Biopolitics

by Stefano Vaj

  Europe’s Faustian culture perhaps is not the last [among the “superior cultures” of the second man], but it is definitely the most powerful. […] And also the most tragic of them all. […] A will to power, that irradiates all the limits of time and space, whose means is the unbounded, the infinite, subjugates entire continents, and in the end embraces the entire globe with the forms of its traffic and its communications and transforms it with the violence of its operative energy and the prodigies of its technical processes.[193]

  Therefore, the human races and populations and cultures, if they carry on existing, will not be able to be anything other than wholly artificial – in an ulterior, more radical sense than the one already inherent in “natural culture” that we have seen is proper to man in general –: they could therefore exist only insofar, as Cavalli-Sforza emphasises, as they are directly and deliberately projected and established, on the basis of criteria that are not “rational,” but directly dependent upon the worldview, and of the emotional and aesthetic choice, of their creators.

  Such a possibility is very present also to proclaimed advocates of the end of history who are philosophically much better equipped than Cavalli-Sforza.

  Hence, it is an author of unquestionable lucidity like Jürgen Habermas who warns against what he regards as the “nightmare scenario” of a “genetic communitarianism,” in which different cultures could carry forward a “genetic self-optimisation of mankind in different directions, thereby ending up jeopardising the unity of human nature as a basis with respect to which all men have until now been able to understand and mutually recognise each other as members of the same moral community” (even if, in reality, what Habermas presents as the “natural” and traditional state is the one towards which, if any, the present-day world is tending, for the first time in history).[194]

  8 .The “eugenic temptation”

  The Zeit-Umbruch, the “fracture of history” that we are experiencing, with the alternatives that it imposes on man and on society today, first manifests as an obscure anxiety, and then as a possible response with the birth and spreading of the overhumanist historical tendency,[195] but becomes part of a more general awareness in the first half of the 20th century; and in that context it is undeniably interwoven to varying extents with the directly political expressions embodied, in different stages, by the eugenicist movement.

  In turn, such expressions find their way into the totalitarian revolutions of the period, and into their tendential aspirations to take upon themselves the identity and the “millenarian” future of the communities of reference (national, cultural and ethnic).[196] Also, there is no doubt in this sense that the national socialist theory and practice, while much less “revolutionary” than it claimed to be[197] represents a breaking point, which rapidly leads to a polarisation of the positions,[198] and partly to an occultation and repression of the whole question in the latter half of the 20th century.

  Besides, such elements are used time and again in bioluddite propaganda as the specific anathema against every possible consideration of these questions – especially through a ritual reference to the measures or positions of that era, conjured over half a century later as imaginary interlocutors in a contention between the Evil they exemplify and the humanist, egalitarian and anti-fascist Good, so as to paralyse, disqualify and render unmentionable in polite company any heterodox position whatsoever.[199]

  It is however true that the short-lived German national socialist regime involved itself with all the aspects that regarded the future of the population under its rule, making use of most of the tools known at the time: family medical history, marital guidance, selective abortion and sterilisation, maternal assistance, demographic and public health policy, allowing or refusing citizenship or immigration, euthanasia, and all other measures more generally related to the biological steering of a given community. Stated goals included the promotion or reinforcement of some biological traits, the rarefaction of others, the removal or counterbalancing of feared dysgenic effects (for example, the possible negative selection of traits such as courage or service-mindedness), and protecting and enhancing collective identity in directions deemed desirable.

  It is during the national socialist era, in 1940, that Konrad Lorenz wrote for instance (as was later reproached to the Nobel Laureate in Physiology and Medicine, and founding father of modern ethology): “It would be necessary, for the preservation of the race, to consider an even more severe elimination of people we regard as morally inferior than is the case today. […] We should – and we have the right to – entrust this to the best among us and commission them to carry out a selection which will decide upon the prosperity or annihilation of our people.”[200]

  And again: “In prehistoric times the selection founded on toughness, heroism, social usefulness was only made by external hostile factors. It is necessary that this rule be taken up again today by a human organisation, otherwise humanity, in the absence of selective factors, will be annihilated from the degeneration due to domestication.”[201] In the same sense, Othmar von Verschurer, director of the Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin, whose scientific prestige is unquestioned even by Jacquard who quotes him,[202] remarked in 1943: “the leader of the German Volksreich is the first statesman who has made the data of hereditary biology a guiding principle for the management of the nation.[203]

  The fascist position in general, and the national socialist in particular, remained of course quite empirical on these matters: various measures were debated, adopted, suspended or restored; ambitious programs of research were financed; and mixed positions traditionally seen as “rightwing” (such as the compulsory exclusion of undesirable deviancies, or the refusal to mobilise the female workforce even in a very advanced stage of the war, or the defence of the family) and “leftwing,” as when Hitler in Table Talk declares himself in favour of “free love,” when some ideologists speculate about the abolition, to demographic and eugenic ends, of monogamy after the war, or when the party officially defends the right, and duty, of German women to procreate children for the new Germany (the so-called Führerdienst) also outside wedlock – at the cost of stirring up the only case of public antifascist demonstration of the entire period, the rally organised in Monaco by the catholic White Rose.

  The racial question properly speaking is more complex, but definitely central in all variants of fascism. Since in his discourse to the party at the congress in Rome in 1921, Benito Mussolini declared: “I intend that fascism should be concerned with the problem of race. Fascists should mind the health of the race, with which history is made.”[204]

  The fascist concept of “race” is on the one hand treated like a perfectly empirical concept, and on the other – especially, but not only, in National Socialistcircles – is dealt with like a politico-religious myth that is useful to define an identity, that is in this perspective to choose roots to which to belong in the light of one’s intended future[205]. Of course, as ever, at the political level “the people” means something different from the “population” studied by the biologist or the demographer, in the same way as the nation in a political sense is different from the merely ethnographical concept, or class from the merely sociological concept.

  In this context, the fascist world usually makes a general reference to a European specificity and identity, assumed as much through its ultimate cultural origins (Roman beginnings, classicism, Celtic, Germanic and Indo-Aryan traditions) as through its biological substrate (precisely the europoid or “Aryan” ethnicity).[206]

  Secondly, National Socialism imagines, at a political level, a national, German community of reference and, more broadly at an ethno-cultural level, a Germanic one, which represents at the same time the subject and the object of the historical action it promotes.

  In the project that this subject embodies, the policies implemented by National Socialism then promote the protection and the development within the popular Germano-Germanic community of the “
Nordic” component (Aufnordung, “nordisation”), that is, of a series of genetic traits present in different degrees in the europoid race that defines a sub-race thereof,[207] and that are deemed desirable or “noble” for reasons of a basically aesthetic, emotional and cultural kind.[208]

  This coexists more or less paradoxically with a recognition of the other racial components present in the Germano-Germanic sphere (and more generally of the European race of which this one is a part), of their historical contribution to the shared identity, and of their full participation in the popular community – as moreover is visible the fact that the National Socialist ruling class itself represented a faithful cross-section of this community (including alpine, balkanic, mediterranean ingredients), nor have any of their exponents can have ever seriously believed that things were otherwise.[209]

  That this should have been the general frame of reference – beyond pretentions that the National Socialists themselves regarded as purely propagandistic – is confirmed also by the cultural humus from which the movement emerged. Hence Jünger in the Worker[210] speaks very precisely about a Wille zur Rassenbildung, “the will to create a race.”[211]

  Polemically, Jews are not regarded as part of the Aryan race by definition,[212] although it is obvious that members of the Jewish community of Western Europe are at least racial hybrids. And this for reasons that are essentially politico-cultural, that is, linked to the rejection that the ones belonging to the Jewish community would allegedly express with respect to what the National Socialists regard as the European identity, notwithstanding the proportion of genetic components that might be embodied in any single individual; that is, to the choice that such belonging implies in terms of “ethnocultural community of reference.”[213]

  Significantly enough, National Socialism does vice versa regards as “Aryan” and europoid, although equally or more mixed at a racial level than European Jews, at least part of the population of Northern India; and it has to recognise that the truly Nordic percentage of the Norwegian population is considerably higher than that within the frontiers of the Reich, or to consider the germanisation of European immigrants with desirable characteristics; but it would never dream of considering neither “Nordic,” nor even member of the community of the German people, a dolichocephalic Jew, with blue eyes, blond hair and a Grecian nose – Jew to whom, by the way, it is sometimes enough to have be it a single drop of “Jewish” blood, especially on the maternal side, to feel sufficiently connected to the lineage and identity of Abraham.[214]

  In the context of this programme, the restoration or the creation of a “pride of lineage” and of a “racial awareness” in the Germano-Germanic community, or in other respective communities of reference of the various European fascist movements, clearly represents a fundamental wedge, and these movements – in spite of the keen interest of some of their exponents in other cultures – openly encourage ethnocentrism.

  This lies at the root of the propaganda about one’s own respective “superiority,” which, in a relativist and anti-universalist context, should in fact be entirely resolved within the perspective of the community of belonging.

  This tension may explain why in spite of a generally high opinion of, and admiration for the Arab world (as much or more Semitic in its ethnic composition than the Jews!), or for the Japanese and oriental people in general, none of them had ever even considered that these people should, for instance, promote interbreeding with the European race (and culture), or consider the latter a “superior” model.

  This also explains why the Reich considers anti-Semitism – which is understood by the National Socialists to be a politico-racial problem of the whole “Aryan world” – as “exportable,” while it considers the orientations and projects relative to German racial “self-determination” on which it insists (precisely the “Nordic preference” expressed by the majority of German leaders at the time) to be merely matters internal to the German (and then Germanic) community.

  The theme of race is anyhow interpreted in different and variegated modes by various other fascist German movements, by various political and scientific circles of the regime itself, and by various fascist movements and regimes in other countries, so much so that present-day excessive generalisations and simplifications often appear totally arbitrary,[215] and are quickly abandoned whenever the “right” quotation is required to accuse any non-luddite position as “fascist.”

  However, it should once more be stressed that whenever a overhumanist influence is perceivable in the first half of the 20th century[216] allethno-racial and eugenic concerns – contrarily to what happened and still does in the American and Anglo-Saxon spheres – are declined in the intrinsically relativist perspective of a popular subjectivity and of a collective historical project whose goal it is to compete and assert itself with respect to other homologous perspectives and identities, rather than to deny them.

  Lastly, even in the fascist regimes, the biopolitical level is normally where – except of course as regards the “Jewish issue,” especially in war time[217] – the State entrusted with an essentially “educational,” rather than legislative, administrative or repressive, task.

  For instance, checking the family medical records of one’s intended partner is encouraged, but only in the case of SS members does their content influence to some extent one’s marital freedom. The campaign against smoking, at the time quite futuristic, does not translate into any form of prohibitionism. The “racial doctrine” (Rassenkunde) becomes a subject taught at school, but there is no differentiation of civic or political rights among citizens of the Reich on basis of the sub-race they belong to, something that would clearly have compromised the desired cohesion of the popular community; and in Germany such a differentiation is not even legally implemented with regard to demographic contributions, in contrast to ancient Rome (where the emancipation of women was connected to the birth of the third child) or to the more modest pressure exerted in this area by fascist Italy, in particular at the fiscal level with the so-called “tax on celibacy.”

  More subtly, another widespread idea was that, modifying dominant values and consequently the relative success of individuals inside the community (for example, in the shift of the relative social importance of accumulation of means of exchange, in the form of money, in favour of courage, sturdiness, loyalty, beauty, service-mindedness or fighting spirit), would end up influencing also the biological composition via a differential reproductive advantage of the favoured genetic components.

  If this outline takes little account of contradictions, ambiguities and deviations that are historically easy to document, mainstream anti-fascist propaganda on National Socialist eugenics and biopolitics is in many respects highly dubious.

  While a more in-depth analysis and criticism of the latter exceed the scope of this essay, an effort to try situating these stances in their historical context is required, not in order to find some unlikely justifications or mitigating circumstance that would absolve them, their condemnation being especially justified in a humanist perspective, but simply to better understand their goals, impact and legacy.

  In particular, some positions, that appeared plausible to people with very diverse political and philosophical orientations throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, are perceived today as “discredited” and “criminalised,” not so much because of any actual, intrinsic “intolerability” or “absurdity,” but because, and only because, of the link that has been established between them and National Socialism.

  In any event, the above-mentioned trends are part of a complex Zeitgeist concerning the creation of a “new man” who also reflects the “environmental” aspects of his surrounding, for example ecological, urbane, psychological, sanitary, social, educational etc., and among which the eugenic theme is but one ingredient.[218]

  In addition, in the biopolitical field, many themes can be interpreted in different ways, which the fascist regimes did not fail to exploit to both propaganda and tactical en
ds. The project of criminalising abortion and the propaganda linked to contraceptives in the Italian Criminal Code of the time (expressively subsumed under a section that makes explicit reference to the “health of the lineage”), are clearly consistent with a policy geared towards the demographic maintenance and growth of the community of reference, but that at the same time happens to satisfy traditional catholic positions, in which such practices are condemned precisely as an expression…of a “blasphemous” control of man over his own biology.

  Similarly, the use of sterilisation or of euthanasia to limit the perpetuation and propagation of supposedly dysgenic characteristics can also be defended and promoted in connection with considerations of a “humanitarian,” hedonist and fundamentally individualist kind (such as those advanced today by the Italian Radical Party).

  The perception itself of the matters discussed above is today so affected is by repression, falsification and diabolisation related to fascism that it becomes hard to retrace the history of some ideas, a history which might reserve to whoever is interested in its study it a few surprises. But the records of this history obviously still exist.

  In order to “denounce” the deep roots of some eugenic concepts, Jeremy Rifkin deliberately begins the chapter headed “A Eugenic Civilization” of The Biotech Century with a “shocking” quotation:

  Some day we will realise that the prime duty, the inescapable duty of the good citizen of the right type, is to leave his or her blood behind him in this world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type. The great problem of civilisation is to secure a relative increase of the valuable as compared with the less valuable or noxious elements in the population. […] The problem cannot be met unless we give full consideration to the immense influence of heredity. […] I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. Criminals should be sterilised and feeble-minded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them. […] The emphasis should be laid on getting desirable people to breed.