coevolution gene-culture

A Canadian-born academic, Andrew William Fraser was an associate professor in the Department of Public Law at Macquarie University in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. He is best-known for his book The WASP Question. [The views here expressed are not to be confused with those of American Renaissance nor with those of Canlorbe.]

  Grégoire Canlorbe: A striking contemporary trait in the WASP people is what may be called extra-ethnic individualism, i.e., the propensity to assess foreigners (including those non-white) as self-determined, free “individuals” who can transition fluidly from an ethnic group to another one—and to welcome them on one’s territory and to provide them with national citizenship. Is extra-ethnic individualism an acquired, “cultural” trait—or is such feature one biologically anchored?

  Drew Fraser: There is no radical break between biology and culture. Racial differences generally are, in large part, biologically or genetically grounded. But culture, too, is more than a social construct; it, too, has a substantial biological component. Deeply entrenched cultural differences between racial groups may be reflected in their respective genomes. The culture of any given racial group is never static; it changes and develops, sometimes in tandem with genetic changes.

  One example of the interaction between biology and culture was the emergence of lactose tolerance among peoples who gave up a hunter-gatherer way of life to engage in animal husbandry. The concept of bioculture presupposes the co-evolution of biology and culture.

  But any such co-evolution is a long process occurring within stable gene pools over millennia. Negroes have been in America for a little over four centuries without assimilating into the dominant white culture, much less undergoing genetic changes as a consequence. Paradoxically, American Negro culture, having been released from the disciplinary matrix formerly imposed by slavery and Jim Crow, is becoming steadily more remote from WASP bioculture. Contemporary black Americans dependent on public welfare are reverting to the fast-life strategies (e.g., low investing parenting of many children) associated with their sub-Saharan African ancestors.

  WASP biocultures are generally characterized by predispositions towards individualism, exogamy, and small nuclear families. As a consequence, WASPs display a relative lack of ethnocentrism. Kevin MacDonald explains these biocultural traits as an evolutionary adaptation to the rigors of life in cold, ecologically adverse climates. Natural selection worked there to favor the reproductive success of individuals capable of sustaining “non-kinship-based forms of reciprocity.”

  The Anglo-Saxon Männerbünde who invaded and settled in England were bound together originally more by covenant than kinship. The prominent place accorded to oath-taking and covenants in early England was associated with the growth of the individualism later manifested in the development of the English common law of contract, private property and eventually impersonal corporate forms of business enterprise. All of these legal norms required sustained co-operation between and among strangers.

  The distinctive culture that emerged from the interaction between the genotype of the English people and their environment can be understood as what Richard Dawkins calls an extended phenotype. Like the spider’s web or the beaver’s dam, the extended phenotype of WASP bioculture creates a feedback loop between genes and environment. If the WASP bioculture creates a “society of strangers,” its most characteristic extended phenotype is perhaps the modern nation-state. WASPs can be said to have invented the nation-state as the primary institutional expression of their collective identity.

  The problem is that Anglo-Saxon states, like Frankenstein’s monster, have escaped control of, by, and for the people who created them. WASP bioculture emerged within a high-trust society of strangers within which the state was expected to act as trustee for the interests of society as a whole. Today, those Anglo-Saxon nation-states have been absorbed into a more or less autonomous and self-perpetuating, globalist system of governance.

  WASPs are now vulnerable to the machinations of transnational corporate welfare states determined to open up every formerly Anglo-Saxon country to an unending flood of mass immigration. Predominantly non-white immigrants come from low-trust societies predisposed to elevate kinship and tribal loyalties above impersonal norms of fairness and justice.  Individual WASPs are ill-prepared to compete with racial strangers co-operating with each other to advance their collective interests.

  Clearly, the survival of WASP biocultures depends upon the successful adaptation to these altered circumstances.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: What is your take on Samuel Huntington’s classification of contemporary civilizations—and on his claim that the XXI century’s struggles will be neither economically nor racially motivated, but instead “civilizational” clashes? Did Huntington have a satisfying, perspicacious understanding of WASP civilizational model?

  Drew Fraser: Huntington contended that clashes between civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace but, at the same time, looked to an international order based on civilizations as the best safeguard against war. He probably overestimated the unity, cohesion, and cultural continuity of the major civilizations. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the case of Western civilization.

  The United States, according to Huntington, is the core state of Western civilization. He believed that the United States possesses a core “Anglo-Protestant culture.” Recognizing that mass immigration represented a serious threat to the survival of that core culture, Huntington held to the vain hope that new immigrants could and would assimilate into the host culture.

  His analysis rested, as well, upon the presupposition that the core Anglo-Protestant culture established in the British North American colonies has survived intact down to the present day. In fact, the character of the American people was altogether different in the colonial and early republican periods. Sociologist David Riesman described the dominant character-type of those days as “inner-directed.” Knowing the difference between right and wrong, early Americans were “rugged individualists,” possessing a sort of inbuilt psychic gyroscope that enabled them to stay on course, whatever the obstacles.

  Nowadays, most Americans (especially those in the managerial-professional elites) display an “other-directed’ character of the sort essential to success in corporate, governmental, and academic bureaucracies. According to Robert Jackall, the moral ethos prevalent in managerial circles is “most notable for its lack of fixedness.” The other-directed character requires, not an internal gyroscope, but a sort of radar able to pick up minute shifts in the fluctuating relationships with significant others in a mass-mediated social order.

  The rootless cosmopolitanism of an other-directed corporate culture is driven by an “essential, pervasive, and thoroughgoing pragmatism.” In modern multiracial mass societies, the early republican constitution of liberty was replaced by a corporatist constitution of control promoting the enhanced growth and vitality of an increasingly plutocratic globalist system.

  Amidst the ruins of their ancestral bioculture, WASPs throughout the Anglosphere have been abandoned by Woke corporate welfare states which no longer even pretend to represent them. WASPs are now de facto, if not yet de jure, a stateless people. Only by falling back upon their ancestral racial and ethnic identity will ordinary WASPs find the spiritual strength to turn the tables on cosmopolitan elites.  It is those faithless elites, not other civilizations that pose the greatest existential threat to the Anglo-Saxon peoples.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: In your most recent article, you enjoin “virtuous WASPs” to “challenge the corrupt globalist plutocracy misgoverning the Anglosphere.” Who are exactly those plutocrats—and how should they be fought?

  Drew Fraser: The modern Anglo-American business corporation is a product of the managerial revolution. For more than a century now, ownership of the business corporation has been separated from control. Shareholders are no longer responsible for the governance of the corporate system. Complex systems of corporate finance have created interlocking structures of corporate control concentrating power in the hands of an irresponsible plutocratic oligarchy.

  That plutocracy is made up of people from a wide range of ethnicities. Throughout the Anglosphere, Jews play prominent roles in finance, media, academia, the law, and politics. Other ethnic groups have found niches of their own, such as the Indians involved in Silicon Valley. While no one ethnic group dominates the globalist plutocracy numerically—even WASPs can still be found within its ranks—there is little doubt that what E. Michael Jones calls “the Jewish revolutionary spirit” provides what amounts to its guiding ideology.

  WASPs are largely responsible for the invention of both the nation-state and the modern business corporation. I believe WASPs have an ethnoreligious duty, therefore, to clean up the mess that they and others have made of their biocultures and its extended phenotypes (or Lebenswelt as a German might put it, more poetically). Having become a stateless people, the WASP diaspora ought to re-model itself to some degree on the experience of the other, once-stateless, diaspora which became our chief ethnic rival; namely, the Jews.

  In other words, like the Jews, WASPs should be more than the ethnomasochistic people-in-itself that they are at present; they can and should become instead an ethnocentric people-for-itself.  The one essential lesson they must learn from the Jews is that it is morally permissible, indeed obligatory, to ask of every public policy, corporate institution, and religious practice one simple question; namely, “Is it good for the WASPs?”

  WASPs need to regenerate the ethnoreligious spirit of the early medieval Angelcynn church.  In the time of Alfred the Great (849-899), the church provided the embryonic English people with the first intimation that they, too, could become, a “holy nation” destined to do God’s work in healing a wounded world. The most important task of a resurrected Angelcynn church and its ancillary educational institutions will be to prepare WASPs to play a leading role in the reconstitution of a responsible ruling class.

  Just how one major aspect of such a program might be accomplished is the subject of my forthcoming book on the republican reformation of corporate governance. It is to be published shortly by Arktos Media. It is entitled: Reinventing Aristocracy in the Age of Woke Capital: How Honourable WASP Elites Could Rescue Our Civilization from Bad Governance by Irresponsible Corporate Plutocrats.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You addressed the “German Church Struggle” in the 1930s—and how the victory of the side most famously represented by Karl Barth would encourage the cosmopolitan character of Christianity in the whole West. What alternative is there to the deracinated universalism of mainstream Christianity?

  Drew Fraser: The story of the conflict within German Protestant churches between supporters and opponents of the National Socialist regime is known as the Kirchenkampf.  Mainstream historical writing on the church struggle typically rests upon one unshakeable premise; namely, that, even before the war, the National Socialists, generally, and Adolf Hitler, in particular, were culpably criminal and irredeemably evil.

  Karl Barth played a leading role in organizing ecclesiastical opposition to Hitler’s regime and its German Christian supporters. At the end of the war, Barth emerged as the clear victor over his völkische rivals in the Protestant churches. By the 1960s, he was a world renowned religious thinker, even appearing on the cover of Time magazine. He gave an enormous boost to cosmopolitan Christianity by rejecting any Volkskirche by denying that either nations or nationality were any part of the divinely-ordained order of creation.

  Barth refused to acknowledge that the Church can “be regarded as a human production.” He insisted that the Church does not owe its existence to this world; rather its being is “secured, unthreatened, and incontestable only from above, only from God, not from below, not from the side of its human members.”

  By contrast, the ideal of the Volkskirche rejected by Barth and his ecclesiastical allies held that “in the national determination of man we have an order of creation no less than in the relationship of man and woman and parents and children.” But mainstream Christians in every erstwhile Anglo-Saxon country now regard their own peoples as merely historical constructs whose purely contingent national identity cannot be identified as a command of God or a presupposition of the divine order of things.

  Barth’s complete ideological triumph has effectively licensed the virtual extinction of Christian nationhood throughout the Western world.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: When it comes to the Anglican Church in Australia—how do you assess the extent of its fall compared to Western Christianity’s other sub-movements?

  Drew Fraser:  The Anglican Church of Australia, especially in its Sydney Diocese, regards itself as Christian first, evangelical second, and Anglican in a distant third place.  In his 2012 Presidential Address, the then-Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen lent his fulsome support to the transformation of Sydney into a multiracial global city. He celebrated the fact that between 2006 and 2011 over 300,000 migrants arrived in Sydney from over 216 countries.  He was not at all concerned that China and India now dominate the countries of origin.

  Just this year, the Sydney Diocese elected as its new Archbishop a Buddhist adult convert to Christianity whose Sri Lankan parents migrated to Australia when he was a young child.  Clearly, Sydney Anglicans have no interest in the survival of a national church nurturing and preserving the ethnoreligious identity of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants whose ancestors founded the Church of England in Australia.

  This represents a sharp departure from the hopes invested in the Broad-Church movement in the nineteenth-century Church of England.  1 John 5:6-8 tells us that the Trinitarian character of a holy people is found in the “three who bear witness on earth: the Spirit, the water, and the blood; and these three agree as one.”  At least one Anglican theologian, Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872), located the Spirit, the water, and the blood in the tripartite spiritual constitution of every national church.

  Maurice defended the Trinitarian unity of family, church, and nation. Unfortunately, the Anglican Church of Australia and elsewhere has rejected such a traditionalist theology. Instead, WASPs in the Australian Church have embraced the secular cult of human equality with all the enthusiasm their middle-class English souls can muster.

  Anglo-Australian Anglicans have missed altogether the theological point and purpose of Australian nationhood. Indeed, the Church has joined forces with the State to siphon off the Spirit and the water from the blood-faith of its Angelcynn forbears. The amorphous mass of individualistic WASP Anglicans must be satisfied with the thin gruel offered them by a “public theology” engaged in the competitive (indeed pathological) display of out-group altruism which characterizes evangelical mission in a post-Christian world.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You suggest holding theology as the “queen of the racial sciences”—and race as a trinitarian phenomenon paralleling the trinitarian deity. Thus you envision “race-as-biology,” “race-as-ethnicity,” and “race-as-theology” are the three constitutive elements of race—especially in the white man. Please tell us more about it.

  Drew Fraser: There are three dimensions to racial and ethnic identity. The first, race-as-biology, promises to shed light on the relationship between blood and behaviour as manifested in measurable group differences such as average intelligence, temperament, and reproductive strategies.

  By contrast, race-as-ethnicity deals with the myths and symbols which move men to collective action. As Hannah Arendt observed, to act, “in the most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin…to set something in motion.” The actor is someone who starts something new. Applied to the birth of an ethno-nation, her insights suggest that action promotes the process of ethnogenesis in two stages: (1) the beginning made by a charismatic leader; and (2) the subsequent construction of a novel collective identity by his followers.

  No wonder, then, that the imagined community of Christians appeared in late antiquity “in the guise of a miracle.” Not even the most devout Jews longing for the messianic restoration of national Israel expected what actually came to pass. Against all the odds, Christians—this new race of men—were moved by the Spirit to accomplish their divinely-appointed mission.

  Race-as-theology helps us to understand how Spirit and blood mingled with the life-giving power of water to sustain the first, embryonic Christian communities. Since then, Christian nationhood has been nourished by the continuing interplay of Spirit, water, and blood. But disorder or dysfunction in one or more of those elements has led many nations to defeat and destruction.

  Even the most atheistic practitioners of race-as-biology concede that a shared religious faith is likely to enhance the inclusive fitness of any race or nation. Conversely, the essentially trinitarian character of Christian nationhood is subverted when the unitarian logic of biology suppresses the theological dimension of racial or ethnic identity.

  But a one-dimensional obsession with race-as-theology is no less productive of disastrous consequences. The now-dominant unitarian theology of cosmopolitan Christianity asserts that there is only one race, the human race. The denial by “anti-racists” of the fixed, intractable, biological character of the observable differences between various population groups provides ideological cover for the deliberate displacement of white European populations in favour of non-white immigrants.

  Differences between Negroes, white Europeans, and Orientals are part of the divinely-ordered nature of things. Race is a theological not just a biological or cultural phenomenon.  Those who refuse to recognize the theological significance of race do so at their peril.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Could you remind us of your case for a “patriotic king” in Australia, a wording you openly borrow from a book by Henry St. John, 1^st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)?

  Drew Fraser:  Royalty plays a central role in the bible story. Jesus the Christ traced his descent to King David. As the very model of an English David, Alfred the Great established a Christian kingdom in England. The hereditary monarch of the British dominions once served as trustee-in-chief for his realm. The religious significance of the monarchy was given formal recognition when Henry VIII, his heirs, and successors were declared to be Supreme Governors of the Church of England. The Royal Supremacy played a significant role in the rise of the Broad-Church movement in the nineteenth-century Church of England.  Nowadays, it has since become little more than a hollow simulacrum of the putative royal authority vested in a shapeshifting Crown. As in secular matters, the reigning monarch exercises the Royal Supremacy as a rubber stamp for any government of the United Kingdom commanding a majority in the House of Commons.

  A major objective of a future network of Angelcynn churches throughout the Anglosphere should be the rescue of the captive Crown in right of the Royal Supremacy from corrupt politicians with no demonstrable interest in the spiritual welfare of Anglo-Saxons “at home” or in the diaspora. Once Royal Supremacy over the Church of England has been insulated from political control, it should be extended to every reformed Angelcynn Church, not just in the United Kingdom, but throughout the British dominions as well.  In time, it may become possible for the Crown to charter Angelcynn churches, even in what remains of the American republic.

  In the eighteenth century, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, appalled by the blatant corruption of the ruling Whig oligarchy, hoped that the idea of a Patriot King would re-awaken the English nation from its spiritual slumbers. The appearance of such a patriot prince would have been a miracle indeed. In our own time, it is doubly hard to imagine a British prince daring to stand against a government determined to maintain its control over the royal prerogative in ecclesiastical affairs. But, as Bolingbroke wrote, those who pray for such a deliverance must not neglect such means as are in their power “to keep the cause of reason, of virtue, and of liberty alive.” The blessing of a patriot prince might indeed “be withheld from us” but to “deserve at least that it be granted to us, let us prepare to receive it, to improve it, and to co-operate with it.”

  Bolingbroke knew that were a patriot prince to campaign in defence of the monarchy, he would be subject to a raging torrent of criticism and abuse. Yet when a good prince is seen “to suffer with the people, and in some measure for them…many advantages would accrue to him.” For one thing, the cause of the British peoples generally “and his own cause would be made the same by their common enemies.”

  What is the nature of that cause? In short, acting as the Supreme Governor of an Angelcynn communion extending throughout the Anglosphere, a patriot prince will call forth a spirit of resistance to both managerial statism and the abstract universalism of globalist plutocracy. He will do everything in his power to civilize those wild and immoral forces. But the appearance of a Patriot King is not inevitable. Indeed, only a people whose lost liberties are restored to memory will recognize his coming as an opportunity to reshape their allegedly preordained future.

  Anglo-Saxon republicans may yet be compelled to call upon God to save the King. As things stand now, the ritual absence of the monarch from everyday life is but one more sign that we are no longer a serious people. Forswearing the faith of our fathers, we surrender our bodies to the state and our souls to the degenerate society of the spectacle. It would be a sign of spiritual and moral progress were we to wish that a Patriot King will come to save us.

  In effect, the idea of a Patriot King would serve as a Sorelian myth, inspiring WASPs to act in opposition to an irresponsible and corrupt plutocratic system demanding automatic obedience and mindless conformity. For the radical French syndicalist Georges Sorel (1847-1922), men cannot be galvanized into action through discourse or considered analysis. According to historian Irving Louis Horowitz, Sorel viewed action as “the outcome of an appeal to imagination and intuition, which dramatizes the consequences of an act rather than [offering] a reasoned prediction of those consequences.”

  An ethnoreligious appeal to the idea of a Patriot King will nourish WASPs around the world “on the strength of kinship and community feeling; on the ability to act as a collective unit.” To act as a whole, as a united people, WASPs will need to focus on a single unifying element. As a Sorelian myth, the pragmatic value of the idea of a Patriot King will not depend upon its “objectively primary content as such, but simply the quality of making men cohere in a common endeavour.”

  Remember, though: a king is, indeed, like unto God; he cannot save those who will not save themselves. Those who pray for the miraculous appearance of a Patriot King must make themselves worthy of such a blessing. The resurrection of the Angelcynn church will be but the first step in the salvation of the WASPs. Much else will need to be done if virtuous WASPs are to create and secure “little republics” of their own on the fiercely-contested terrain of a transnational civil society.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You studied the “theological significance of the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in AD 70.” What would be the political, “theological significance” of the reconstruction of the Jerusalem temple—and of the reestablishment of the priestly caste attached to its service?

  Drew Fraser: Mainstream Christianity rests upon some version of a futurist eschatology. That is to say, the most Christians, Catholics and Protestants alike, believe that the Bible reveals the salvation history and destiny of humanity from the creation of planet earth in Genesis until the end of the world at the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Belief in the prophesied end of the world takes several forms. Most Christians are “amillennialists” who take no firm position of when or how the Second Coming will take place. “Post-millennialists,” by contrast, believe that Christ will return only after the kingdom of God has established its dominion to the ends of the earth.

  Christian Zionists (aka “dispensationalists”) believe that the reconstruction of the Jerusalem Temple will inaugurate the Millennial (thousand-year) reign of Jesus Christ here on earth in preparation for the Last Judgement. On this view, the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948 was in partial fulfillment of God’s promise of salvation to all Christians.

  Not all Christians, however, accept the deeply-entrenched (though competing) ecclesiastical traditions grounded in a futurist eschatology. Preterists (from the Latin praeter meaning “past”) hold that the Bible story effectively comes to an end with the destruction of the Temple in AD 70. Their reading of the bible story suggests that those who look forward to the return of Jesus Christ at the end of the world are misinterpreting the Bible in accordance with presuppositions grounded in a false hermeneutic. Futurist eschatology, preterists say, is simply unbiblical.

  Preterists hold to a covenantal eschatology grounded in a Hebrew hermeneutic according to which the bible story has to do with the rise and fall of Old Covenant Israel. They insist that the clear text of Scripture shows that all of the biblical prophesies of a new heaven and a new earth, not just those in Revelations, were fulfilled in AD 70. In August of that year, Christ came (the Parousia or Second Coming) to oversee the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, the physical centre of the old heaven and old earth occupied by God’s first people. In Revelation, we see the Old Covenant world of Israel sinking into lakes of fire, while the New Covenant enters into history to create a new heaven and new earth. The Jerusalem Temple makes its exit in a spectacular cataclysm. The new creation becomes incarnate in the church, the ecclesiastical Body of Christ, which by AD 70 has been carried to the ends of the known world. There the bible story ends.

  The Old Covenant bound the holy nation of Israel to God; the New Covenant extended the grace of God to every nation (ethnos) of the oikumene. The leaves of the tree of life in the New Jerusalem were to serve for “the healing of nations.” Old Israel was no more. On Judgement Day, Christ sentenced the stiff-necked synagogue of Satan to spiritual death. Only a righteous remnant was left to carry the holy seed of Israel unto the nations. For almost two thousand years, every Christian nation adjured Jews within their realm to recognize their Redeemer, thus ending their age-old rebellion against God. In sharp contrast to the Jews, Anglo-Saxons eagerly entered into the new covenant world.

  A preterist biblical hermeneutic is clearly opposed to Christian Zionist dispensationalism.  The reconstruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the modern Israeli state cannot be justified theologically within the framework of covenant eschatology. (It would, of course, signal a blasphemous desire to reverse the divine judgement on Old Covenant Israel.)

  On a positive note, preterism provides a warrant for an Angelcynn ethnonational church aiming to raise up WASPs as a holy nation in their own right. Such a warrant was clearly exercised when the early Christian church recognized a biocultural affinity between the covenantal language of the Bible itself and the prominent place occupied by covenants in tribal social structures of Old England.

  Conversely, once Anglo-Saxon churches downplayed the importance of blood covenants to the spiritual life of both family and nation, the ancestral attachment of Anglo-Saxon Protestants to the Body of Christ began to fade away. The civil religion of the modern Anglican church, focused as it is on personal salvation, refuses to recognize itself as the spiritual home of the large, partly-inbred extended family that constitutes the Anglo-Saxon ethny. No such bloodless faith will ever give birth to a holy nation in the eyes of God.

  Contemporary WASPs drawing upon the wisdom enshrined in Holy Scripture will recognize that their own ethnonation, no less than ancient Israel, must ground itself in a divinely-ordained covenant between the dead, the living, and the unborn. The living members of a godly nation will see themselves as the trustees of the family blood, rights, property, name, and position for their lifetime. They have an inheritance from the past to be developed and preserved for the future. Along with its warrant for nationhood and a storehouse of wisdom for all ages, the biblical fate of Old Covenant Israel stands as a clear warning to any nation breaching its covenantal obligations to God and man.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Thank you for your time. Please, feel free to add anything else.

Drew Fraser: Thanks for the opportunity to do this. I found your questions quite stimulating.

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That interview was initially published in American Renaissance, in July 2021