Heritage and Foundations

by Alain de Benoist

  To Live According to his Rhythm

  In this regard, Professor Hall denounces the traumatising nature of contemporary architectural achievements aimed at eliminating differentiation in the habitat. ‘With the anarchic urbanisation that is developing today’, he writes, ‘it is less the overcrowding that threatens us than it is the loss of our identity’.

  ‘He demolishes’, writes Françoise Choay in his preface, ‘the universalist pretension of the tradition of spatial planning derived from Fourier, and taken up by Gropius, Le Corbusier, and his disciples’.

  In the cities of tomorrow, man must be able to live according to his own pace or rhythm. And yet the optimum dimensions of lived or experienced space depend on the ‘intensity of relations’, a criterion that varies vastly from place to place. ‘There is therefore no universal urbanism’.

  ‘Because of our a-cultural bias’, Edward T. Hall concludes, ‘we believe only in the superficial differences between the peoples of this world. For this reason, we miss much of the richness which comes from knowing others’.

  The richness of the world is its diversity.

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  La dimension caché, as study by Edward T. Hall.437 Seuil, 253 pages.

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  What Edward T. Hall says about space in The Hidden Dimension, he also demonstrates about time in a second study entitled The Silent Language.438 Each culture, in effect, formalises and orders temporal spaces in a unique way. From this results a different perception of the notion of time, which is expressed, among other places, in the structure of language. (Here E. T. Hall converges with the observations of Benjamin Lee Whorf observations on the mental system revealed by the formation and development of different language families).

  He gives this example: ‘I remember an American agriculturalist who went to Egypt to teach modern agricultural methods to the Egyptian farmers. At one point in his work he asked his interpreter to ask a farmer how much he expected his field to yield that year. The farmer responded by becoming very excited and angry. In an obvious attempt to soften the reply the interpreter said, “He says he doesn’t know”. The American realised something had gone wrong, but he had no way of knowing what. Later I learned that the Arabs regard anyone who tries to look into the future as slightly insane. When the American asked him about his future yield, the Egyptian was highly insulted since he thought the American considered him crazy. To the Arab only God knows the future, and it is presumptuous even to talk about it’.

  E. T. Hall develops the idea that culture, which is intimately linked to social communication, is not a thing, but a set of things — which means that ‘there is no one basic unit or elementary particle, no single isolate for all cultures’. Likewise, there is no independent experience of culture that makes it possible to ‘calibrate’ it: experience is ‘something man projects on the outside world as he gains it in its culturally determined form’. The conclusion: ‘There is a principle of relativity in culture, just as there is in physics and mathematics’.

  Natural Law

  ‘A society’, Says Robert Ardrey, ‘is a group of unequal beings organised to meet common needs. In every species founded on sexual reproduction, the equality of individuals is a natural impossibility. Inequality must therefore be considered as the first law of social structures, whether in human societies or otherwise’.

  Citing Jefferson, according to whom ‘all men are created equal’, Henry Allers Moe, former director of the Guggenheim Foundation, said one evening in 1965:

  ‘There are not many absurd statements that have done as much harm as this one. Everyone knows it, but no one says it’.

  Robert Ardrey, sixty-nine years of age, says it. And even writes it. An American living in Rome, a dramatist (he is the author of Thunder Rock, a play that was performed in Paris as Tour d’Ivoire under the direction of Jean Mercure), a successful screenwriter and novelist (Khartoum), he abandoned literature in 1955, after a series of conversations with Professor Raymond Dart.

  Like L. S. B. Leakey and Robert Broom, Dart belongs to a generation of anthropologists and palaeontologists who have shown that the evolution of man ‘from some ancestral monkey from the forests was not what was believed in the time of Darwin’. In 1924, in the Transvaal, he discovered the remains of one of our ‘great predatory ancestors’: the African Australopithecus.

  This biped with a small brain but strong canines lived two or three million years ago. A carnivorous hunter, he used tools to slaughter his prey. He is one of the direct ascendants of the human branch: we are indeed the ‘children of Cain’.

  ‘With one or two exceptions’, says palaeontologist Alfred S. Romer in 1968, ‘all the specialists examining the question today believe that Australopithecines are the true ancestors of man’.

  Raymond Dart had already sustained the view twenty years ago (International Anthropological and Linguistics Review, 1, 1953, 201): man essentially distinguishes himself from other primates by the fact that he is first a hunter, and a large part of his physical and psychic peculiarities are explained by his predatory mode of life. This thesis has been confirmed by P. R. Thompson in a study published in the Journal of Human Evolution (4, 1975, 113) which furnishes ‘irrefutable proofs of the convergence of human behaviour with carnivorous behaviour’.

  Thompson’s study concerns fifteen species of primates and eleven species of the most well-known carnivores, and distinguishes seven distinct behavioural traits in which the two categories oppose. It shows that the behaviour of man is identical to that of carnivores and different from that of primates on six points: sharing of food within the social group, storing food, occasional cannibalism, killing more prey than necessary (surplus killing), aggression against non-prey species, and the way of feeding the young. (The seventh point concerns the defence of the group, which, in man as in other primates, is principally assured by males; Thompson sees this as a consequence of the division of labour).

  ‘The union of the carnivore and the big brain’, states Ardrey, ‘there lies the origin of man’. Our oldest ancestor was a killer. His murderous ways are the most certain in our heritage. Man is not descended from a fallen angel, but from an evolved anthropoid. He is an animal of prey.

  Immediately after his meeting with Dart, Robert Ardrey, who remembers having studied natural science in Chicago, returned to his first vocation. He obtained some grants and embarked for Africa. In 1961, in African Genesis (French title: Les enfants de Caïn, ‘The Children of Cain’, Stock, 1963) he took up the conclusion of Raymond Dart again, but this time deepened them.

  The question that he poses is this: ‘What have we inherited from our hunter ancestor?’.

  The answer imposes itself: If the first hominids are not peaceful baboons, but carnivorous killers, then Rousseau, Marx, and Freud are wrong. ‘And with them’, writes Ardrey, ‘all those who believe in man’s first innocence, in his innate lack of aggression, who deny that violence forms part of our nature, and who believe that it is solely determined by the contingencies of the environment’.

  A second book was published in 1966. The Territorial Imperative (Le territoire, Stock, 1968). Ardrey underscores the significance, in most societies, of the ‘territorial impulse’.

  As soon as an individual enters the age of adulthood, he explains, he begins to ‘establish himself’, to ‘settle down’. He demarcates his zone of influence, marks his borders, and creates his routines. In short, he takes possession of a territory, that is to say, of part of his specific environment.

  The quicker this space is demarcated, the quicker he will establish normal social relations — provided that the territories are well differentiated. In the United States, Gerald B. Suttles (The Social Order of the Slum) and Edward T. Hall (The Hidden Dimension) have shown that delinquency increases in direct relation to the anonymity of the large concrete hives.

  A ‘territorial instinct’ therefore exists, which is essentially defensive. ‘If we defend our homeland and our country’, writes Robert Ardrey, ‘it is
for biological reasons — not because we choose to do it, but because we must’.

  From the outset, African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative knew a smashing success.

  In The Social Contract, Ardrey pushes his reasoning to its ultimate consequences. Referring principally to Konrad Lorenz, he not only shows, in a lively and colorful style, that ‘aggression is the main guarantee of survival’, he also attacks the egalitarian myth.

  Sociologists and politicians have long pointed out that egalitarian systems, far from conforming to societies that are fundamentally homogeneous, conserve (and even occasionally resurrect) the inequalities that they denounce. Hence the idea that these inequalities are not due to the influence of the ‘environment’ or to ‘class relations’, but that they correspond, in the social field, to an inequality in the distribution of aptitudes.

  ‘Diversity,’ explains Ardrey, ‘is the very substance of evolution, for it is from the diversity of beings that natural selection makes its choice’.

  He adds: ‘The question of inequality can be displaced, but there was a time, the Victorian era, when sexuality was also displaced. If we have transferred the taboo of sexuality to its consequences, perhaps this is but an evolution of the Puritan spirit’.

  The Errors of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  One afternoon in New York, Robert Ardrey was feeding the birds. It is cold, the ground is covered with snow. Half a dozen titmice fly around, but they do not approach, even though they are probably hungry. Suddenly, a seventh titmouse appears and alights upon the edge of the plate. All the others then join it. The ‘alpha’ has arrived.

  In the farmyard, ‘each chicken has the right to peck those who are inferior to it in the hierarchy, but these have no right to return the favor’. Such ‘phenomena of domination’ have been observed among birds (Eliot Howard, then Lorenz), fish, and reptiles (G. K. Noble), as well as among primates (Carpenter).

  Every society thus has its born leaders. They are the alphas. They play the simultaneous role of chiefs, sentinels, and guardians.

  Contra Freud, the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler argued that the will to power, not sexuality, governs behavior. ‘His conclusions’, assures Ardrey, ‘are now confirmed by the study of the natural world of which man is a part’.

  The French edition of Ardrey’s book is entitled La loi naturelle (Natural Law), but the English original is called The Social Contract. Here, the celebrated Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1754),439 by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is in fact revised and corrected.

  A century before Darwin, Rousseau understood that man is rooted in nature. But his ‘nature’ resembles the green paradise of infantile love. It is an ideal nature, which does not take into account either the realities of life or what is specifically human in man. It is also the projection, into an imaginary past, of a moralising point of view: what society should be according to Rousseau. In L’Emile he writes: ‘Nature has made man happy and good, but society makes him depraved and miserable’. It therefore inaugurates what Robert Ardrey calls ‘the era of the alibi’. (‘If I fail in my undertakings, it is the fault of others’). And rejoining the use, by Judeo-Christianity, of ‘resentment’ as a driver of morality — and as a formative principle of American ‘good conscience’ (cf. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morality).

  The German philosopher Ernst Cassirer would remark: ‘All contemporary social struggles have the same origin. They proceed from the consciousness of the responsibility of society, which Rousseau was the first to have and which he bequeathed to posterity’.

  Is it really society that corrupts man, or man that corrupts society?

  The Foundations of a New Social Contract

  According to Robert Ardrey, many of the disappointments that man has encountered are explained by his refusal to admit the existence of a ‘natural law’ applying to his innate relationship to living systems taken in their entirety. From this emerges his dream of an ‘impossible philosophy’. Because he tends to master the universe, man believes he can make a clean slate of the past. But to master the world is not to change it. The existence of supersonic aircraft does not negate the laws of gravity.

  ‘We have tried to dominate nature as if we ourselves were not a part of this nature. And we have pursued the dream of human equality as men of centuries past pursued the Holy Grail’.

  One consequence, among many others: ‘We are still waiting for the day when the scientist will be free to explore racial differences in total freedom without having his life threatened’.

  Professor Sol Tax, from the University of Chicago, has written: ‘We are egalitarian, not because we can prove the existence of absolute equality, but because we are certain that the differences that may exist within vast populations are irrelevant on the plane of the politics of nations. This conviction proceeds from our knowledge, but it equally satisfies us as citizens of the world’.

  Comments Robert Ardrey: ‘These remarks are not those of a free man. Nor do they say what the discipline of a free science should be’.

  What we lack most today is an ‘evolutionary philosophy’. The society of equals is a utopia. But the just society, where everyone has their chances at the beginning, is an accessible goal.

  ‘The just society as I see it’, writes Robert Ardrey, ‘is a society in which a sufficient order protects the members, whatever the diversity of their gifts, while a sufficient disorder offers each individual every opportunity to develop these genetic gifts’.

  This balance between order and disorder, unity and diversity, constitutes the new ‘social contract’ that he intends to propose.

  ‘We are not gods, and Jean-Jacques was right. We are a part of nature, he said so, too. But the fundamental difference between my social contract and Rousseau’s lies in the fact that his was an agreement between fallen angels, while mine is between evolved apes’.

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  La loi naturelle, a study by Robert Ardrey.440 Stock, 447 pages, 26 Francs.

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  The classification of the Australopithecus continues to be the subject of a certain number of debates. A new diagnosis has been proposed by M. H. Wolpoff and C. O. Lovejoy in the Journal of Human Evolution (4, 1975, 275). It incorporates the genera ‘Paranthropus’, ‘Plesianthropus’, ‘Meganthropus’, ‘Zinjanthropus’, and so on. Its authors defend the thesis (which they had already previously revealed) of a single line of African Plio-Pleistocene hominids. In this thesis, there is continuity and direct filiation between Homo africanus (Australopithecus), Homo erectus, and Homo sapiens. In addition, the two Australopithecus morphologies (slender and robust) are grouped together: we only distinguish morphotypes due to individual variations (and without doubt also to sexual dimorphism).

  According to other orders, by contrast, only the ‘slender’ Australopithecus would be placed among the ancestors of man: the ‘robust’ Australopithecus would constitute a distinct branch corresponding to the Paranthropus. This is the thesis sustained by J. T. Robinson, in Early Hominid Posture and Locomotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).

  Some controversies have also resulted in Homo habilis, a taxon created in 1964, which some consider to be a simple extension of the ‘slender’ Australopithecus morphology.

  In March 1976, Robert Ardrey published a new book entitled The Hunting Peoples (New York: Atheneum). It is an ethological approach to the phenomenon of the primitive hunter. A French translation is anticipated.

  Is Man Only an Animal?

  What is man’s place in nature? Is man an animal? If so, is he nothing else?

  For centuries, anthropomorphism has governed our minds. Under the influence of beliefs and dogmas. It seemed self-evident that man, ‘king of creation’, was also the centre. His ‘nature’ was said to be radically distinct from that of other living beings.

  It was also self-evident that the sun and the stars revolved around the Earth. In his City of God (XVI, 9), St. Augustine deduces the impossibility of the antipod
es from the fact that ‘on the day of Judgment, the men who would be on the other side of the Earth could not see the Lord descending through the air’.

  This vision of the world collapsed on 24 May 1542.

  On that day, the German astronomer Nicolas Copernicus published a work entitled De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. Herein he resurrected the ancient theory of Aristarchus of Samos (270 BC), who first sensed that the Earth and the other planets of our system revolve around the sun.

  On 5 March 1616, the Sacred Congregation of the Index suspended Copernicus’s book. But it was already too late. The libido sciendi,441 which the Fathers of the Church and the Doctors of the Middle Ages had expressly condemned, resumed its rights.

  First speculative and theoretical, the research became operative and descriptive. Leonardo da Vinci (1552–1619) declares: ‘The interpreter of the Nature’s artifices is experience’.

  Returning in its turn to the monistic conception of the first physicists of Ionia, Galileo (1561–1643) establishes the physical reality of heliocentrism: it is now the Earth that revolves around the sun. Ruining the cosmology of Aristotle, it renders the work of Newton and his successors possible. ‘For the closed and finite world of the ancients and the Scholastics, he substitutes the open and infinite world which enthuses Giordano Bruno and scares Pascal’ (Louis Rougier).

  The German Kepler (1571–1630) demonstrates that the planets describe ellipses, and that they do not move uniformly in their orbits. Henceforth, the Earth is only one planet among others. The world becomes an infinite universe, ‘whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere’. In the eighteenth century, Fontenelle, the French philosopher, would hold forth on the ‘plurality of worlds’.