In Favour of an Aristocracy
The law of propagation itself imposes three obligations upon people: ‘The first is that of having children, and children of superior quality at that, thanks to the implementation of eugenic principles. The next is that of raising those children in a manner that enables their hereditary potentialities to enjoy optimal development. The final obligation is that of acquiring and transmitting to our children the moral and intellectual qualities that are necessary for a successful social life; because the future of a race, its happiness and misery all depend on the level of its families and community’.
Carrel explains that the purpose of eugenics is not to eliminate, but to promote. By increasing the quality of the population, it strives to achieve the common good. He states: ‘It is necessary to make a choice. The pointlessness of our efforts to ameliorate low-quality individuals is now obvious. It is far more worthwhile an endeavour to foster the growth of those characterised by higher quality. The crowd always profits from the ideas and inventions of the elite, as well as from the institutions that the latter founds. We must relinquish the dangerous notion of impeding the strong, raising the weak and thus allowing the mediocre to proliferate. […] Voluntary eugenics would not only lead to the production of stronger individuals, but also to the existence of families in which resistance, intelligence and courage would become hereditary. These families would constitute an aristocracy from which elite men would be likely to stem. And the eugenic establishment of a hereditary biological aristocracy would embody a crucial phase on the path that leads towards solving our greatest contemporary problems’.
As World War II drew nearer, Alexis Carrel was already an honorary member of both the Soviet Academy of Science and the Academy of Pontifical Sciences. He was, however, no prophet in his own country.
He returned to France in 1941, journeying through Spain along the way. On the 16th of April, he was granted an audience by Pétain.347 On the 5th of December, the Journal officiel published a legal text that allowed for the establishment of a Foundation for the Study of Human Issues. Its actual creation would be decided on the 17th November, with Alexis Carrel appointed as its regent.
The purpose of the Foundation was to ‘study every aspect of the measures that would enable us to safeguard, improve and develop the French population in all of its activities’. It was particularly expected to ‘find all practical solutions and conduct all necessary demonstrations in order to improve the population’s physiological, mental and social state’.
So as to achieve this, Carrel surrounds himself with young doctors that espouse original ideas: Jean Sutter, the future leader of the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED) and a man who authored a book entitled Eugenics (PUF, 1950), Dujarric de la Rivière, Ménétrier, Gessain, and many others.
In a matter of two years, the heads of the Foundation establish four departments and sixteen teams that specialise in studying natality issues, lineage biology, the development of childhood, the habitat, rural economy, biotypology, nutrition, and so on. They also proceed to establish a laboratory of biochemical research, a statistical and sampling centre, a psychophysiological institute, a Mother and Child Centre, and a synthesis centre.
The Age of ‘Civilised Men’
From 1935 onwards, the death rate in France outweighed the number of births. In the space of seven years, the French population had decreased by approximately 580,000 individuals. The Foundation fought against the plummeting birth rate and fostered the drafting of a new legislation. The Foundation’s Notebooks (Issue number 1, PUF, 1943) stated: ‘The number of children in France is insufficient. Generally speaking, the same thing applies to their quality. It is, however, pointless to increase the natality rate as long as population growth is accomplished through the fecundity of flawed elements. In their current form, family benefits fall very short of encouraging the propagation of superior classes’.
The ‘Carrel Foundation’ enabled professional educators and specialists to familiarise themselves with the latest developments in the sphere of biotypology. It also taught doctors how to ‘prevent rather than cure and to consider workshop visits more useful than any hours spent at the factory dispensary’.
Furthermore, the Foundation made sports more accessible in industrial companies, conducted studies into psychological fatigue (an unprecedented event in France itself) and saw to the betterment of working conditions, hygiene, and the habitat. It also carried out a population survey.
All this activity was based upon a creed, one that Doctor Soupault explained in the following manner: ‘The Foundation understands the difference between lifeless and thinking matter, but it also knows that consciousness, which is inseparable from matter itself, will respond to the perfecting of its organic substratum with an improvement of quality. Last but not least, the Foundation is well aware of the fact that throughout the evolution of lifeforms, there has been a constant parallelism between the development of the mind and the structural and functional progress of organs, and particularly that of central nervous systems’.
Alexis Carrel himself specified the basic factual aspects characterising the task that was to be accomplished: ‘Human science must lead to some kind of anthropotechnics. And the latter shall affect mankind in the same fashion that technology has impacted aeroplanes. One day, perhaps, it will design individuals whose superiority to us will equal that of modern aircraft compared to the biplane once flown by the Wright brothers. The Foundation turns out to be the very first scientific institution dedicated specifically to the designing of civilised men’.
In Jour après jour,348 he outlined a certain programme: ‘It is necessary to establish new relations between men; to replace ancient ideologies with scientific notions of life; to harmoniously develop every individual’s hereditary potentialities; to abolish social classes and replace them with biological ones, removing democracy and enthroning biocracy; and to enable men to behave rationally, in a display of fraternity embodying the very law of love. Life’s ultimate purpose, after all, does not lie in personal profit’.
This programme would, however, never be implemented, as it was passion that held sway at the time. Carrel found himself caught in the turmoil of Liberation. On 21st August, 1944, at the behest of doctor Milliez349 and professor Pasteur Vallery-Radot (who had been appointed Secretary General of Health), he was suspended from all duties. Despite the fact that it had kept its distance from all political activity, the Foundation was simply dissolved, superseded by the INED (The National Institute of Demographic Studies).
A few months later, Alexis Carrel is struck down by a heart attack, the second in a matter of months. He passes away on 4th November, 1944; not a single official representative attends his funeral.
The Unity of All Living Beings
Although the entire modern vascular surgery contained in Carrel’s works was still in an embryonic state, we are indebted to him for all recent organ transplants. As a moralist, however, he garnered less attention.
Dean Jean Lépine350 had this to say about Carrel’s Man, the Unknown: ‘It is simultaneously an homage to science, an affirmation of the unknown, and a demonstration of the very unity of living beings, which cannot be reduced to a specific material principle or spiritual unity’.
Reverend Father J. T. Durkin notes: ‘Carrel’s passion lay in attaining novel ideas using novel means. How strange it is to realise that it was his deliberate refusal to accept traditional thinking that drove the contemporary intellectual vanguard to nail him to the wall’.
Doctor Soupault concludes that ‘Carrel belonged to the elite, in the sense that he saw what most others did not, attempted to highlight some of our modern society’s greatest 20th-century affinities, perceived the dangers that threatened his endeavours, and specified the various approaches that would allow us to find urgent solutions. It would not be outrageous to classify him as a prophet. His strength, however, turned out to be insufficient, and our merciless destiny is now leading us straight in
to the dark depths that aroused so much fear in him’.
***
Alexis Carrel, an essay by Robert Soupault, Les Sept couleurs, (11 Saint-Martin Street, 75004, Paris, France), 300 pages.
***
Carrel’s first English biography was published in 1975 in the United States and entitled Alexis Carrel, Visionary Surgeon (Charles C. Thomas, Springfield). The book was authored by W. S. Edwards, a cardiovascular surgeon who collaborated with Carrel from 1930 to 1941, and his son P. S. Edwards, a specialist in French political issues. The biography owes a great deal to Doctor Soupault’s book, as well as to Carrel’s American friends (particularly Anne and Charles Lindbergh). It also comprises details regarding Carrel’s experience at the Rockefeller Institute.
The two books written by Mr Jean-Jacques Antier entitled Alexis Carrel (Wesmael-Charlier, 1970) and Carrel, the Unknown (SOS, 1974) focus entirely on certain spiritual aspects.
The content of the lecture given by Carrel in 1942, entitled La construction des hommes civilisés351 has been translated into Italian as Patologia della civiltà moderna (Giovanni Volpe, Rome, 1974).
Debates
The Religious Question
Does God Exist?
‘The Good Lord is a small and entirely blue fellow that smokes his pipe by the fire’: such words can be found in a nursery rhyme born of the imagination of Mr Pierre Gripari352 and included in his book entitled Diable, Dieu et autres comptes de menterie353 (Table Ronde, 1965).
It is obviously not on the topic of this Sulpician ancestor, who still retains Jupiter’s and Odin’s beard, that Mr Christian Chabanis set out to converse with twenty supposed atheists (Dieu existe-t-il? Non, répondent…).354
In its gruelling effort to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy — which had long been condemned by the Church — with the teachings of the faith that had been specified by the Church Fathers and the councils, Thomism contributed to defining a certain number of ‘proofs of the existence of God’. Unlike Saint Augustin, Saint Thomas deemed these to be essential, convinced that it was necessary ‘to understand in order to believe’, and not ‘to believe in order to understand’. One thus attained proof through primary or efficient cause, and evidence by means of eternal truths, the contingency of creatures, the apparent finality of our state of affairs, etc. It was from this effort to combine faith with reason that scholastics saw the light of day.
Feeling uneasy about the argument of ‘primary causes’, Voltaire355 made the following confession during the 18th century: ‘The universe is a source of disconcertion to me, for I cannot even consider the notion that this clock could function without the presence of a clockmaker’.
Nowadays, however, Christians are less sure of themselves. Some theologians, not all of whom are ‘revolutionary’, believe that the desire to ‘prove’ something comprises an element that contradicts the very nature of faith: they say that a ‘provable’ God would no longer be God. And they are not mistaken: since human intelligence can only gain knowledge through sensory experience and abstract and innate conceptions that vary in relation to both time and place, it could never access, solely through the recourses of our human understanding, anything which, by definition, exceeds its capacities.
On their part, rationalists state that it is up to believers to prove the soundness of their own convictions and that they themselves are not required to ‘demonstrate the contrary to be true’ since, based on proper logic, one could not ‘demonstrate’ what does not actually exist (or what one considers to be non-existent). In most cases, they abide by the refutations presented by Bertrand Russell in Why I Am Not a Christian (Pauvert, 1960).
When questioned by Mr Chabanis,356 Eugène Ionesco357 declared: ‘Atheism is often a linguistic misunderstanding’. In La métaphysique et le langage,358 a work that was originally published in 1960 and then reedited in 1973, philosopher Louis Rougier expresses the same view with regard to metaphysics.
In the West, metaphysics, meaning the ‘science of Being as such’, is based upon Aristotle’s ‘theory of categories’. Linguist Emile Benveniste has established the fact that it is a transposition of categories specific to the Greek language. And yet, as remarked by professor Rougier, the latter substantified the verb ‘be’: it thus ‘bore within it a latent sort of metaphysics’. ‘One might even wonder whether the very structure, syntax and semantics of language do not actually condition the thinking of various ethnic groups that correspond to distinct linguistic families’, he adds.
Wearing a turtleneck jumper and displaying black hair and thick eyebrows, Mr Christian Chabanis, the thirty-nine-year-old author of an essay on Gustave Thibon, proudly declares himself to be a believer.
He has chosen various personalities to act as his interlocutors, personalities that he groups, quite arbitrarily, into series: scientists (Alfred Kastler, Jean Rostand, Pierre Debray-Ritzen, François Jacob, etc.); politicians (Raymond Aron, Jacques Duclos, Alfred Grosser, Daniel Guérin); and writers and moralists (Roger Garaudy, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Vilar, etc.), in addition to a few ‘sociological’ personalities.
When reading the study that he has conducted, it becomes evident that the age of ‘wild anticlericalism’ and the Combes sheets has indeed expired.359 On each side of the microphone, one desires to be open to both others and dialogues.
An Ever-Reopening Wound
In the age of Léo Taxil360 and congregation inventories, being an ‘atheist’ was synonymous with belonging to the ‘Left’ or the ‘extreme Left’. This, too, has now changed. The movement of ideas, the rise of Christian progressivism and Rome’s novel orientations have all left their impacts. One now encounters ‘Right-oriented atheists’, just as one meets ‘Left-oriented Christians’. Georges Elgozy, Raymond Aron, Debray-Ritzen and Ionesco thus find themselves face-to-face with Garaudy, Guérin, Edgar Morin and Duclos. — ‘My anti-Sovietism is an anticlericalism’, Raymond Aron declares. ‘It rises up against a clericalism that is all the more despicable for being founded upon the worship of a social regime’. — ‘I believe that, within the Church, one expects the unavoidable advent of socialism to come to pass and that many people have been preparing themselves for a coexistence with it. Well, we are going to coexist very peacefully indeed’, says Jacques Duclos.
Incidentally, ‘there are communists who believe in God and have their children baptised’. According to an IFOP poll conducted between 16th — 21st December, 1972, the ‘religion-less’ represent a mere 24% of all Communist Party members.361
The reading experience, however, fails to quench the reader’s hunger. What accounts for this fact is, first of all, that Mr Chabanis is a little too fond of hearing himself speak. His ‘interviews’ are, in fact, dialogues in which the interviewer never willingly takes a backseat to the interviewee, sometimes going as far as to reserve himself the right to have the last word.
On the other hand, the ‘atheists’ being interviewed are only semi-atheistic: for various reasons, almost all of them insist on tempering their positions. Alfred Kastler admits finding it difficult to imagine the world without any purpose to it. Jean Vilar sympathises with the notion of a ‘revolutionary’ Christ. Alfred Grosser, a professor of political sciences, has arranged for his children to be given a Christian education. Roger Garaudy intends to ‘experience history from a resurrectional perspective’. As for Georges Elgozy, he vacillates between charity and faith.
In Jean Rostand’s case, atheism is ‘raw’: it represents an ‘ever-reopening wound’. And if anarchist Daniel Guérin quotes Blanqui (‘No God, no masters’), he does so in order to correct the latter: ‘What matters today is our struggle against masters’.
Left-oriented sociologist Edgar Morin (author of La Brèche)362 declares himself to be a ‘neo-atheist’. Above all, however, he reproaches Christianity for not being Christian enough, apparently preaching the notion that all is love — just like the Jesus people who inhabit the California that he is familiar with.
The ranks of serene ‘
interviewees’ are dominated by the opinions of psychiatrist Pierre Debray-Ritzen (a man who has penned La scolastique freudienne363 ) and those of biologist François Jacob (La logique du vivant).364 — ‘My mind is constantly burdened by doubt’, declares François Jacob. ‘Not in a religious sense, however. I have experienced some rather unpleasant things throughout my existence, such as being on the receiving end of a spray of fragments during the war, fragments that came close to ending my life there and then; still, at no time did the issue arise. Not for a single instant was I overcome by the idea that I would be returning to nothingness and that God could get me out of this tight spot’.
What professor Debray-Ritzen has retained from his Catholic education is a foolish memory: he has, above all else, absorbed the ritualistic aspect, the celebrations, the lights; a ‘wondrous’ world of strictly pagan origin that combines with that of childhood. Metaphysics, by contrast, ventures beyond such things, for sheer ideas are repulsive to it. A disciple of both Koestler365 and Claude Bernard, it is the experimental method that he holds dearest. — ‘In this age of ours, anyone who would declare himself to be the Son of God would immediately be taken away by the men in white!’ he states.
In the end, Mr Chabanis only gave the floor to personalities whose opinions, even when taken as a whole, are miles away from mirroring the exact ‘profile’ of contemporary atheism in all of its complexity. For he has failed to interview traditional rationalists (Jacques Monod, Alexandre Dauvilliers, Evry Schatzman, Georges Ory), the contributors and writers at Raison présente and La pensée, the advocates of logical empiricism (Louis Rougier), and those who contest the Christian message in the name of their own philosophy of life (Nietzsche, Spengler) or the values of classical antiquity. Hence the lingering impression of a more or less rigged debate.
Systems and Debates Page 19
