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Grégoire Canlorbe

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A conversation with Zuhdi Jasser, for Gatestone Institute

A conversation with Zuhdi Jasser, for Gatestone Institute

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Mar 6, 2021

M. Zuhdi Jasser is the President of the American Islamic forum for Democracy. He is a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander. He is a former Vice-Chair and commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) appointed by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) from 2012-2016. He is a physician in private practice specializing in internal medicine, primary care, and medical ethics in Phoenix, Arizona. Dr. Jasser and his wife Gada and their three children live in Scottsdale, Arizona. You can find him on Twitter @DrZuhdiJasser

Canlorbe: Dear Dr Jasser, thank you for joining me. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are the first two Muslim women to serve in American Congress. Do you sense they are promoting an enlightened, tolerant version of Islam? Are they representative of the mentality of the majority of Muslims in America?

Jasser: Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) are simply byproducts of the Islamist farm teams that recruited them and trained them in the art of Islamist ideology and dissimulation. Those farm teams include the alphabet soup of Islamist organizations (‘Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups’) that exist in the United States including but not limited to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) for example. Whether future politicians all the way up to Congress, media pundits, or the many demagogic imams, they all rise up from within the Islamist populist movement in the United States and the West telling insular Islamist communities what they want to hear while claiming to speak for all Muslims.  

Omar and Tlaib rose up in Democratic politics because they represent decades of cooperation and inter-connectivity between the Islamist movements here the West, if not globally, along with the far left’s progressivism. In 2011, I and other Muslim reform leaders were asked by various members of Congress to testify on the connection of the non-violent ideologies of Islamism to the radicalization process for militant Islamists. Since then, we have testified many more times on the Hill to the compromising influence of global Islamist ideologies and domestic Islam is organizations to our national security. The American Islamist groups worked in a coordinated fashion to attack me, the organization I represent, and the other Muslims in our Muslim Reform Movement each time we testified to Congress—their attempts at takfirism (declaring us not to be ‘real’ Muslims) were often less than subtle and typically disgusting. The Islamist groups and their domestic Islamist platform was piggybacked onto the social media popularity of various far left firebrands. They repeatedly attempted to smear us and never addressed the issues or ideas that we represented in our testimony. It is always beyond revealing how fearful Islamists are of actually addressing the connection between the separatism of their non-violent ‘political Islam’ (Islamism) and violent political Islam.

This is the classic method of Islamists—they tag onto identity movements and transform the belief in the ideology of the faith of Islam into an identity racial group which it is not. This stifles any real diversity of ideas and promotes a culture where the community is perceived to be a racial type monolith. Thus anyone who speaks out becomes a “uncle Tom” and against the tribe.

I believe there is nothing that better exemplifies and demonstrates the potent nature of the alliance between the far left and the Islamists (also known as the Red-Green alliance) than the so-called ‘squad’ and the combination of Congresswoman Omar, Tlaib and Cong. Ocazio-Cortez (D-NY) and Pressley (D-MA). In 2020, we saw the Islamist identity politics fit right in to the Black Lives Matter Movement and it’s racialization of every issue in its airspace. It is quite a cooperation to behold, even though ultimately the Islamists or theocrats in actuality agree with very little of the ideas of the far left for example when it comes to implementation of their draconian interpretations of ‘shariah law’.

The bottom line is that the template of the alliance between the far left extremists and Islamists is embodied in the relationship we see between AOC and her following and the Islamist members of Congress and their following.

To your question, and in pretty much every way, these two members of congress represent the current leading edge of political Islam in the West and its inherent collectivism and identity politics. They represent the stifling of dissent and dissidents against Islamism in otherwise diverse communities. They represent the empowerment of domestic and global Islamist supremacists and their Islamic nation-state ideologies over the exceptionalism of Americanism and of secular liberal democracy. Sure. They would ultimately deny this, and certainly there are some clear differences between Omar and Tlaib. For example, Omar‘s foreign policy is clearly proven over and over that she formulates her positions looking first for the interest and through the lens of the global political Islamist populist movement and then all else follows. She spins it to her benefit in a deceptively American context, yet you can see in her unwavering support of Turkey’s Erdogan, Qatar, various permutations of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and even Iran that her affinity for Islamists is something else! As a naval officer, there is nothing I found more offensive than her fabricated statements right before she was elected that somehow Americans killed thousands in Somalia, more than the terrorists we were fighting, implying that those of us who served in “Operation Restore Hope” were terrorists.

Canlorbe: You make no mystery of your Syrian origins. How do you assess Bachar al-Assad’s policy? Do you believe Donald Trump had the right attitude towards Bachar when, in April 2017, he decided a missile strike in response to the use of chemical attack?

Jasser: Bashar Assad’s policies are in line with the Syrian Ba’ath party fascism of over 50 years. The Syrian revolution which begun in 2011 needs to be understood in the context of the methods with which the ruling party wields its power. The Syrian Ba’ath Party is an Arab nationalist socialist party (akin to an Arab Nazism) which seized power by military coup in 1963. The Alawite (a Shi’a heterodox offshoot) sectarian faction of Ba’ath Party loyalists then took power in another bloody coup in February 1966. After the Alawite coup of 1966, the fascist Ba’ath transformed its predominantly supremacist political platform to incorporate a preference for Alawite religious sectarianism. Members of Sunni Muslim leadership were purged from the military. The entire leadership became comprised of Alawite Ba’athist faithful. Sunni, Christian, Druze, and Ismaili influence was all but eliminated. Non-Alawite officers who were ousted reported that in the late 1960s and early ‘70s Syria was on the verge of a sectarian civil war. This condition was often difficult to ascertain for blind analysts since like many Arab tyrants Hafez Assad ruled in a predominantly secular fashion rather than theocratic. Now this began to shift as the son, Bashar moved Syria into the complete orbit of Iran and essentially became a client-state of Iran as well as Russia.

But, in 1970, Hafez al-Assad took the reins from his fellow Alawites in another coup. Assad, in line with the totalitarian doctrine of the Ba’athist Party, ruled Syria with an iron fist for 30 years. Assad ended the Ba’ath Alawite in-fighting and the regime cleansed any non-Alawites in its midst, obliterating any Sunni protestations within or outside the party. To quell religious sectarian unrest, Assad placed a few party loyalists who were Sunni, Christian, and Druze in mid-level and a few higher levels of political, but not military, leadership, though most knew them to be window dressing and sympathizers. The Syria of Hafez Assad was much like the Iraq of Ba’athist Saddam Hussein, described by a pseudonymous expatriate as “A Republic of Fear”: “a regime of totalitarian rule, institutionalized violence, universal fear, and unchecked personal dictatorship.” Many of our Syrian families, after suffering for years in and out of prison, muzzled in every form of expression left for American freedom after realizing that a revolution to topple one of the world’s most ruthless military tyrannies would likely never materialize in their lifetimes.

  The Assad regime paralyzed the humanity of 22 million Syrians for two generations using incalculably cruel methods. Brothers, sisters, families reported on one another to Syrian intelligence (Mukhabarat); many vanished, never to be seen again; and anyone who dared dissent from the ruling party was systematically tortured and made an example with frequent collective punishment. By the twenty-first century, there would come to be more Syrians living outside Syria than inside, and some analyses claim that one in nine expatriates living abroad provided steady information to the Assad regime on expatriate Syrian activities in order to spare family. The Syrian Human Rights Committee has chronicled many of the atrocities committed in the past 45 years by the Assad regime: the Hama Massacres of 1963, 1982, and again in 2011, Tadmur, and the countless prisoners of conscience systematically snuffed out by the regime.

It is upon this background that the Syrian revolution commenced in March 2011 as part of the greater regional Arab awakening. The Assad regime calculated that it would be able to slow walk a persistent genocidal cleansing operation against the Syrian people who are part of the revolution. While the first year of the revolution showed significant diversity with a proportional representation from Sunni, Alawaite, Druze, Christian and others involved marching in the streets, Assad did as his party always did, driving internal sectarian divisions to rip apart the country leaving his regime alone. He was sustained with heavy foreign sustenance from Russia and Iran in military, financial, and human assets. The Sunni population eventually was significantly radicalized with ISIS arising in 2013 in Syria and Iraq due to a perfect storm of Assad’s radicalization of Sunnis, their ideological influence from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey as well as Iraq’s descension into anarchy. The growth of ISIS provided the Assad regime a convenient cover for continued military genocidal operations with the use of chemical weapons against the majority of the population who were unarmed and had naively thought the world would put enough pressure on Assad if they saw it on Youtube to bring it to an end. Sadly, Russia and Iran were likely the primary reason Assad urvived and the civil war did not evolve organically. The UN remained feckless as Russia and Iran consolidated Assad’s grip on Syria’s humanity systematically exterminating over 600,000 people and displacing 10,000,000 of Syria’s 22,000,000.

This is not to say that the West or anyone should have intervened in any way close to what happened in Iraq. What use is the UN, however, if ruthless tyrants can use chemical weapons and eradicate swaths of their own population with no repercussions. A Bosnia type response akin to President Clinton’s and the UN’s response to Serbia’s crimes in 1995. President Obama however did not just avoid military intervention but his administration essentially actively supported the Assad regime at the altar of their “nuclear deal” with the Islamic Republic of Iran and empowerment of The Iranian Republican Guard Corps and it’s Masters in Tehran. Their hundreds of billions of dollars handed to the theocrats as well as their insurance of security gave them a green light to spread terror into Syria along with thousands of troops and the empowerment of the terror group Hizballah.

President Trump’s administration’s response to the Assad’s repeated use of chemical weapons in April 2018, while minimal in the scheme of what had happened in Syria to that point, did send a message that reverberated within the Assad regime, not to mention Russia and Iran, that red lines do mean something for this administration. It did appear to have some deterrent effect as limited as it was.

Canlorbe: At Trump’s request, Saudi Arabia, but also the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain (who have just signed the Abraham Accords), promised to make peace with Israel. They also promised to stop financing, hoisting terrorist organizations. Do you believe those regimes can be trusted? How will they behave under Biden’s presidency?

Jasser: In Reagan’s words, “trust but verify”. But first, if I can reflect on the failed “Arab Awakening”? While it was not a Spring, except for Tunisia where a culture of democracy and some liberalism is actually beginning to take hold, a complete reset in the Arab world against tyranny, was certainly very appealing to those of us from families that have been fighting against these dictators, autocratic monarchs, and otherwise Islamist theocrats for now over two generations. But now after a decade of failed revolutions, there must be a better path forward? Somewhere between the 20th century’s ossified tyrannies and the chaos after 2011, must be a way forward? Some may appropriately simply say that no real democracies evolved quickly after centuries of tyranny and in fact often needed multiple revolutions before taking hold. Perhaps there can be a more methodical transition towards modernity with steady benchmarks of reform and liberalization?

The challenge as always, will be in keeping it from being too slow to the point of fiction which has been plan ‘A’ for the tyrants across the Middle East since WWII as they lied to the West about reforms in order to placate each new administration with a 5 or 10 year plan while transitions in power in the West along with our societal ADD gave them a pass. Remember the changes in 2011 created vacuums facilitating the re-emergence of tyranny and radical Islamists, but sometimes, like treating cancer, the patient has to get much more ill first before the dawn and return of health.

Essentially, a model of reform that I see possible, perhaps remotely, but possible, for liberalism and freedom may be an evolution in a brisk pace towards constitutional monarchies (as much as I disdain genetic supremacism), for example, that build civil society institutions that begin to modernize Islamic thought, end the concept of an Islamic state and its jihad, and instead look at their state and citizens through the prism of universal human rights. What we’ve been seeing in the UAE does frankly give some hope as does Bahrain, Sudan, and more to come. I so far have less optimism for Saudi Arabia relinquishing the dominance of the ideas of salafi-jihadism and its draconian interpretation of Islam even as the Saudis openly condemn and declare war on ‘political Islam’. Their track record is abysmal. But as we see them outlaw child marriage and make other changes, the principle of “trust but verify” may be appropriate to push them forward?

I am sure this is likely confusing to many non-Muslims, if we try to say, that well the Saudis are now anti-Islamist despite decades of supporting Muslim Brotherhood groups across the planet? And how can anyone blame them? However, please understand that the concept of an Islamic Republic, with an Islamic flag and an Islamic jurisprudence (sharia) in which the Qur’an is the source, not just a source of law, is in fact certainly still a form of political Islam, but rather just more of a top-down, corporate, theocracy no matter which way you cut it–while the Islamist populist movements (like the Muslim Brotherhood) are bottom-up grass roots (viral) theocracies founded in populist sharia ideologies. Regardless, of whether it’s a top-down corporate approach or a grassroots bottom-up one, if the state’s raison d’etre is based in Islam and the primacy of Islamic law rather than individual rights and the protection of minorities as in secular liberal democracies then it will always be anti-freedom and illiberal.

We will have to watch very closely if there is an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel whether, it will also be followed by new interpretations from the pulpits of the grand mosque in Mecca or mosques in Medina and across the country. The fact that we heard this coming from the pulpits in the Emirates and Bahrain is what made the Abraham Accords a reality to believe rather than doubt.

For the first time I do also see peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia as not only a short-term possibility but even a long-term one. The combination of the populist Islamist movement threat to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its radical offshoots of ISIS and al Qaeda combined with the threat of Shia Islamism of Khomeinism has shaken the foundations of the Saudi state establishment and forced them to reckon with monsters they helped create (Muslim Brotherhood and their mosques) while also pushing them to forge more meaningful acknowledgement of the state of Israel and the West. Let us not also underestimate the role of the Trump administration and the Pompeo State Department in making this happen. This early reform however will only be real when it’s met with genuine reinterpretation of the antisemitic translations and interpretations of the Qur’an and Hadith (Prophet’s sayings) that the government of Saudi Arabia pushes. Not until their imams begin to marginalize the bigotry (anti-Semitism) of so many of those interpretations and begin to present new interpretations will that change be in fact durable.

As for Qatar I’m strongly of the opinion that we should begin the process of closing our base there and finding other options for our regional security. Their state propaganda arm of Al Jazeera in addition to their relationship with Iran, Turkey and global Islamist movements of the Muslim Brotherhood has rendered them no longer an ally let alone hardly even a “frenemy”. This should not surprise anyone. The Al-Thani family went all in the Muslim Brotherhood since 1961 when they have safe haven to the spiritual guide of the Ikhwani movement– Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi. He has since been a close partner of the royal family aligned ideologically and strategically with a global reach of at least tens of millions of Islamists. We have long followed and dissected Qaradawi’s English and Arabic work and there is little doubt that he and his followers are the central cancer of the Sunni Islamist global movement against the west and our way of life. The Qatari government’s fealty for Islamists has brought them economically and ideologically closer to Iran’s Khomeinists in addition to the Taliban. My position has always been that Qatar sees itself as the global center for Islamists ie. “The Caliphate”. Their extreme wealth makes for a toxic global brew for most of our Islamist enemies.

I see no inkling of reform or change on the programming of Al Jazeera or any of their imams or clerics. In fact, only months ago did we see systematic Holocaust denial on the programming of Al Jazeera as they attempted to quickly erase history of that. They are too deeply embedded at heart and economically with Iran, Turkey and other Islamist supremacists across the planet to have any hope at reform unless their regime falls. We can only pray.

There’s little doubt that the Biden administration will simply be Obama 3.0. It may even be worse than the Obama administration because it’s going to trip over itself in such an exaggerated fashion trying to whiplash the progress against Islamists domestically and abroad we have made since ’16 that the pendulum will swing back further than even the Obama administration was proud to advance in defense of Islamists.

We’re already seeing this in the Islamist that was selected to be a senior White House staffer for legislative affairs—Reema Dodin. She is notably not only historically an operative with Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups like CAIR in DC but she also stated as a student at UC-Berkley, “Palestinian suicide bombings are the last resort of a desperate people”. With her likes running interference with the Hill for the White House, we may see an even more radicalized policy in favor of not only Iranian appeasement but overt support of Islamist interests domestically and abroad. What is certain based on how Dodin while at Senator Durbin’s office with her allies at Muslim Advocates beat the drum of Muslim American victimization against our testimony on the Hill, it will only get worse.

As for Biden’s foreign policy, he is already signaling that the Pentagon will focus on diplomacy first and the military second. So the Pentagon is a branch of the State Department? If that’s not “leading from behind 3.0”, I don’t know what is.  Sources say he wants to “de-emphasize the military” and lift up diplomacy. If that vision is by openly weakening our defense programming, that will signal a green light to actually usher in more war, not less. Peace through weakness doesn’t work against thugs like Khamanei and Assad across the planet. We are thus likely to see a re-emergence of Islamist belligerence and a testing of the waters as they try to make gains against Biden’s apparent appeasement strategy. Now more than ever, our private work needs to push for anti-Islamist reformers against the likely ascendant Islamist threats.

Canlorbe: Putin is an ally to the mullahs and sits at the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. In Russia, Muslims are representing 10% of the total population (and Islam is the second most widely professed religion). Is the Russian regime a trustworthy ally in promoting enlightened Islam and fighting against terrorist, theo-political Islam?

Jasser: Oh my, is that a trick question? Just kidding. Domestically, as Michael Weiss pointed out in 2017, the Russians have long played a double game with radical Islamist terror, in fact helping fuel ISIS with recruits from Chechnya to give Assad cover and allow Russia to ship out the jihadists it creates. Regionally, Putin’s regime has empowered our greatest enemies—Iran’s terror regime from its IRGC to Hizballah, and Assad. Its state propaganda, RT, is finally listed under FARA and is an unwavering part of the Assad/Khameinist media arm—state sponsored media. They have worked with our nominal ally, Turkey (selling them missiles) and giving them the greenlight against our Kurdish allies in Syria. Part of their longtime interest in Syria is their only Mediterranean port and base at Tartus. Chechnya’s tyrant, Kadyrov portrays himself as a devout Muslim but he is a two-bit radical tyrant and Putin tool who has systematically radicalized his population while violating the human rights of every minority group from the gay community to dissidents.

As I discuss in my book, A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Patriots’ fight to Save his Faith” my father told me that our family’s deep seeded anti-communism and anti-Islamism is what drove them to become enamored with the West and learn about the exceptionalism of secular democracy and especially about Americanism. Russia’s Putin and its kleptocrats would never promote an enlightened anything, let alone defeat theocracy. They still have a state sponsored church and the other faiths whether within Christianity or outside have lesser to no rights. There’s a reason their entire economy is oil and produce no products of any kind competing in the free markets. The Putin regime is against individual creativity and battles of ideology. In order for reformists to emerge, we need a public platform of critical thinking and modern civil institutions that protect universal human rights.

Canlorbe: Both Maimonides and Averroes endeavored to conciliate religion and Hellenic philosophy (especially Aristotle). They believed the obeisance to God’s law was consistent with the philosophical, rational exegesis of the latter. How do you assess the legacy of Averroes in Islam with respect to that of Maimonides in Judaism?

Jasser: As a physician dedicated to treating the ill, your question resonates with me more than you would ever know. My chosen profession is as a doctor and it was the inspiration of clear broad-minded thinkers (and doctors) like Maimonides and Averroes who influenced so much of my idealism about medicine and medical ethics. Their confidence in weighing in on philosophy, theology, legalisms, and politics are an example of what I have always aspired to be and do in my own life even if their ideas are from almost 1000 years ago. Because it was not necessarily the specifics of their ideas, but the courage of their inquiry. Scholars have oft pointed out the strong resemblance between Maimonides’ “understanding of God’s manifestness in the order of nature” and Averroes’ “conception of God and providence which focuses heavily on God’s essential preservation of all species, and his role as the cause of being and unity in all hylomorphic substances.” Averroes, for example, saw God in every element of nature’s diversity. Averroes’s gift or legacy to Islamic thought was much like Maimonides, he took human feelings and sensations, like ‘heat’, ‘intellect’, ‘mind’, ‘wisdom’, and ‘creativity’ and used them to broaden our human understanding of God. To most Salafists, even the suggestion of imparting human-like attributes to God is blasphemy whether or not it is intended just to understand and relate better to our understanding of God. Giving philosophical descriptions of God using human metaphors and nature provided Averroes, like Maimonides, a flexibility of thought about God which in the right era of boundless human creativity and inquiry can become the foundation of real enlightenment and liberalism.

Similar to Maimonides, Averroes sought to bring to Islamic thought a “blending of God as pure unity and God as intellect” a very Hellenic thought process seen throughout Arabic discourse seen in, for example, the Theology of Aristotle.

Contrary to essentially every extremist or literalist movement in Islam today, Averroes’ legacy was about taking God’s unity (tawhid) and giving Muslims a way of looking at that unity, consistency, and omnipresence in a way that does not conflict and actually explains the infinite diversity of the human condition, our nature, and our laws. This is actually also the essence of our Muslim Reform Movement—an attempt to bring back such a deep understanding of diversity of thought and interpretations of Islamic law (shariah) in a way that allows us to live in harmony with modernity and secular liberal democracy through a separation of ‘history and religion’ or more allegory and less literalism. Averroes may not have explicitly gone so far as real liberalism. But then again there were no liberal democracies upon which to reflect for these thinkers at the time. But the foundations of his thought, similar to what Maimonides was to Judaism, gave metaphysical nuggets of what God is and what God is not, along with the infinite possibilities for human nature brought about by God. Averroes, like Maimonides, looked at scripture, the Qur’an for Averroes as allegory. This courage to go beyond literalism is part of his legacy and similarities to Maimonides.

Sadly, while both Maimonides and Averroes did their amazingly open-minded and deep work during the 12th century, both in Muslim majority nation states, Averroes’ legacy has so far been very difficult to find in the “Islamic world” if not lost to hundreds and hundreds of years of intellectual and philosophical stagnation and reactionary movements that ultimately dominated and decimated most free Islamic academic and civil institutions since his life. It is my hope and prayer that our work contribute not to what the Islamists want—a revivalism of the old—but rather a genuine reform towards a Western model of Islam based on infinite diversity of thought and protection of individual inquiry and their universal human rights rather than the oppressive collective and the proverbial Islamic state.


That conversation was initially published by the Gatestone Institute, in March 2021

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Averroes, Bachar al-Assad, Grégoire Canlorbe, Islam, Maimonides, Putin, Syria, The Abraham Accords, Zuhdi Jasser

Hoppean ethics, Misesian praxeology, and their claim for apodicticity—a global assessment

Hoppean ethics, Misesian praxeology, and their claim for apodicticity—a global assessment

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Mar 1, 2021

A fundamental belief of libertarianism/liberalism [from “classical liberals” to anarcho-capitalists] is that there exists a certain human nature, the observation of which allows one to draw a certain objective conception of the “good life,” with that conception being seen as the only possible objective conception, and the only possible valid one. Also, the observation of the human nature allegedly allows one to draw an objective categorical norm with regard to the right model for the positive law (with that categorical norm being seen as the only possible objective categorical norm, and the only valid categorical standard, as concerns the right model for the positive law); and objective instrumental standards for the purpose of the “good life.” Namely: moral ownership of oneself and of what one acquires non-violently as concerns the alleged objective categorical norm for the model for the positive law; rational and peaceful subsistence as concerns the content of the “good life;” and prioritized, peaceful pursuit of (material) subsistence, property, non-violence, responsibility, savings, mutual charity within the social division of labor as concerns the alleged objective instrumental standards for the purpose of the “good life.”

  Another fundamental belief of libertarianism is that human conduct, while being not subject to any law as to its content (by reason of the alleged free will of humans), is nevertheless characterized by a number of laws as to its structure. Those laws are allegedly the object of what Ludwig von Mises called “praxeology;” and are allegedly apodictic. Thus completing—with an apologetic goal—praxeology with an investigation of the content of human action, Hans Hermann Hoppe endeavored to show that the experience of the type of human action that is argumentative action is necessarily the occasion for any human individual engaged in a given argumentative action to notice the existence of apodictic truths (i.e., that their terms are sufficient to render true, and which are therefore true by right and true whatever may be) in the domain of the knowledge of good and evil; and not only in the field of formal logic with the allegedly apodictic laws that are notably identity, non-contradiction, and the excluded third.

The claim of the non-aggression principle’s apodicticity

  In addition to coming as an outgrowth of praxeology, Hoppe’s thesis intends to complete, or even replace, the jusnaturalist libertarian defense of the categorical principle of non-aggression, i.e., the defense of the categorical principle of non-aggression as a law that allegedly lets itself be deduced from human nature. While a loophole of libertarian jusnaturalism lies in its violation of the logical impossibility of deducing a categorical imperative (for instance, the principle of non-aggression) from an alleged state of affairs (for instance, the human nature such as libertarianism represents it to itself), Hoppe’s thesis intends to fill that gap. And to prove the purported objectivity of the principle of non-aggression despite the impossibility of deducing an ought (in a categorical sense) from an is, i.e., without trying to deduce a categorical ought from an is.

  According to Hoppe, in substance, the moral law non-aggression (i.e., the categorical principle that every man is the sole moral possessor of himself and of the goods which he acquires peacefully, and that no one is therefore morally entitled to showing violence towards someone, his integrity or his property acquired without violence) takes on the character of an apodictic truth just like the logical laws in the first-order logic (i.e., identity, non- contradiction, excluded third party, etc.). The performative contradiction that Hoppe judges to be necessarily associated with the contestation of the principle of non-aggression is alleged to endow the principle of non-aggression with a character of apodictic truth, i.e., to render the principle of non-aggression true by its sole terms, true whatever may be, true by right.

  It is worth specifying that in first-order formal logic, the criterion necessarily retained to judge the apodicticity of a proposition consists of knowing whether it is tautological (i.e., true for any distribution of the values ​​of truth), the laws of first-order logic serving as laws followed and assumed by the calculation of truth values. The incremental criterion contingently retained consists of knowing whether a proposition is reducible to a tautology via relations of synonymy, that second criterion being contingent in that it is conditioned on the recognition of those propositions reducible (to tautologies) as being propositions themselves tautological.

  Likewise, it is worth specifying that at least two modes of performative contradiction are conceivable. On the one hand, the act of acting in such a way that one proves in spite of oneself that one considers to be false some statements one however makes at the moment of the concerned action. On the other hand, the act of acting in such a way that one proves in spite of oneself the falseness of statements which one however makes at the same time. At last, it is worth specifying that the categorical form in a categorical statement—whether it is a moral law (for instance, the non-aggression principle) or a logical law (for instance, the identity principle)—does not endow such statement with an objective or apodictic character.

The Hoppean fallacy

  Hoppe’s argument in favor of the alleged apodicticity of the categorical principle of non-aggression, an argument known as “the ethics of argumentation,” does not consist of undertaking to prove the tautological character of the non-aggression principle or its reducibility to a tautology. Instead, it consists of affirming that the fact of displaying an argumentation for (or against) a given thesis necessarily supposes subscribing to the principle of non-aggression; and that the performative contradiction in the first above-evoked sense (i.e., in the sense of the saying of words that contradict the beliefs that the conduct accompanying those same words supposes and manifests) associated with any argumentation against the non-aggression principle proves in spite of itself the aforesaid principle’s apodicticity.

  Those two assertions are false. On the one hand, far from the fact of displaying an argumentation necessarily supposing that one adheres to the principle of non-aggression, such an activity can very well suppose (for example) that one agrees as an Arian to listen to (and dismantle) the pro-Trinitarian arguments of his slave; but that one does not recognize him as having the right to express himself again on that subject (once the conversation is over), let alone quietly leave the palace to which his servitude attaches him. On the other hand, a performative contradiction (in the above-evoked sense), whatever it is, never proves that the belief one reveals in spite of oneself through the conduct consisting of contradicting that belief (or accompanying the fact of contradicting it) is true, even less apodictic. It only proves that there is an adherence to the aforesaid belief (whose true or false character remains to be determined).

  Even if, indeed, the fact of engaging in some argumentation necessarily implied adhering to the principle of non-aggression, that assumption would only amount to believing (in spite of oneself) in the truth of the principle of non-aggression, not to proving (in spite of oneself) the aforesaid principle’s apodicticity. To put it in another way: even if the principle of non-aggression were necessarily a belief underlying any argumentative activity (and therefore, were necessarily be a premise, secret or avowed, of the statements held within the framework of some argumentative activity), the fact of arguing against the principle of non-aggression would only amount to inferring conclusions contradicting the premises that one reveals in spite of oneself when drawing those conclusions. That would not render apodictic (i.e., true by their sole terms, true whatever the reality, true by right) the aforesaid premises.

A variation of the Hoppean argument—and how it is fallacious as well

  Another attempt to prove the non-aggression principle, inspired by the “ethics of argumentation,” consists of invoking the second mode of performative contradiction: namely the fact of adopting a behavior such as to prove the falsity of statements one makes at the very moment of the aforesaid conduct. While it is no longer a question here of proving the alleged apodicticity of the non-aggression principle, the offered argument is nevertheless not less unsatisfactory than is the attempt to demonstrate the aforesaid apodicticity. The argument in question consists of asserting that the fact of arguing against the non-aggression principle, therefore the property of oneself, is an action that mobilizes, if not the voice or a pen, at least the mental abilities; and which, like any action, proves that one is in possession of one’s own body (including one’s brain). That relation of possession allegedly proving, in turn, that any suffered aggression is immoral—given it undermines the aforesaid possession of oneself.

  Here again, each of those two statements is false. The fact of acting only shows that an order is given to the body (and executed), and not that the aforesaid body finds itself to belong to the aforesaid order’s author. (We will leave aside whether the author in question merges with the brain, the nervous system, or the soul). As for moral possession, i.e., the entitlement to be the possessor of a given good, therefore to hold it (and use it) without suffering any coercion, it does not derive from factual possession as such (i.e., the actual possession of a good regardless of whether or not one is entitled to possess it), nor from the earliest factual possession (i.e., the fact not only of owning a given good, but of being the first to own the good in question). Even if a human (or another animal) were actually the factual possessor—and a fortiori the first factual possessor—of his own body, the aforesaid factual possession would in no way imply moral possession, therefore an entitlement not to be subjected to violence nor to a deprivation of liberty.

  The act of arguing against the principle of non-aggression does not reveal the alleged moral possession (or even the alleged factual possession) of oneself any more than it does reveal the aforesaid principle’s alleged apodicticity. More generally, the moral possession of oneself is not more ascertainable or provable than the principle of non-aggression is apodictic. The fact of observing human nature, taken or not from the angle of argumentative action, does not more allow us to notice the alleged moral (or even factual) possession of oneself any more than the principle of non-aggression is reducible to a tautology or than the contingent presupposition of the principle of non-aggression in any argumentation attacking the truth of the aforesaid principle confers on the aforesaid principle an apodictic character.

  That is just as true for the laws of first-order logic: the fact of observing reality does not more allow us to notice the ontological counterpart of the aforesaid logical laws (including the alleged necessity for any entity considered in a given respect at a given moment to be what it is rather than what it is not) than their contingent presupposition in any argument attacking the truth of the aforesaid logical laws does confer on the aforesaid logical laws an apodictic character. They are only assumed—rather than true by their terms alone or demonstrated.

Two expected objections

  An objection from a proponent of “the ethics of argumentation” may be that the laws of first-order logic—just like tautologies (i.e., propositions remaining true for any distribution of truth values) or propositions reducible to tautologies—are indeed apodictic: nevertheless, insofar as the aforementioned laws are objectively evident by themselves (and only insofar as they are objectively evident by themselves). Whereas tautologies and propositions reducible to tautologies are apodictic insofar as they are demonstrable as true for any distribution of truth values ​​(and only insofar as they are demonstrable as true for any distribution of truth values). And whereas the reducibility of propositions effectively reducible to tautologies may consist, for those propositions, of being reducible insofar as their terms are synonymous, but also of being so insofar as they are likely to be revealed via a performative contradiction, i.e., likely to be the object of an adhesion likely to get revealed in spite of oneself via a performative contradiction.

  Another objection may be that the laws of first-order logic—identity, non-contradiction, excluded third, etc.—are certainly assumed (rather than demonstrated or true by their sole terms), and that they are assumed, if not by any argumentative activity, at least any senseful argumentative activity; but that denying the apodicticity of the aforesaid laws or the one of the propositions which those laws suffice to render true is precisely senseless for our reason, insofar as those laws are a necessary condition of any senseful argumentative activity. Just like it is allegedly senseless for the reason to deny the apodicticity of the principle of non-aggression, insofar as the prior supposition of that principle is a supposedly necessary condition, if not of any argumentative activity, at least any senseful argumentative activity.

  That ultimate argument in favor of holding the non-aggression principle and the laws of the calculus of predicates as apodictic does not pretend to prove their alleged apodicticity. It proposes that we act as if they were apodictic, i.e., proposes that one conventionally holds them as apodictic; and that, on the grounds that they are allegedly necessary conditions for any senseful argumentative activity. (In other words, that argument proposes that the first-order logical laws and the moral law of non-aggression be held to be apodictic conventionally rather than sincerely, i.e., by convention rather than conviction. It happens, nevertheless, that the same argument, which can be qualified as performative, is mobilized in favor of sincerely holding as apodictic the first-order logical laws and the moral law of non-aggression. In that case, the fact that those logical and moral laws allegedly come as necessary conditions of any objectively senseful argument allegedly proves that those laws are objectively apodictic.)

How performative contradiction is not tantamount to tautology

  Regarding the previous argument, the fact of adhering conventionally or sincerely to the laws of first-order logic (also called the calculation of predicates), i.e., the fact of holding them to be true by convention or by conviction, does not imply one adheres sincerely or conventionally to the idea that performative contradiction is a criterion of reducibility to a tautology.

  Whereas the propositions that first-order logic is necessarily led to consider as true propositions by the operation of laws alone are the sole tautological propositions (i.e., true for any distribution of truth values), the propositions that first-order logic is contingently led to consider also as true propositions by the only operation of the logical laws include only those propositions reducible to tautologies via synonymy. Those propositions which are revealable via a performative contradiction, but which are neither tautological nor reducible to a tautology, are necessarily excluded outside the propositions that the calculation of predicates is necessarily or contingently likely to consider as true propositions by the sole operation of the logical laws.

  To put it in another way, the revealability of a given proposition via a performative contradiction (i.e., via an action which proves that one implicitly adheres to that proposition even though one is in the process of denying it at the time of said action) does not render that proposition reducible (to a tautology) any more than it renders it tautological. Given that only a proposition reducible to a tautology is contingently conceivable as tautological (within the framework of first-order logic), and given that a proposition revealable via performative contradiction is not necessarily a proposition reducible to a tautology, performative contradiction cannot be a criterion of apodicticity in first-order logic: neither necessarily nor contingently.

  Or again: adhering to the laws of first-order formal logic necessarily implies adhering to the idea that the tautological character of a proposition is a criterion of its apodictic character, and contingently implies (i.e., implies in the case where we admit that a proposition reducible by synonymy to a tautology is also render tautological by the sole fact of its reducibility) of adhering to the idea that the characteristic of a proposition to be reducible to a tautology is a criterion additional apodicticity. Nevertheless, it does not imply adhering to the idea that performative contradiction is a criterion of apodicticity—and that, given that a proposition revealable by performative contradiction is not rendered reducible to a tautology by the sole fact of being revealable through performative contradiction.

Or again: in the eyes of the first-order logical laws, the fact of articulating a given statement (for instance, the negation of the non-aggression principle) while acting in a way that reveals one subscribes to the opposite of such statement only amounts to, simultaneously, expressing (verbally) a thing and (behaviorally) its contrary. It does not amount to proving the apodictically true character of the statement behaviorally expressed. The joint fact of expressing verbally the negation of the non-aggression principle and subscribing behaviorally to the non-aggression principle does not more render the non-aggression principle apodictically true than it proves the wrongness or the truth of the non-aggression principle. Expressing (verbally) p and (behaviorally) non-p does not more prove the wrongness or the truth of non-p than it renders p apodictically true. It only amounts to expressing two things excluding each other.

  (As for the idea that the laws of first-order logic are self-evident: introspection allows us to see that those laws are not self-evident nor seem to be self-evident. The fact of being seemingly self-evident is, instead, a characteristic of what can be called the alleged ontological counterpart of said laws, i.e., a characteristic of the alleged ontological facts that are, for example, the impossibility for a given entity not to be what it is in a given respect and at a given time.)

The conventional character of logic laws

  Regarding the argument that the moral law of non-aggression and the logical laws of first-order logic (i.e., identity, non-contradiction, excluded third, etc.) are both necessary conditions for an argumentative discourse which be genuinely senseful, and that it is therefore senseless to deny their apodicticity (despite the fact that said apodicticity is neither provable nor self-evident), the laws of first-order logic and the principle of non-aggression admittedly have in common that they claim to be the necessary conditions for an argument that makes sense. But precisely, the fact that an argument makes sense in the opinion of the laws of first-order logic only proves that it makes sense in the opinion of said laws: just as the fact that an argument makes sense in the opinion of the principle of non-aggression (in that it supposes and respects the categorical imperative to refrain from the slightest coercion towards the interlocutors and towards anyone) only proves that it makes sense in the opinion of said principle.

  The fact that the laws of first-order logic or the principle of non-aggression serve as necessary conditions for arguments which are meaningful in their opinion does not imply that they serve as necessary conditions for argumentations which be objectively senseful. An argument which supposes a formal logic refusing all or part of the aforementioned laws will make sense in the opinion of the own laws of its own formal logic, which will not prove that it is objectively senseful: just like the fact that an argumentation assuming other categorical imperatives than the principle of non-aggression makes sense in the opinion of its own moral presuppositions does not prove that it is objectively meaningful.

  It is worth pointing out that (convinced or conventional) adherence to the idea of ​​the apodictically true character of the laws of first-order logic does not imply adhering (sincerely or conventionally) to the idea of ​​the apodictically true character of the principle of non-aggression (and vice versa); and that the sincere (rather than conventional) adherence to the idea of ​​the objectively true character of the laws of first-order logic is, sometimes, both motivated by the two reasons Aristotle proposes for sincerely adhering to the (idea of the) objective truth of the logical laws of identity, non-contradiction, and excluded third. Reasons that are performative (i.e., the laws in question are, in Aristotle’s opinion, necessary conditions for a senseful argumentation, what allegedly renders them apodictic) and ontological (i.e., the laws in question are, in Aristotle’s opinion, also founded by their ontological counterpart: for example, any entity, according to the respect considered and the moment considered, is necessarily what it is rather than what it is not).

  Finally, one cannot but notice the failure of the performative argument in favor of the idea of ​​the insane character of rejecting (by convention or conviction) the apodicticity of the first-order logic’s laws or the one of the non-aggression principle, i.e., the argument consisting of pointing out the alleged necessity to assume (by convention or by conviction) both the laws of first-order logic and the principle of non-aggression so that an argument be objectively senseful.

  It makes perfect sense to believe that the conformity of a given argument to the principle of non-aggression does not render the aforesaid conformity objectively senseful. Just like it makes perfect sense to believe that the conformity of a given argument with the laws of first-order logic does not render the aforesaid conformity objectively senseful; or to believe that the objectively senseful character of conformity to the laws of first-order logic—if it were attested—would not prove the objectively senseful character of conformity to the principle of non-aggression.

Beyond Aristotle and Rudolf Carnap

  In practice, the performative argument in favor of holding conventionally or sincerely as apodictic the laws of first-order logic is sometimes accompanied by an ontological argument in favor of holding them (sincerely, and only in a sincere mode) for apodictic, which consists of pointing out the alleged ontological counterpart of the laws of identity, non-contradiction, and excluded third middle; and of justifying on the basis of said ontological counterpart the fact of sincerely holding them as apodictic. It also happens that, quite simply, one takes for the alleged apodictic character of the aforementioned laws what is actually the apparent self-obviousness of the ontological counterpart of said laws.

  In both cases, the alleged ontological counterpart of the aforesaid laws would render said laws true by their conformity with reality (rather than true by their terms alone). It would not justify considering the aforesaid laws to be apodictic truths: whether by conviction or by convention. The alleged ontological counterpart is itself unfounded: given it is quite simply induced from a certain characteristic common in things and people in the field of reality which is offered to our senses (more precisely, the field immediately offered within what, in reality, is available to our senses). Namely the characteristic of being necessarily what one is (i.e., the ontological counterpart of the principle of identity); of being necessarily incapable of being both what one is and what one is not at a given moment and in a given respect (i.e., the ontological counterpart of the principle of non-contradiction); and of being necessarily constrained to be either something or something else, but not both simultaneously, in a given respect and at a given moment (i.e., the ontological counterpart of the principle of the excluded third).

  Since an induction is not a valid inference, it is wrong to generalize such characteristic to all the entities that inhabit reality on its various stages. Given the human mind is capable of conceiving the Trinity (which necessarily violates the laws of non-contradiction and of the excluded third) or the included third in quantum mechanics (with the fact for a photon of being simultaneously a wave and a particle, or for an electron of occupying two distinct positions simultaneously), it is nevertheless able (to a certain point and only in some people) to extract itself from those logical laws in order to try to apprehend the nature of the entities inhabiting other floors of reality.

  To the Aristotelian thesis that the logical laws of identity, non-contradiction, and the excluded third have a not less performative foundation (i.e., they are allegedly the necessary conditions for a senseful discourse, from what it supposedly follows that they are apodictic) than ontological (i.e., they are allegedly based on the impossibility for a given entity to be both what it is and what it is not in a given respect and in a given moment, etc.), incidentally respond the following Carnapian remarks. Namely that it is “a sure sign of a mistake if logic has need of metaphysics and psychology—sciences that require their own logical first principles;” and that in logic, “it is not our business to set up prohibitions, but to arrive at conventions,” Rudolf Carnap explaining, in this regard, that “prohibitions can be replaced by a definitional differentiation” and that “in many cases, this is brought about by the simultaneous investigation (analogous to that of Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries) of language-forms of different kinds—for instance, a definite and an indefinite language, or a language admitting and one not admitting the Law of Excluded Middle”

  For our part, we defend a synthetic position. Namely that the principles of formal logic are admittedly conventional and that they, admittedly, cannot be proven ontologically; but that while coming as strict convention (instead of serving as objective criteria of what is objectively senseful or insane among the conceivable modes of argumentation), they are nevertheless confrontable with the noticed or soundly conjectured reality, which corroborates them (in default of confirming them objectively) and allows their gradual improvement as they are objectively refuted.

  We believe the same applies to moral principles: at least those instrumental (rather than the categorical moral principles), including those designed for the purpose of a “good, viable” life in society. Whereas the categorical moral principles cannot be put to the test (since what is can neither confirm nor invalidate what must be categorically), the instrumental moral principles are confrontable with the reality observed or reasonably conjectured, which is able to refute them and help their enhancement (and even, perhaps, able to confirm them for some of them).

  As regards more particularly the rules of law (among the instrumental moral principles effectively contributing to the “good life” in society), we believe that the Aristotelian jusnaturalist approach—ignoring the muddy, chimerical conceptions of a reason folded in on itself and endeavoring to identify, more modestly, the normal rules of law, functional with regard to the natural order (as a scrupulous observation reveals it and as a solidly corroborated imagination guesses it), and those which transgress the order of nature—is transposable and adaptable to a cosmos subject to intra-species biocultural evolution and inter-species biological evolution. It is true that liberalism lays claim to the observation of human nature to prove the alleged objectivity of its categorical ethical principle for the shaping of law (i.e., the categorical moral law of non-aggression), as well as of his conception of the “good life” and of the instrumental ethical principles associated with it. But the idea that it has of human nature is a fantasy and owes nothing to observation or to solidly corroborated imagination. We will come back to that subject elsewhere.

The fallaciousness of the Hoppean criticism against logical empiricism

  In addition to his vain pretension to demonstrate the objectivity and the apodicticity of the categorical principle of non-aggression, and his most complete hermetism with regard to a jusnaturalist approach which be properly of Aristotelian obedience, Hoppe is mistaken on logical empiricism. And makes unjustified accusations against the Vienna Circle, the idea he has of the latter coming as a straw man.

  The Hoppean argument against logical empiricism (presented in his article “Austrian rationalism in the age of the decline of positivism”) consists of presenting as self-contradictory the claim that any proposition is either a contentless, analytically true proposition, or a synthetic, empirically true proposition, or a normative proposition—so that the knowledge of the world can have no apodictic basis. And the claim that knowledge is always hypothetical to the point that experience can never have any value when it comes to assessing our theories. It turns out that each of two claims is neither self-contradictory nor attributable to the Vienna Circle’s logical empiricists. The first claim implicitly conceives of itself as a synthetic proposition, what is fully coherent with the tripartition it proposes. As for the second claim, it implicitly supposes that it comes as an exception to the rule it formulates: hence it escapes self-contradiction as well.

  While the notion that analytical truths are contentless is, indeed, characteristic of the Vienna Circle, the latter nonetheless believed that logical laws served as an apodictic foundation for science. While Wittgenstein (who was not intellectually, institutionally affiliated to the Circle) conceived of the analytical truths as exhibiting the structure of the universe, in default of being endowed with signification, it seems to us that neither Rudolf Carnap nor any other member of the Circle came to endorse the view that analytically true propositions (such as “a bachelor is unmarried” or “two plus two makes four”) served as factual statements. The fact still remains that they did not reject the idea of an apodictic, a priori foundation for science as Hoppe claims. As for the idea that experience is wholly impotent regarding the confirmation of knowledge, it is not more characteristic of the Viennese empiricism—whose research agenda was precisely to show how experience could assess in probabilistic or instrumentalist terms the truth of a scientific statement.

  That said, Carnap would come to conceive of formal logic in conventionalist terms. While Karl Popper would come to dismiss induction and to conceive of experience as able only to infirm our theories—and Willard Van Orman would come to dismiss the distinction between analytical and synthetic truths and to conceive of experience as unable to confront our propositions taken in isolation. The Vienna Circle’s project, i.e., the project of establishing the reducibility of meaningful statements to science and the reducibility of any scientific proposition to an empirically testable proposition, was admittedly a failure. But that project had nothing to do with the Hoppean description of the aforesaid project.

Praxeology in the Misesian sense

  Along with jusnaturalism in the Rothbardian or Randian sense, evolutionism in the Hayekian sense, or the Hoppean claim of the non-aggression principle’s apodicticity, praxeology in the Misesian sense constitutes one of the mirages of contemporary liberalism—about which one can say that one of its wrongs is to prefer the illusions of Ludwig von Mises to the clairvoyance of Vilfredo Pareto. Unwittingly, sociology in the Paretian sense addresses and demystifies each of the major axes of Mises’s theoretical edifice.

  Praxeology in the Misesian sense, not content with claiming to elaborate propositions a priori true (in the sense of being true by reason of their sole terms), intends to focus exclusively on the structure of human action—and to deduce, progressively, its theoretical corpus from the sole proposition that humans act (in the sense of giving oneself ends and of choosing and using means with regard to the aforesaid ends). Besides, it denies the existence of human instincts and therefore their interference with human action (be it the determination of ends or the choice and handling of means), apart from an alleged instinctual effort of the part of every man to achieve the idea he has of greater happiness.

  While denying, in that regard, that the field of the “sociology of instincts” (what, nowadays, would rather be called “sociobiology” or “evolutionary psychology”) can have any relevance, Mises envisages what he calls the “categories” of human action (i.e., the structures inherent in any particular human action) as the fruit of biological evolution in a context of selection by the natural environment. Thus, he paradoxically anticipates what is the fundamental credo of evolutionary psychology as it stands: namely the computational theory of the human mind, i.e., the theory that the human mind is fundamentally composed of “modules” dedicated to information processing, anchored into the human brain, and selected over the course of our species’ genetic evolution.

  When it comes to the constitution of human civilizations, Misesian praxeology considers the division of labor as the most fundamental of social bonds: the very cement of society (what does not mean that it denies the rest of social ties, but that it recognizes a secondary place for them). As for the idea that Misesian praxeology has of progress, it notably sees in it the enhancement of the social division of labor (and of the human mutual aid operated within it) via the development of economic institutions (including money)—and via the substitution of “cooperation through contractual bonds” to “cooperation through hegemonic bonds.”

Misesian praxeology’s epistemological claims—and their fallaciousness

  Since none of the methodological claims of praxeology in Mises’s sense are realistic, none can prove compliant with the actual approach of Mises or his followers. Admittedly, it seems, the facts pertaining to the structure of human action—for instance, the successive assignment of a subjectively homogenous good’s acquired units to less and less priority objectives—are self-evident by reason of the nature of those very facts. But that apparent self-obviousness is precisely an attribute of those discovered facts (which, nonetheless, become self-evident only once they have been discovered and described); not a property of the proposition describing them. If one subscribes to first-order formal logic, the latter is not an apodictic proposition either—given it cannot be reduced to a tautology in the sense of first-order logic, i.e., a proposition which remains true whatever the distribution of truth values.

  As for the discovery of the structural facts pertaining to human action, introspection allows us to notice that the discovery process admittedly requires deduction (notably from the proposition that men act); but that deduction is far from being sufficient for the aforesaid process and that a supplement of observation and intuition is both possible and indispensable for it. Most often, the Misesian praxeologist’s inquisitive mind only gives, a posteriori, a hierarchized, axiomatic-deductive presentation to the theories it previously acquired (via inculcation, intuition, or observation), what amounts to assembling the previously discovered pieces of a dispersed puzzle.

  The methodological principle that praxeology (and therefore economics as a branch of the latter) only deals with the structure of human action is just as disproven via the examination of the theoretical propositions subsumed by praxeology (at least, in its Misesian version). Outside the praxeological edifice’s most fundamental propositions (such as the assertion that any engaged action tries to select the most suited means and endeavors to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs to a less satisfactory one), praxeology and economics actually deal with the content of (the different types of) human action: especially the content of the type of human action known as entrepreneurship.

Why Pareto (and not Mises)?

  Sociology in the Paretian sense sets itself the implicit goal of covering both the structure of human action (with Pareto’s distinction between actions that are logically structured and those with an illogical structure) and its content, Pareto endeavoring notably to identify the nature of the instinctual “residues” which dictate—often surreptitiously—human ends, as well as the means mobilized for those ends; and that very often generate “illogical actions.”

  While Mises conceives of praxeology as a strictly deductive approach whose starting point merges with the sole affirmation that man acts (in the sense of pursuing ends and mobilizing means), Pareto conceives of the study of human action as “logico-experimental,” that is to say focused exclusively on observation and induction. Both converge as concerns the idea that human actions are not necessarily logical and that they sometimes—especially as a result of reasoning processes disoriented by emotion—adapt improperly the choice (and use) of means to the pursued ends.

  Mises nevertheless limits himself to identifying rationality’s instrumental function (i.e., the function of determining the respective content of ends and means), while Pareto proposes a more extended analysis of rationality which identifies—in addition to the instrumental function of rationality—a concealment function, which consists of developing fictitious justifications for our illogical acts with the idea of ​​passing off them as coherent. Besides, Mises, quoting Ludwig Feuerbach on that occasion, denies human instincts (and their incidence in human action) apart from a general “instinct of happiness,” while Pareto, thus anticipating sociobiology, imputes human emotions—and the illogicality they do not fail to introduce into our actions—to a web of instincts that we share very widely with animals.

  Apart from the methodological pretensions, Pareto is quite superior to Mises on each of the above-mentioned points: Pareto’s only naivety is to believe that the effective methodology of his “sociology” is strictly “logical-experimental,” while the involved process mobilizes intuition and deduction as much as induction. As we have noted above, Mises’ pretension to resorting exclusively to deduction (from the sole assertion that man acts) is not less chimerical—himself coupling actually deduction with induction, as well as with intuition.

  Let us add that, unlike Mises, in whose eyes the effect of any economic law is strictly independent of the social context of economic actions, Pareto rightly points out that economic laws—while remaining absolute—see the interdependence between economy and (the rest of) society countering the effect of those very laws. Protectionism thus causing a recomposition of political and industrial elites for the benefit of those individuals the most gifted to encourage the nation’s industrial development, what potentially compensates for the loss income linked to protectionism. Besides, Mises mistakenly imagines the social division of labor, and therefore economic facts, to be the only cement of society, therefore the most fundamental social fact of all, while Pareto not less lucidly remarks that in addition to the social division of labor, the cement of society also includes, at least, the juridical hierarchical order within which the struggle for political preeminence is constantly being played out.

  Yet another cleavage relates to the possibility for human action to create a world leaving behind it the interindividual (or interstate) struggle for physical power and the associated expropriation. Pareto admittedly recognizes a slow progress in the direction of a greater rationality of human actions—in the senses of greater objectivity in knowledge of the world, and greater skill in the choice and the use of means. An impression which emerges from his work is nonetheless that the “cycle of elites” capturing physical power and expropriating the good of others constitutes in his eyes a timeless trait of human societies.

  For his part, Mises has the naivety to believe possible, if not inevitable, the entry of humanity into an era in which men will have abandoned the quest for physical power (including political) and in which the violence of states will subsist only to protect persons and their goods (and to chastise assassins and thugs). Thus, he stands at the midpoint of the millennialist hopes of his anarchist heirs (including Murray Rothbard), who believe to be feasible and even inevitable the coming entry of humanity into an era in which states themselves will have disappeared, the protection of persons and goods finding itself henceforth taken charge of by organizations without a coercive monopoly.

Conclusion—and a few precisions on natural law and on quantum physics

  The revealability of a proposition via a performative contradiction (in the sense of the saying of statements that contradict a proposition whose endorsement is both supposed and manifested by the action accompanying the saying of those statements) is not equivalent to a tautological character nor equivalent to the reducibility to a tautology, i.e., a proposition true for any distribution of truth values in first-order logic. Just like the fact of conforming to certain logic laws or certain moral laws in a given argumentation intended to debunk those very laws does not render them apodictic. Hoppe’s case for the apodicticity of the non-aggression principle, i.e., the principle that no one is entitled to exert coercion toward someone or his non-violently acquired property, is not less fallacious than is his pretension to align the positive legal rules with a categorical, objective norm.

  Basically, Hoppe does not better understand natural law (i.e., law based on nature) than do liberal jusnaturalists—even though he avoids the fallacious deducing of an ought from an is. Natural law should not be understood as apodictic, nor should it be understood as an objective categorical principle serving as a universal model for positive law. Natural law is admittedly objective; but it is neither categorical, nor distinct from positive law, nor applicable to the individual (taken independently of society), nor totally universal, nor discoverable a priori. Instead, it comes as a certain modality of positive law: namely those of positive legal rules which effectively contribute to the survival and functionality of a given society in view of the biocultural specificities of that society; but also in view of human nature (as it has been made by biological evolution) and in view of the cosmic order in which any human society takes place.

  In other words, natural law is a hypothetical rather than categorical norm. It serves as an imperative required for the survival and functionality of a given society (in intergroup competition). Far from being external to positive law or applicable to the individual taken independently of society, it is only applicable to society and serves as positive rules of law effective for the success of a given society in intergroup competition. Besides, it is partly universal, partly circumstantial. It is universal when it comes to those positive rules of law which, to contribute to the success of society (in terms of survival and functionality), take into account human nature or the cosmic order. It is circumstantial when it comes to those positive legal rules which, in order to contribute to the success of society (in terms of survival and functionality), take into account the biological specificities of a given society or the cultural traditions of said society. Those same traditions finding themselves constrained to take into account human nature, cosmic order, and the biological specificities to ensure the success of said society (in terms of survival and functionality).

  Natural law is not discovered via conjectures independent of experience. Instead, reason discovers it—imperfectly—via careful and comparative observation of the different human societies; as well as via the identification of the functional societies and those dysfunctional (as concerns their rules of law) and via the connection of functionality (and dysfunctionality) to cosmic order and to human nature such as observation and solidly corroborated imagination allow us to conceive them. In a sense, the same applies to logical laws—namely that they are not discovered via a priori, independent conjectures (i.e., conjectures which are both independent of experience and independent of science), but via conjectures both confronted to the experienced reality and to the scientifically, solidly conjectured reality. In that sense, Quine’s epistemological holism, i.e., the claim that experience only confronts a theoretical edifice (from its logical laws to its protocol sentences) taken as a full-fledged unit, is true.

  As for praxeology such as devised and bequeathed by Mises, it is inept for many reasons: including its apodictic pretension; its rejection of the interference of instincts with human action; its frivolous treatment of the difference between rational and irrational actions (which ignores Pareto’s residues and derivations); its ignorance of the interdependence between economic and social facts; or its laicized millennialism. But also, its restriction of the field of action (i.e., the field of behaviours defining and deciding to reach some goals, and determining and using some means for those goals) to human beings alone.

  Instead of action being unique to conscious beings (and a fortiori humans), quarks, atoms, bacteria, and the cosmos itself (taken as a whole) have made decisions and acted long before the onset of consciousness—as our friend Howard Bloom says in essence. A particle takes decision about the selection and the realization (via quantum decoherence) of one of the different states it simultaneously maintains—just like a homo sapiens when acting selects and realizes one of the possible futures of his action. And just like the cosmos itself has been deciding at each incremental level of emergence—starting with the emergence (known as inflation) which saw the cosmos going from nothingness to immensity and accomplishing a primordial decoherence, i.e., a primordial decision as to the one of the simultaneous states which would be retained.


That article was initially published in The Postil Magazine‘s March 2021 issue

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A conversation with Emil O.W. Kirkegaard, for The Postil Magazine

A conversation with Emil O.W. Kirkegaard, for The Postil Magazine

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Mar 1, 2021

Emil O. W. Kirkegaard is a Danish intelligence research and freelance data scientist. No connection with existentialist philosopher Søren Aabye Kierkegaard. But Emil Kirkegaard’s great-grand father, Harald Rudyard Engman, was a Danish dissident, anti-Nazi artist, who was exiled to Sweden during WW2.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Your name is notably attached to the study of stereotype accuracy—especially those stereotypes underlying immigration policy preferences in Danes. How do you sum up your research in the field?

  Emil O.W. Kirkegaard: It began some years ago, around my dad’s 50 years birthday (in 2014), I was visiting Sweden because his girlfriend is Swedish and my dad decided to rent a house in Skåne, occupied East Denmark, for the birthday party. Some years prior I had read Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate (from 2002) and recalled that he made some reference to the accuracy of demographic stereotypes. Checking out the supporting references, I found the same names repeated many times: Lee Jussim and Clark McCauley (all the cited works are in an edited book, Lee et al., 1995). I googled the names of the authors and found a copy of a book chapter with the great title The Unbearable Accuracy of Stereotypes. It contained a neat summary of the evidence, as it was at the time (Jussim et al., 2009). I realized there was a whole scientific literature on this topic, one that wasn’t as stupid as my general impression of social psychology. Recall this was in the middle of the early years of the replication crisis, with priming results falling left and right. Just after, I checked out the library (that is, Library Genesis, the Russian pirate library), and found that Lee Jussim had written a book in 2012, Social Perception and Social Reality: Why Accuracy Dominates Bias and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, and I immediately started reading it (Jussim, 2012). While reading this book, I immediately saw the connection to Bayesianism, which I was familiar with because I had long been reading the blogs from people in the Sillycon Valley rationalism movement (focused on LessWrong in those days, now mostly reduced to the Scott Alexander-verse). Say you’re judging some person for some trait, say antisocialness. The prior belief is the initial guess about some individual based on whatever demographics one can immediately glance, whether this is sex, age, country of origin, race, name, clothing and so on. As such, the question of stereotypes was easy to attack scientifically: simply ask subjects to estimate the group means of various groups, and see how well these line up with reality. In fact, a decent size but haphazard set of studies had been done like this, and they pretty much invariably turned up strong evidence of accuracy (the exception being when the data assumed to represent reality was questionable, see (Heine et al., 2008)). At the same time, I had just started studying immigrant outcomes in Europe, and had in my possession a big dataset from Denmark, where we had crime rates, mean incomes, rates of use of social welfare, educational attainment, and unemployment for some 70 immigrant groups in Denmark, as grouped by country of origin (or of their mothers; (Kirkegaard & Fuerst, 2014)). In other words, I had the perfect criterion data to study stereotype accuracy in Denmark, and I knew that similar data existed for other European countries, so there was a way to expand afterwards (Kirkegaard, 2014b, 2015). I then found a way to buy survey data fairly inexpensively. We first conducted a pilot study and found quite large accuracy, despite recruiting unrepresentative people online (such as from my Facebook!). I then managed to raise some funding from friendly sources, and our first big study was published in Open Psych journals in 2016 (Kirkegaard & Bjerrekær, 2016a, 2016c). I tried to do things right from the start: large sample size (about 500), pre-registered analyses, and open science practices (open access, data, code, and reviewing). As mentioned above, I was familiar with the replication crisis issues in social psychology and did not want to contribute to such poor practices. I also knew that my results would get attacked by leftists, and thus had to be extra strong to withstand scrutiny (Gottfredson, 2007; Kirkegaard, 2020). However, our results were crystal clear — the main aggregate stereotype correlated r = .70 with real differences — and the results were closely in line numerically with the findings that Lee Jussim had summarized. The idea of linking these data to the immigration preferences was good, and obvious in hindsight, but it wasn’t mine. Noah Carl was the first to combine the two ideas in his 2016 paper, also in Open Psych (Carl, 2016). After reading his paper, I knew the next step forward was to measure all three variables in a single study: real group differences (insofar as government data can tell), stereotypes (estimates of those differences), and finally policy preferences for the same groups. When looking at immigrant groups, it was obvious that popular opposition to immigrants was closely in line with the actual immigrant groups with high rates of social problems, whether crime or welfare dependencies (so in practice, against Muslim groups). I teamed up with Noah for a study like this, and we wanted to get it out somewhere ‘mainstream’, so we tried a bunch of social psychology journals, not with much luck. One editor, Karolina Hansen, at a Polish university told us we needed to explicitly state, multiple times, that Muslims were not causing their own misfortunates, whereas our study was agnostic on this topic. I guess I should not be so surprised since, despite being in Poland, she has a Danish last name, so was probably infected by the Woke memeplex. Unfortunately, it was around now that the time of troubles began for Noah Carl, and he had to divert time to defending himself against the communist campaign and their friends in the media (Carl, 2019). It didn’t end well and he was fired (Quillette Magazine, 2019). We managed to finally publish this work in 2020 (Kirkegaard et al., 2020). To return to the question, I would say that my work in this field has just begun and I expect to publish a bunch of more studies on immigrants, stereotypes and their links to intelligence. We are currently finishing up a big study in the Netherlands, with similar results. The last part is important because from an intelligence research perspective, having accurate stereotypes is simply a manifestation of the general factor of intelligence, already strongly correlated with general knowledge. So, one should see pervasive correlations between stereotype accuracy and intelligence, and in fact, that is the case. Some left-wing psychologists and their media cheerleaders hilariously tried to brand this as a negative aspect of intelligence (Khazan, 2017; Lick et al., 2018; Sputnik News Staff, 2017).

  Grégoire Canlorbe: A well-known investigation on your part deals with the dataset of OKCupid’s users. You especially focus on the association of cognitive ability with self-reported criminal behavior—and with religiousness. May you tell us more about it?

  Emil O.W. Kirkegaard: Back in 2010, or thereabouts, I discovered the OKCupid dating site, and used it myself. The dating site really was very special, as no other dating site collected so much interesting data on their users. Most dating sites attempted only crude social matching, or even dumber things like astrological signs. However, OKCupid was started by a mathematician, and he had a better idea despite no background in psychology. As a big fan of open science, I was wondering how to get a copy of the data for my own curiosity. I teamed up with a programmer to do a scraping (automatic download) of the website, and we managed to download data from nearly 70,000 users. Mind you, a lot of these profiles are essentially empty and not useful, but still, the dataset is amazing, and one can typically use about 10-30k users in a study, depending on which variables are desired and which subgroups. Again, in the spirit of open science, we wanted to share these data with the world, so we sent our paper to review at Open Psych (Kirkegaard & Bjerrekær, 2016b). I don’t recall exactly how it happened, but some mainstream social psychologists started retweeting my tweet to the data (e.g. Brian Nosek of OSF), and eventually the SJWs joined in (Oliver Keyes was a notable nutty blogger who wrote some rambling blogpost on this, since apparently deleted), or maybe the other way around. In any case, it ended up with a global media event of sorts where we got featured in various big outlets: Wired, Forbes, Vox, Vice, even Fortune magazine. A guy I went to school with in 2006 called me and wanted some input for an article he was writing for the Danish state media. The data on the website was really already public, and just required a free user (some of it). It’s just that when it sits in 70,000 profiles, it is not as useful for analysis as when they are in a spreadsheet type format. The task of scraping could be done by a chimpanzee, and involves visiting random profiles and copypasting the data into a big spreadsheet. In fact, the website itself wrote in their user agreement that users should consider the data public (“You should appreciate that all information submitted on the Website might potentially be publicly accessible. Important and private information should be protected by you.”). In the end, OSF deleted the copy of the dataset on their service, following a copyright complaint from OKCupid’s owners. Someone reported me to the Danish data protection agency, and they sent me some questions in a threatening manner, which I didn’t answer, and then after some months gave up the case. The media never reported on this dropping of the case, so in the eyes of the media and the public, it appears I was accused and presumed guilty of some crime, and in fact, a case was not even filed against me in court.

Aside from this origin story, the dataset is really quite something. This is because the questions on the site were mostly made by users themselves, and because of this, some of them asked about things that psychologists would not dare to ask about. They are also a lot more diverse in topics than what interests psychologists. We have published some studies looking at intelligence estimation based on some 14 questions with high g-loadings, and intelligence scores from these do in fact relate to religiousness, crime (self-reported, not optimal), political interest and so on in the usual ways (Kirkegaard, 2018; Kirkegaard & Bjerrekær, 2016b; Kirkegaard & Lasker, 2020). This is doubly interesting because the data were filled out by users well-knowing that other users would be reading their answers, thus suggesting that social desirability bias should be large here. Evidently, it is not large enough to remove the usual associations. Later on the website got bought by Big Dating, that also owns Tinder and others, and the website is now a low quality clone of Tinder, a shell of its former glory. Sad! The most interesting remnant of the website, aside from this (unfortunately) partial copy of the site’s database (and others that exist), is that the founder wrote a book on some analyses he did (Rudder, 2015). It’s really a commercialization, and not a good one, of the old OKTrends blog. Fortunately, internet polymath Gwern has archived the blog, so people can and should read the unredacted analyses https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/index.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Your university background is linguistics. Do you believe race differences may be manifested in language? What are your thoughts about Umberto Eco’s remark that “the language of Europe is translation”?

  Emil O.W. Kirkegaard: I did a bachelor degree in linguistics, starting in 2010. Before that I studied 2 years philosophy, but I was disillusioned with that department and the field, and did not finish the degree. I was always good with language in school, and since I was already interested in philosophy of language, branching out to linguistics was not a big step. Honestly though, studying linguistics had a big advantage: there were no class attendance requirements, so I could avoid going to classes (these are a waste of time). This freed up a huge chunk of time, and allowed me to sleep in the day and work in the night, whenever this was practical (I have non-24 disorder). Passing the exams is really mostly a matter of writing 3 essays of 10-15 pages every 6 months, one for each class one’s taking that semester. Each class is usually based on some book or some papers, so one will have to read these. All in all, writing a paper takes perhaps 2 days, editing included, and reading the required material takes maybe another 3 days, so we’re looking at about 15 days of work every 6 months. In Denmark, the state pays students a stipend to study, about 800 USD, and there is low-cost, subsidized student housing available too, so this income is livable, and one can even invest some of it in Bitcoin on the side (Moon Inc.). The rest of the time I used unwisely to play too much on the computer, but still a large proportion of the time, I used to self-study psychology, genetics, statistics and programming. When I was doing the master’s (candidate) in linguistics in 2015, I was already good enough that a high profile professor wrote me to recruit me for his startup in genetics. That ended my career in academia, not that I was keenly interested in pursuing a linguistics PhD.

So, with my unusual linguistics background aside, what about race and language? It’s hard to say because linguists are generally speaking non-quantitative people, and don’t look at these things, except in bland ways. There are some findings on how the physical shape of the humans differ by race, and this affects the sounds they produce. Africans have notably larger lips and a broader nose (for cooling), and this results in slight differences in the sounds they make. I don’t think this is very important, however. More interesting in the big picture are associations between culture and language (an extreme version is called linguistic relativity), and of course, some cultures are vastly more complex than others. Some languages are really quite simple, lacking words for most scientific concepts, some even basic mathematics like counting. I am not aware of any formal study of ethnic group IQs and their language features. Economists conduct these kinds of studies, trying to spot relationships between psychological traits and languages, and how this should be reflected in economic outcomes. Best thing they have come up with is that languages that allow dropping of pronouns are higher in some good stuff (Feldmann, 2019; He et al., 2020; Mavisakalyan & Weber, 2018). There is a big dataset of language features called The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS), which is used to study this stuff (the field is called linguistic typology). It has data for some 2700 languages last time I looked, and these are given geographical coordinates, countries and so on. One could match this to ethnic IQs and national IQs failing that, and maybe something useful would come out of this. Honestly, I have not looked because I don’t think much interesting will come out of this. I did take an initial look at the data from a quantitative perspective in a preprint never published (not even submitted anywhere, (Kirkegaard, 2021), I posted it as a formal preprint for the purpose of this interview). The national data are kind small for languages because of the extensive family relationships between them, so the effective sample size is less than the number of countries. Biologists are familiar with this problem, and have standard phylogenetic regression methods to handle it, and linguists also (they do it in a worse way), but economists less so. I think it is better to proceed here with ordinary national IQs work, and expanding to the genetics of these, á la what Davide Piffer has been doing since 2013 (Piffer, 2013, 2015, 2019, 2020a, 2020b), and what we did in our big 2016 paper looking at the genetic ancestry of countries and their subdivisions (Fuerst & Kirkegaard, 2016). I am not familiar with Umberto Eco, so I have no comment on that quote.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: As an avowed proponent of eugenics, do you share the belief in COVID-19 pandemic’s purifying role? What is your assessment of the reservations on negative eugenics that Charles Darwin—while acknowledging the attenuation of natural selection in Victorian England—expressed in The Descent of Man? Namely that “the surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.”

  Emil O.W. Kirkegaard: COVID-19 almost only kills old people who are no longer reproducing, so it has no eugenic or dysgenic effect. If one wanted to be really cynical, one could say that by killing off a bunch of unproductive people, it is easing the state’s welfare budgets, though causing large initial costs in healthcare. I agree with Darwin. There is an uneasiness with realizing the problem of dysgenics and doing anything about it. Galton himself commented on this in his autobiography (1908): “Man is gifted with pity and other kindly feelings; he also has the power of preventing many kinds of suffering. I conceive it to fall well within his province to replace Natural Selection by other processes that are more merciful and not less effective.”. So how can we do things more merfically? Many have thought about this problem (Glad, 2004). I submit that we don’t need to do too much. Some countries have already managed to reduce the intelligence-fertility relationship to a quite weak negative or null association through existing social policies and cultural changes (Kolk & Barclay, 2019; Meisenberg, 2008; Reeve et al., 2018). Aside from that, we have the tools at hand to reverse the problem: embryo selection and genome editing. With the latter, we can edit embryos to remove some known errors, insofar as these are known (typically well-known genetic disorders). The former technology has been here for years, but needs to be augmented with a modern genomics approach, and get rid of the communist ethos that prevents this from happening (Anomaly, 2018, 2020; Anomaly & Jones, 2020). Interestingly, survey evidence shows that large fractions of the world population, with notable differences between countries, are already in favor of such technology, and this fraction is increasing over time, just as it did when the original IVF technology emerged (Pew Research Center, 2020; Zigerell, 2019). On the technology side, we need to figure out how to produce a lot of egg cells (sperm are plenty!), and combine these with the best sperm cells if possible (sperm selection), nurture the resulting embryos, and pick the best combination of genes among the sibling embryos according to the best genetic prediction models. This approach was outlined in Gattaca back in 1997, so this is hardly new, we just need to get serious about it. Galton suggested the same more than 100 years ago (“I take Eugenics very seriously, feeling that its principles ought to become one of the dominant motives in a civilised nation, much as if they were one of its religious tenets.”, same source). If we let the power of capitalism achieve this, we can all have healthier, smarter, prettier, more creative children, and work towards improving our Kardashev score. Considering the current way Western elite thought is moving, there is probably not so much hope for this. Richard Lynn made similar forecasts in his 2001 book Eugenics: a reassessment (Lynn, 2001).

  Grégoire Canlorbe: A nation’s collective intelligence partly lies in its average IQ. It also lies in its ability to network the various individual IQs within it in an efficient way, i.e., in a way allowing the nation to solve the faced challenges and to prevail in intergroup competition. Efficient networking within a national brain notably includes intragroup competition for innovation—and the shifting of resources towards sound innovators, i.e., individuals bringing a way of thinking which is different, novel, but also more efficient than the previous admitted thought patterns. Do you sense a correlation between average IQ and efficient networking? Historically, which nation performed best in terms of intragroup cognitive collaboration?

  Emil O.W. Kirkegaard: It’s a tough question because competing nations throughout history have not generally been so easy to compare, since they differ in population size, and change their borders and thus populations over time as well (e.g. modern Austria vs. Austria-Hungary vs. Greater Germany). The ultimate test of inter-group competition is warfare, and so one can look at which countries are very good at this, or have good standing militaries (Karlin, 2020). One can go beyond looking at who won a lot of wars. One can look at efficiency specifically, and for World War 2, there are some numbers here on the combat efficiency of soldiers from the warring states. Though these were calculated by the US army after the war, it probably won’t surprise many to learn that Nazi Germany soldiers were the most efficient in per capita terms. Specifically, the research computed the worth of a solider, setting the Nazi German one to 1.00, yields values of 1.10 Americans, 1.45 British, and >4 Slavic (Polish or Russian) (Kretaner, 2020; Turchin, 2007). Details of the calculations are hard to find, and I have been unable to find numbers for World War 1 or any other wars, but I admit to not being a military historian and not having spent more than a few hours looking. Peter Turchin talks a lot about this collective efficiency, he uses the term Asabiya for this, from the great Islamic golden age thinker Ibn Khaldun. We can make some guesses though, group efficiency is higher when people have a feeling of belonging. Most academic research finds negative effects of ethnic/race diversity on social trust (Dinesen et al., 2020), and given the ubiquitousness of ethnic voting in democracies, and the endless anti-European hatred from the European left, it’s hard to disagree with diagnosis of an overall negative effect of ethnic diversity on collective effectiveness. We currently live in a time of extreme political polizationation (mostly Europeans versus other Europeans in the same countries), mostly caused I think by the radicalization of the global media by communist Woke theories from academia. Zach Goldberg is doing great work on this topic (Goldberg, 2019a, 2019b). China, on the other hand, is going strong in terms of collective efficiency, insofar as their human capital allows (corruption is endemic outside WEIRD populations; (Henrich, 2020)). All this aside, collective efficiency is positively affected by national average intelligence, and this shows up in any kind of analysis one does. Intelligence is at the individual level related to trust, honesty, competence at any job, patience and so on, so it is not surprising that countries with smarter people outcompete others by large margins (Kirkegaard & Karlin, 2020).

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You dedicate yourself to exploring the relationship of personal names to factors like social status, intelligence, age, and country of origin. What are your conclusions at it stands? Do you subscribe to the Jewish belief that someone’s name predicts his destiny?

  Emil O.W. Kirkegaard: I never heard of this Jewish belief, but it is certainly true that names have associations with outcomes in life. You see when most social scientists discover such patterns, they immediately think it results from some kind of discrimination (the so-called second sociologist fallacy: any group difference is caused by discrimination by the above average groups). They devise experiments to show that people preferentially hire people with higher status names, and so on (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004; Oreopoulos, 2011). Yes, I am sure one can find some evidence of this stuff. It goes back to the stereotype discussion initially. People act in a crudely Bayesian matter, they use whatever information about an individual they can find. Sometimes researchers give people only names, and so of course people will use such information until they can get some better information. This is both rational and not a big mystery. My entry into this topic was, again, due to nice data presenting itself but in a less useful format. A Danish newspaper bought government statistics about first names of people living in Denmark, specifically about their average incomes, crime rates, and so on. These data were then published on a website, sort of. There was a search function and one could look up any name to see the stats for that name, but no way to download all the data. Together with a friend, we figured out how to get the entire dataset behind this website. We then carried out a bunch of analyses of this. We confirmed the usual “S factor” pattern. Maybe we should call this Thorndike’s rule, as he wrote in 1920: “a still broader fact or principle—namely, that in human nature good traits go together. To him that hath a superior intellect is given also on the average a superior character; the quick boy is also in the long run more accurate; the able boy is also more industrious. There is no principle of compensation whereby a weak intellect is offset by a strong will, a poor memory by good judgment, or a lack of ambition by an attractive personality. Every pair of such supposed compensating qualities that have been investigated has been found really to show correspondence.” (Quoted from Gwern’s page on correlations). Anyway, in our data names with higher mean incomes were also, on average, less crime prone, and worked better jobs and so on (Kirkegaard & Tranberg, 2015). So for every name, one can score it on this composite measure of social status, or “general socioeconomic factor” as I called it in 2014 (Kirkegaard, 2014a) in a study of countries. I got the idea from reading Richard Lynn and Gregory Clark’s books in short succession (Clark, 2014; Lynn & Vanhanen, 2012). Clark talks about how everyone is born with a latent, genetic score for this generalized social status, and the various social status indicators in life are an imperfect indicator of this (and the other part being mostly luck). However, if one relies on last name data, one can actually see that the heritability of the latent general social status is about 75%. This finding replicates across many datasets from different countries, even in Maoist China, it’s really quite astonishing. I realized then, that the same thing can be said for countries and subpopulations inside countries, such as immigrant groups (Kirkegaard & Fuerst, 2014). In our follow-up study we were also able to show that average intelligence measured in the Danish army correlated quite well with this general social status of names (Kirkegaard, 2019). Personally, I don’t think having a funny name does much to harm one’s career, and it’s a quite simple matter to change it these days, if one really thinks so. The fact of the matter is rather than funny parents give their kids funny names, and low status parents their kids low status names, and so on. This results in first names being differentiated by genetic propensity for social status, despite not being a family. One can even see dysgenics this way in our Danish data, as higher social status names had fewer ‘kids’, a kind of pseudo-fertility measure, and so these reduce their share of the population over time. Elite families dying out is a familiar finding to many historians.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: It is sometimes asked whether our ontological concepts (causality, identity, quantity, and so on) are intended in the human mind to relate to objective properties of the observed things. Or, on the contrary, only serve as molds allowing the human mind to clarify, organize the empirical datum; but having nothing to do with the content of reality. It is also asked whether the human mind is able to draw its concepts from an immaterial dimension reached through suprasensible perceptions. Or, on the contrary, is condemned to rely on itself—and on sensible experience. What is your take on such issues?

  Emil O.W. Kirkegaard: That philosophy is a waste of time. For those few who still want to wade into this territory, I highly recommend Alan Sokal’s writings on ontological realism, quantum mechanics and postmodernism (Sokal, 2008; Sokal & Bricmont, 1999). In my opinion, the best philosophy is written by working scientists or philosophers with a very close relationship to science (and I don’t mean doing some pop-neuroscience). For those wanting to put a label on me, I like to refer to myself as a neo-positivist scientific realist. This is essentially the view that evolution favors organisms that have some level of accuracy of their perception of the real world, comes equipped with a bunch of mostly adaptive cognitive biases (“tinted glasses”), and that through rigorous application of the scientific process, we can better see reality as it really is. Unfortunately, I don’t think that social science is close to this scientific ideal, being staffed by the wrong people, with the wrong incentives. Social science would do better if we fired everybody who works there, and hired some random physicists to figure things out. This is essentially what Dominic Cummings did in order to win the 2016 Brexit vote, his blog has a bunch of stuff on this.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Going back to linguistics, you may have heard of the proposition “Est vir qui adest.” Namely the anagram for Pilatus’s question to Jesus, “Quid est veritas?” What does such connection inspire to you? Which one of Jesus or Pilatus is the chad—and which one the virgin?

  Emil O.W. Kirkegaard: I generally don’t read fiction, so I am not overly familiar with the Bible stories. Considering that Jesus supposedly died as a childless Virgin (if we disregard the Mary possibility), and Wikipedia tells me that Pilatus apparently had a wife, and we don’t know anything about any potential children. So it boils down to the interesting question of whether Jesus was as holy as he claims to be (i.e., the Gospels claim him to be!), considering the base rate of fertility rates among cult leaders. On the balance of probabilities, I am going with Chad Jesus and the groupies theory, and may God forgive my atheist sins.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Thank you for your time. Would you like to add something?

  Emil O.W. Kirkegaard: These were some very far reaching questions. You certainly have a talent for interviewing. Maybe you can get a job at Playboy.


That conversation was initially published in The Postil Magazine‘s March 2021 issue

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A conversation with Aurelio José Figueredo, for The Postil Magazine

A conversation with Aurelio José Figueredo, for The Postil Magazine

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Fév 1, 2021

Aurelio José Figueredo is a Cuban-American evolutionary psychologist. He is a Professor of Psychology, Family Studies and Human Development at the University of Arizona, where he is also the director of the Ethology and Evolutionary Psychology Laboratory. He has also been a long-time member of the interdisciplinary Center for Insect Science at the University of Arizona, which has regrettably been closed just this past month. His major areas of research interest are the evolutionary psychology and behavioral development of life history strategy, cognition, sex, and violence in human and nonhuman animals, and the quantitative ethology and social development of insects, birds, and primates.

Grégoire Canlorbe: You are notably known for your research on personality in nonhuman primates (including monkeys and chimpanzees). The Hominoid Personality Questionnaire was used as a quantifier of the big five personality traits in chimpanzees. May you start by telling us more about it?

  Aurelio José Figueredo: To be clear, the research on stumptail macaques, published in 1995, used a different list of behavioral traits that had been developed by Stevenson-Hinde, & Zunz (1978). The Hominoid Personality Questionnaire was used for our study of personality in chimpanzees in 1997, and was later extended to other Great Apes. That is an important distinction because the findings of these two studies were different. The Great Apes all showed human-like personality structures resembling the human “Big Five”, although to varying degrees.  The macaque monkeys showed a simpler pattern of three major factors, but whether this was a result of differences in the list of items used is unclear.

Figueredo, A.J., Cox, R.L., & Rhine, R.J. (1995). A generalizability analysis of subjective personality assessments in the Stumptail macaque and the Zebra finch. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 30(2), 67-197.

King, J.E., & Figueredo, A.J. (1997). The five-factor model plus dominance in chimpanzee personality. Journal of Research in Personality, 31, 271-271.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: A controversial hypothesis by J. Philippe Rushton is that fast life history—including traits like psychopathy—and a healthy, powerful mind, which is high in g, are negatively correlated at the individual level. Do you believe such correlation is indeed displayed—from lower animals to the most sophisticate of mammals?

  Aurelio José Figueredo: There is something that we have called “The Rushton Paradox”.  On an individual-differences level, at least two meta-analyses (Woodley, 2011; Figueredo et al., 2014) have found weak and trivially small correlations between life history speed and general intelligence. On the other hand, at the aggregate level of human social groupings or biogeographical regions, there is a strong positive correlation between slower life history strategies and aggregate cognitive abilities (e.g., Figueredo, Hertler, & Peñaherrera-Aguirre, 2020). This paradox was resolved by modeling the evolution of higher levels of aggregate intelligence as an emergent property of social groups rather than an individual-level adaptation (e.g., Figueredo et al., 2017).

  In the 2017 paper that I cited, the one we called “Plants, Parasites, and People,” we constructed a model, which is a multiple-stage ”Cascade Model”, that slow life history, first of all, is attributable to ecological factors; that we have warmer and wetter climate as well as higher parasite loads predicting human life history speed. Then, life history predicts a variety of other things in sequence before we get to intelligence. For example, slow life history people are generally more cooperative—they have less crime and conflict within their groups. So it creates a more cooperative society. And what we found out in other publications that I didn’t cite, but that I can send you, is that they are more strategically differentiated. They’re more diverse, both in their cognitive abilities and their life history strategies. Those are called the cognitive and strategic differentiation effort hypotheses. What that cognitive and strategic diversification leads to is macroeconomic diversification where the society becomes, first of all, more productive as per Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage: there’s a higher economic productivity consequent to having a greater degree of specialization and trade between the different specialists. It boosts the productivity of a society, and we use various indicators of macroeconomic diversification in that paper. And we show that the intelligence of a slow life history population is elevated indirectly, through this macroeconomic diversification, increasing their aggregate wealth, and thereby indirectly increasing their human capital.

  Now see: once you increase your human capital, that leads to gains in IQ. But this kind of thing is called an emergent property of social groups, so that an individual can have individual traits like extraversion, or weight, or height, or anything like that, but an individual can’t have something like macroeconomic diversification all by himself or herself. That is not a property at an individual level. That is a property of an aggregate economy. For example, I can’t have inflation. I can live in a society that has inflation, and I can be affected by inflation; but I don’t personally have an inflation rate, per se. Similarly, macroeconomic diversification is something that only exists at the aggregate level, and it is produced indirectly by a population’s aggregate slow life history. Once you have that, it has the effect, and we documented that in this paper, of increasing the cranial capacity and the intelligence of the population. And that was our explanation of the Rushton paradox because it wasn’t just in one study. In study after study after study, the relationship between individual level IQ and individual level life history is trivially small. It’s extremely small, in many cases, not statistically significant.

  Actually, J. Philippe Rushton, who passed away in 2012, is one of the people who were somewhat resistant to the results of such analyses. But this is what you get, like it or not. So, on an individual level, Phil Rushton was wrong. Now, I’m not saying this to bash Rushton. He was a very good friend. And I agreed with him on many things, but there are other things that we frankly argued about in a friendly way because we were friends for years. And we would argue—I’m sure you argue with your friends, that happens. And there are points of contention between you. There is virtually no empirically-validated relation between individual IQ and individual life history strategy. But at the aggregate level, there is a very strong relation. And I sent you a couple of papers that show that between aggregate intelligence and aggregate life history. And that is the answer to the Rushton paradox. At least, that’s the answer that our group has proposed. As far as I know, nobody else would propose any solution to this paradox because most people are not even aware that there’s a paradox. But that is my answer to that question.

Woodley, M. A. (2011). The cognitive differentiation–integration effort hypothesis: a synthesis between the fitness indicator and life history models of human intelligence. Review of General Psychology, 15, 228–245

Figueredo, A.J., Wolf, P.S.A., Olderbak, S.G., Gladden, P.R., Fernandes, H.B.F., Wenner, C., Hill, D., Andrzejczak, D.J., Sisco, M.M., Jacobs, W.J., Hohman, Z.J., Sefcek, J.A., Kruger, D., Howrigan, D.P., MacDonald, K., & Rushton, J.P. (2014). The psychometric assessment of human life history strategy: A meta-analytic construct validation. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 8(3), 148-185.

Figueredo, A.J., Cabeza de Baca, T., Black, C.J., Garcia, R.A., Fernandes, H.B.F., Wolf, P.S.A., & Woodley of Menie, M.A. (2015). Methodologically Sound: Evaluating the psychometric approach to the assessment of human life history [Reply to Copping, Campbell, and Muncer, 2014]. Evolutionary Psychology, 13(2), 299-338.

Figueredo, A.J., Cabeza de Baca, T., Fernandes, H.B.F., Black, C.J., Peñaherrera-Aguirre, M., Hertler, S.C., Garcia, R., Meisenberg, G., & Woodley, M.A. (2017). A sequential canonical cascade model of social biogeography: Plants, parasites, and people. Evolutionary Psychological Science, 3(1), 40-61. DOI 10.1007/s40806-016-0073-5

Figueredo, A.J.,  Hertler, S.C , & Peñaherrera-Aguirre, M. (2020). The biogeography of human diversity in cognitive ability.  Evolutionary Psychological Science, in press.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: A fundamental debate in psychology focuses on how knowing whether a certain behavioral pattern that is widespread, if not in all human societies, at least in most human societies (for instance, the prohibition of murder and incest), comes as the fruit of cultural selection. Or, on the contrary, comes as the fruit of genetic selection—whether such pattern was inherited from our primate ancestors or designed in the Pleistocene era (or even later in the course of our species’ biological evolution). As an evolutionary psychologist, what criterion do you resort to when it comes to distinguishing between those of widespread (if not universal) behaviors due to cultural selection; and those due to genetic selection?

  Aurelio José Figueredo: The framing of this question presupposes that “cultural selection” and “genetic selection” are two distinct and independent processes. Quite simply put, they are not. Since at least the 1980s, most mainstream theories of human evolution have incorporated the idea of gene-culture coevolution (e.g., Lumsden & Wilson, 1981; Richerson & Boyd, 2005), meaning that genetic changes produce selective pressures for cultural changes, and that cultural changes produce selective pressures for genetic changes. You are correct that genetic selection continued to take place well after what is commonly presupposed to have been either in our distant nonhuman primate ancestors or in our own species during the distant past in the Pleistocene Era. Gene-culture coevolution has continued (and even accelerated) throughout the Holocene (Cochran & Harpending, 2009) and up to and including the Modern Era (Hertler et al., 2020).

  One notable example is that of lactose tolerance, the ability of people like you and me to drink cow’s milk in adulthood. Now, all mammals are born with an enzyme called lactase, which digests the milk sugar, lactose, but they only have it for a certain period of time during infancy because mammals only feed on milk during their infancy, and afterwards no longer feed on milk. So, they don’t need the enzyme for lactose after that time. In certain human, not all human populations, but in certain human populations, that created a cultural adaptation because dairy farming is not genetic. They had a cultural innovation for dairy farming, and they substantially enhanced their nutrition and fitness. And as a result of that, those populations evolved what’s called lactase persistence. In medicine it’s called lactose tolerance, but it’s really the persistence of that enzyme into adulthood. It is not distributed evenly throughout the world. Studies have been done, where, according to the archeological record, there has been like 5000 years of dairy farming. So, in those areas, the gene for lactase persistence is highly prevalent. Where there has been very little to no dairy farming, you know, then, lactase persistence is absent. And for a long time in medical circles, this absence was called lactose intolerance and treated as a disorder. Because in societies derived from European or Mediterranean societies, it is rare to be lactose intolerant because everybody digests the milk from cows even as adults. Dairy farming is a clear-cut case of a cultural innovation—because nobody has ever identified a genetic mutation for dairy farming. But wherever dairy farming took place over sufficient evolutionary time, and adults were drinking milk, a genetic mutation followed and spread throughout the population. I said cow’s milk, but it could be sheep’s milk or mare’s milk. It’s believed by some that mare’s milk was the first kind of non-human milk that we started drinking, out in the Eurasian steppes. The proto-Eastern Europeans started doing that thousands of years ago. It is in those populations where that gene is not universal, but it’s highly prevalent because of the fitness advantages of being able to consume the milk of non-human animals even as an adult, even after you are past the breastfeeding period.

Lumsden C., & Wilson, E. O. (1981). Genes, Mind and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Richerson, P. J. & Boyd, R. (2005). Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. University of Chicago Press.

Cochran, G., & Harpending, H. (2009). The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilizations Accelerated Human Evolution. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Hertler, S., Figueredo, A.J., & Peñaherrera-Aguirre, M. (2020). Multilevel Selection: Theoretical Foundations, Historical Examples, and Empirical Evidence. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Your name is attached to the claim that, instead of religion being the cultural cause of moral intuitions, the association between religiosity and moral intuitions comes as “a spurious correlation” caused by slow life history strategy. How do you develop that insight?

  Aurelio José Figueredo: We developed and empirically supported that idea by testing various alternative structural equation models, some of which hypothesized religion as the cause of moral intuitions, and comparing them for best fit to the data that we had collected. The best model, by these empirical criteria, has life history strategy as the common cause of both. Both behavioral traits are thus ultimately reducible to that single biological cause, rather than one psychosocial trait causing the other.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: As a proponent of the multilevel selection approach, you probably know E.O. Wilson’s suggestion to leave behind kin selection theory (i.e., the claim that group selection only occurs at the level of groups of kin-related individuals), which he says has been refuted in hymenoptera and a variety of other species (including homo sapiens). Do you believe kin selection, instead of being wholly inoperative, applies in some specific cases? What is your take on E.O. Wilson’s candidate for a more comprehensive model of group selection—namely eusociality?

  Aurelio José Figueredo: We do not agree (see Hertler et al., 2020) that kin selection theory has been entirely “refuted” in the Hymenoptera. In fact, we just wrote a recently accepted entry (“Hymenopteran Eusociality”) to the Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior on that topic, which I can provide upon request. What has been refuted is the idea that kin selection is the sole selective pressure underlying Hymenopteran eusociality. Other forces have also been conclusively shown to be at work, and kin selection alone is neither a necessary nor sufficient explanation for advanced forms of sociality. In our view, kin selection models have largely been subsumed under more complex models of multilevel selection, only applying to altruistic relations among very close kin. For more diffuse kin networks, such as in human hypersociality among quite distant relatives, or ultrasociality as it is sometimes called (Turchin, 2016), other theories need to be incorporated. The relative degrees of genetic relatedness within-groups and between-groups (as captured in the statistic Fst, for example) is still a cardinal parameter underlying social evolution, but it is not the only consideration. Ecological factors, for example, also feature prominently.

Turchin, P. (2016). Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Chaplin, CT: Beresta.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: The cover of your very new collaborative book, Multilevel Selection, reproduces Lionel Royer’s famous painting of Vercingetorix surrendering to Caesar. What did motivate such illustration choice? In group selection and life history terms: how do you explain the West has been unique in producing such a variety of great men (both in history and fiction)? To name but a few, Achilles, Ulysses, Alexander the Great, Sulla, Julius Caesar, Vercingetorix, William the Conqueror, Cesare Borgia, Julius II, Davy Crockett, Rhett Butler, Tony Montana, Frank Castle.

  Aurelio José Figueredo: That cover was selected because we wanted to emphasize the continuing importance of competition between groups as a persisting selective pressure in historical populations. That scene was a particularly dramatic one, illustrating a relatively recent outcome of intergroup conflict.

  As far as the West producing a disproportionate number of “great men”, I am not really sure that is true. Most of the examples that you give are military leaders.  To those, I would retort with Temujin son of Yesugei (the “Genghis Khan”, which was a title, not a proper name), who conquered the largest contiguous land-based empire in human history, and his General Subutai, arguably the greatest military strategist that ever lived! If we are instead talking about spiritual/philosophical leaders, I could counter with the cases of K’ung Fu-Tse (“Confucious”), Lao-Tsu (founder of Taoism), and Prince Siddhartha Gautama (“The Buddha”, founder of the eponymous religious philosophy).  In what way are these lesser men than their Western counterparts? I am simply skeptical of the premise behind this particular question.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: The fall of the Soviet Union resulted into the ending of the intergroup tournament between America and Russia. How do sum up the Cold War’s intragroup consequences on America’s biocultural fabric? What did happen to the latter once the war was over?

  Aurelio José Figueredo: The fall of the Soviet Empire clearly reduced the intergroup selective pressures to which US populations are subjected. Our current conflicts are cases of “asymmetrical warfare” against substantially weaker opponents. There hasn’t been a major war among “Great Powers” for over half a century. Not that I am looking forward to having one, mind you, but it would definitely ratchet up the group-selection pressure, as by providing a true “existential threat”, which the current crop of Jihadis simply do not do, in spite of all the fear-mongering about them. In several of our recent publications, we have documented the decline in group-selected values in “Britannic” populations (meaning the successor states of the British Empire, including the USA) as a direct consequence of the reduced intensity of competition between groups over the Late Modern Era (reviewed in Hertler et al., 2020).

  Within our collaborative writing group, including colleagues like Michael A. Woodley of Menie, these group cohesion factors and things like loyalty, altruism, martial valor, self-sacrifice are thought to be group-selected traits that, within the context of a multilevel selection model, have sometimes been able to partially overcome the forces of individual selection, which are disruptive of these traits. They have been able to partially counteract, in certain historical periods, the forces of individual selection, which oppose group cohesion. But this can happen only under conditions of intense inter-group competition. And when that intense inter-group competition declines, for whatever reason, then these traits erode. We have documented this trend during the relatively peaceful and prosperous period that followed the very harsh and conflict-ridden Little Ice Age. The Little Ice Age had raged throughout most of the early modern era, starting in the mid XIV Century, actually early XIV Century. And that was a period of very intense competition, resource scarcity, famine, pestilence, warfare. But the Little Ice Age came to an end at about 1817, and things have been relatively benign since that time, and the prevalence of warfare has substantially decreased. The prevalence of inter-group competition has decreased, generally.

  So, we have been trying to frame group selection within a broader historical perspective in that respect. A lot of people don’t get the fact that social conflict has been decreasing over the past couple of centuries—actually, Steven Pinker (2011) wrote about this phenomenon in his own book, that even though millions and millions of people died in World War One and Two, your per capita risk of dying, corrected for the total population size, was much less in those two wars than in most of the wars of the more distant past. The actual per capita rate of war mortality has plummeted. Also, the rate of criminal homicide—the rate at which we kill each other—has declined, and all social competition has been substantially reduced since the end of the Little Ice Age. And as a result, the amount of violence has decreased in European and European-derived populations. But we’ve also—Michael and I—found, for instance, that a lot of these pro-social values, a lot of the idea of sacrifices for the security of the group have been eroding consistently since the 1800s. In fact, we’re just now revising the paper that we recently submitted that show the data for this as well. And we can send you that paper, if you’re interested. But right now, it’s still in the review and revision stage.

  The Soviet Union, in my reading of history, was the last great existential threat that the United States faced since the defeat of Germany and Japan in WW2. That was a serious challenge. Had the Germans and the Japanese won WW2, the Anglo-American hegemony that had been exerted over the world since the end of the Napoleonic Wars would have been reversed, and the dominance and hegemony of the Anglo-American, Britannic people would have been essentially broken. Similarly, had the Soviet Union won the Cold War, the same thing would have happened. That was a real threat.

  Once the Soviet Union fell, there was virtually no threat from anyone in the world to the global dominance of the Britannic people for a long time. And as a result, we have shown by various types of evidence that their group selected traits and social cohesion have been eroded, and are presently in a state of decay. Now, this may not persist, because some people believe that communist China is going to be the next big threat to this Pax Americana, so to speak. I don’t know enough political science to know whether that’s true or not, but some people are saying that there’s going to be another threat, whether there will be a cold war, or a hot war, or any kind of war is unknown. I have no way to predict that. But if that should happen, you will see a resurgence of this kind of nationalism and this kind of group cohesion in response—with respect to the external threat. But without an external threat, the forces of group selection cannot overcome the forces of individual selection. Individual selection puts a premium on self-interest and not group welfare. And as a result, those are the evolutionary conditions that lead to the proliferation of individually-selected people and the erosion of group cohesion. So, the fall of the Soviet empire was just the latest episode in this process. It may not be the last. I can’t tell the future with any degree of confidence because there are still uncertainties, for example, as to what’s going to happen over time.

Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. New York, NY: Penguin.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Anthropologist Robert Ardrey did not hesitate to characterize man as a territorial animal, most likely evolved from carnivorous African primates; and not—as was then the scientific consensus—from Asian herbivores. Unless in the case of defensive wars, those intended to expulse one or more intruders, Ardrey nonetheless refused to include war among the manifestations of the territorial imperative. Rather he thought war to fall within cultural selection. Do you follow him on that point—or do you judge war to fall within biological adaptation?

  Besides, how do you account for those inter-ethnic differences in territoriality we can witness today? With superorganisms in the West proving prone to tolerating an ever-higher proportion of foreign ethnicities on their soil; and, conversely, those in Asia and Africa exhibiting persistently high levels of territoriality.

  Aurelio José Figueredo: First off, Robert Ardrey was not much of an “Anthropologist”: He was primarily a playwright and screenwriter for most of his life (a very good one, in fact!) He then wrote some semi-popular science books to cash in on the then-current fad of writing potboilers based on human evolutionary science and ethology.

  Ardrey’s speculations notwithstanding, war is indeed a biological adaptation and is a straightforward manifestation of violent intergroup competition. We see it in many other species besides ourselves, as with many eusocial insects. We also have evidence for the antiquity of warfare in our own species, dating back to prehistoric as well as contemporary pre-state societies (see Keeley, 1996), where it has been present nearly universally. For example, the archeology of the European Neolithic is littered with the mass graves of the defeated, with bones clearly exhibiting signs of violent deaths. Many sites in Africa show similar patterns, so this is not limited to ancestral Europeans. Once again, in response to Ardrey’s position on the matter, recall that cultural and genetic selection are not mutually exclusive nor independent of each other, so his dichotomy there is both useless and obsolete.

  With regards to current trends in demographics, I can only speculate. My first reaction is to see how long they last. The “superorganisms in the West” of which you ask might well be in the process of fragmentation as a result of the relaxation of the formerly intense group-selective pressures. However, as you know, in places like France, there is a substantial opposition to this. And in many other countries, there is a substantial reaction to these open immigration policies that they have had. So, I don’t know that that is going to be viable long term, because a lot of the natives have been reacting to this quite strongly. And governments may be pressured to avoid this kind of thing, or at least, to limit the ethnic separatism that is practiced by some of these immigrant communities. For example, you know, I speak a little French—I’ve been to France several times—so I hope you don’t mind if we talk a little bit about the specific example of France. I don’t think any French people, at least none that I know, and I know quite a few of them, object to the Muslims staying in France. They just insist that anyone, whether Muslim or not, has to adapt to French culture, French civilization, if one wants to live in France. You have to speak French, abide by the laws of France, and be a normal citizen of the republic. That’s what French people have told me. It is not that they don’t like Muslims per se, but that the kind of separatist impulses that some of these communities have are objectionable to French nationalism. That’s my understanding.

  The idea that incorporating diverse cultural elements within one society is unfeasible, I don’t think that’s completely correct. To wit, if you look at European history, the Roman Empire lasted for over a thousand years, but I’m talking about the Western Empire. If you count the Eastern Empire, the so-called Byzantine Empire, that lasted—their collective existence might be close to two thousand years. Those were empires that, although established by particular ethnic groups (the Romans), ruled over a very multicultural, diverse array of nations, for century after century. And they had a thriving civilization going. Now, were individual ethnic groups pursuing their own self-interest? Of course, they were. You know, everybody pursues their own self-interest, regardless of who it is. So, was there a certain amount of ethnic nepotism among all the groups involved? Absolutely. That’s really what any evolutionist would expect. But does that mean that within an empire, you cannot coexist with these other groups for perhaps centuries, and perhaps even millennia? I would say the history of Europe would answer no, it is not impossible. You can have a multicultural empire that includes a diverse set of ethnicities, provided they are all guided by a common set of laws and principles. In that sense, I completely agree with the French attitude on this matter.

  The Romans referred to this principle as Romanitas, or Romanness. And, the law was the law, and it was the law for everybody, and Roman law was strictly enforced. And after a few centuries, everyone in the Empire was granted Roman citizenship. At least, all free persons (not slaves) were granted Roman citizenship. And there were many emperors from Gallia, from Hispania, even some from North Africa that actually became Roman emperors. And they were all incorporated. In fact, there was one semi-popular book I remember called The Celtic Empire, in which the author made the case that Gallia, which is now France, became one of the dominant parts of the Roman Empire after the second century. It was a really critical part of the Empire. The Roman Empire wasn’t just Italians. So, I frankly don’t agree that ethnic homogeneity is absolutely necessary for a functional multinational society or state —what I’m calling an empire regardless of type of government. There have been plenty of examples where that has been made to work. Another example, if you don’t want to think of Rome, is the so-called Inca empire, correctly called Tawantinsuyu, of the Andes in South America. They had a very multicultural empire. However, they had a brilliant road system, just like the Romans, and any province that rebelled or tried to practice separatism was crushed by the imperial army. Rebellion was not tolerated. You had to follow the rules, and you had to actually be part of that Andean state. And if not, there were dire consequences. So, a certain degree of conformity to social norm was enforced both by the Romans and by the Andean people. And they were very good examples of multinational states, multi-ethnic states that lasted with some degree of stability, literally for centuries.

  So, even though I’m an evolutionist and yes, genetic relatedness is an important factor in group selection, it is not the only factor. It is not necessarily the predominant one. And it is not strictly necessary, as some theorists have argued. The historical evidence indicates that nationalism, as we know it today, arose in the 19th century. It—that ideology of nationalism—was not even a coherent doctrine in Europe before that. I’m not saying there aren’t some instincts for ethnic nepotism. Those clearly exist in every human group; everywhere, you find ethnic nepotism. But the kind of radical nationalism that Europeans came to accept in the 19th century is a recent historical invention, and it may be degraded over time as a result of these different social realities. I think this phenomenon was actually caused by the imperial expansion of the European powers, the fact that they incorporated ethnically different groups into their empires; often against the objection of the natives, but they incorporated these diverse groups into their societies. So, for example, to use the case of France again, you have a lot of Algerians in France. The Algerians never invaded France. France invaded and conquered Algeria. That’s historical fact. So, we have Algerians now in France. Just understand, you asked for them, right? They did not voluntarily do this. And it’s not just like that in France, but in all the formerly imperial powers. They just incorporated these other people, created worldwide empires and global trade networks. So, that automatically incorporates these people within your society whether you acknowledge it or not.

  So, now the question is how to deal with these diverse groups—and how to incorporate them as part of an orderly society. I believe that historical evidence indicates that that is possible. But you cannot tolerate the separatists. This kind of multiculturalism philosophy that’s being preached nowadays, where everybody is just pursuing their own ethnic interests and there’s no loyalty to any kind of higher power, is not feasible in the longer term. But is it possible to create a true multicultural state where everybody engages in a cooperative network and everybody plays by the same rules? I think that historical evidence indicates that yes, it is possible. But you have to be firm. You can’t be weak. Only strong empires can do this.

Keeley, L. H. (1996). War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. Oxford University Press

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You challenge the idea that interindividual romantic relationships are primarily influenced by communication. You instead suggest that life history strategies in partners serve as the most fundamental force in shaping the outcome of their relationship. May you come back at that issue?

  Aurelio José Figueredo: Again, I tend to favor more fundamental and biological explanations to purely psychosocial and behavioral ones. “Communication” is only a proximate cause, whereas life history strategy better specifies the ultimate selective pressures that might have led to that behavior. Specifically, the need for biparental care in species with altricial offspring (such as our own) requires long-term bonding between fathers and mothers for the purpose of raising their offspring. It is that biological function that requires the communication. I am not downplaying the important role of supportive communication in maintaining human romantic relationships, but merely trying to explain why it is there.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Thank you for your time. Do you feel the need to add something?

Aurelio José Figueredo: I should point out that all the work that you have attributed to me was instead the work of many collaborative efforts over the years, and the role that my coauthors have played, as well as the massive contributions that they have made, should not be downplayed. I just wanted to acknowledge that before we finish. The citations provided present only a partial list of those collaborators. I think this was a very good interview, and I thank you for being honest, and as you said, not hostile. I don’t feel on the spot like you’re trying to catch me in something as some interviewers have tried to do in the past. And I appreciate your being open-minded.


That conversation was initially published in The Postil Magazine, in February 2020

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Aurelio José Figueredo, Grégoire Canlorbe, J. Philippe Rushton, Life History Theory, Michael A. Woodley of Menie, Robert Ardrey, The Rushton Paradox

A few considerations on Marxian theory—economics and ontology

A few considerations on Marxian theory—economics and ontology

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Jan 1, 2021

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

Filed Under: Uncategorized

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

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

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Nov 26, 2020

  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

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: American Civil War, Barack Obama, Catholic Church, Christianity, Crusades, Donald Trump, Edwin Chadwick, Grégoire Canlorbe, Italian Renaissance, Jules Dupuit, Mark Thornton, Mercantilism, Robert B. Ekelun

A conversation with Frank Salter, for American Renaissance

A conversation with Frank Salter, for American Renaissance

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Oct 30, 2020

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

Filed Under: Uncategorized

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