Grégoire Canlorbe

Grégoire Canlorbe

A few considerations on Marxian theory—economics and ontology

A few considerations on Marxian theory—economics and ontology

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The Marxian thought has at least an economic component and one ontological. In these few lines, I intend to address the exploitation topic in Marxian economics. As well as the following topics of Marxian ontology: the driving role of contradiction in human cultural evolution; the emerging forms of matter; and the reification within commodities.

The Marxian theory of exploitation: an assessment of the Austrian response

  The Marxian conception of exploitation in capitalism conceives of the latter as the appropriation—within entrepreneurial profit—of a non-remunerated portion of the wage earner’s daily working time. The Austrian response to the Marxian conception notably consisted of highlighting the complementarity of the respective temporal preferences on the part of workers (preferring a smaller but quicker remuneration over a more tardy but greater one) and entrepreneurial capitalists (preferring the latter over the former). It also consisted of underlining the adjustment role which freely determined equilibrium prices operate (via the occasioned losses and profits), Friedrich A. von Hayek thus speaking of Karl Marx’s alleged inability to apprehend “the signal-function of prices through which people [including entrepreneurs] are informed what they ought to do” by reason of “his labor theory of value.” Namely his theory that selling prices, at least in the long run, are fixed by production costs—and the alleged objective value of goods by the incorporated quantity of abstract labor. It turns out that neither the complementarity of temporal preferences nor the adjustment role of equilibrium prices (in the direction of the long-run equilibrium, in which each factor finds itself to be optimally allocated) are actually inconsistent with the Marxian conception of exploitation.

  The Marxian argument can be put as follows. Like any commodity, labor power is sold (at least in the context of the long-term equilibrium, i.e., the equilibrium in the presence of a completed, henceforth optimal allocation of capital) at its cost of production, therefore the employee’s living cost. In the long-run equilibrium, the entrepreneurial profit strictly appropriates the remuneration of the margin between the employee’s total working time and the working time strictly required to cover the employee’s living costs; that said, when economy does not find itself in the long-run equilibrium, salary and entrepreneurial profit will both oscillate around a level strictly equal to the production cost. Hans Hermann Hoppe’s answer (inspired by Eugen Böhm Ritter von Bawerk) can be put as follows. According to Hoppe, Marx’s analysis observes the selling price of any produced good is (at least when demand is properly anticipated) greater than the wages paid to the workers involved in the production of that good; therefore the paid wages only cover the purchase of goods requiring fewer hours of work than those goods the wage earners help to manufacture. Yet there is a complementarity of time preferences between the employee (who prefers a lower and faster remuneration to one more delayed and higher) and the entrepreneur (who prefers the latter to the former); it follows the selling price’s superiority, besides allowing for entrepreneurial remuneration higher than wage bill, supposes convergent interests in the wage earner and the entrepreneur.

  Actually Marx’s argument turns out to be misunderstood by Hoppe—and rigorously unaffected by the complementary of time preferences. The exploitation phenomenon Marx describes does not lie in the difference between immediate salaries and postponed entrepreneurial remunerations, what is only a symptom of the aforesaid exploitation. Instead it lies in the furnishing of a salary which, instead of covering the whole daily working time (as it formally seems to do), strictly remunerates the working hours needed to cover the workforce’s subsistence costs. Marx believes that incomplete remuneration to be at the origin of the subsistence—in the long-run equilibrium—of the margin between the selling price of goods and the remuneration of production factors, that margin allowing entrepreneurs to grant themselves a remuneration greater than the distributed wages.

  As for the coordination of production factors, Marx utterly recognizes the adjustment to be spurred by short-run fluctuations in the rate of entrepreneurial profit (above and below its long-run level strictly corresponding to unpaid, surplus labor time); and by the concomitant gradual equalization between production costs and the selling price of commodities—including the labor power, whose remuneration is thus rendered equal to its subsistence costs in the long run. Not only does the labor theory of value (such as understood by Marx and before him David Ricardo) claim the fixation of selling prices by production costs to occur only in the long-run equilibrium’s context; but the labor theory of value itself does not occupy the center of Marx’s political economy. The latter is really articulated around the notion of commodity fetishism: as pointed out by Soviet Marxian economist Isaak Illich Rubin.

The flaws of the Marxian theory of exploitation

  Despite the flaws of the Austrian criticism, Marx’s approach to exploitation remains wrong. Let us start with recalling the sense of the notion of “abstract working time” in Marxian economics: abstract working time boils down to working time conceived independently of the physical or mental effort associated with the considered task. Even assuming the alleged correspondence between abstract working time and (the long-term level of) exchange value, i.e., selling price, the Marxian elucidation of entrepreneurial profit as the margin (between the exchange value of a given good and the remuneration of the involved production factors) allowed by the payment to the workforce of a wage limited to strictly covering the aforesaid workforce’s subsistence costs is quite unsatisfactory.

  The invoked argument is the exchange value of all goods (including labor power) revolves around a long-term level strictly equivalent to the exchange value of the incorporated abstract working time—and therefore strictly equivalent to the production costs of the aforesaid goods, what means the workforce’s subsistence costs in the case of labor power. Hence—according to Marx—the granted wages in the long-run equilibrium actually leave unpaid a whole part of the daily working time by wage earners. The equalization (in the long-run equilibrium) between the workforce’s subsistence costs and the workforce’s remuneration does not imply that the actual working time on the part of a wage earner is partially remunerated. Instead it implies that in the long-term equilibrium, the one established once the allocation of capital in the various branches of industry—given a certain state of economic conditions, from preferences on the part of consumers and investors to technology and demography—has reached its completion, the correct, total remuneration for a wage earner’s complete performance is then fixed at a subsistence level.

  It also implies entrepreneurial income is nullified at the long-term equilibrium, in which there is nothing left for the entrepreneur once the factors of production have been wholly remunerated. Therefore entrepreneurial profit can only exist within the framework of the process of capital allocation—with the aforesaid profit remunerating the speed (and the accuracy) of the allocation of production factors in anticipation of jointly mobile and uncertain demand. Austrian economics, especially Mises and Kirzner, extensively deals with the process through which the entrepreneur—when earning its profit—adjusts the daily-generated equilibrium prices in the direction of the long-run equilibrium: in which the allocation of production factors is henceforth achieved and optimized; and in which each selling price is henceforth equal to the production costs.

  The Austrian approach to equilibrium prices (and therefore the law of supply and demand) and their gradual entrepreneurial adjustment is sometimes praised for its purported realism. Yet the law of supply and demand such as understood in Austrian economics (but also in neoclassicism) is hardly realist. It claims, indeed, that any subjectively homogeneous good is sold at a unique price which happens to coincide with the intersection of supply and demand curves; but such claims makes sense only in the framework of an auction market in which, indeed, an auctioneer may gather the different supply and demand propositions and determine the equilibrium price. Besides, the Austrian conception of entrepreneurship applies only in the case of those of profit opportunities which are preexisting (and more or less manifested), while a number of entrepreneurs in the real world do not earn a profit through adjusting (towards the long-run equilibrium) the allocation of capital on the basis of preexistent profit opportunities, but through inventing new profit opportunities. What results into the apparition of a new long-run direction for the economy, i.e., the breaking of the previously scheduled long-run equilibrium for the benefit of the economy’s re-direction towards a new long-run equilibrium.

A word about the partnership of opposites in cosmic evolution

  The Marxian thought is also one ontological (besides its economic, political considerations). Marxian ontology stresses the driving role of contradiction in human cultural evolution—more precisely, the evolution of the emergent forms of matter in the successive human cultures. Before looking more closely at the Marxian approach to contradiction in human evolution, let us turn to an example of the partnership between opposites in the cosmos. In addition to his unfortunate exclusively determinist view of human history, Marx precisely failed to notice the harmonic, collaborative character of opposites in the course of human cultural evolution—a harmonic character that, indeed, a tearing, conflictual character can accompany sometimes.

  The concept of communication, generally defined in terms of consciousness, is an eminent example of a notion whose definition must be updated in view of a sharper distinction between those qualities of its object—the particular genre of things it subsumes—which are necessary and those which are contingent. Conscious communication only comes as a modality of communication, so that the conscious character of a given conscious communication in the cosmos comes as a contingent (rather than necessary, constitutive) character of the genre of things called communication. Communication should be redefined, consequently, as the interaction between two signals: the first acting as a stimulus; and the second providing a response which depends on its interpretation of the aforesaid stimulus. It is really the prerogative neither of humans nor even of animals endowed with conscience; like war, love, hierarchy, and sociability, communication preceded consciousness and a fortiori homo sapiens in the order of the universe. It was even prior to the point where the behavior of the big bang’s daughters, the elementary particles, was already (and has remained to this day) the behavior of communication.

  Throughout the cosmos, individual and collective entities are communicating with each other by means of words, chemical signals, or gravitational force—and communicating according to patterns of opposition (integration and differentiation, fusion and fission, or attraction and repulsion) whose iteration pursues itself at each level of emergence. Let us take the very first entrepreneurs of the cosmos—namely the quarks (of which there happens to be six varieties): the communication—via the phenomenon known as “strong force” or “strong interaction”—between two quarks-entrepreneurs which are of the same variety will be a communication of their mutual repulsion. Nevertheless the one between two quarks which are exactly different in the right way will be a communication of their mutual attraction—and one of their attraction towards an additional quark which is of the type suitable for mounting the proton start-up (composed of two quarks “up” and one quark “down”), or the neutron start-up (composed of two quarks “down” and one quark “up”).

The flaws of Marxian ontology—the approach to contradiction and matter

  Heraclitus understood the collaborative character of opposites. He nonetheless failed to grasp the perpetually declined (as well as complexified) character of their partnership—and the evolving character of the cosmos (including human societies). Marxian ontology certainly has the merit of stressing the role of contradiction in the becoming of the forms which matter acquires in the world of humans: especially the industrial organization of the mineral or human material, as well as the ideology and the law structuring a human society. Nevertheless it erroneously deals with the evolutionary process in question—and with the driving role of contradiction in the latter.

  Starting with its denying the informing action (and the existence) of the archetypal, supra-sensible forms to only retain the passive ideological and legal “superstructures” of the sort of matter which happens to reside in the “relations of production,” themselves serving as the passive organization happening to emerge from the other sort of matter that are the technological resources available at a given time. What is more, Marxian ontology, thus delivering an incomplete understanding of the material foundations for law and ideology, reduces the aforesaid foundations to technology and to the “relations of production.” What renders it, for instance, wholly ignorant of the properly biological compartment of the material backing of ideologies and law systems—the set of genetic dispositions shaped and selected over the course of human biological evolution in groups and individuals.

  As for contradiction in the process of human evolution, Marxian ontology exclusively conceives of it as a tearing whose each particular version (characteristic of a particular time of human history) calls for its resolution through the “leap” (to quote Lenin) to a superior bearing of human history, the course of which is, besides, seen as rigorously determined. And seen as spurred—through the successive resolution of the different encountered cases of contradiction—towards a prefixed final stage of human history. Instead contradiction should be envisioned as a harmonious (though sometimes it can be simultaneously tearing) partnership between opposites which perpetually declines itself in various modes over the course of the wholly improvised process of human (and even cosmic) evolution. Such misunderstanding in Marxian ontology is all the more devastating as the aforesaid ontology envisages the interindividual or intergroup conflict as rooted in economic life alone—and as doomed to disappear through a purportedly inevitable return to primitive communism nonetheless conserving the advanced technology.

  No more than interclass struggle can be reduced to a struggle engaging properly economic classes, technology and the relations of production cannot be envisioned as the sole and necessary origin of ideologies. Thus a given ideology does not necessarily accompany a given economic system—so that, for instance, capitalism of the globalized and digitized type is not necessarily accompanied by a cosmopolitan ideology (in the sense of moral relativism and universal leveling). What is more, their perceived economic interests—instead of idealistic considerations or their perceived ethnic interests—do not serve as the only and necessary motives on the part of the dominant economic classes for promoting the particular ideologies whose standard bearers they make themselves.

  The fact the class struggle does not necessarily occur between economic classes and for economic motives—instead coming as a derived form of the “struggle for life” likely to engage all kinds of classes and motives—was remarkably raised in Vilfredo Pareto’s The Socialist Systems. “The class struggle is only one form of the struggle for life, and what is called “the conflict between labor and capital” is only one form of the class struggle. In the Middle Ages, one could have thought that if religious conflicts disappeared, society would have been pacified. Those religious conflicts were only one form of the class struggle; they have disappeared, at least in part, and have been replaced by socialist conflicts. Suppose that collectivism is established, suppose that “capitalism” no longer exists, it is clear that then it will no longer be in conflict with labor; but it will be only one form of the class struggle which will have disappeared, others will replace them. Conflicts will arise between the different kinds of workers in the socialist state, between “intellectuals” and “non-intellectuals,” between different kinds of politicians, between them and their citizens, between innovators and conservatives.”

The flaws of Marxian ontology—the approach to commodity

  In addition to excessive Marxian emphasis on economy when it comes to the backing of superstructures and the background of conflict, a word deserves to be said on the Marxian definition of merchandise. The latter retains (as necessary, constitutive characteristics of the merchandise genre) the use value and the exchange value, as well as the above-mentioned “fetish” character. What amounts to retaining the outlet for the purpose of which the goods are put up for sale; the matter within the aforesaid merchandise—which, in the Marxian approach, sees itself notably assimilated to the “concrete” and “abstract” work incorporated in the fabrication of the aforesaid merchandise—; and finally its form, which is exclusively perceived as the reification of the relations of production.

  Such conception notably commits the error of omitting the commodity’s efficient, external cause: namely the entrepreneurial expectations on the course of the demand for consumption or investment. Those expectations turning to be the only effective, rational visage of economic calculation, which means economic calculation is simply impracticable in the absence of the private ownership of capital—and the central planning Marx praises and prophesizes is necessary dysfunctional, irrational. It also commits the error of developing a simplistic approach to the form of merchandises, which really consists of a reification above all of the immaterial capital of fantasy—the stock of dreams and legends which inspires the economic not less than cognitive development in humans.

Conclusion—and a word on Herbert Spencer

  The Marxian approach to exploitation in capitalism is flawed in that it misunderstands the alleged equalization (in the long-term equilibrium) between subsistence cost and earned wage as leaving unpaid a whole portion of the working time; instead such equalization implies the working time’s properly correct, total remuneration strictly equates a subsistence level in the long-run equilibrium. Thus entrepreneurial profit does not exist outside the allocation of capital goods; it is not rooted into exploitation, but into the speed (and the accuracy) of anticipations before an uncertain, mobile demand.

  As for the Marxian approach to the emerging forms of matter in human evolution, it neglects, for instance, the biological compartment of the involved matter—and restricts the material foundations for ideology and law to the economic, technological compartment. Thus it believes ideologies to come only and necessarily as the “superstructure” of the “relations of production,” themselves the superstructure only and necessarily of technology. The truth is that a certain ideology or law system is not necessarily indissociable of a certain economic system (just like a certain economic system is not necessarily indissociable of a certain ideology or law system). By the way, Marxian ontology fails to notice—among the merchandise’s reified components—the presence of the infrastructure of fantasy, thus neglecting the reification of human dreams and restricting itself to the one of the relations of production.

  As for the Marxian approach to contradiction in human evolution, it commits the double mistake of restricting intergroup conflict to the struggle between economic classes for economic motives—and restricting contradiction to disharmony and tearing. It also commits the mistake of believing human evolution to be rigorously predetermined—and scheduled to gradually reach its predefined finish line through gradually solving, dissipating the different successive encountered cases of contradiction. The Spencerian vision of cosmic and human history is materialist (in the sense of denying the ideational, archetypal field) like the Marxian vision of human history. It also has this characteristic in common with its great rival that it underlines the driving role of contradiction—although it conceives of the aforesaid contradiction as a harmonious tension declining itself perpetually. Nonetheless the Spencerian approach remains flawed.

  Herbert Spencer rightly believed the partnership between differentiation and integration discerned by Karl Ernst von Baer in the growth of the embryo to be transposable to the evolution of the cosmos and the one of humanity; nevertheless he made the mistake of considering that collaboration exclusively in the mode of the increase in the division of labor. As if, as the division of labor progressed on the scale of the world, individuals became more and more differentiated in their professions; but also more and more integrated in a humanitarian embryo leveling the nations and dissipating the borders. That faith in the advent of a division of labor supplanting the nations (and the war between the nations) to let subsist the sole individuals producing and exchanging on the scale of the world fits very well with Spencer’s anarcho-capitalism; it fits less with anthropological and historical reality. Namely that, as the economic, military interaction between nations increases, those, far from disappearing (for the benefit of a humanity integrating increasingly uprooted, denationalized individuals), only further differentiate—and only further oppose each other. So that the executed integration comes down to an intensification of the intergroup “struggle for life;” and applies as much to the individuals engaged in the global division of labor as to the nations engaged in the increasingly integrated military and economic competition.
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That article was initially published in The Postil Magazine‘s January 2021 issue

A conversation with Robert B. Ekelund, for Man and the Economy

A conversation with Robert B. Ekelund, for Man and the Economy

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  Robert B. Ekelund is eminent scholar emeritus at Auburn University. Besides authoring The Marketplace of Christianity and Economic Origins of Roman Christianity, he co-authored with Robert F. Hebert A History of Economic Theory and Method, and with Mark Thornton Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You claim the mercantilist doctrine to have been first and foremost a rationalization of rent seeking—and the balance-of-trade objective a by-product of mercantilism rather than the primary motive for the latter. Could you come back to this subject?

  Robert B. Ekelund: Yes, so-called “state policies” remain a rationalization of rent-seeking today as they do and did in any society when political or other institutions are able to grant privileges to individuals or groups at the expense of societal welfare. The book with my late friend Bob Tollison (Mercantilism as a Rent-Seeking Society: Economic Regulation in Historical Perspective, 1981) argued that there is no “state” interests, per se, but individual or group self interest molding and guiding economic policy within a polity. Rationalization of the balance-of-trade theory (or tariffs and subsidies) is merely an expression of a process of particular rent- or profit-seeking individuals or groups or institutions. Tollison and I argued that this approach describes mercantilism better than a rosary of so-called “characteristics” that evolved in the literature. This process was as alive in ancient Egypt as it was in medieval Europe under the aegis of Roman Catholic Church control or as it is in modern day United States or France.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: After the Obama Administration’s commitment to drive America down the road to serfdom, many expected Trump to be a sort of Reagan on strong steroids—and to dismantle the socialist agenda of his predecessor just like Reagan did with Carter’s. For now has Trump been up to this mission?

  Robert B. Ekelund: Assessing the success or failure of any political administration is always difficult. Obama inherited a set of institutions—including a monetary policy of madness over the Bush years—and left a set for Mr. Trump. Obamacare, if that’s what you refer to as a “road to serfdom,” was merely an evolution to an inevitable single-payer Canadian/European medical system. One must look to the history of rent-seeking in medicine and all allied fields. Physicians demanded and received state (and then federal) regulations at the end of the 19th century to stabilize and increase their incomes. That tentacular control ultimately led to the limitation in the number of doctors, the number of hospitals and regulation of all ancillary fields, including medical insurance and pharmaceuticals. The number of physicians has not kept up with population growth; hence the march to some kind of “socialized” system. Such rent-seeking cannot be undone due to the institutionalization of profit-seeking interests. The damage that Mr. Trump’s administration has done to the institutions of a free society dwarfs Obama’s or any president before him. The deficit and debit (before the Covid crisis) ballooned under Trump. It declined under Obama. Trump’s trade policies could not withstand the logic of Economics 101. His assaults on the freedom of the press and the freedom from religion would give Thomas Jefferson apoplexy. Trump’s only mission has resulted in a march to tyranny and not one to socialism, although at some points they overlap. If Obama’s policies were a road to serfdom, Trump’s are a super-highway.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You have been highly active in the field known as economics of art. You have been as much involved in the historical study of the Catholic Church as an economic firm. How do those combined approaches enlighten the flourishing of painting and sculpture during the Italian Renaissance?

  Robert B. Ekelund: The Catholic Church acted as super-national government prior to and during the Italian Renaissance. In the Italian case, the Church supported those families who oversaw the Church’s vast financial empire, especially the Medici’s. (Italy was an agglomeration of political powers rather than a unified nation). These powers were competitive in all things, including art and scientific patronage. Artists also competed to become patrons of particular rulers and formed a stable of intellects and talents that reflected upon the glories of their supporters. Great art and sculpture were one result. (We find a similar situation in the high-stakes commoditization of art today among the uber wealthy). In addition to patronage the Church used various tactics—for example, threats to eternal salvation, a chief aspect of their monopoly—to obtain great art. Michelangelo’s homosexuality was used against him as a cudgel to complete the Sistine Chapel and other projects. His sublime productions for the Church may be looked upon as a kind of “penance.” Forgiveness of sins and special blessings were used in trade to get artists and sculptors to produce. Valuable emoluments in all fields from members at all levels of society were obtained in this manner. Why? Because the Church, at that time and place, had a monopoly on assurances of eternal salvation. It manipulated theology, marriage and usury, among many other policies, to maximize wealth and membership. The road to heaven was a toll road.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: As a historian of economic thought you especially dedicated yourself to exhuming the pioneer contributions by Jules Dupuit and Sir Edwin Chadwick—in the respective fields of microeconomics and the economics of regulation. How do you sum up their work?

  Robert B. Ekelund: Dupuit and Chadwick were pioneers for quite different reasons. My career-long study of 19th century engineers, the French engineer Jules Dupuit (1804-1864) in particular, yielded an astonishing result. In work joined by my friend and colleague Robert Hebert, we established that Dupuit had uncovered and developed traditional contemporary (neoclassical) microeconomics in its full measure before the mid-19th century. Our research is reported in Secret Origins of Modern Microeconomics: Dupuit and the Engineers (1999). Those inventions include standard market theory, monopoly theory including a sophisticated discussion of the degrees of discrimination, welfare theory, marginal cost pricing, spatial analysis, time and transport costs, and empirical economics. In short, the origins of partial equilibrium “Marshallian” economics are French, not British and they occurred before the middle of the nineteenth century. In contrast, my work on Edwin Chadwick, alone and with others, focuses on his prescient theoretical anticipation of the modern field of law and economics, including Coase’s analysis of social cost and proposals for franchise bidding in natural monopolies. While Dupuit and Chadwick studied different issues, their attempt to invent and integrate theory, institutions and policy analysis was astonishing for their time or in any time.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: While Austrian economics endorses the law of supply and demand—the selling of any commodity, not necessarily at a profitable price, but at least at a price equalizing the supply and the demand which are linked to the aforesaid price—it claims to dismiss the ideal assumptions of neoclassical economics. Yet those assumptions—convex preferences, “perfect” competition, and demand independence—are seemingly the theoretical conditions under which the law of supply and demand is operative. How do you make sense of the Austrian position?

  Robert B. Ekelund: I have sometimes noted that in some areas of economic theory the distinction between Austrian and neoclassical economics is a distinction without a difference. Marshall, and Dupuit before him, expressed a formal theory of supply and demand using ceteris paribus assumptions together with the factors you describe. The emphasis was on continuity in expressing demand curves and they are amenable to mathematical manipulation. Although standard neoclassical theory and Austrian theorists both emphasized rational behavior, the Austrian theories of demand and production featured discontinuities rather than continuities—a feature of both Marshallian and Walrasian versions of competition. When probabilities are added to the latter, prediction is possible. Thus, while both approaches to economic behavior are similar, the Austrian version eschews prediction in favor of description in analysing economic functioning. Thus, both versions of neoclassical economics reemphasize rational behavior and economizing but Austrian economics “do” economics differently than orthodox Marshallians.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You rightly point out the fact that Stuart Mill was the first to show how the law of markets—the profitable equalization between aggregate supply and aggregate demand notwithstanding the below-cost sales which may happen locally—was rendered inoperative in the presence of hoarding. In classical economics another acknowledged limitation to the law of markets lied in the periodic outbreak of entrepreneurial mistakes—by reason of factors such as the distorting of interest rates by excessive credit creation. How do you assess the pertinence and the originality of Keynes in this context?

  Robert B. Ekelund: Hoarding does undermine the law of markets but only in a short run context. But what is the cause of hoarding? Not markets, but something like an invasion or a virus which causes an abrupt increase in demand and decrease of supply which temporarily makes price vanish. Hoarding may also be created by a sudden change in risk aversion. Spikes of entrepreneurial errors due to excessive credit creation also seems to undermine the law of markets, i.e., Say’s Law, but what is the cause of excessive credit creation? The British monetary debates tried to identify and fix this cause without much success. This is the economics that Keynes was taught. He apparently just assumed that such flaws were inherent to the market (a liquidity trap?) and the solution was exogenous, i.e., something the government should fix. That it was a short-term fix with deleterious consequences was not emphasized.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: A well-known investigation on your part covers the ascent of Christianity in the Roman empire’s religion marketplace. Should Saint Paul be credited for giving a universal dimension to the nascent Christian message—a pretension to welcome Pagans without asking them to join the Jewish community and to espouse its mores and national destiny?

  Robert B. Ekelund: There is some truth to the statement that without St. Paul there would likely have been no Christianity, at least as we know it. That was due to his entrepreneurial skills which included at least in part a victory over St. Peter’s belief that to become Christian one first had to be Jewish. This meant that non-Jews, courted by Paul’s famous epistles, could become Christians without first converting to Judaism. Males would not have to undergo circumcision (as adults) to join the Christian faith. Apparently, this was an important element in the rapid early spread of Christianity and St. Paul certainly gave a universal dimension to the religion in this regard. Assurances of eternal salvation were the ultimate linchpin in the success of Christian monotheism. The apostles (broadly conceived), with Paul the most significant, were able to analyze that critical aspect of Christian religion.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Do you subscribe to the claim that the adoption of Christianity as a state religion was decisive in triggering the fall of the Roman empire? What may be the economic and politic interests leading nowadays the Catholic Church to promote ecologism and a variety of causes detrimental to the West?

  Robert B. Ekelund: Geopolitical and other factors—“barbarian” invasions, the rise of Moslem religion, the general incompetence of Roman leaders in the first three centuries of Roman rule and the fragmentation of multiple deity worship by the early 4th century—all contributed to the fall of the Roman empire. However Constantine (306-337 CE), ostensibly goaded on by his mother St. Helena, made Christianity—composed of the then-most-popular texts—the official religion of the Empire. The growth and emerging political power of Christians were probably more influential propellants to Constantine. This gave him the power to loot temples and properties of the various “pagan” sects. Later emperors outlawed all other religions and Christian entrepreneurs (apostles) set out to Christianize the world. So, yes, Christianity played a role in the declension of empire, but it was not the only factor. The modern Catholic Church equates the teachings of Jesus to a kind of social democratic polity, one that underlines redistributions and respect for the environment. Right-wing groups, whose political and economic interests are all too obvious, oppose the Church whose grounds are chiefly theological and moral. That does not mean that economics does not underlie the latter as well.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You wrote about the socioeconomic realities of the American Civil War. Could you remind us of the outlines of your approach? Regarding the economics of the Crusades in the medieval era, what are the main facts which deserve to be highlighted here?

  Robert B. Ekelund: Our approach to the American Civil War revolves around the use of basic economic analysis to reveal how blockades, tariffs and monetary matters were conducted on both sides of the War. The North had an overwhelming advantage in the terms of population and industrial development, but the struggle lasted far longer than anticipated by the North. One fundamental issue was that the South was at a disadvantage as a “confederacy” wherein the states did not present a united policy effort. Both economies resorted to the printing press, but the Southern economy was more adversely affected by inflation than was the Northern economy. Most historians focus on battles, armies, and generals to describe the outcome of the war. We emphasize the war at sea. Blockades are typically not very effective because of the incentive of higher prices on both imports and exports mean high profits, plus the possibility of adopting new technologies, i.e., blockade runners. However, in this case the Confederacy adopted policies that disincentivized the blockade runners. In 1864 the Confederacy passed trade legislation that prevented importing luxury goods, put price controls on other goods, and commandeered half of the shipping space on blockade runners. This ruined the blockade running business and the Confederacy began to experience severe shortages and increasing losses on the battlefield.

  The medieval Crusades were (in part) a spiritual device to extend the monopoly of Christianity to Moslem-controlled areas of the East. But attending these organized wars the Church and Church interests received substantial revenue and rent flows. In terms of direct flows, the Church received revenues from tourism and relics. (St Helena initiated the relic hunt in her 4th century trips to the Holy Land). There was an impetus for cathedral building to house such relics providing awe and grandeur “capital” to members. Additionally, another direct revenue source from the Crusades was the “buy-back” of crusading vows by those who subsequently regretted their pledges. Excommunication was the alternative. Numerous indirect benefits to the Church were attached to the Crusades. Peace, order, and enhanced authority were benefits to society as well as to the Christian monopoly. For the individuals who participated there were spiritual benefits (remission of sins) and temporal benefits. Pillage and plunder of “infidels” was legitimized and classes of “warrior monks” (e.g., the Knights Templars, the Hospitallers, and the Teutonic Knights) emerged to fight the Church’s enemies and to spread potentially taxable membership.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Thank you for your time. Is there something you would like to add?

  Robert B. Ekelund: I enjoyed the discussion. Clearly my interests in economics have been diverse. There is one strand that is woven through them—the application of microeconomics, including monopoly theory, industrial organization and law and economics, to a multiplicity of problems. Institutional change has also been a large aspect of my interest in the field. Economic issues are everywhere from the regulation of cosmetology to religion and art. I have tried to find interesting applications in these and other areas and to encourage my students to do so as well.

  That conversation was originally published in Man and the Economy, in their December 2020 issue

A conversation with Frank Salter, for American Renaissance

A conversation with Frank Salter, for American Renaissance

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Frank Kemp Salter is an Australian academic and researcher. Most of his career was at the Max Planck Research Centre for Human Ethology, in Andechs, Germany. Salter is best known for his writings on ethnicity and ethnic interests. Originally trained at Sydney University as a political scientist, his doctoral and subsequent research focused on ethology. He studies political phenomena using the methods and theories of behavioral biology in addition to conventional methods. Those phenomena include hierarchy (Emotions in Command, 1995), indoctrination (Ethnic Conflict and Indoctrination, 1998, edited with I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt), ethnic altruism and conflict (Welfare, Ethnicity and Altruism, 2002, Risky Transactions: Trust, Kinship and Ethnicity, 2004), and genetic interests (On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration, 2003). Salter has also been employed as an adviser to Australia’s populist One Nation party.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Besides the tenor and the scope of collective genetic interests in humans, your field of investigation covers the universal biological underpinnings of the obedience to one’s hierarchical superior—especially in the framework of bureaucracy. May you tell us more about your theory as it stands?

  Frank Salter: In writing Emotions in Command I observed command-giving in many organizations, from the military, to courts and parliaments, to nightclub doormen and theatrical rehearsals. The methods and observational categories were very much in the ethological tradition of Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, who I later joined as a colleague at his Max Planck Research Centre.

  Observing the organizations, I expected to find dominance behaviours, which I did, but also found friendly conduct. In ethology these are designated “affiliative”. Effective leaders take care to soften commands and bind subordinates to them through acts of generosity and fairness. In doing this they are helped by what I called the “dominance infrastructure”, this being the organization’s set of rules backed by inducements and punishments. My observations confirmed part of Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy—that it is a rule-governed hierarchy. Being rule governed, with obedience largely ensured by the dominance infrastructure, administrative positions can be filled by a wide range of personalities. Domineering behaviour or brilliant leadership have negative and positive effects respectively, but are not required for the organization to tick over.

  It was the discovery of the affiliative component of hierarchy that led me to search for an “affiliative infrastructure”. That search resulted in me studying ethnic ties, which can bind large populations. Is there such a thing as an “ethnic infrastructure”?

  Grégoire Canlorbe: A popular claim by J. Philippe Rushton is that racial differences are displayed in ethnocentrism, which strictly arise from those in genetic similarity: the least genetically heterogeneous ethnic groups being those most inclined to an ethnocentric behavior, and reciprocally. The truth of such assertion notably requires the validity of these two premises: namely that race differences are attested in the field of genetic homogeneity; and that ethnocentric behaviors cannot be high in national groups with genetically distant members, i.e., cannot be selected beyond the level of kinship. Do you endorse such couple of ideas?

  Frank Salter: Philippe Rushton’s theory was not the basis of my research into ethnic kinship. Instead, it was William Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness, which is generally accepted in ethology and evolutionary biology. The theory states that kinship bonds promote the reproduction of shared genes. Hamilton extended his theory to ethnic groups. I’m not aware of the finding you describe (the variations in genetic homogeneity, and the fact the degree of genetic similarity predicts the level of ethnocentrism), though they have a certain plausibility. What I am aware of is that the degree of genetic homogeneity is related to solidarity, a sense of social cohesion; or, to put it differently, that conflict increases when society becomes more diverse genetically. That finding, which is compatible with Hamilton’s theory, has been repeated again and again. The work of the late Tatu Vanhanen is an excellent example.

  Nonetheless it seems that a more diverse society can actually lead to greater ethnocentrism: not at the level of society taken as whole, though, but instead at the level of the different ethnic components of society. As you can see in the case of America especially (but this is a universal trend in the West), white majorities are now increasingly ethnocentric, but it clearly doesn’t compare to the very high ethnocentrism of black or Latino minorities. This is an issue the media and the universities don’t understand, and never talk about. I remember a recent interview with political scientist George Friedman, in which he agreed that contemporary America is based on a racial caste system ruled by a racist, ethnocentric oppressive white majority. Conversely it is maintained that non-white minorities are oppressed and free from any racial feelings. The exact opposite is true. Whites are generally more individualistic and less ethnically motivated than minorities. This is evident in surveys and degree of bloc voting in elections. Europe and its settler societies score lower in collectivism than other civilizations. Those differences make multiculturalism possible, because if whites were as ethnocentric as minorities, they would quickly end affirmative action and replacement-level immigration.

  This interpretation contradicts the current mantras of the Black Lives Matter movement and its ideology derived from Marxist whiteness theory. They would have us believe that white societies are profoundly racist because they privilege white people. At the same time they deny that whiteness and by implication blackness and Hispanicness have objective ethnic dimensions. They have no theory to explain why some minorities in the U.S. have substantially higher average incomes than whites (Chinese, Japanese, Indians). Neither can they explain why a racist society fixated on white power would allow indiscriminate immigration policies to put whites on track to become a minority, or why such a society would accept anti-white curricula in universities and schools.

  This and other messages current in the mass media and educational establishment indicate the wholesale politicization of the university system, resulting in a collapse of rationality in elite public discourse.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Does the cultural, political assimilationism of the ancient Roman empire (which neoconservative America has basically inherited) come as an efficient, sound “group evolutionary strategy”? As regards the flourishing of white virility in a multi-racial context: how do you assess the Crocodile Dundee trilogy’s comparison of the situation in Australia with that in the USA?

  Frank Salter: It could be argued that the Roman Empire was the outcome of the Roman group strategy, though the Empire took on a life of its own with the adoption of imperial rule. The best work I’ve seen on the Roman Empire’s evolutionary impact is by Peter Frost and the late Henry Harpending. They argued that the Empire and Medieval states inadvertently genetically pacified their populations by using the judicial system to execute violent males. Up to one percent of each generation was executed or died in the legal process. The European homicide rate fell steadily from the 14th to the 20th century. To utilize a metaphor from Crocodile Dundee, genetic pacification results in fewer and fewer interactions between men ending with the words, “that is a knife”.

  As for white virility, the multiculturalist reality across the West since the 1970s has been that the founding ethnic group is subordinated and reduced demographically. The character Crocodile Dundee was played by an Anglo Australian (Paul Hogan), and Anglos have been the big losers from large scale indiscriminate immigration introduced from the 1970s. The same is true in the United States. For Americans, one of the attractions of the film is that Mr. Dundee reminded them of their frontier ancestors—rugged, direct, masculine. He even carried a knife that resembled the one made famous by Jim Bowie. The reality is that Australian Anglos, like American whites, are not virile, but henpecked by the nanny state. They are pecked by affirmative action. Their history is falsified in the movies. Their children are turned against them by PC history classes. They are vilified by the mainstream media. In England their young women are raped en masse by immigrant Pakistani men. “Henpecked” is an inadequate metaphor, because these pathetic nonentities are on their way to become minorities in their own homelands.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: When it comes to The Biology of Peace and War Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt judged the inter-group military conflict to occur as the product of cultural (rather than biological) evolution, while being partly predisposed at a genetic level through the instincts for xenophobia and aggression. He also contended the human species to be jointly endowed with a “biological filter” forbidding humans from taking the life of another human (in the framework of the “ritualization” of intra-group aggressiveness); and a “cultural filter” asking humans to kill their opponents in the framework of human wars. How do you assess those claims in view of the present data? After several decades of a prevalence of inter-group economic competition, do you expect a strong resurgence of the mode of group selection that is war?

  Frank Salter: I think that Eibl’s core insights remain valid, though warfare needs to be distinguished from conflict. The latter occurs between individuals and groups and can occur spontaneously due to xenophobia and aggression. Warfare, on the other hand, is an organized activity. Individual soldiers need only follow orders to kill others, and those giving the orders can be motivated by a variety of motivations, including aggression but also the wish to be reelected, to make a profit or to spread an ideology. Eibl was right to emphasise the inborn taboo against killing, though there is variation in this trait; psychopaths exist in various degrees.

  (Classical ethology did not handle individual variation very well. Especially with Konrad Lorenz it was focused on describing “species typical” behaviours.)

  Eibl’s distinction between innate and culturally-directed sociality was a major contribution to behavioural biology. This distinction was also taken up by Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox in their book, The Imperial Animal. Humans are evolved for small-scale ritualized fighting and ambushes. Modern armies demand systematic killing. The traumatic effects on soldiers is only partly mitigated by modern weapons which allow killing at a distance. No wonder that soldiers returning from combat often suffer Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. As a species we are not fully evolved for this activity. Tiger and Fox extend this principle further. In their view humans are not evolved to be Weberian bureaucrats who treat other humans according to a set of formal rules.

  Is warfare a form of group selection and is it likely to return on a large scale? Much modern warfare is unconnected with genetic selection, whether at the individual or group levels. Napoleonic soldiers on both sides died in their millions probably without benefiting their reproductive fitness, whether at the individual or ethnic level. The same goes for many wars. However, I think there are exceptions. Ethnic groups contain a large number of copies of their member’s genes, which can make it adaptive for individuals to sacrifice their lives to prevent genocide or displacement. The Russian soldiers who died resisting the Nazi invasion in the Second World War saved their ethnic kin from large scale replacement, which was Hitler’s war aim.

  As for the future of warfare, it continues to be an instrument of foreign policy, though hopefully diplomatic methods for resolving conflicts will continue to develop.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: In order to make sense of the long-established scientific helplessness of China (which has never delivered a genius veritably comparable to Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, or Benoît Mandelbrot), it has been sometimes advanced that the cognitive backwardness of Chinese civilization as a “group evolutionary strategy” should be connected to an insufficient masculine martial spirit. Yet Chinese history is one full of epic warlike males: let one think of Xiang Yy, Xue Rengui, Mao Zedong, or Jet Li; Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is universally praised and studied. Another regularly invoked factor lies in the lack in creativity (both at a genetic and cultural level); but Chinese food or the Hong Kong movie industry—with masters like Tsui Hark or John Woo—are notoriously virtuoso. Do you see a valuable remaining explanation?

  Frank Salter: I’m optimistic about China’s scientific potential. They and kindred populations have a high average mathematical IQ and a strong work ethic. What is remarkable is their delayed industrialization and democratisation. The evidence that China has a huge scientific potential is strong. As immigrants to democratic Western societies, they outperform whites in school and university. Their contribution to fundamental research appears to lag but is happening, for example in biomedical and computing fields. Also relevant is Taiwan’s relatively high scientific and technical innovation compared to the mainland. Another line of evidence is comparison of cultures and religions. China’s relatively low inventiveness, as indicated by the rate of patents, is probably the result of collectivist institutions. Confucious conformity was replaced by communist conformity. Constraints on free speech have not much improved with the transition to ethnic nationalism managed by a one party state.

  This relates to a matter of equity that is rarely discussed. We are seeing a large scale transfer of intellectual property from the West to Asian economies, such as Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan. Japan and lately Korea and Taiwan have been contributing to that knowledge for several decades. That vast body of knowledge took centuries for the liberal world to develop, often at large material and human cost. (By ‘liberal’ I mean rule-of-law and civil rights, which led to representative democracy.) Now that vast store of knowledge is treated as part of the global commons, something that should be free for all. That seems unfair. China is a regimented, undemocratic low wage society that has taken away jobs and wealth from the West. It has not adopted the democratic and liberal institutions compatible with creativity; instead it has been parasitic on Western liberalism. Liberalism has a price. It yields creativity and innovation, but also causes conflict and disorganization.   Is it right that China has free access to Western intellectual property? I’m not sure if this is feasible, but it would be good to see the creative cultures of the world join together to collectively bargain with the less creative cultures. In effect our centuries-long investment in civil rights and democracy should be made to pay dividends.

That conversation was initially published in American Renaissance, in October 2020

A conversation with Pierre Bergé, for The Postil Magazine

A conversation with Pierre Bergé, for The Postil Magazine

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Pierre Bergé—born on 14th November 1930 and deceased on 8th September 2017—was a French award-winning industrialist and patron. He co-founded the fashion label Yves Saint Laurent, and was a longtime business partner (and onetime life partner) of the eponymous designer.

  A supporter and personal friend of François Mitterrand, Bergé was currently described as a social liberal. Bergé participated in all the campaign rallies of François Mitterrand (except in 1981, when he did not vote for Mitterrand). Bergé later served as President of the Association of the Friends of Institut François-Mitterrand.

  A longtime fan and patron of opera, Mitterrand appointed Bergé president of Opéra Bastille on 31 August 1988. He retired from the post in 1994, becoming honorary president of the Paris National Opera. Bergé was also president of the Comité Jean Cocteau, and the exclusive owner of all the moral rights of all of Jean Cocteau’s works. In 2010, he bought a stake in Le Monde newspaper, along with investors Matthieu Pigasse and Xavier Niel.

  A supporter of gay rights, Bergé supported the association against AIDS, Act Up-Paris, and assumed ownership of the magazine Têtu. He was also one of the shareholders of Pink TV, before withdrawing. In 1994, he participated in the creation of the AIDS association Sidaction, and he became its president in 1996 until his death.   Bergé was finally the author of several essays devoted to Yves Saint Laurent, as well as to freedom and republican values. He published in 2010 a book, Lettres à Yves, which was translated into English with the title Yves Saint Laurent: A Moroccan Passion, in 2014.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Do you approve the decision of the international community, during the Paris conference on the Middle East, to condemn “the colonization of the Palestinian territories by Israel”?

  Pierre Bergé: I approve this decision. I am absolutely in favor of the State of Israel, but just as indisputably pro-Palestinian. I am extremely wary of Mr. Netanyahu; in fact, I do not trust him much more than Mr. Trump. I am extremely shocked that one can, while being from the Jewish people, the martyred people, the people of the Shoah, challenge territories to other peoples.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Donald Trump was described by gay journalist Milo Yiannopoulos as the most pro-gay candidate in the electoral history of the United States of America. Do you subscribe to this judgment? What is your view, in general, on the election of Donald Trump?

  Pierre Bergé: For the moment, it seems to me that the American President the most favorable to homosexual rights, and in general human rights, was none other than Barack Obama. My admiration for this man is immense and unwavering. I am waiting to see what Trump will do. With regard to election results, not only in America but around the world, I would say that people are tired of the commonly agreed assumptions and let themselves be tempted by new ideas. I fully understand that, although I do not approve their choices.

Having said that, I would also like to point out, without questioning the American institutions and the Electoral College system, that Hillary Clinton, a woman I do not greatly appreciate, was almost 3 million votes ahead of Donald Trump. One must be careful not to overestimate the enthusiasm of the American people for the man who will make the oath this week [week of Monday 16 January 2017]. Without necessarily incriminating the American electoral system, one can still deplore this gap between the choice of ballot boxes and the outcome finally imposed. This situation is not unique; it has many antecedents, and not just on the American soil. Bertrand Delanoë, in 2001, was also elected mayor of Paris while he was a minority in numerical terms. 

Grégoire Canlorbe: “A woman,” writes Yukio Mishima in Forbidden Colors, “is never as exhilarated with happiness as when she discovers desire in the eyes of a man.” As a fine connoisseur of the feminine soul, do you hold this remark as insightful?

Pierre Bergé: This Mishima’s quotation echoes what Yves Saint Laurent said about the beauty of a woman in love. “The most beautiful clothes that can dress a woman are the arms of the man she loves.” Do not think I am bringing everything back to Saint Laurent, I am not so candid! But you will agree that the resemblance of his intuition with that of Mishima is striking. What Saint Laurent had in mind, with this statement, is that a woman does not need clothes to be happy, because the essential lies elsewhere.

You describe me as a fine connoisseur of the feminine soul. This may be true, but I nonetheless think I am more aware of the male soul. As to whether I agree with Mishima, it seems to me that he is somewhat reductive in his statement. I believe that it is every human being who is never so happy as when he discovers sexual attraction or admiration in the eyes of another human being, whether the latter is a man or a woman.

Grégoire Canlorbe: It is not uncommon, among conservative circles, to deplore what they perceive as a pronounced disdain for the military and religious functions – the warrior and the priest – in post-1789 society, while “merchants,” i.e., entrepreneurs and capitalists, are excessively valued in the nation. Would you say that the captains of industry are precisely the warriors of the capitalist era, the samurai of modern times, by virtue of their conquering character, their sense of abnegation, and their competitive spirit?

Pierre Bergé: Georges Clémenceau said, of the French Revolution, it is to take “en bloc.” In other words, if one adheres to the values of the Revolution, one must also accept the bloodbaths that accompanied the promotion of the ideals of 1789; and what the Revolution has brought to the world is too great and too decisive for us to be entitled to deny it in the name of the atrocities committed during the Terror. I regret it obviously, but the Revolution is to be taken in its entirety, with its good and its bad sides.

Your question is interesting. Unfortunately, your idealist portrait of businessmen is far from reality. I am often taken aback when I hear a politician, such as those who present themselves during this campaign period, claiming to be concerned exclusively with the fate of France. The truth is that a politician cares, in the first place, for his own interests – and only secondly for France. But those you call captains of industry, for their part, have no ounce of patriotic consideration. They care so little about the interests of France that they do not hesitate to relocate their production sites or to settle in tax havens.

I may surprise you, but I am not admiring the business company. I remember talking about it with President Mitterrand, who had somewhat let himself be distracted at the end of his first seven-year term. “You would make a mistake,” I told him in essence, “if you thought the company was there to create jobs.” He was visibly intrigued by my remark. “In reality,” I continued, “the company is there to create profits; and the day it can make a profit without creating a job, it does it.” This is all the more true at the moment. Like the assembly line a century ago, the robotization is about to allow the companies to do without a considerable part of manpower; and this is what the company is there for.

The company is there to produce, sell, negotiate, and optimize; and all the rest, I tell you straight away, is bullshit. If you ask big business leaders, you will certainly hear them claiming great principles, such as, the fight against unemployment, the economic influence of France, or its leadership in technological innovation. No doubt they will agree that they are the samurai of modern times. But let them perpetuate the custom of seppuku, if they really want to walk in the footsteps of the samurai of old! I fear very much that you will not find many who have the courage to give themselves a “beautiful death,” or even to renounce some juicy profit, to do honor to France.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Feminist sociologists are generally inclined to denounce all kinds of voluntary female behavior, particularly with regard to sexual preferences or dress habits, on the grounds that these behaviors reflect “symbolic violence” from males. Yet the veil often escapes their warnings, and they even see in it a mark of feminine dignity and resistance to the diktats of male lust. How do you explain this apparent complacency on the part of feminists towards Islam?

Pierre Bergé: Your ascertainment surprises me. It seems to me that it is a minority of feminists, not the majority of them, who make this complacent speech vis-à-vis Islam. You do well, however, to draw attention to the possible straying of today’s feminism. Our society, imbued with gender theory, wants to make women and men equal. But equality is a dreadful word. Men and women are certainly equal before the law; they are not equal in anything else.

We evoked above the Revolution of 1789. As beautiful as the triptych on the pediment of the French Republic is, the choice of the term equality was a regrettable error. The word justice would have suited our motto “freedom, equality, fraternity” better. No human being, male or female, is equal to another, except that everyone has the right to freedom and to the pursuit of happiness. Men and women are certainly unequal; it does not follow that women are inferior to men in dignity and freedom; they are simply different.

My friend Louise de Vilmorin used to say, in essence, that if men and women were not there to perpetuate the human race, if they had no sexual attraction, a woman would walk next to a man like a rabbit next to a hat. Women and men belong to two different worlds. I have many female friends, whom I respect; and I spent my life defending women. But in wanting to make women absolutely equal to men, one ends up preaching total nonsense. The search for parity is one such nonsense. Hiring a woman on the pretext that she is a woman cancels the exercise of judgment on her objective skills, and prevents a sincere appreciation of her work and her talents.

That said, that women are rarely at the level of men in working life, and there are persistent inequalities in treatment. I will not dispute it. After centuries of female oppression by religion and the law, society is marked by old power struggles; and one cannot seriously expect the gap between men and women in business, and elsewhere, to be leveled overnight. There is no denying injustice. But denouncing this state of affairs is not an alibi to promote the egalitarian feminism on which I have just expressed myself.

As concerns, more particularly, the Islamic veil, there is undoubtedly an attempt to standardize the hijab, even the full veil, in our Western lands. I obviously denounce this trend, because I see the Islamic veil for what it is: a perfect instrument of legal and religious oppression, which is out of place in a lawful society. No coherent defender of the freedom and dignity of women can rejoice at the trivialization of this dress custom in public space and in homes.

The contemporary complacency with regard to the Islamic veil takes on a paradoxical allure, when we know to what extent the emancipatory ideals of feminism, indisputably incompatible with traditional Islam, have moreover conquered our era, not without some excesses which I have spoken of above. In your question, you do well to suggest this tension. But it is much less the feminist intellectuals and activists, rather the previously mentioned “merchants,” who advocate a spirit of misguided tolerance. I recently spoke in the media to denounce the “Islamic fashion” that several major clothing brands adopted.

When the sense of priorities is reversed to the point that the spirit of profit prevails over the values of the Republic, one can effectively claim that the City is corrupted by an excessive valuation of the market function. I told you that I do not admire, personally, the business company. I admire art and creation; that’s true. But I hate commerce and marketing. In addition, I have always felt that a fashion designer was there to embellish women, to encourage them on their path of freedom, and not to be the accomplice of misogynistic manners that are hostile to the liberal principles which are theoretically those of Westerners and, in particular, of the French since the Revolution.

Grégoire Canlorbe: “A very common error (…) consists in believing,” Konrad Lorenz tell us in his 1972 essay, Behind the Mirror, “that feelings of love and respect cannot be associated together (…) I have the absolute certainty to have never loved and respected a friend more deeply than the undisputed leader of our group of children of Altenberg, four years my elder (…) Even those of my age whom I would classify (…) as inferior to me, always had some something in themselves that impressed me and in what I felt them to be superior to me (…) I don’t think that one can truly love someone whom one looks down on, from all point of view.” In regard to your own experience, do you subscribe to this analysis of love?

Pierre Bergé: All those I have loved in my life were also people I admired. I endorse Konrad Lorenz’s wording: I do not believe either that one can truly love someone that one looks down on, from all points of view. It is true that one can have a very strong sexual attraction towards someone whom one despises. One can even get on remarkably well with him in the bedroom. But if one does not admire him, one may well be subject to his animal charm, sensitive to his dangerous side, but it will not be love – even if this means deluding oneself about the tenor of feelings that one experiences towards him.

I would add that one can love and admire someone who is self-destructing before one’s eyes. It happened to me; and it was with a heavy heart that I had to bring myself to leave Yves Saint Laurent in the 1970s. Addiction is a disease just like cancer or depression. Would you stop admiring and cherishing someone because he has a tumor?

Grégoire Canlorbe: It is not uncommon to hear that a “deregulated” market economy necessarily leads to growing income inequalities which state intervention is fortunately able to correct. Opposed to this first approach is notably that which estimates that, whatever the economic system considered, communism or capitalism, the market economy left to its own devices or accompanied by a redistributive system, the state of affairs is such that 20% of the population holds 80% of the national income. Which of these two opinions do you prefer?

Pierre Bergé: The second option that you evoke seems to me to present what has actually happened so far. All economic systems have experienced a highly unequal distribution of wealth. I do not know whether one should see in it the manifestation of an eternal law of human affairs, inscribed in the natural order of things. But as a man of the Left, I would prefer, of course, that it be possible to correct this tenacious tendency for the majority of national income to be concentrated in the hands of a minority of the population. That said, I am no longer fifteen; and I am no longer under the spell of communist or Proudhonian ideals. I will not tell you, like a François Hollande, that finance is my “enemy.” But I keep being shocked, in the age of globalization, by the indecent distribution of wealth and the dubious practices of certain companies.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Which one, between Putin’s Russia, religiously Orthodox, and militant Islam, do you currently see as the greatest threat to the freedom of women and minorities?

Pierre Bergé: Both seem to me to be dangerous, beyond the shadow of a doubt; but the greatest danger assuredly comes from militant Islam. I am aware that the Orthodox Church is close to power and that the Patriarch of Moscow is making an authoritarian speech on social issues. Even though homosexuality was decriminalized in the aftermath of the fall of the USSR, the government expressly talks about fighting “homosexual propaganda,” in other words, the political and social demands by the LGBT community.

The fact remains that the terrorist acts which strike France and other countries in the world are concretely coming from the Muslim community. It is easy to notice that it is not the Orthodox who provoke a crash, besiege an embassy, assassinate journalists and caricaturists, take hostages in a supermarket, commit assaults in a performance hall, the street or a Christmas market, and enslave men and women.

Grégoire Canlorbe: A fashionable assertion is that Western societies have secularized to the point of giving rise to a spiritual void unprecedented in human history. In the opinion of Vilfredo Pareto, in his 1917 treatise The Mind and Society, the Christian religion has only given way to the democratic religion.

“The acts of worship of the Christian religion,” he writes, “have diminished among modern civilized peoples, but have been partially replaced by acts of the worship of socialist saints, humanitarian saints, and especially of the worship of the State and of the god People (…) The Catholic processions have almost disappeared, but have been replaced by ‘processions’ and by political and social ‘demonstrations’ (…) For many of those who deviate from the Christian religion, Christian enthusiasm has changed to ‘social,’ or ‘humanitarian,’ or ‘patriotic,’ or ‘nationalist’ enthusiasm; there is something for every taste.”

Do you subscribe to Vilfredo Pareto’s iconoclastic thesis, or to the common opinion that we have indeed come out of religion in the West?

Pierre Bergé: This analysis that you cite is perhaps iconoclastic, but it does not hold water. To begin with, it is wrong that the Christian religion is on the decline in the world. We mentioned earlier the Orthodoxy that is rising from the ashes. Furthermore, it is excessive to present democracy as a substitute for the Christian religion. In fact, democracy is simply not a religion. But it is quite true that men on the left regrettably tend to classify all Catholics as reactionary rightists.

I like to say that men on the left, to whom the Republic very much owes its existence, have emptied the churches to fill the museums. I totally agree with it. But we certainly have not replaced Catholic worship with socialist worship. It is foolishness to pretend that we would worship a “State god” or a “People god.” The state does have a significant weight in society; and the ambient discourse is indeed articulated around the values of assistantship, secularism and the nation. But none of this has ever taken on nor could have ever taken on a religious character.

I fail to see how Christian practices and beliefs would have diminished on the grounds that democratic institutions were gaining ground. They have certainly decreased, at least in France, but if they have done so, it is certainly not in the context of a competition with the values and customs of the Republic. The reason for this relative decline of Christianity, more particularly Catholicism, is to be found in the obsolete side of its beliefs and practices. After having been in the spotlight for two thousand years, not without the support of force, to the extent that the Church burned heretics, they are simply going out of fashion.

In the end, what has changed with the secular Republic is not that a new official cult has tried to supplant Catholic worship, but that religious affairs have been relegated to the private sphere. This was not the case before. Let us not forget that the Catholic Church has persecuted the Protestant community from which I come. Even if religion now belongs to the intimate sphere, and no longer to the political sphere, the religious beliefs of Catholic citizens have of course an impact on their electoral preferences and on their positions about a given subject in society or a given draft law.

As evidenced by a recent survey, relayed last week by an article in Le Monde, it is however a biased perception that every Catholic is opposed to marriage for all or to surrogacy. In reality, there are multiple scenarios among Catholic voters. A number of them are politically right-wing, when it comes to the economy, and yet sensitive to left-wing concerns about so-called social issues. I think, therefore, that we have to take a step back from the overly obvious prejudices that we leftwing men commonly share about Catholics.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Thank you for your time. Would you like to add a few words?

Pierre Bergé: You did well to request this interview. Now I would like it if you tell me about yourself.

That conversation with Grégoire Canlorbe, which happened in January 2017, was initially published in French in Revue Arguments, in Mars 2017; then published in English in The Postil Magazine, in September 2020

A conversation with Nathan Cofnas, for Genetic Literacy Project

A conversation with Nathan Cofnas, for Genetic Literacy Project

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download  Nathan Cofnas is an American philosopher and PhD Candidate of Philosophy at Oxford University. He is known for his works on the evolution of morality; his debate with Kevin B. MacDonald about Jewish ethnic interests; and his paper titled “Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry.”

  Grégoire Canlorbe: It is not uncommon to hear that IQ tests are not measuring intelligence stricto sensu, but only the success in passing IQ tests. Hence so many people supposedly gifted with a high IQ turn out to be complete morons in the real life… lacking subtlety, depth, hindsight, creativeness, polyvalence, humility, alertness, and a critical and independent mindset. As a defender of the research on group differences in intelligence, do you contest such claim?

  Nathan Cofnas: The claim that IQ tests only measure the ability to take IQ tests is a common critique, but not among those who are familiar with the relevant evidence. IQ is highly correlated with a range of real-life outcomes both inside and outside the classroom: educational attainment, job performance, health, even your chance of getting into a car crash. This is not surprising when you consider that, as Robert Gordan put it, “everyday life [is] an intelligence test.” Nonacademic tasks like planning and following a healthy diet, preventing or treating diseases, reading a bus schedule, making a budget, avoiding accidents, or setting up household appliances involve problems that have the same basic form as IQ test questions. People with higher IQs tend to do these things better and more reliably than those with lower IQs.

  That being said, the ability that IQ tests purport to measure—so-called “general intelligence”—is not well understood in any detail, and “intelligence” certainly has other dimensions. Success at any given activity requires a constellation of abilities and dispositions. It’s pretty much always an advantage to have more general intelligence, but the people with the highest IQs are not necessarily the most successful or the “smartest” in a colloquial sense. The traits you mention—subtlety, creativity, critical thinking, etc.—are to some extent independent of general intelligence, and can be just as essential.

  As readers may or may not know, there are nontrivial differences in the distribution of IQ among racial groups, and these differences go a long way toward explaining racial disparities in socioeconomic status. There is a debate about the role played by genes vs. environment in producing race differences in IQ. We know that environmental factors can influence IQ: better nutrition/healthcare as well as familiarity with abstract, scientific thinking both increase IQ up to a point. But race differences persist even when environments become as equal as we know how to make them. The 15-point IQ gap between Blacks and Whites in the US has been stable for decades, and has resisted extreme interventions including cross-racial adoption. I have argued that it’s time to start thinking about what the political and ethical implications would be if these differences are influenced by genes.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: In contrast to the view that the evolution of moral and juridical norms is best explained by the psychological forces operating within individuals (and facing the trial of natural selection), you argue that the success of an established norm is most often imputable to the magnitude of the power backing the latter. How do you sum up your argument? Does your thesis apply to the transition of Ancient Judaism to Talmudism—a renovated practice of Judaism in which kings and priests would be left behind for the benefit of the masters of exegesis?

  Nathan Cofnas: An influential approach in cultural evolutionary theory assumes that beliefs/ideas/practices spread as a result of individuals’ learning biases, natural selection, and random forces. People have learning biases to, for example, conform to the majority or adopt practices that seem useful. Then natural selection favors individuals and groups with adaptive beliefs and practices. William Durham, Joseph Fracchia, and Richard Lewontin raised the objection that this ignores the role of power in cultural evolution. Maybe cultural evolution is not driven by the aggregate of the individual decisions of agents in a population but by the whim of the powerful. If so, the learning biases that feature in some cultural evolutionary models of the evolution of morality would be largely irrelevant in practice.

  Drawing on work by Christopher Boehm, I argued that the evolution of morality probably was driven largely by the exercise of power in ways that undermine cultural evolutionary models that emphasize individual learning biases. Hunter–gatherers in the Pleistocene did not choose what moral rules to follow based on learning biases. Instead, rules were imposed by coalitions of the majority to advance their explicitly represented collective interests. Rule-violators were subject to fitness reducing punishments. This created selection pressures to internalize group norms and, I argue, to be innately receptive to certain rules that were widely enforced across groups.

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A conversation with Renaud Camus, for American Renaissance

A conversation with Renaud Camus, for American Renaissance

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Camus  Jean Renaud Gabriel Camus, co-founder and President of the National Council of European Resistance, is a French writer and political theorist known for having coined the syntagm “great replacement”—referring to the colonization of Western Europe by immigrants from North Africa, Black Africa, and the Middle East. He was to be a speaker at the 2020 American Renaissance conference, which was canceled because of Covid.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Your caustic, disillusioned outspokenness led you to a series of court appearances. How do you sum up the tale of your mishaps with the Prosecutor’s Office alongside the American public, accustomed to freedom of expression?

  Renaud Camus: Oh, it is more than the prosecutor’s office. It is a never-ending series of appearances before a whole hierarchy of different courts, usually on charges of incitement to racial hatred. It is also under that heading that I am usually condemned. Of course, from my point of view, hate has absolutely nothing to do with it. There are none in my writings, nor any attacks on people. But hatred is the very effective name that the replacist power has chosen to give to any opposition to genocide by substitution, to any resistance to the Great Replacement, to the slightest objection to the change of people and civilization. By the way, when people start to speak of your hatred, you have to be wary: it is usually that they want to kill you, or at least to end you, to silence you.

  As an example, here is the tweet that earned me the most recent lawsuits:

  “A box of condoms offered in Africa it is three less drowned in the Mediterranean, a hundred thousand euros in savings for the family allowances fund, two prison cells freed and three centimeters of sea ice preserved.”

  A joke, not the slightest hatred, no reference to the slightest race, and a simple reflection among others of my constant concern as for the population explosion everywhere, Europe eminently included, which makes all ecological policies pointless. Well that joke could very well get me in jail, since it will undoubtedly lead to my conviction, too, and since I was sentenced last time to a suspended prison sentence, a suspension which a new unfavorable verdict would overcome.

  A young novelist, Thomas Clavel, has just published a novel, Un traître mot [A single word], which roughly accurately describes the current state of freedom of expression and repression in France today. The book is alternative history, but hardly. The imposed sentences are barely heavier than those we undergo in reality, for a wrong word one sees oneself being inflicted years of prison and re-education, but one or two years will be probably enough so that we definitely arrive, in the reality, to what is shown there. Reading A single word in Paris in 2020 it is, relatively speaking, like reading Kafka’s The Trial in Moscow in 1936. In both cases, the literary exaggeration is minimal. And in Clavel one is much more heavily condemned for words than for deeds. Power is taking out of prisons criminals by action in order to replace them in cells with criminals by opinion. We are pretty much there. As I am speaking to you, the new minister of Justice is releasing, under the pretext of coronavirus and prison overcrowding, hundreds or thousands of people convicted of theft, rape, armed assault or blood crimes. Is it in order to make room, and to fill the liberated cells with people like us, who oppose the industrial crushing of races? The Keeper of the Seals said, during his assumption of duty, that his ministry would be that of anti-racism and the fight against hate. The hatred that he slays, as we have just seen, is the opposition to the change of people. As for the anti-racism he promotes, it is the desire to mix and confuse all races, therefore to make them disappear, starting with the white-one will even say, one already says, that it has never existed, that it is a fantasy, a creation of the mind.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: The late Guillaume Faye spoke very highly of you in his last published book Ethnic Apocalypse, commending your initiative to launch the NCER [National Council of European Resistance] and the speech you pronounced on this occasion in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. He also praised your choice of words—Undifferentiated Human Matter—to qualify the way the native ordinary people is supposedly perceived by the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie. How much is your own reflection beholden to the syntagms that Faye invented—especially ethnomasochism and archeofuturism?

  Renaud Camus: Oh, ethnomasochism is quite precious. I have a little more trouble with archeofuturism which is so precisely fayan, or fayesque, that it becomes difficult to handle by anyone other than its creator. But I do not despair, not admittedly to appropriate it, but to be led to make personal use of it.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You claim to disapprove all acts of violence—including those perpetrated against the perceived occupying authorities by autochthonous terrorists like Brenton Harrison Tarrant and Patrick Crusius, both of whom have made use of the syntagm “the great replacement” in their respective manifestos. What do you reply to the claim that we are presently at war with some extra-European races (alongside whom Islam serves as a rallying banner); and that in a time of war one cannot gain victory without resorting to violence against the enemy?

  Renaud Camus: Brenton Harrison Tarrant used the syntagm of the great replacement without any reference to my books or to me, whose existence he probably does not even know. The appellation must have seemed relevant to him, that is all, during his stay in Europe; and seemed to accurately describe the situation he was seeing with us, all the more than it is an obvious one. The syntagm is now everywhere on the continent, it is a household name [in English in the original text]: he adopted it, good for him, although it has complicated my life a lot. As for Patrick Crusius, he refers to Tarrant and his manifesto The Great Replacement, and not in the least to me, whom he probably knows even less than Tarrant knows me. Their actions are enough to prove that they did not read me. They are as far removed as possible from in-nocence [neologism by Renaud Camus, synonymous of harmlessness], which is the central concept of my thinking. And their views are contrary to mine in almost every way. Tarrant is for example an ardent natalist, while population growth is in my opinion one of the most serious threats to the planet; and more than a threat, since it is already destroying everything there is to destroy.

[Read more…] about A conversation with Renaud Camus, for American Renaissance

A conversation with Jon Entine, for European Scientist

A conversation with Jon Entine, for European Scientist

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220px-Entine_photo  Jon Entine is an American science writer. He is the founder and executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, a nonprofit that educates the public about the revolution in biomedicine and agricultural biotechnology. He was formerly a fellow at the Institute for Food and Agricultural Literacy at the University of California, Davis, the Center for Health & Risk Communication at George Mason University, and at the American Enterprise Institute. After working as a network news writer, producer and head of documentaries for NBC News and ABC News from 1974-1994, Entine moved into scholarly research and print journalism.

  Entine has written seven books, four on genetics and chemical risk, and has addressed a range of controversial issues, including the genetics of sports; the shared ancestry of Jews, Christians and Muslims; socially responsible investing; and why organic farming will not scale to produce sustainable food. He is a contributing columnist and writer for dozens of newspapers and magazines. He has was won 19 major journalism awards including two Emmys, three CINE, Ohio State Award, Chris Award, Best Feature Film Interntional Sport Film Festival,  and a National Press Club Award for Consumer Journalism.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You carefully investigated the genetic underpinnings of the over-representation of blacks in many high profile sports. Could you remind us of the fruits of your inquiry? Why do whites dominate strength related positions and events in so many sports—and why are blacks so poorly represented in some major sports, such as swimming?

  Jon Entine: I think it’s phenomenal, really startling that if you look at the major sports around the world: track and field, football in Europe, American football, baseball, and basketball, which is an international sport, you see a very odd distribution of which athletes do the best in various sports. In many of the sports, the ones that require speed, quick reaction time, things like global and American football or basketball or sprinting, it’s utter dominance by athletes of West African ancestry.

  In long distance running, which requires endurance, you see the dominance of East Africans and a few North Africans, whose ancestors evolved in higher altitudes, shaping their physique and physiology. You look at strength events, and you see dominance of East Europeans and Euro-Asians with very minimal representation of those of African ancestry. These aren’t just recent aberrations.

  These patterns have persisted for decades and have actually become more pronounced as the playing field got more level, so ‘natural talent’ could emerge and environmental factors were at a minimum. Once the influence of performance enhancement drugs during the 1960s, 70s, and ‘89s driven by Russia and the Eastern bloc dissipated, which distorted who were the best athletes, we saw these patterns become even more pronounced around the world. And I think the more you research this, the more you understand that at the elite level of athletic competition, we are very much a product of our genetics and the patterns reflect evolution in different geographical areas.

  This is not a black/white issue or an issue of ‘race’ as we have traditionally used the term. It’s about regions of evolutionary origin. Phenotypes and genotypes are shaped by thousands of years of evolution. Although some characteristics seem to loosely correlated with traditional, folkloric notions of race, many do not. Just look at the difference in body types and athletic skill sets of distance running East Africans and elite athletes who trace their primary descent to West Africa. The differences in physiology and physique may be small in the case of some characteristics, and there is a great deal of overlap, but those differences are magnified at the elite level of sports competition where a fraction of a second can make the difference between winning a gold medal or being an also ran.

  Social factors alone or even significantly cannot explain why the top two thousand all time 100 meter times are held by a person of West African ancestry yet West Africans are almost nonexistent at the elite level of medium and long distance running. I addressed many of these issues, along with the toxic history of ‘race science,’ in my book Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It. Although the book is now 20 years old, and some data are dated, the arguments in the book are now mainstream science and genetics. It was actually based on a documentary that I wrote and produced back in 1989 with Tom Brokaw, Black Athletes: Fact and Fiction.

  The idea that anybody can grow up and become an elite athlete with the proper training and opportunities is just not supported by what we know of genetics. Genetics is not destiny, but I would say that genetics is like designing a house. You can tidy up the rooms a little bit, you can move things around, but generally speaking, who you are is like the house itself. Once it’s built, it’s set, and these predeterminations are the result tens of thousands of years of evolution.

  That said, there are always cultural and genetic factors in play. There is a biocultural feedback loop in sports in which culture helps magnify small but meaningful biologically-based differences. People say, “Oh, there are few blacks in ice hockey,” for instance. Well, ice hockey is played in northern climates, and there have been relatively few blacks in Canada or in Europe, historically. So, the number of blacks is almost representative of the number of blacks in those regions. And some sports, like gymnastics, for instance, or swimming, require a lot of training. They require facilities, pools that are very expensive. Social opportunity has largely excluded minorities. The more factors that cost a lot of money, like the availability of expensive facilities, then, cultural and social factors come into play.

  The sports that I cited: running, football, soccer, and basketball which are usually state sponsored or sponsored by schools—sports like those represent a level playing field. It doesn’t require special financial advantages to be a great long-distance runner or sprinter. It’s really natural talent that comes to the fore. So, it’s best to think of sports as a biocultural phenomenon—sports success. And the lower the cultural barriers to entry, the more genetic factors come into play. And those genetic based differences are not distributed equally among populations. In running, blacks of West African ancestry dominate the sprints, totally. In long distance running, blacks of East African ancestry dominate. And that’s purely a result of our genetic history.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: It has been hypothesized that race differences in intelligence and in psychopathy should be connected to the severity of encountered winters over tens of thousands of years of evolutionary time—with Caucasians and a fortiori Northeast Asians having faced the coldest winters and consequently evolved the higher IQs and the lower psychopathy levels necessary to navigate difficult environmental circumstances. Do you endorse this alleged connection?

  Jon Entine: Well, there has been some speculation on that controversial issue by evolutionary psychologists and others, as well as some geneticists, that some people embrace and some people do not. One of the suppositions is that evolution does shape who we are physically, and there are group differences–overlapping but real. We know that. And so, some people have asked, if genetics shape us physically, and we see the examples in sports, it must shape us psychologically and intellectually, as well. And there’s belief among many scientists that there are patterns of differences based at IQ tests—although many people like to dismiss them as unimportant or pseudo-science or racist. I think there’s profound evidence and belief within the psychometric community that IQ tests are very real measurements of a kind of intelligence. But how much of the differences are the result of evolutionary factors versus environmental and cultural factors, including those that impact biology, such as natal and childhood development. Obviously environmental factors predominant in explaining patterns of differences.

[Read more…] about A conversation with Jon Entine, for European Scientist