Grégoire Canlorbe

Grégoire Canlorbe

A conversation with Zuhdi Jasser, for Gatestone Institute

A conversation with Zuhdi Jasser, for Gatestone Institute

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A conversation with Pierre Bergé, for The Postil Magazine

A conversation with Pierre Bergé, for The Postil Magazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A conversation with Nathan Cofnas, for Genetic Literacy Project

A conversation with Nathan Cofnas, for Genetic Literacy Project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read more…] about A conversation with Nathan Cofnas, for Genetic Literacy Project

A conversation with Jon Entine, for European Scientist

A conversation with Jon Entine, for European Scientist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A short conversation with Daniel Pipes, for Gatestone Institute

A short conversation with Daniel Pipes, for Gatestone Institute

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220px-Daniel_pipes_bw  Daniel Pipes is an American historian and president of the Middle East Forum. His writing focuses on Islamism, the Middle East, and U.S. foreign policy. His archive is at www.DanielPipes.org 

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Do you expect the George Floyd protests to leave, in the American collective memory, a mark comparable to the September 11 attacks and the Vietnam War?

  Daniel Pipes: The great question is: Will the current lurch to the left be temporary or permanent? I worry it is permanent because liberals are capitulating to progressives as never before. Will that trend continue or end? It is hard to forecast when very much in the moment.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Donald Trump’s foreign policy is often praised as dismissing nation-building in favor of short-term intervention, economic asphyxiation, and striking a deal with US enemies. How do you assess Trump’s approach? Do you subscribe to John Bolton’s criticism?

  Daniel Pipes: Trump came to office with minimal knowledge of the outside world, just impressions and emotions. He also lacked a philosophy or a network. The result has been haphazard. Bolton saw this from close-up and was understandably appalled. Fortunately, some of Trump’s instincts are solid, for example, as concerns China, Iran, Israel, and Venezuela, and he does not get intimidated by the Establishment consensus. So far, anyway, no catastrophe.

[Read more…] about A short conversation with Daniel Pipes, for Gatestone Institute