by Greg Johnson
Individuals or groups of individuals can of course continue to find reasons in the Christian faith to live and to die, but it has lost the decisive role that it played in the past. It no longer constitutes the total frame of reference and the principal normative criterion of social existence. That means that religious membership today merely has the status of one opinion among many, on the general foundation of indifferentism and practical materialism. It is a radical change in the very definition of religion.
Under these conditions, the question is no longer whether Christianity should or should not be “preserved.” The Churches try to survive, clinging nostalgically to a past that no longer corresponds to anything, while seeking on the contrary to adapt to the current world, by reaffirming their universalist vocation, trying to pose as “moral authorities,” etc. That is their business. The real issues of the future lie elsewhere.
Why doesn’t the New Right refer to Christianity when it preaches a return to the roots of Europe? Paul Piccone and Gary Ulmen, in their introduction to Michael Torigian’s “The Philosophical Foundations of the French New Right” (Telos, no. 117, Autumn 1999, pp. 4–5), wonder if two thousand years of Christianity is not sufficient to make this religion an indigenous tradition, even if certain parts of Europe (like Scandinavia and the Baltic States) were Christianized only much later. Are there many political movements eager to return to roots that preach a return to paganism?
The New Right has never preached a “return” to paganism or a “return” to roots, or a return to anything for that matter. Instead, we wish to go beyond current society, but we wish to envision the future through the lens of a clear consciousness of the past. These two approaches are quite different: recurrence is not synonymous with return! Let us say simply that one can “futurize” the present only by “historicizing” the past.
The problem is that the majority of our contemporaries live in a perpetual present, i.e., a point of view where only the present moment counts and one is no longer capable of awaiting the future or drawing lessons from the past. The past is not limited to the point of origin, which is an always conventional limit anyway, but takes into account all accomplished history. To make any sense of history, we must look at the longest possible term.
Christianity obviously forms part of European history, but Europe was not born with it. When Christianity appeared, Europe already had five or six millennia of culture and civilization behind it. To speak about the “Christian roots” of Europe amounts to denying that the Latin, Greek, Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic cultures of Antiquity ever existed, which is obviously indefensible.
You have sometimes described Christianity as the “Bolshevism of Antiquity.” Does the New Right regard Christianity as the ancestor and principal carrier of totalitarianism?
When Christianity was spread in Europe, it necessarily had to destroy the old order. That entailed the struggle against paganism. We have innumerable testimonies on the ways in which the early Christians profaned the old places of worship, destroyed the temples and the statues of the gods, tore down the altars, toppled the colonnades, burned the philosophical and literary works that displeased them, etc. It was indeed a question of “making the past a clean slate.” The polemical phrase you quote is alluding to this.
On the other hand, to say that Christianity is the direct origin of totalitarianism is excessive. It nevertheless contributed to it by introducing into the Western realm a type of intolerance—religious intolerance—that was previously unknown. Paganism quite naturally recognized the legitimacy of the various beliefs professed by the various peoples. With Christianity the concepts of absolute good and evil appear, a single god, orthodoxy, dogma, heresies, inquisitions, wars of religion, etc.
The Christians intended both to convert all humanity and to fight against what they regarded as “idolatry.” Their religion being above all a moral religion, they tend to see in their enemies, not just as the adversaries of the moment but as figures of Evil. To eradicate Evil, those who claim to incarnate the Good are quickly led, in all clear conscience, to employ any means.
In modern times, the totalitarian regimes acted no differently: they claimed to carry out “just” wars, declared their adversaries criminals, and were inevitably led to place them outside humanity. One consequence of this way of thinking is the elimination of the third: “He who is not with me is against me,” said Jesus—a saying recently repeated by President George W. Bush.
ON THE HUMAN SCIENCES
E. O. Wilson describes neuroscience, human genetics, evolutionary biology, and conservation biology as four “frontier disciplines” of the natural sciences that today are bridging the gap between the scientific and humanistic cultures. Does the New Right support Wilson’s call for “consilience,” i.e., a unified knowledge joining together the life sciences and the human sciences?
Edward O. Wilson is certainly an excellent researcher, but I do not believe that he is a great philosopher. The theme of the “unity of knowledge” ignores the irreducible difference that exists between the exact sciences and social sciences (which Wilhelm Dilthey called the “sciences of the spirit”). Generally, it amounts to an attempt by the former to annex the domain of the latter. The call for “consilience” is in this respect quite similar to the attempt launched in the 1930s by men like Otto Neurath or Philipp Frank to arrive at the “unification of science.” The only difference is that Neurath privileged theoretical physics as the supreme discipline, whereas Wilson stresses biology, which today has become the “queen of the sciences.”
Wilson writes, “Nature is governed by simple universal laws of physics, to which all other laws and principles can be reduced” (Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge [New York: Knopf, 1998], p. 59). His approach is thus clearly reductionistic—understanding everything from the point of view of physics, if one takes into account the Copenhagen interpretation of the Uncertainty Principle. To believe that the essence of politics, for example, can be reduced to “simple universal laws of physics” makes one smile. The same applies to all the values that apply to human life insofar as the human realm is a realm of evaluation, in keeping with hermeneutics and phenomenology: man seeks to give meaning to his life, and this meaning necessarily goes beyond the biological order of life. Wilson’s “scientific evangelism” reminds one of Auguste Comte’s “religion of science.” In my view, such projects are doomed to fail.
Specialists in the social sciences are too often ignorant of the findings of the life sciences. Specialists in the life sciences, for their part, tend too often to reject the findings of the social sciences as the realm of non-rigorous speculation or “philosophy,” i.e., non-knowledge. I think they are both wrong.
Both the life sciences and the social sciences should learn how to mutually illuminate one another. The social sciences make it possible to understand and study what is uniquely human, while the life sciences make it possible to better understand the foundations of this uniqueness. The social sciences tell us about what in man is changing, while the life sciences tell us about what remains the same. Instead of opposition or unity, the social sciences and the life sciences should seek complimentarity.
In 1928, Helmuth Plessner, one of the principal founders of philosophical anthropology, wrote, “No philosophy of man without philosophy of nature.” The assertion can be turned around: no philosophy of nature without philosophy of man. One can also quote Aristotle: no kind of thought is valid if it is unaware of its own limits.
Francis Fukuyama (Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution [New York: Picador, 2002]), Gregory Stock (Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future [New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002]), and Richard Lynn (Eugenics: A Reassessment [Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001]) are some recent authors who are interested in a possible return of eugenics. What is the New Right’s position on eugenics? What are the consequences of today’s gap between Western and East Asian nations regarding eugenics?
Historically, in the 19th and 20th ce
nturies, the principal theorists of eugenics were chiefly men of the Left. The United States and the Scandinavian countries, moreover, adopted eugenic policies well before Hitler’s Germany. These facts are forgotten today, and eugenics is largely discredited because it is mistakenly seen as specifically “Nazi.” But at the same time, all the Western countries practice a minimal eugenics that does not dare speak its name: embryonic sorting, therapeutic abortion, the fight against hereditary diseases, etc. I am not sure that eugenics will ever be rehabilitated as such, but I am certain this trend will continue.
The eugenic practices that the development of the life sciences makes it possible to consider in the earliest stages of embryonic life will not be imposed by the state, but on the contrary they respond to the desire of parents who of course wish to have the best children possible. In my eyes, this desire is perfectly legitimate: a society with fewer sick people is objectively better than a society with more.
The true difficulty begins when one wishes to pass from negative to positive eugenics. Indeed, this raises the crucial question of the criterion of “quality” one selects. The most common answer is general intelligence as measured by IQ (the “g” factor evoked by Spearman in 1927, or the “fluid intelligence” of Raymond B. Cattell, in opposition to “crystallized” intelligence). But this criterion is in many ways debatable. I know quite well the literature about IQ and the polemics to which it is continually subjected. (I published a bibliography about it in 1998.) The work of the London school, from Galton to Robert Plomin, while passing by Eysenck and Jensen, arrived at conclusions that cannot be seriously disputed—even if it is also necessary to take account of Robert J. Sternberg’s work on “triarchic” intelligence. The contemporary state of research on intelligence has been quite well-summarized in a recent book: Helmuth Nyborg, The Scientific Study of General Intelligence: Tribute to Arthur R. Jensen (London: Pergamon, 2003).
The heritability of intelligence, i.e., the share of inter-individual variations of intelligence that can be attributed to genetic factors—or, if one prefers, the share of the phenotypic variance that can be attributed to genotypic variance—is the subject of increasingly concordant evaluations. This heritability remains, however, relative to a given environment (by definition, if there is no difference in environment, the heritability of the variance is established automatically at 100%).
In addition, the quantification of a quality—and intelligence is primarily a quality—never allows us to completely grasp its nature. This is why I find it much more interesting to know which mental differences can exist between individuals with the same IQ, rather than to know which one has the higher IQ. Lastly, the very concept of a test is a Western concept; this is why, in my opinion, even so-called “culture-free” tests can never be completely successful.
Thus my reservations are not because of the London school’s definition of intelligence or the validity of IQ tests, but rather because of the overvaluation of intelligence as the criterion of human value. Indeed, being intelligent does not at all guarantee that one is right: the falsest ideologies are the creations of highly intelligent men, sometimes geniuses. (Marx was not less intelligent than Heidegger, and Richard C. Lewontin is certainly not less intelligent than Arthur R. Jensen.) Besides, if intelligence were always advantageous, it would have always been selected for by natural selection, which was not the case.
This overvaluation of intelligence is quite typical of modern societies. It was foreign to the European mentality throughout most of our history. The Homeric hero, the medieval knight, the French gentilhomme, the English gentleman, or the Spanish caballero, represent as many ideal types (in Max Weber’s sense) which never gave a central place to cognitive capacities, but rather to character traits: courage, a sense of honor, disinterestedness, generosity, fidelity to one’s word, will, decisiveness, sensitivity, creativity, etc., all qualities that have nothing to do with intelligence per se.
I appreciate intelligence of course: all things being equal, it is more pleasant to deal with intelligent people than with idiots. But I do not make intelligence the sole criterion of human value. I myself joined MENSA around 20 years ago. I left it very quickly, since the extremely intelligent people I met there were also mediocre. We live in a time which, for the first time in history, tends to privilege cognitive capacities alone. This climate facilitates the access of intelligent people who lack character to decision-making jobs. In the long run, it will make us dependent on machines (which already have, in many fields, cognitive powers greater than man’s).
Ludwig Klages represented all of European history as a slow rise of the prerogatives of the intellect (der Geist) to the detriment of those of sensibility and “heart” (die Seele). This critique of the intellect, which is found in continental Europe in a great number of “Right wing” authors, contains at least a share of truth. Georg Simmel, for his part, indeed showed how the diffusion of the money economy supported the prevalence of the strictly intellectual and cognitive functions over the emotive functions and solidarity. Such a description helps to understand the passage from the holist model of community (“culture”) to the individualistic model of society (“civilization”). It also helps us criticize the latter. Since Plato one ought to know that scholars should be especially distrusted in positions of power. Today we need strong spines more than big brains.
The implementation of positive eugenics encounters other obvious difficulties as well. The biological law of regression to the mean (the most intelligent tend statistically to have children less intelligent than they are, and the less intelligent tend to have children more intelligent than their parents) contradicts one of the principal postulates of the eugenic doctrine. Moreover, men in general react more to the beauty of women than to their intelligence.
The inevitable intervention of public authorities is also problematic. Simple incentives can only have a limited effectiveness; more authoritative measures entail social engineering, to which I am completely opposed.
We will see what happens with the Chinese eugenics program. Their ultra-K strategy implemented in a coercive way by the authorities frequently results in the selective abortion of girls and will lead in twenty years to a serious imbalance in the ratio between the two sexes. For now, I would prefer to live in Sicily, where people in general have character, rather than in Singapore, a true air-conditioned hell!
In his book Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, 3rd ed. (Port Huron, Mich.: The Charles Darwin Research Institute, 2000), J. Philippe Rushton drew up a list of a whole series of significant statistical differences between blacks, whites, and Asians, which reveals a continuum in which whites regularly occupy an intermediate position between Asians and blacks.
He cites, in particular, cranial capacity, the number of neurons in the brain, the results obtained by IQ tests, cultural achievements, the proportion of monozygotic twins per 1000 births, hormonal levels, sexual organs, the frequency of sexual relations, permissive attitudes, the rate of sexually transmitted diseases, aggressiveness, impulsiveness, self-image, sociability, the gestation period, motor development, the development of teeth and the skeleton, the median age of the first sexual relations, the median age of the first pregnancy, life expectancy, the stability of marriages, the propensity to obey the law, and mental health.
Are you in agreement with Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, for whom “Rushton’s work is not that of a crackpot or a bigot . . . it is plainly science” (The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life [New York: The Free Press, 1994], p. 643) or do you think, like Cavalli-Sforza and his collaborators, that “the classification of the races appeared a futile exercise for reasons that were already obvious for Darwin” (The History and Geography of Human Genes [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994])? Could Rushton’s work provide a scientific base to the “differentialist antiracism” of the New Right?
J. Philippe Rushton is certainly not “a crackpot or a bigot,” and those who t
hink he is deserve only contempt. The statistical correlations that he highlights are data that must be discussed calmly. The question is what conclusion to draw. The classification of races is one thing, their hierarchization quite another. For my part, I do not believe for an instant that there exists an overarching criterion that makes possible an absolute hierarchy of races. Any attempt to show that A is inferior to B amounts to saying that A is less B than B itself, which is merely a tautology.
Any criterion rests on a subjective choice. Rushton kept a certain number of criteria and set others aside. He says nothing, for example, about the color of the eyes, skin, and hair, which are the phenotypic traits by which the eye immediately distinguishes between the races. And in these three fields, Europeans are by no means “intermediate” compared to the Asians and the blacks. The same goes for many pathological factors or diseases, for which the “continuum” postulated by Rushton does not appear.
Among the criteria retained by Rushton, some are of a doubtful nature: the age of the onset of puberty or the first sexual relations dropped considerably in Europe during the last decades without its population changing “biologically.” “Sociability” is an extremely fuzzy concept, which does not have the same meaning in Norway and in Greece. And the great number of early maternities among English teenagers (white ones) is certainly not explained by their ethnic membership. As for the frequency of multiple births among African women, it is certainly an interesting datum—less interesting, however, in my opinion, than the comparison of the myths relating to twinhood among various cultures.
