tensions and contradictions around these issues go away, a holistic understanding that takes phenomenology and intuition seriously can help us tolerate these tensions and prevent us from thinking ourselves into corners. We are then in a better position to make good use of tensions that, painful as they can be, are the basis for the symphony of our existence.

We better make it count, then.