Grégoire Canlorbe

Grégoire Canlorbe

A conversation with Kenya Kura, for The Postil Magazine

A conversation with Kenya Kura, for The Postil Magazine

by ·

  Kenya Kura is currently an associate professor at Gifu Shotoku Gakuen University in Gifu prefecture, Japan. He graduated from the University of Tokyo (B.A. in Law) and obtained Ph.D. in Economics from University of California, San Diego in 1995. His original papers regarding the following conversation are “Why Do Northeast Asians Win So Few Nobel Prizes?” (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.2466/04.17.CP.4.15) and “Japanese north–south gradient in IQ predicts differences in stature, skin color, income, and homicide rate” (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000949).

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Could you start by reminding us of your main findings about IQ differences?

  Kenya Kura: My first motivation about IQ study, basically, came from the simple fact that some IQ researchers, way back, like Richard Lynn and Arthur Jensen among others, reported that East Asians are higher in their IQ. And I was just wondering if it was true or not, and then, I went into the field of whether or not there is some kind of gradient of intelligence among Japanese prefectures. And so far, what I have found is very much in line with other findings that the Northern Japanese are somewhat more intelligent than the Southern residents on these islands. About the gradient amount Japanese people, what I have found is not at all unique: in Northern Japan IQ tends to be probably about three points higher than the average Japanese. And in the Southern Island of Okinawa, for example, it is like seven points lower than the average. And pretty much, it varies. Sort of stylized pattern that I figured out for many times and very consistently. That’s pretty much it. Also, I’ve been probably more interested in the psychological differences between the East Asians and the Europeans than most of the European Psychologists.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Do you have something to say about the dysgenic patterns (i.e., the factors of genetic decline at the level of things like fertility gaps) in contemporary Japan—compared with the West?

  Kenya Kura: Actually, Richard Lynn has been asking me for probably more than a decade, probably 15 years or so, if I can get some kind of evidence about this genetic effect in Japan. But unfortunately, I haven’t got a very solid dataset on the negative correlations—the so-called the famous dysgenic trend found almost everywhere in the world that more intelligent women tend to have fewer children. But, having said that, it’s very, very obvious that in Japan, this genetic effect is going on as much as in Western society. For example, Tokyo has the lowest fertility rate. And where most intelligent men and women tend to migrate when they are going to college or when they get a job and stuff like that. So, it’s apparent that most intelligent people are gathering in the biggest city areas like Tokyo, and Tokyo has the lowest fertility rate. So, it gives us some kind of evidence but, unfortunately, this is not a really solid analysis. I also figured out that the more educated you are, the fewer children you have. This is a very much stylized or prominent sort of phenomenon also found in Japan. So, I’m sure of this genetic effect.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Is it true that the taboo about genetic differences in intelligence is far less prevalent in Japan (and the other East-Asian countries) as it is in the West?

  Kenya Kura: I have been working on this subject matter for at least 20 years, and I got the impression that the real taboo of this kind of research is pretty much the same as in Western society. But there is one very big difference: in Western culture you can always pursue your scientific theme or scientific field and prove you are right. And it’s a very Western idea: individuals have a right to speak up and try to prove they are right, but Asian culture doesn’t have that. So, the problem is that Japanese scholars are scholars in some sense, including myself, but, actually, most of them are just mimicking or repeating what Western people are doing. So, there aren’t many people actually trying to show or present their own thesis, their own theory, so to speak. So in that sense, if Western society or Western Science Society says A is right, B is wrong, in the Japanese society, it is pretty much subordinate to the whole attitude.

  So, I would say that mainstream Japanese scholars tend to just follow the mainstream Western culture. Personally, as for this sensitive scientific field, I really don’t have any friend working on this matter. People, including myself, are afraid to be regarded as a very strange, cranky person who is saying: “look, in group data, we are so different that there isn’t much we can do to, for example, alleviate poverty in the third world or in developing countries.” If you say that, then people think, “What?” Even though you might be right—many people think you might be right—but it is not part of our culture to speak up, that’s why I don’t expect anything to come out of the Asian scientific society to have an influence on the Western science society.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: While any evolutionary psychologist agrees, in principle, that human individuals are not tabula rasa genetically, most of them nonetheless refuse to admit that it applies to groups as well, i.e., that human groups exhibit as much specific genetic characteristics as do human individuals. In other words, all agree that a human individual (whoever he is) is endowed with a specific individual genome that contributes to shaping his psychological identity; but only a minority agrees that a human society (whatever it is) is also endowed with a specific collective genome that contributes to shaping its cultural identity. How do you account for that duality?

  Kenya Kura: For this sort of question, I have pretty much the same opinion as other IQ researchers of this kind. Basically, as you said, many people agree about the genetic differences between individuals whereas, when it comes to group differences, they try to negate the existence of genetic differences. So, yes, there is a dichotomy, here. But I understand this idea because their point of view—because everybody wants to be a nice person. Right? So, if you are seeking for truth only as a scientist, that is fine. But we are not some sort of abstract existence without any physical reality because everybody around you feels awkward probably if you say: yeah, but, you know, group difference makes a lot of sense. And most of the sort of talk that inequality existing in this world is probably explained by genetic differences, as Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen said, makes all the people around you feel very, very awkward or strange about your political sort of personality or your political view, itself. I can say only probably this much. So, many people are just politically persuaded not to mention—not only that—not to recognize, trying to make a lot of effort not to recognize the difference and try to negate the fact. That’s my understanding.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: It seems the Indo-European cultural pattern that is the tripartite hierarchy of society for the benefit of a warlike, sacerdotal aristocracy with a heroic ethos (i.e., the ethos of self-singularizing and self-immortalizing oneself through military exploits accomplished in contempt for material subsistence) has been present or paralleled in traditional Japan. Do you suspect an Indo-European influence in Japan?

  Kenya Kura: Oh, I have sort of an idea. It’s not very much proven, but Japanese society or Japanese people are basically a hybrid, about 30 percent of the original so-called Jomons before the Chinese or Koreans came, about two thousand years ago. And this Korean or, I would say, Chinese genetic factor constitutes about 70 percent. So 70 percent of Chinese plus 30 percent of indigenous Japanese people is the basic genetic mix of current Japanese people. And this kind of huge 70 percent explains the East Asian characteristics. Basically, it gives us looks like mine, right? Probably, any European can notice that Japanese, Korean, Chinese typically have different face characteristics. And although, as I said, Japanese people have 70 percent of retaining this genetic tendency, the 30 percent remains in our genetic structure. And I suspect that this natural 30 percent gives us more of a war prone personality than the Chinese or the Koreans. So, that’s why we put a lot of war emphasis, like the Samurais’ theory, as you might know: more martial arts, real battle and war, and really domination, all over Japan. That’s my understanding.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: The traditional Japanese have been highly creative and sophisticated in the martial-arts field—to the point of surpassing the Westerners from that angle. Yet only the traditional Westerners have come to transpose to the field of science the art of fighting, i.e., to transpose to science the spirit of competition, innovation, and assertiveness associated with physical combat. How do you make sense of it?

  Kenya Kura: It’s a very good point—an interesting point for me, too. My understanding about it is that, for example, French people seem to like judo a lot. I have heard that it’s very popular. So, for example, judo, or we have a similar sort of art that is huge called kendo. But that kind of martial art, as you said, has been very sophisticated in this country, and also in China, to some degree, maybe even more so. But that gives me an idea of science itself because science itself is equally into any kind of sort of natural—not only natural reality, but also the analytical view for every kind of phenomenon. So, for example, we don’t have social science, and we just import it from the West. It’s the same. I mean, natural science was imported from the West. And when it comes to science, it’s also based on logic—a heavy dose of logic and mathematics, usually. None of the Asians were interested in mathematics, at least not as much as Western people had been. So, when it comes, for example, to geometry, even the ancient Greeks were very much interested in it. The Chinese people never developed the equivalent of that kind of logic. And it’s also true that mathematics has been developed almost exclusively in Northern Europe within the last five hundred years. And Chinese people, although they were in higher numbers than White Europeans, they didn’t develop anything. Neither did the Japanese or the Koreans.

  So, the problem is that East Asians tend to neglect the importance of logic. They don’t see that much. They just talk more emotionally, trying to sympathize with each other, and probably about political rubbish, more than Western people, but they don’t discuss things logically, nor try to express their understanding and make experiments to determine if something is true or not. Scientific inquiry is very much unique to Europeans. That’s my understanding. So, although it seems like East Asians are very quick to learn things—the Chinese are probably the quickest to learn anything—but they’ve never created anything. That’s my idea. So, they don’t have the scientific mentality, a sort of inquiry or sufficient curiosity to make science out of sophisticated martial arts.

  It may be true that the “traditional Japanese have been highly creative and sophisticated in the martial-arts field—to the point of surpassing the Westerners from that angle.” But I guess nowadays even judo or any kind of martial arts is more developed or more sophisticated, a lot more sophisticated, in European countries. The Japanese or Chinese created the original martial arts. But their emphasis—especially the Japanese, they put too much emphasis on their psychic rather than physical power. So, when you look at any kind of manga or anime, the theme is always the same: the rather small and weak main character has got some kind of psychic power and a special skill to beat up the bigger and stronger enemy. And it’s pretty much like “the force” in the Star Wars movies. But in the case of Japan, it’s a lot more emphasized. So, they tend to sort of think less about physical power and more about the psychic personality kind of thing. That’s the sort of phenomenon that we have, which shows some lack of analytical ability from my point of view.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: A common belief is that the Japanese people is both indifferent to the culture of Western peoples—and genetically homogenous to the point of containing no genius. Yet contemporary Japan is displaying a variety of geniuses in videogames (like Shigeru Miyamoto), music (like Koji Kondo), etc., and is quite opened to the Western world culturally. Videogames like Zelda and Resident Evil are highly influenced by the West: the Western heroic fantasy in the case of the former; and George Romero’s movies in the case of the latter. Some Japanese actors (or movie directors) enjoy worldwide fame, like Hiroyuki Sanada who is portraying Scorpion in the new Mortal Kombat movie.

  Kenya Kura: About the sort of personality and the intelligence mixture of the geniuses, I guess—Dr. Templeton and Edward Dutton—I’m sure that you talked with him—Edward Dutton wrote a very good book about why genius exists and what kind of mixture of personality and intelligence we need to make a real genius. And I do agree basically with Edward Dutton’s idea that we don’t have the sort of nice mixture of intelligence and, at the same time, a sort of very strong mindset to stand out from other people. The Japanese tend to be among others too much. So, they can’t really speak up and have a different kind of worldview from other people. As I said, Japanese scholars tend to rather avoid discussion or serious conflict of some point of view against other scholars so, that’s why there is no progress or no need to prove what you’re saying is true or not. That is a problem.

  Okay, so, this is just a part of answering your question. And the other thing is—oh, but I’ve been talking about science—in order to be a scientist, you have to basically propose some kind of thesis and at least show some evidence that your thesis is right or proved in pieces. But when it comes to fine arts or Manga, Anime or literature or movies or games, you don’t really have to argue against other people. You just create what you feel is beautiful or great—whatever. So, because Japanese culture basically avoids discussions or arguments against each other, they are more inclined to create something like visual arts. That’s why I believe Japanese manga or anime have been very popular also among Europeans. Probably including yourself, right? I’m sure you’ve played or traded video games from Japan.

  You talked about Hiroyuki Sanada. He’s one of the most famous action movie stars, like Tom Cruise type. So, I understand what you wrote, here. And the other thing is—it’s pretty much the same. In the Edo period, about 300 years ago, there was fine arts called ukiyo-e. These paintings and printings were sold to the public. And the French impressionists in the 19th century were, as far as I know, very attracted to those ukiyo-e and they got some inspirations from them and how to draw the lighting or nature itself. So, I do believe that Japanese people are probably genetically talented to some degree. I would dare to say they’re talented in visual arts. But it does not mean that they are talented in science. These activities are totally different, which gives me a very interesting sort of contrast.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: In intergroup competition, the Empire of Japan was highly successful militarily—until 1945’s nuclear bombing, obviously. How do you account for that performance?

  Kenya Kura: A German soldier was a very effective soldier, even compared with Americans or Swedes. So, I believe it’s very similar in the case of Japan. The Japanese tend to be tightly connected to each other, which gives them a very high advantage in military activity. That’s why they first tried to really dominate the whole of Asia, and, eventually, they had a war against the US in order to sort of get the whole Chinese continent. And, of course, Japan was defeated. But Japan is not so much endowed with natural resources like oil or coal, or whatever. In some sense, we’re very strong in military actions, it’s true. So, it’s very similar to the story that the Chinese are probably more inclined to study and learn original things like Confucius or the old stuff in order to show how intelligent they are, whereas the Japanese tend to be more war prone, more warmongers. They think more seriously and put more emphasis on military actions than the Chinese or Koreans. So, that’s why Japan, in the last century, first invaded Korea, and then, moved into the Chinese continent and defeated Chinese army. That’s just how I understand it. It’s very similar to German history.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Democracy is commonly thought to allow for an “open society” in which every opinion can be discussed—and in which ideological conflict can be settled through exclusively peaceful, electoral means, without the slightest drop of blood. Does the democratic regime in Japan since 1947 corroborate that vision?

  Kenya Kura: You’re right. Exactly. You are French, so you have a serious understanding of how people can revolt against the ruling class because of the French Revolution, which is the most famous revolution in human history. So you have a serious understanding about the existence of conflict and that the product of this conflict may be fruitful, good for all human beings. But, unfortunately, Asia does not have that sort of culture that if you say something true and then, have a serious conflict of opinions about it, it may turn out to have a fruitful result. That’s very Western to me.

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

Kenya Kura: I’ve probably said pretty much everything in a scattered manner, but let me emphasize one thing: usually, for any kind of European person, the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese look very similar or the same, but genetically, we are probably somewhat different, much as, for example, Slavic language people and the Germanic language group. So there might be some kind of microdifference of this kind which may, especially in the future, explain the dynamics of History. That is what I want to know and try to understand.

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

A conversation with Drew Fraser, for American Renaissance

A conversation with Drew Fraser, for American Renaissance

by ·

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.

  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, 1st 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.

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

A conversation with Göran Adamson, for Gatestone Institute

A conversation with Göran Adamson, for Gatestone Institute

by ·

Göran Adamson is an associate professor in sociology with a PhD from the London School of economics. He is engaged in public debate in Sweden focusing on free-speech issues, populism and diversity. He is an outspoken critic of multiculturalism from a left-wing political perspective. March 2021, his new book—Masochist Nationalism – Multicultural Self-hatred and the Infatuation with the Exotic—was published by Routledge.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You have been working on a statistical study of the relationship between ethnic background and crime in Sweden. Is the Islamic faith in migrants a strong predictor of delinquency?

  Göran Adamson: That’s a good question. I just want to give a little background on the report because the report builds on, or is an updated version of, a report by the crime prevention agency from 2005. It had been almost 20 years since the Swedish state had done any research about the relationship between migration and crime. And so, this was a completely private initiative. And I was the head of this study. And I can just tell you that the two most salient features in this study were that we found that among people who were suspects or, with reason, were suspected of a crime, about six out of 10 in Sweden were migrants, which is more than half of every second people, the suspect of crime in Sweden is a migrant. And when it comes to the murder rate people who were, with reason, suspected of murder, it was about 73 or 74 percent. You know what I mean? So, about three out of four people suspected of murder in Sweden in 2017 are migrants. So, these figures are frightfully high. But the funny thing is that the Swedish Social Democrats and people you might call multiculturalists—the politically correct—they have not been interested in investigating this even though these are issues that people have been talking about. Maybe the most important issue and the reason why the Swedish Democrats have become so huge over the last 10 years—they are now almost the biggest party in Sweden—it is like Front National—what is it called? Something else now. But you know, Marine Le Pen’s party. So, but talking about if there is a link between Islam and crime, I think you could say yes because if you check the migrants who are the most likely suspects of crime, the proportion of the—I mean, it is called overrisk. An overrisk is a term—it indicates the risk of any person on the street being the suspect of a crime. And when it comes to people from the Middle East, the overrisk is about three, generally speaking. So, the overrisk means that the person from the Middle East—and many of these people are regrettably Muslims—the risk that this person has committed a crime is about roughly three times higher than for a Swede. So, clearly, you could say that there is a link. So, if you were to say that crime among migrants has to do with culture, I think it is fair to say that association has to be made. But in Sweden—what people are talking about in Sweden is something different, namely socioeconomic factors, if you know what those are.

  Socioeconomic factors mean that the causes behind crime and rape and everything are marginalization, exclusion, unemployment and financial issues that are linked to our country and, notably, something we are to blame for, which is something completely different as if you would talk about culture, which is something that people bring when they come to Sweden. And so, the socioeconomic explanation, so to speak, has been completely dominant among left-wingers and among Social Democrats in Sweden for decades. They have been repeating the idea of socioeconomic factors as the main cause behind crime among migrants. And they have repeated that like parrots—with the persistence of parrots. They have kept repeating: “Culture has nothing to do with it” over and over again. So, that’s what they’ve been saying. And then, other critics and I, we have asked them: “Okay, but if socioeconomic factors are the reason behind crime among migrants then, how do you explain the fact that migrants from, say, Vietnam or Thailand, have a much, much lesser propensity for crime than migrants from other parts of the world, if you know what I mean?”

  If the socioeconomic factors have to do with marginalization then, how come marginalized people who come from other cultures, such as Thailand and, basically, the Far East—Thailand, Vietnam, etc.—how come these people are actually underrepresented in crime? They are less likely to commit a crime than Swedes! So, the socioeconomic factors do not give a proper explanation for that because you can clearly say that there are people who come from much worse circumstances, actually, than some people from the Middle East. And even so, these people who come from much worse circumstances—for instance, the Vietnamese, just to give a case in point—they are much less prone to committing violence than other migrants. So, my point here is that the socioeconomic explanation doesn’t quite hold water, which leads to my suggesting—and other people suggesting—that there has to be another explanation, which is cultural. Which is for instance, how you see women. For instance, how you see the state. For instance, whether you have any respect for the state, or whether you’d rather live in clan based societies. All of these things. And, again, I’m not criticizing individuals, but if you turn a blind eye to cultural differences, you will end up with this very appealing, sweet, self-critical left-wing explanation, saying that everything has to do with socioeconomic factors. And people walk about—politicians, members of the media and academics, they walk about repeating these things—this particular explanation—without realizing that it doesn’t quite explain huge differences in criminal propensity between groups of migrants from various regions of the world. So, I think that’s an important point to make.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: To what extent is Sweden losing its culture—compared with those other Western countries prey to Islamization? How does the Church of Sweden react to the Islamic presence?

  Göran Adamson: I think the interesting thing with Sweden is that we—I say it in my new book: it has to do with a kind of masochistic attitude. And the masochistic attitude is an interesting combination between—it’s the fact that we are somehow enticed and we simply like to paint our own culture, our own religion and our own history, background, identity in rather dark colors, and we are happy to compare our own culture unfavorably to other cultures. And I think this is not only Sweden. This has been going on in Britain and in many other countries, maybe less in France. But you should mention that George Orwell wrote about this—and this is actually the basis of my new book—in an essay called Notes on Nationalism in 1945 where he talks about two concepts—and I’d like you to bring this up in the interview. One concept is the idea of negative nationalism, which is: you’re obsessed with your own culture, not in order to trace it, but in order to criticize it. The second one is transferred nationalism. It’s a kind of exported nationalism, you know what I mean? It’s the same sentimental, idealistic, romantic, self-eulogizing bullshit as a far right winger. But the only difference is geographic. It’s not done on behalf and for the benefit of your own country. It’s done for the benefit of Syria, it’s done for the benefit of Iraq or Somalia, or any other distant culture or country, of which you know next to nothing. And George Orwell says this—and this is something I’d like you to bring up. He says that I know—because he’s written about similar things, about the working class. He says, “I know enough about the working class not to idealize it.” If you know what I mean. So, you can turn this around and say that the thing that enables these kinds of left-wing, loony ideas, images, and fantasies about exotic cultures is the fact that the left knows very little—next to nothing—about these cultures because if they knew enough—like, I have lived, over the last 10, 12 years, in six, seven countries. I’m not an expert, but I know a little bit about these countries, like in Jordan, now. You would not idealize these countries the way the left-wing academics in Sweden are doing it or in Paris, possibly, and in London, because you’d know too much. And there’s another aspect, here. I think it’s very important. It relates to when people come to Sweden, for instance—if migrants come to Sweden. So, what’s happening? They are greeted by those who know very little about their own culture, who care very little about their own culture, and again, who are very happy to make unfavorable comparisons with other cultures. Almost like a pastime. Like saying, “Oh, you know, the way we treat homosexuals in Sweden… oh, you know, the way we treat women in Swede… oh, the way we treat migrants in Sweden, and structural racism” and all that kind of nonsense. This is not true. If you were to wake up one of these left-wing people in the middle of the night, they might admit, “I know this is not true, but it’s great fun.” And everyone else does the same. We have all these dinners and we just sit around and harass our own country, our own dance traditions, and we love it. And so my question is: if people come to Sweden, how are they supposed to respect Swedish culture if we don’t do it ourselves? I think that’s an important question. Because, in basically every other culture, every other country, people have a certain respect—even in dictatorships, they love their country, the tradition, etc. But in Sweden, we are not allowed to do that. And of course, how are other people supposed to find any kind of respect for Sweden if the Swedish Establishment has nothing but contempt for its own tradition and culture? I don’t understand. And there is an illogical and very bizarre thing also going on because if Sweden is such a bad place, then why is everyone coming here? Why is everyone who’s escaping trying to come to France, to Germany and especially to Sweden, if it’s such a bad country? No one is escaping from Sweden to Yemen. People are escaping from Yemen or from Somalia to Sweden. It’s as if we simply cannot accept the fact that we are fortunate and privileged because it goes against our own self-deception. This whole self-critical, self-harassing attitude is a perfect let-out, so to speak, for our country. It’s a perfect excuse and it’s a perfect way to avoid and evade the kind of shame of being privileged. One more thing. It is all made-up, you know. This self-critical attitude among scores of western elites can only occur in wealthy societies. It is an odd fruit among those who are troubled by the fact that they are privileged and fortunate. But why on earth be troubled by it? Why be ashamed by all those before us who made our country so successful? This is just head-spinningly grotesque.

  But to get back to Sweden losing its culture, I remember when I was teaching in Malmö many years ago, and there was a huge poster in one of the corridors, and the question on the big poster was: “What do you know about Ramadan?” And I was wondering, “I don’t know anything about Ramadan, and frankly, I’m not interested.” And then, in order to protest, I wrote in small letters: “What do you know about Yom Kippur?” in the corner of the big poster. And then, I had lunch. This is a good case in point. You should bring this up. And then, when I came back, I had a look at the poster again. But to my great surprise, my question was gone. And it wasn’t gone, nobody had erased it. I was completely sure that within an hour, somebody had seen my question and they had taken down the whole poster, replaced it with a different one, identical, and put it back on. So, that made me think about some of these forces behind the scenes going on in Sweden where I would say that foreign cultures and most prominently Islam are being pushed forward and promoted to the detriment of Swedish culture.

  And, of course, also to the detriment of, for instance, Jewish culture. Because if you tried to put up a poster informing about Jewish traditions like Yom Kippur or any other Jewish tradition, it would be taken down, it would be set on fire. So, you have this escalating self-harassment going on in Sweden and in many other cultures. Humility and self-criticism are fine, and to invite other cultures, that’s a good thing. But it is dangerous if all of these things become one-sided. If this means that other cultures, and Islam, most prominently among them, is allowed to be marketed and fostered, cherished while Swedish traditions are no longer seen as important, Christian traditions are no longer seen as important–because what will happen—then, you will see the slow, gradual shift of focus from Swedish traditions. All of these things people actually escape to. That’s the reason why they come to Sweden, and gradually, these ideas–I’m not saying these things will happen within the next five years, but there will be a slow shift of attention towards values, traditions and customs that might not have proven to be so successful throughout the years. You could take another case in point: the big community center a few blocks from Ground Zero in New York. There was a Muslim community center, but it was on for a few years and then, I don’t know what happened to it. And then, people said, “We don’t know if this is the right spot for a Muslim community center, just around the corner from Ground Zero where almost 4,000 people perished.” But then, again, you could say that this might not be a bad idea for cross-religious tolerance. But then, you need to think of the prospects for any church to be created and inaugurated in a Muslim country, in a Muslim culture. There are slim chances you could have a church, for instance, in many Muslim countries. They are not allowed. So, this is one-sided tolerance where justified self-criticism is replaced by self-annihilation. An idea fostered from above by the political left-wing elites whereby Western cultures, Western traditions, Western ideas are being dismissed for the benefit of some kind of multicultural veneration and idealization of anything exotic. And the more exotic, the better. And it seems as if the most exotic culture and religion has a name these days. And the name is Islam. And you should ask yourself–Douglas Murray, he asked this question: “What’s so great about Islam?” Ask yourself that question. This is an empirical question. And check. Ask yourself why. What is the benefit? Because there has to be some hidden scheme behind all of these tendencies, not only in Sweden, but in many other countries, also France. But I think France is somehow changing now with Macron’s speech and the decapitation of the teacher, etc. I mean, these are horrendous events, and things are likely to change. To sum it up, I think this kind of self-humiliating attitude only exists among a very thin layer of our societies: within the elites. Among the people, if you ask anybody living in a small town in Sweden if they are part of this self-harassing, self-hating agenda, of course not! They like Sweden. They like their country. They like their traditions. They celebrate Christmas and all of these things. So, what we’re witnessing is that there is a tiny elite with a huge impact in the media, in science, in the universities and in politics. And this also connects to another important aspect, namely the tension between the people and the elites. And this is increasing, this is intensifying all the time, and it doesn’t look good. If you would say that society rests on a close sense of solidarity between classes, then, in the West, we have a problem. Brexit is a problem. Trump is a huge problem from this point of view of solidarity between classes. Because there are clear tendencies of a political polarization. And the political polarization, I would say, is mostly polarization between classes.

  The church in Sweden, now that’s a case in point. There’s this fantastic book. And you know what you should try to do? You should try to have this book translated into French and English. It’s called The Art of Surviving the Swedish Church. It was written by a close friend of mine: Helena Edlund. She is a priest in Sweden. You should write about this. You should actually bring this up. Please, mention this in your article. The story is this: when she studied to become a priest, she was warned—people warned her about the so-called “Dark Coats.” Well, people who were labeled the Dark Coats, people who were supposed to be almost like Darth Vader: these were priest students who would be dangerously conservative. They would be terrifyingly religious. They’d be against homosexuals. They would be like monsters. But after a few weeks, she realized that she was one of them. She was a Dark Coat, too. She had these views herself. She had a belief in religion. She thought that reading the Bible was a good thing because when she was studying, the teachers kept saying, ‘Well, you don’t need to study that, it is just the Bible. Forget about the sacraments! Ignore all that! You can study other books instead.” And all of these religious traditions were seen as unimportant by the people in charge of the Swedish church. So, she wrote a book about this called The Art of Surviving the Swedish Church. And she, for being a religious person, she has been harassed, humiliated to an extent you would not believe could happen in the Western community. Her book came out a few years ago. And this book is a shocking example of what happens when the church is being kidnapped by left-wingers. And you should mention this. And so, her book is a very interesting case in point of what Rudi Dutschke, the German left-winger said, he said what the Left needs to do is to “march through the institutions.” You know what that means, to march through the institutions? So, this is what the Left has been doing in Sweden. Institution after institution: universities, the media, the entire educational sector from kindergarten all the way up, and in the Swedish Defense, we are promoting transsexual soldiers, and we have drafting campaigns for our army asking things like: “Suppose I came out as a gay while I’m out fighting for my country? » I mean, are these questions interesting? This is the rhetoric. And also, most importantly, the Left has been marching through the church, the Swedish Church. So, the Swedish Church is now hijacked by left-wingers and the archbishop in Sweden, she is famous for ignoring Swedish religious traditions. She’s much more keen on other more exotic religious traditions. And you might understand there is a particular religion she’s very, very keen on. This is Islam, because it’s connected to the whole idea of multiculturalism and the multicultural idealization of everything exotic. So, even if you go to the Swedish Church where you think you might find some—what do you call it?—refuge from the mayhem of political correctness, you end up from the ashes into the fire. And now, there is an increasing number—it’s been going on for many years—of people who are leaving the Swedish Church. They leave the Swedish church not because they are not religious, but because they are religious. They leave the Swedish Church because they have faith in God and they think that Christian traditions are important. And if you think that Christian traditions are important, you tend to stop paying your membership. You tend to send in an application saying, “I want to stop paying, I want to leave the Swedish Church and buy a few books per year instead.” So, when it comes to religious convictions, the Swedish Church is not what it looks like. I love churches, but I also left the Swedish Church a few months ago for precisely this reason. But you should actually mention the book. It’s called The Art of Surviving the Swedish Church. It’s a fantastic book. And if this book were available in English, it would have an impact. It’s a shocking witness to the state of Sweden.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: A common left-wing criticism against multiculturalism says that the capitalist class uses immigration to place at its disposal a large, cheap workforce—and the occasioned ethnic struggle to divert the indigenous workers from the class struggle. Do you share such line of criticism?

  Göran Adamson: Well, to some extent, I do. And I’ve written about it, myself, in my previous book—The Trojan Horse – A Leftist Criticism of Multiculturalism in the West. I have a discussion about it, saying that this is a classic left-wing criticism, that instead of uniting—instead of being able to unite against the globalizing elites—the elites are manufacturing these silly, whimsy wars between the lower classes, between workers, Swedish workers versus Muslims, and Swedish workers versus migrants, whatever. To some extent this is true. And clearly, you could say that this whole focus on LGBTQ, sexual identities etc. sounds very much to me like not only sidetracking, but also an attempt to confuse, engage people into playing games or engage in futile, silly unimportant battles while there are much more important battles to be fought. For instance, or actually most prominently, the battle against globalization, neoliberalism and the dismantling of national borders, I think that is clearly the most important battle to fight. And so, I think there is a class issue here, which is important. Then again, of course, you need to realize that even if you were to somehow foster the lower classes’ unity against the exploitation by the European Union, the neoliberal elites and all those international organizations, etc., you would clearly bang your head against the wall of cultural differences because, simply, even though both are poor and in need of assistance to be aided into a better life, the Swedish worker and an unemployed person from the Turkish countryside might have—save for the fact that they are both low-income—very, very little in common. It is sometimes easy—if you’re faced with the whole amount of cultural agenda, you are really tempted to just shout that this is all bogus and this is actually a class issue. But then again, this is also often taken too far. Because if you do that, if you’re a Marxist and you only talk about class identities and the need to fight against the globalizing elites, then, you simply forget the fact that there are cultural differences between people. And if you would like to unite the Swedish worker with an elderly illiterate woman from the Turkish countryside, or a man from Somalia, go ahead.

  Then, you should also mention a little bit my attitude towards the idea of islamophobia. I think the entire idea of islamophobia is ridiculous. I think that if you use the words islamophobia and islamophobic, you are playing a sordid partisan game because nobody would be called liberalophobic if they criticized liberalism. So, there is only one religion, there’s only one structure out there where you can use this: it’s Islam. If you’re critical towards Islam, you’re seen as phobic in some way, which is a very strange idea, hugely strange idea that shouldn’t be used. And you could actually say that to people who are likely to suffer the most from this kind of on-the-surface tolerant idea are not people in the West because we try to go by as good as we can and have learned to handle criticism. But it is the people in the Muslim community because they are somehow seen as so childish, so fragile and so helpless that they cannot stand any solid, open, rational, reason-based discussion about certain shortcomings within Islam. So, under the surface, it’s an absolutely amazingly arrogant attitude towards an entire religion. The idea of islamophobia rests under the surface on arrogance against Muslims. And also, the funny thing is that people who use islamophobia, they, of course, can capitalize on this. They can use it. They use it, and then, they engage in one project or another where they are often fabricating problems, exclusions, marginalization, and suddenly our academics, social workers and politicians are sitting with a handful of nicely marginalized groups of migrants—helpless and uneducated to be used and exploited as tools for our own careers, and our quest for moral haughtiness, under the pretense of tolerance and anti-racism. It is all a rather fearful sight. This is how I see it.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Over the course of human history, only the Western man has come to morally condemn xenophobia and scientific, political racism—for the benefit of the “open society.” All other peoples on the face of the earth are keeping on praising racial pride and distance with respect to the foreigner. What’s more, Chinese or Japanese scientists are notoriously more open to discussions on racial inequalities in intelligence, etc., than are Western scientists. As a sociologist, how do you make sense of that cultural originality of contemporary Westerners?

  Göran Adamson: That’s a very good question. I don’t know. I have a friend. He wrote a book years ago. It’s called Multiculturalism: Some Inconvenient Truth. Rumy Hasan is his name. Razor-sharp, fantastic. And he’s so good, he will probably never be professor. Anyway, he has a concept called the “Western post-colonial sense of guilt.” We had colonialism, and colonialism provides us forever with a wonderful excuse to go about attacking ourselves. I mean, Hitler and all the rest. We can attack ourselves as much as we please because it gives us this thrilling idea of self-hatred, which is so dominant among the educated classes, among the intellectual middle-class in Sweden, today. You wouldn’t believe it. And also, in many other countries. And I don’t know, because if we talk about—I mean in Sweden, there are courses in post-colonial studies. I mean, studies in what? Sweden was never a colonial power in the first place. It’s like you can have a course about Swedes murdering people from other cultures. And then, you say, “Well, we never murdered people from other cultures. We never took slaves.” And then, they would say, “Well, maybe, but stop talking about that. It’s such a nice thing to have a course harassing your own country.” But you’re asking about what the root of it is. If you think about it today, I think you can say the root somehow lies in the particular, peculiar Western interest in lack of reflection. And it’s like an ever-present desire among intellectuals to idealize people below, as it were, oneself, be it workers or migrants, or even kids. And maybe, I can finish off by—I had a glimpse of insight this morning because my youngest daughter, she’s nine years old. She’s not a toddler, she’s nine years old. And she tends to leave a mess all over the place. For instance, she was sitting, shelling an egg. And then, I saw the eggshells lying there. And then, I thought, “That’s quite wonderful” because it was real, it wasn’t intellectual, just a pile of eggshells. And I picked them up and felt some very primitive pleasure in doing it. And then, I thought, “Well, this is the problem because as an intellectual, I long for precisely this: some kind of authenticity.” And authenticity precludes intellectual reflection, if you know what I mean. And this authenticity, you may find it on a table among the eggshells of your little child, or you can find it among workers who don’t reflect all the time. Or you can find it among migrants. It’s the kind of desire, aspiration, longing for what you are not. It’s a longing for a lack of thought. It’s a longing, it’s an anti-intellectual endeavor. And this endeavor is not only strong among people who have read Friedrich Nietzsche, it’s strong among everybody. If you’re an intellectual in Europe, you like this, you like the lack of—you basically tend to appreciate what you are not. I think this is part of it. And then, you see people walking about, acting like migrants. They are not feminists. And then, Swedish women, they tend to love it because they see authentic men. They see authentic guys. And these authentic guys, they might be dangerous. They might be angry. They might possibly be rapists. I have no idea. But these Swedish women, they think, “We don’t give a damn because we think there is something genuine about these guys.” They are Swedish feminists. Can I give you a fine example of this? You should bring this up, put this in. A friend of mine was working for Sida, which is the Swedish Ministry of Global Aid. These two ladies who’d just come back from Afghanistan, gave a presentation. And then, Jens, my friend, he noticed that they were smiling all the time and almost bursting out laughing. Eventually, one of them apologized. And they showed pictures of some Talibans and said: “You know, these Talibans, with their beards and their Kalashnikovs, they are so manly!” Did you hear that? And then, my friend said, “Well, they might be manly on a primitive level, but if they ever got their hands on you, they might rape you. Or kill you. Those are not nice guys like your Swedish husband.” But when they go home from work, they might just start harassing their nice, feminine husband who might actually be a better guy—better man—than the Talibans in Afghanistan. But here you go: you have this kind of intellectual middle-class women in Sweden idealizing everything exotic to the extent they would even idealize the man who might kill them or rape them, and who certainly would not accept this woman walking about not covered. But this also brings us back to what I was talking about at the beginning of our discussion, namely that you have these politically correct left-wing intellectuals who idealize exotic cultures. And the reason why they can idealize exotic cultures is that they know next to nothing about them. This is why they can go on doing this.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: In your article “Was Nazism anti-sex? – On left-wing fantasies and sex as the dark matter of politics,” you challenged the view that Nazism was wholly conservative on sexual freedom. Do you want to add something about left-wingers’ confusion on the matter?

  Göran Adamson: The Left seem to think that because they have reached the conclusion that National Socialism is the worst thing on Earth, all of its traits must also be equally repulsive, including the Nazis’ approach to sex. So, since Nazism is such a terrible idea, they must also be strongly opposed to sexual promiscuity. They must also be anti-sex. But judging from my own research, it seems that the Nazis, in terms of sex, at least in terms of sex among ordinary Germans, were basically looking at it as business as usual. There was nothing special about it. But what the Left has been doing ever since the end of World War II has been to buy into this idea of National Socialism as anti-sex. And if National Socialism is anti-sex, then sexual promiscuity and basically fucking around with everybody is an emancipatory anti-Nazi endeavor. So, if you check out the left-wingers, the 1968ers and people like John Lennon and Yoko Ono, they were basically thinking that their sexual promiscuity, collectivist living and all of that anti-authoritarian attitude generally was an anti-Nazi attitude. And I think you could basically say that the 1968ers and the left-wingers at the time and their huge focus on sexual promiscuity and sleeping around with everybody, to a great extent had its origin in a misconceived approach, misconceived understanding of sex during the epoch of the Nazi regime, namely believing that the Nazis were sex hostile. And if you were a good left-winger, you would be pro-sex. You would be promiscuous like mad, and you would just make kids left, right and center. And there is this famous dictum. It says: “Make love, not war,” as if the act of sex itself would be an act of peace, as if the act of sex would be an antiracist, anti-nazi antiwar, peaceful activity. I think this entire idea rests on a misunderstanding. If you study the sources—if you study the material, the empirical evidence, there is very little evidence proving that the Nazis were antisex. You can just check it out. There were condoms lying all over when they had their party rallies. There’s nothing antisex about that. So, again, the Left invents enemies, and then, they run like sheep in the other direction. And then, you have the entire anti-authoritarian movement, and all of these huge implications for the educational sector in the West. There are huge, extremely tragic implications for the education sector in the West. And this rests to a very great extent on the misconceived ideas of sexuality under National Socialism. That’s it.

See: Göran Adamson, Masochistic Nationalism – Multicultural Self-Hatred and the Infatuation with the Exotic (Routledge, March 2021)

That conversation was initially published in an abridged version by Gatestone Institute, in June 2021

A conversation with Bo Winegard, for The Postil Magazine

A conversation with Bo Winegard, for The Postil Magazine

by ·

Bo Winegard is a former assistant professor and independent scholar and writer who is currently working on a book on human nature and conservatism.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: The “coalitional value theory,” which you have contributed to devise, asserts that humans evolved unique mental mechanisms for assessing each other’s marginal value to a coalition. Could you tell us more about those mechanisms—and how they intervene in artistic, scientific production?

  Bo Winegard: The basic idea is that we evolved some kind of mental system—I’m not sure exactly how this is instantiated in the brain/mind—to assess each other’s value to coalitions. For example, suppose that we form a soccer team. Pretty quickly we would understand who is better (more valuable) at soccer, and who is worse (less valuable). Ceteris Paribus, we defer to those who have more coalitional value (e.g., if Messi were on your team, then you would defer to him); and we often assert ourselves over those who have less value.

  My colleagues and I hypothesized that these mechanisms might partially explain the creation and display of certain cultural artifacts such as paintings, poems, history books, scientific articles. The idea is that cultural displays signal underlying traits (e.g., intelligence, ambition, education) that generally contribute to a coalition, that make it (the coalition) more formidable and successful. In politics, for example, being able to persuade other people is valuable; it helps a coalition to achieve its goals. Therefore, politicians might signal their value by delivering eloquent speeches. And those in the coalition might respond to such speeches with awe and admiration.

  The grand idea, which is not entirely novel, I should say, is that human coalitions are cooperative status-exchange systems. Leaders and other revered coalitional members have high coalitional value; they make the coalition better. And in exchange for their service, members defer to them, giving them priority access to coveted resources such as food, material wealth, and mates. In this way, the coalition benefits (by having the person high in coalition value) and the high-status person also benefits (by getting priority access to evolutionary relevant resources).

  Grégoire Canlorbe: A whole field of investigation lies in sex differences as concerns cognition and the relationship to knowledge. What did your long-standing collaboration with Cory Clark allow you to learn in that area?

  Bo Winegard: Ha! I’m not sure I understand the question. I think you are asking what did I learn about sex differences by collaborating for so long with Cory Clark? If so, I will just say a few things. First, Cory is atypical for females, so I would not generalize from my experience with her. And second, I do think that men on average are more tolerant of direct confrontation. My brother and I often get into vehement debates while working on projects, for example. I spare Cory from that because that’s not how our relationship works.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: It is sometimes doubted that intellectual manhood (i.e., the ability to think for oneself and to be intellectually innovative and dissident) is substantially correlated with IQ. What is your take on that issue?

  Bo Winegard: I’m not aware of research on this topic. (And it would be arduous to operationalize “think for oneself.” Even creativity is incredibly difficult to operationalize, and I’m not sure I trust much of the research on it.) I do think originality and innovation require a certain minimum level of cognitive ability. However, once one is above that level, I doubt there’s much correlation. I know many brilliant people who are intellectual cowards. In fact, I would contend that American universities are filled with craven professors who are afraid even to voice their true beliefs on a wide variety of taboo topics. I suspect that intellectual cowardice and cognitive ability are completely orthogonal.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: It can be easily noticed that the greatest military strategists in human history have been, if not bisexual (like Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar), at least misogynist (like Napoléon Bonaparte). Is there a coalitional value theory of that phenomenon?

  Bo Winegard: I’m not sure that I completely understand the question. But I think that some misogyny is likely a result of coalitional value mechanisms. For men’s coalitions, women, on average, simply aren’t as valuable as other men. Consider, for example, a sports’ team. Clearly men are better, on average, than women at sports. Thus men often deride other men who are bad at sports as being effeminate (e.g., “throwing like a girl,” “crying like my sister,” et cetera).

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You challenged the idea of a “panhuman nature.” Could you remind us of your argument? Do you also contest, more specifically, the idea of a certain psychological, physical structure invariant across those human populations that are racially European?

  Bo Winegard: The idea behind a panhuman nature is this: Most human-specific traits evolved before the end of the Pleistocene; and, more specifically, most probably evolved before humans expanded across the globe to face novel selection pressures. Therefore, most human psychological traits are shared across populations. There is thus a panhuman nature. I think the concept is useful in some ways but mistaken in others. Think about a different example that is more clear: Dogs. It is the case that one can generalize about a canine nature. Dogs of different breeds share many tendencies. On the other hand, it is wrong or misleading in my view to say there is a pancanine nature in a strong way because dog breeds also vary in behavior proclivities in important and fascinating ways. A Yorkshire Terrier is quite different behaviorally from a Whippet, for example. If you purchased one expecting the behavior of the other, then you might be surprised!

Human groups are not so different from each other as dogs are, obviously. But they are different. And for similar reasons: selection. Of course, dogs were artificially selected and humans were more or less naturally (sexually and socially) selected. And the intensity of selection dogs faced was probably much higher. But humans lived in different environmental conditions from each other for many thousands of years. They faced different selection pressures (probably primarily related to climate). This is phenotypically obvious. People whose immediate ancestors evolved in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, look different from those whose immediate ancestors evolved in Northern Europe. The most obvious difference is skin color, which is related to the intensity of ultraviolet radiation in such a way that darker skin is associated with more intense radiation. In my view, psychological traits are no different from other physical and anthropometric traits.

Thus groups have slightly different psychological traits from each other. Unfortunately, in the United States at least, this is a very controversial topic—probably more taboo than any other in the social sciences. If groups are different from each other, then some groups might score higher on average on certain socially desired traits such as intelligence and compliance and self-control. And this offends the sensitivities of many progressives, who appear to believe in what I have called “cosmic egalitarianism,” or the notion that all human groups are equal on all socially desired traits. I think this belief, this cosmic egalitarianism, is no more plausible than Greek mythology or leprechauns at the end of a rainbow. It’s almost impossible to imagine, that is, that human populations are the same on all psychological traits. Now, they aren’t terribly different. So we can make generalization about human nature that apply, I think, to all human populations. But we have to consider group differences if we want to understand basic social phenomena such as income and crime disparities between populations, et cetera. Again, it is hard if not impossible to talk about these things honestly in the United States because of the dominance of progressives in the media and academia. But I don’t think it helps anybody to concoct a fantastical fiction about group sameness and to use it to then promulgate the myth that systemic racism is the cause of all group disparities.

  As for the second part of your question—again, that depends upon what one means by “invariant psychological structure.” Do I think that European populations differ slightly in traits and propensities? Yes. I think that is quite likely. Do I think that they have fundamentally different psychological structures? No. In a paper, my colleagues and I once compared this to guitars, and I think that’s a good comparison. So guitars are pretty similar to each other. They share a certain structure, if you will. But, there are also subtle differences among them that lead to different tones and tendencies. A Fender sounds slightly different from a Gibson. And an acoustic guitar sounds different from an electric guitar. I think the same holds for human populations, even within Europe.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You covered some of the bias present in politically liberal scientists. What are those? Do you also identify some political bias in hereditarian research about intelligence?

  Bo Winegard: Cosmic egalitarianism. And what we have called “equalitarianism.” Equalitarianism is really a set of biases about group differences. Primarily, liberal scientists repelled by the idea that groups might differ in socially desirable traits in ways that appear to favor white people. At this point, I have no confidence in social science in the United States because of how pervasive this bias is. It’s simply impossible to write about or study topics that are related to race honestly. This is especially true of hereditarianism, because the IQ gap “favors” whites in that whites have a roughly 15-point advantage on average in IQ inside the United States. (The gap appears to be globally consistent, although the exact number depends upon the country, and our data are much more copious inside the United States.) At his point, hereditarianism, or the view that a not insubstantial proportion of the gap is caused by differences in genes, has been removed from mainstream discourse and the academy like a heresy. The orthodoxy simply will not tolerate it, will not debate it, and will not even interact with those who promote it. It has been defeated not by evidence, but by moral bullying—and it is a victim not of falsification but of suppression.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You established yourself as a defender both of “scientism” and of “conservatism.” Yet a common criticism against the view that science (i.e., imaginative hypothesizing corroborated through quantitative, not-trivial empirical predictions) should be solicited to solve all the problems of society is that the limitations of the human mind render science unable to do as well as our cultural traditions, which have been molded—and successfully tested—over several generations of intergroup competition. How do you conciliate science and tradition?

  Bo Winegard: Great question! It’s certainly true that many conservatisms have railed against so-called scientism. But I think that is a mistake. Of course, what follows depends upon one’s definition of scientism. There is certainly a pseudoscientific pretense of knowledge that one should condemn. And there is also a “we trust science” attitude promoted often by progressives in the United States which is mendacious because, of course, they do not trust science that contradicts their sacred values. What I believe is that scientific thinking—skepticism, experimentation, reliance on evidence, et cetera—is the greatest force for generating accurate knowledge in the history of the world. And since I think conservatism is an accurate political philosophy, I think that the insights of science will generally align with the insights of conservative thought. Of course, science will contradict certain particular hypotheses. Maybe, say, the claim that homosexuality is a “chose,” which used to be popular among American conservatives, at least. That is no longer tenable. But the basic idea behind conservatism, namely that tradition is a good guide to a well-ordered, hierarchal, and cohesive society, is something that will be support by science. In fact, I’m writing a book on this right now!

  Some critics of scientism have argued that it is wrong because science can’t determine values. This is correct, I think, in an academic sense. We could find out, for example, that social policy X would increase human flourishing significantly, and some nihilist could say, “I don’t care. I don’t like human flourishing.” Sure. And science will never show that we should care about human flourishing. But most humans share the intuition that human flourishing is important and should be promoted. Once we have that shared intuition, then we can use science to assess policies. Of course, we should always be humble and recognize that we are incredibly ignorant about many things. That is an important conservative argument.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Some attempts have been made to solve moral issues on the basis of biology and evolutionary psychology. Thus abortion and contraception are deemed permissible on the grounds that population control—a mere cultural acquisition among humans, but an instinctual predisposition among a large variety of other vertebrate species—comes to implement the “natural law” that is allegedly the demographic adaptation of any population to its environment.

  As for homosexuality it is claimed that its recurrence as a genetic trait proves that homosexuals, despite being disadvantaged as concerns their reproductive success, are provided with a number of competitive advantages by reason of which homosexuality should be socially welcomed rather than sanctioned. Likewise premarital sex is justified as fulfilling an alleged hidden function of the sexual intercourse among humans, namely the function of ensuring—especially throughout pregnancy—the emotional attachment of the male to his female partner and their future progeny. Do you subscribe to such inferences?

  Bo Winegard: On these issues, I do not think evolution (or biology) is informative about what our moral values should be. In general, I think we should promote human flourishing (broadly defined). I don’t think that finding an evolutionary reason for something justifies or condemns it. I’ll give you two examples. It is possible that rape is an adaptive strategy. Not all rape. But the general behavioral predisposition. I certainly don’t think that makes rape morally acceptable. On the other hand, love is an adaptation, and I think love is often (though not always) morally laudable. What is important is the trait or behavior’s relation to social cohesion and human flourishing, not its evolutionary or genetic logic.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You proposed an evolutionary approach to “tribalism in human nature.” How do you sum up your insights as it stands? How do you account for the ability of human individuals (to a varying degree) to identify to groups extending beyond the level of ethnical biological bonds—from multiracial nations and multiethnic religions to humanity taken as a whole?

  Bo Winegard: To be clear, there was nothing particularly unique in that approach! But the basic idea is this: Humans evolved in the context of competing coalitions and therefore evolved traits and proclivities that facilitate tribalism. They create tribes, favor members of their own tribe, and see other tribes as potential competitors. The first and most primitive tribe is the family, for straightforward reasons of kin selection. But humans collaborate with non-kin as well.

  My best guess is that ethnic affinity is a byproduct of a kin-recognition system. Humans recognize kin via certain cues. One such cue might be maternal perinatal association. Another is probably phenotypic similarity to the self or to other close kin. Experiments have found, for example, that people trust putative others in photographs that have been manipulated to look like the self more than others in non-manipulated photographs. Individuals in the same ethnic group on average look more similar to each other than individuals from different ethnic groups. Others have argued that ethnic affinity is a byproduct of tribal recognition system. I suppose it doesn’t really matter for the purposes of this question. What does matter is that humans do evince ethnic affinity. But they can of course transcend such affinities, creating large tribes called “nations” that are multi-ethnic.

  They do this mostly by inculcating norms of inclusion and tolerance and creating shared symbols (flag, national anthem). But it is worth noting that even within nations, ethnic groups often compete with each other. Ethnic diversity, in other words, often creates tension; and it appears to decrease social trust. This does not mean it is necessarily bad (or good). It’s simply a statement of empirical fact. So, it is true that humans can create large tribes that include many strangers and members of diverse ethnic groups, but those tribes are often inflicted by at least low-level tribal competition and tension.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Thank you for your time. Would you like to add a thing or two?

  Bo Winegard: The thing that I think most important is to promote free, judicious debate about all scientifically interesting topics, at least in academia. And we are losing that audacious spirit of the pursuit of truth, replacing it with a timid spirit of obsequiousness. But the truth should not be feared. And our pursuit of it should be non-negotiable in the sciences. I’m not suggesting that we should say every thought or idea that pops in our head because we think it is true. But I am saying that we should explore every reasonable theory about the empirical world. And today that is simple not happening.

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

A conversation with Zuhdi Jasser, for Gatestone Institute

A conversation with Zuhdi Jasser, for Gatestone Institute

by ·

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

A conversation with Aurelio José Figueredo, for The Postil Magazine

A conversation with Aurelio José Figueredo, for The Postil Magazine

by ·

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 2021

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

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

by ·

  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