This essay serves as the Introduction to a book which has just appeared, entitled Reinventing Aristocracy in the Age of Woke Capital (London: Arktos, 2022); it is available at Arktos and Amazon.

The proudest boast of the transnational corporate welfare state is that it has rendered obsolete the political hegemony of traditional ruling classes. Achievement, not ascribed or hereditary status, is said to be the key to material success and political influence. The open society promoted by transnational corporate capitalism has become the template of social progress. Accordingly, in the USA, only a few decades ago, a complacent WASP establishment was sidelined by a new class of brash outsiders. At the highest levels of American society, WASPs simply ceased to dominate.[i] In the media and entertainment industries, in banking, the law and academia, they were replaced, most visibly and dramatically, by Jewish parvenus.

Harvard University, America’s oldest university and long-time gateway to the ruling class, is emblematic of that transformation. Founded as ‘a schoale or colledge’ in 1636 by the first wave of Puritan settlers in New England, Harvard received its corporate charter from the Massachusetts General Court in 1650. By the nineteenth century, the college had become the intellectual bastion of an increasingly secularized, or, perhaps more precisely, deracinated, WASP Ascendancy.[ii] To all appearances, it remained a predominantly WASP institution until the mid-twentieth century.

Since then, however, Harvard has been almost completely detached from its ancestral ethno-religious identity. The once Anglocentric college was rebranded by cosmopolitan managers and well-connected overseers as a globalist multiversity. As a consequence, American ‘whites’ (a statistical category which includes Jews and non-WASP, European-descended, ethnicities) presently account for only about 42% of the entering class each year. In a striking sign of the times, there are now more Jews than WASPs among Harvard undergraduates.[iii]

In the received narrative of capitalist modernization, the rags-to-riches story of American Jewry is not about ethnic rivalry. Rather, the astonishing upward social mobility enjoyed, inter alia, by American Jews is typically attributed to the economic dynamism, technological prowess, and managerial and professional opportunities created by the modern American business corporation. In industry, education, the law and government, the rise of the managerial class was grounded in the progressive principle of careers open to the talents.

Orthodox Marxist historians emphasized the revolutionary role played by the bourgeoisie in undercutting the authority of established aristocracies.[iv] But the social character of the bourgeoisie was very different from the professional and managerial class spawned by the expansion of corporate capitalism. The eighteenth and nineteenth century bourgeoisie was, formally or informally, an estate of the realm. Unlike the relentlessly materialistic, performance-driven, goal-oriented managerial class, the bourgeoisie remained grounded in the status hierarchy of traditionally, and still predominantly Christian societies. In late nineteenth century, England, its Empire, and Europe, generally, authority could be justified credibly, if not exclusively, by reference to its origins. The genetic legitimacy of traditional ruling classes was based upon custom and social convention or in a presumptive divine right. Apart from any other justification, the right of conquest could be invoked. Like slaves captured in war, conquered peoples were fortunate to be allowed to live under the thumb of a victorious ruler.

The old, landed nobilities of Europe did not simply fade into the background amidst the satanic mills of bourgeois capitalist society. They continued to play a prominent role in social and political life until the Great War of the early twentieth century. In fact, ‘it was the rising national bourgeoisies that were obliged to adapt themselves to the nobilities.’ Even the most successful bourgeois merchants, bankers, and industrialists aspired to positions on ‘the high social, cultural, and political terrain’ occupied and controlled by the nobility.[v]

Even so, Anglo-American society provided fertile soil for the growth of a free market society. The English jurisprudence of liberty had deep roots. Britons had long vowed that they never, never, would be slaves. The ancient British constitution married the authority of both the king and patrician parliamentarians to primordial notions of popular consent. The Protestant Reformation rocked the foundations of ecclesiastical authority by licensing the freedom of every individual conscience. Then, in the mid-seventeenth century, the simmering resentment of English commoners towards their aristocratic and ecclesiastical rulers boiled over as Puritan revolutionaries executed the king in the name of parliament and the people. The Puritan struggle for religious liberty not only produced a civil war which upset the traditional balance of the ancient constitution; it also gave great impetus to the rise of capitalism in both England and colonial America.[vi]

By the 19th century, Anglo-American political authority was no longer justified primarily by reference to its origins. Leading legal thinkers came to scorn the Lockean obsession with social contract no less than the common lawyer’s veneration of musty precedents. A new ruling class appeared, basing its title to political power on its ability to achieve results. From then on, the source of constitutional legitimacy ceased to be genetic; it became goal-oriented or telic instead. Utilitarianism became the political leitmotif of an erstwhile bourgeois, now professionally managed corporate capitalist regime promising to promote the greatest good for the greatest number.

Corporations in the Early American Republic

Just as the rise of the bourgeoisie did not entirely eliminate aristocratic élites, the mental shift toward a goal-oriented view of politics overshadowed but did not entirely eviscerate traditional forms of genetic legitimacy. Indeed, in England, the aristocracy and landed gentry actually performed the economic role of the bourgeoisie as they pioneered new forms of agrarian capitalism. By the early nineteenth century, the result was ‘an open aristocracy based on property and patronage.’[vii] While the aristocracy and gentry classes were open to new forms of enterprise and political organization, the English bourgeoisie tempered its progressive ethos with a respect for traditional social, political, and legal institutions. The culmination of every truly successful business career was the acquisition of a substantial landed estate and, ideally, a hereditary title of nobility, both of which were then passed on to heirs expected to carry on the erstwhile bourgeois, family’s newly-invented traditions.

In both England and the American republic of the early national period, a patrician ruling class emerged which owed its wealth and social standing to the productive use of property. English common law had developed uniquely extensive and concentrated forms of individual proprietorship over land, which facilitated private, purely economic, ‘capitalist’ modes of appropriation. Elsewhere, in France for example, the state was much more important as a means of appropriating surplus labour from direct producers, as were other forms of politically constituted property, such as corporate privileges. Agrarian capitalism on the Anglo-American model helped to consolidate the distinctively bourgeois hegemony of civil society over the state. It came as no surprise, therefore, when foreign observers characterized the early American republic—sometimes even England—as ‘stateless societies.’[viii]

As a matter of constitutional form, early nineteenth century England was a monarchy. In reality, however, like the newly independent USA, it was a patrician republic in which a rising bourgeoisie made up of merchants, professionals and manufacturers constituted a natural aristocracy. By comparison with the continental regimes familiar to Alexis de Tocqueville, the patrician élites in Anglo-American societies favoured a minimalist state, confident that they could deliver the greatest good for the greatest number through the productive use of their private property. This view presumed that the people-at-large would continue to defer to their betters among a natural aristocracy, respecting the constitutional liberty of the latter to do as they chose with their property.

Tocqueville was among the first to warn that radical democratic disdain for aristocratic privilege was bound to give greater weight to popular demands for equality than to inherited traditions of constitutional liberty, much less the political prerogatives of property ownership.[ix] It was not long before the rising tide of democratic politics in America displaced the patrician Standing Order that had ruled colonial New England. In Britain and the American South, where the aristocratic ethos of the gentry was more solidly rooted than in New England, the process took longer, but there, too, the writing was on the wall.

The democratic radicalism spawned by the American Revolution trans- formed American society and politics, extending the principle of equality into every aspect of public, and eventually even into private life. Every branch of government now owed its existence to ‘the people.’[x] As they began to lose control over the newly constituted state and federal governments, patrician élites, especially in New England, began to experiment with new forms of politically constituted property intended to restore their traditional hegemony. They sought and obtained a massive expansion in the number of special corporate charters granted by state legislatures, not just to business enterprises, but to schools, colleges, hospitals, and churches.

For a time, the creative deployment of chartered corporations helped to shore up the sagging social prestige of the old patriciate. But that defensive strategy could be sustained only so long as corporations retained their traditional legal identity as ‘civil bodies politic.’ This concept seems altogether alien to the modern mind, accustomed as it is to think of the corporation as little more than a legal and organizational form designed to facilitate the pursuit of private profit. We take for granted the separation of ownership and control. But, for a patrician élite, the classical republican concept of property was understood as the material foundation of civic virtue. It applied not just to landed property but was embodied as well in the personal rights and responsibilities of the corporate shareholder.

At common law, property, especially landed property, had been conceived as ‘that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual.’[xi] Possession of a landed estate ensured not only the economic autonomy of the household but its political independence as well. With the property owner as its head, every household became a little school of self-government. Property was thus directly linked to the responsibilities of rulership. Something like the same result was achieved by the special charter regime that effectively constituted the corporation as a ‘little republic.’

Corporate charters were granted by state legislatures, on a case-by-case basis, to achieve both public and private purposes. The constitutional principle of ultra vires operated to prevent any corporate enterprise from acting to achieve objects not authorized by its charter. Moreover, shareholders were responsible for the uses to which their common property was put. Consequently, limited liability was not an automatic and universal corporate privilege. Shares in a joint-stock enterprise therefore carried an associational element along with a proprietary interest. Shareowners were members of the corporate body politic; in effect, they were citizens of their own little republic. If the corporate charter did not specify the voting rights attached to share ownership, judges sometimes held that, prima facie, the rule should be: ‘one voice, one vote’ (i.e., not ‘one share, one vote’). Such civic concern for the integrity of the corporate body politic also led many to take a dim view of proxy voting. The practice was widely condemned as an abdication of shareholders’ political responsibilities.

It was not long, however, before the corporation as a civil body politic came under sustained attack as a bastion of ‘aristocratic privilege.’ A radical anti-charter movement arose, most notably in New York and Pennsylvania, to demand general incorporation laws and the extension of limited liability to all shareholders. The ‘democratization’ of the corporation did widen investment opportunities for small shareholders, encouraging widespread use of the corporate device as a means of securing firm central direction over the enterprising use of assets.

But precisely because small investors were least likely to value the associational element of share ownership, corporations ceased to be conceived as bodies politic. Soon the law began to treat corporations as private, economic instruments of capital accumulation. Republican resistance to the ‘one share, one vote’ rule became pointless. For the same reason, from being a sign of civic corruption within the corporate body politic, proxy voting became a simple convenience. Both developments may have owed their origins to the democratic rhetoric of the anti-charter movement, but their most important consequence was to entrench the plutocratic principle in corporate governance.

The Managerial Revolution and Corporate Plutocracy

Ironically but logically, the rise of corporate plutocracy signalled the imminent decline of the bourgeoisie. By the end of the American Civil War, the collapse of the corporation as a civil body politic was pretty much complete. Consequently, the patrician bourgeoisie could no longer function as an informal third estate within the civil constitution of Anglo-American society; it was displaced by an increasingly impersonal system of corporate capitalism. Membership in the body corporate became little more than a legal fossil, altogether divorced from patrician norms of honour and responsibility.

Such a change implied a fundamental transformation in property ownership. Marx was among the first to realize that the joint-stock company effectively abolished private property. Share ownership created a novel form of collective or social capital. From being a form of absolute dominion exercised over an autonomous landed household, proprietary interests were disaggregated into a variable bundle of claims to a share of the wealth or income generated within a complex, interdependent process of production, distribution, and exchange. Property ownership lost its civic significance; it no longer served as a school of self-government. Stripped of its patrician role within the body politic, the civic role of the corporate bourgeoisie was replaced by the self-interested avarice of fickle investors, ever on the lookout for the chance to buy on the dip and sell at the peak.

The moral decline and civic irrelevance of corporate shareholders as a class was a consequence of both the democratic and the managerial revolutions. Even a putatively natural aristocracy was ill-placed to compete with organized political machines employing the rhetoric of egalitarian democracy to license the growth of an impersonal public administration. Nor could wealth alone provide its owners with the managerial skills necessary to run a complex, multi-unit, modern business enterprise.

But the haute bourgeoisie in America and elsewhere in the Western world was not forcibly deprived of decision-making authority in the corporate realm. Rather, given the opportunity, moneyed interests were more than willing to abandon the notion that property ownership should carry with it the sort of public responsibility and civic obligation associated with the aristocratic ideal of noblesse oblige. By and large, the bourgeoisie simply abdicated the responsibilities of rulership.

The public burdens of property ownership came to count for much less than its private benefits, nowhere more obviously than in the sphere of corporate governance. Once the ‘one voice, one vote’ principle was replaced by the ‘one share, one vote’ rule, share ownership became a means of systematically negating the civic significance of property ownership. All shares, not all persons, were created equal. Not surprisingly, wealthy investors soon became quite comfortable with that interpretation of democratic equality. The voice of a shareholder with one hundred or one million shares now carried one hundred or one million times the weight of a member holding but one share in a common corporate enterprise. Votes came to be valued, not as an incident of membership in a corporate body politic, but rather for their tactical importance in securing effective control over a valuable bundle of economic and financial assets.

So long as their business was organized as a family firm, a partnership or a close corporation, an entrepreneurial capitalist could remain in control of his own enterprise. But, having chosen homo economicus as their role model, capitalist entrepreneurs became hostages to fortune in the public realm, where a new class of professional politicians and bureaucrats was expanding the state’s administrative capacities. Indeed, even in the economic sphere, the spectacular success of entrepreneurial capitalism spawned a vast network of hugely complex business enterprises organized and run by professional managers with highly specialized technical and administrative skills. More often than not, the most successful enterprises became public corporations whose shares and bonds were traded in national financial markets. Before long, entrepreneurial capitalists lost control over the corporate sector to a rising class of professional managers. By the early twentieth century, the separation of ownership and control had become the default position in the modern business corporation.

Managerial élites are now in the driver’s seat, not just the corporate sector, but in the state as well. Democracy no longer implies that the government will be ‘owned,’ much less ‘controlled,’ by the people of any given nation. The only legitimate form of democracy, according to the multiculturalist mullahs of the managerial state, is cosmopolitan democracy. The state may still claim to act in the name of the people, but the demos has expanded to include the whole of humanity. By virtue of their presumptive enlightenment, the managerial and professional classes now present themselves, or, rather, the global system which they administer, as the virtual representatives of humanity at large.

Corporate capitalism has expanded to become a global system of organized irresponsibility. Precisely because it is a system, it has become a form of no-man rule. No-one can be held responsible for the operation of the system; it has a life and logic of its own. At most, individuals can be held accountable for a failure to behave in accordance with the norms governing the effective management and orderly administration of sub-systems. Entrepreneurial activity, capital investment and managerial oversight have all become specialized functions, no longer united in a single figure responsible for the uses to which property is put. Those who variously own, manage, or regulate the corporate economy generally escape political responsibility for its social costs, much less for the moral hazards and spiritual emptiness that are among its most obvious by-products. Within a global economy detached from and destructive of local communities, the ruling class has disappeared behind the corporate veil.

In these circumstances, the restoration of a ruling class prepared to accept responsibility for the fate of the common world would be a welcome relief. Unfortunately, political, economic, and cultural élites throughout the Anglosphere are steeped in dishonour; they have privatised the privileges of high social status while socialising the public burdens of responsible rulership. The ideology of ‘democratic capitalism’ allows them to dissimulate their actual role as a ruling class, thereby evading personal liability for the adverse consequences (described antiseptically as ‘negative externalities’) of their corporate decisions. Political imagination is surplus to requirements in a bureaucratic corporate hierarchy. Behind the corporate veil, the civic virtues of honourable conduct and personal responsibility have been translated into impersonal standards of accountability for results achieved. The managerial overclass presents, successfully so far, its globalist program of perpetual economic growth as humanity’s highest achievement. In the absence of a noble ruling class, old-fashioned notions of noblesse oblige lose their functional significance.

Resurrecting the Corporation as a Civil Body Politic

Denunciation of the managerial regime serves no useful purpose unless it arises out of a movement aiming to create a new ruling class. This is not an impossible dream. Indeed, given the accelerating crisis of confidence in the corporate sector, it is becoming an urgent practical necessity. In principle, the goal of such a movement is clear: those who nominally own the corporate sector must recover a measure of control over the uses to which their property is put. To make that possible, the public corporation must be reconstituted as a civil body politic. The best citizens among substantial shareholders in public corporations must be allowed, indeed encouraged to become a civic élite within those corporate bodies politic. Reinventing the aristocratic principle of rule by the best and applying it to the governance of the public corporation could help to cope with the multiplying risks generated by a global society of perpetual growth.

When the major task of capitalist development was the conquest of scarcity, it made good sense to privilege the private benefits of corporate share ownership over the public burdens and civic challenges associated with membership in a corporate body politic. It is now high time to tilt the constitutional balance within the corporation away from civic privatism by creating a political role for the active investor. A new emphasis on the political character of membership in the corporate body politic would re-attach civic responsibilities to the proprietary rights of share ownership.

This would mean an end to the plutocratic principle of ‘one share, one vote,’ which did so much to hollow out the civic significance of corporate governance. Only under conditions of political equality can any significant number of share- holders hope to overcome the formidable collective action problems facing activists within the realm of corporate governance. For that reason, all shareholders who hold a substantial threshold stake in an enterprise should be entitled to participate in a process of deliberative decision-making based on one voice, one vote. Property ownership could, once again, serve as a school of self-government.

It may well be that only a relatively few individuals among millions of widely dispersed investors in thousands of firms are ever likely to enrol in such a course in practical civics. Not everyone is moved by the joys of public happiness. But all those who do take up that civic challenge should stand on an equal footing in the corporate body politic. Those who demonstrate by their actions that they value the privileges of membership should bear final responsibility for the good governance of their joint enterprise.

The problem with the governance of corporations as they are presently constituted is that only money talks. At a general meeting, those who hold a majority of the (voting or proxy) shares, even if they are only a small minority of those present, have no need to either to speak or to listen to their fellow members. Even the best corporate citizen is bound to be discouraged by a voting regime that systematically devalues the power of reasoned speech in favour of the sheer dumb weight of proprietary interest. This would not amount to a constitutional issue if corporate decision-making affected only private economic interests. But corporations now exercise powers that are governmental and political in nature.

The constitution of the public corporation must be reconceived as a novel sort of mixed polity in which private ownership interests are balanced against the public responsibilities of governing a body corporate that creates both economic wealth and political power. Corporate governance should be reconstituted to provide a political theatre in which bourgeois investors keeping a sharp eye on their financial interests can also take on the role of citizens striving to distinguish themselves in the service of the common good (and vice versa).

By treating a senatorial élite of shareholders as political equals in fundamental corporate decisions, a reformed constitutional law enables the bourgeois and the citizen to learn the art of corporate governance from each other. If the public corporation is to survive and prosper while doing business in an enlightened and responsible manner, a coalition of interests must learn to balance the economic imperatives which call the business corporation into being against the responsible exercise of its inherent governmental powers. The consequence would be the re-emergence of a patrician bourgeoisie, the very model of a modern natural aristocracy.

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[i] See, e.g., E.Digby Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy & Caste in America (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1987); and Eric P. Kaufmann, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

[ii] Ronald Story, The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard & the Boston Upper Class (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1980)

[iii] https://datausa.io/profile/university/harvarduniversity/#enrollment_race; see also, Ron Unz, ‘The Myth of American Meritocracy,’ at: https://www.unz.com/runz/meritocracy-appendices/#3 .

[iv] Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution:1789-1848 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962).

[v] Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 80-81.

[vi] R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (New York: Mentor, 1946 [orig pub. 1926]), 164.

[vii] Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 17.

[viii] See, especially, Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 3-8.

[ix] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America 2 Vols [original edition, 1835 and 1840] (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945).

[x] Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1993).

[xi] William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Law of England, Vol II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979 [orig. pub. 1766]), 2.

Will I ever stop hating on the Catholic Church and become a believer? Maybe. But if I do, it won’t just be Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, and Father Leonard Feeney who will have helped me kneel before the Queen of Heaven. It will also be Professor Richard Dawkins. Belloc, Chesterton, and Feeney have set me a positive example of Christian wisdom, insight, and intelligence. Dawkins has done the opposite. He’s set me a negative example of anti-Christian foolishness, blindness, and stupidity. With the able assistance of Christopher Hitchens, he’s taught me to regard atheism as uncouth, adolescent, and autistic.

Top White thinkers

Yes, I think Vox Day is right to connect atheism and autism. Like autism, atheism is a kind of color-blindness: an inability to perceive, understand and appreciate an essential — and extraordinarily beautiful — aspect of reality. Autistic people don’t perceive social relationships; atheists don’t perceive the most important “social relationship” of all, that between God and His Creation. Or so theists like Day would argue. I’m not with those theists yet, but Richard Dawkins is one of those who have helped me away from atheism and towards theism. I look back with shame on the days when I was a fully fledged fan of his. Now I’m only a partly fledged fan. I still admire his scientific knowledge and the quality of his prose. Unlike the polysyllabicizing gasbag Hitchens, Dawkins is a clear and careful writer who is more interested in describing biology than in demonstrating his own cleverness.

Richard Dawkins’ recent book Flights of Fancy (2021)

Not that Dawkins could demonstrate much cleverness if he tried. He’s made solid contributions to evolutionary biology, but he isn’t particularly clever. He himself has said that he doesn’t score well on IQ tests and I think Greg Cochran has called him a “pinhead.” That would be hyperbole, but Dawkins is certainly not “the world’s top thinker,” as a poll in Prospect Magazine once proclaimed him to be. Dawkins himself wouldn’t accept the title: one of his positive qualities is his ability to recognize and honor intellectual excellence in others. He is a staunch admirer of John Maynard Smith (1920–2004) and William D. Hamilton (1936–2000), for example. Those two really were top thinkers, able to bring the immense power of mathematics to bear on problems in evolutionary biology, but they aren’t familiar to millions in the way that Dawkins himself is. Dawkins has done his best to correct that imbalance. He wrote an introduction to an updated edition of Smith’s magisterial The Theory of Evolution (1958) and has often referred to Smith and Hamilton in his books. He did that again in his recent Flights of Fancy (2021), a slight but seductive book about “defying gravity by design and evolution.” It has beautiful illustrations by the Slovakian artist Jana Lenzová and is an excellent short guide to the facts and fancies of flight, all the way from falcons and flying fish to parachutes and patagiums.

Jettisoning material

In chapter 11 of the book, Dawkins pays graceful tribute to Hamilton and describes Hamilton’s “mathematical theory” showing how “an animal (or plant) that takes steps to send at least some of its offspring a long way away will spread more of its genes, in the long run, than a rival that drops all of its offspring right next door to the parent.” (p. 206) This is true, Hamilton showed, “even if ‘right next door’ is (at present) the best place in the world and ‘a long way away’ is on average worse.” That idea is only one of what Dawkins rightly calls Hamilton’s “brilliant contributions to Darwinian theory,” but it sheds light on the central theme of the book: flight in all its forms. Flights of Fancy is about the conquest of the air, whether accomplished by birds, bats, bees or Blanchard’s balloons. Jean-Pierre Blanchard (1753–1806) was a pioneering French inventor who made the “first balloon crossing of the English Channel” in 1785. En route, he and his American companion “were obliged to jettison everything in their beautiful boat-shaped car, including even their own clothes.” (p. 179)

Birds, Bats, Bees, Balloons

Otherwise the balloon would have hit the water and never reached its destination. You could say that, metaphorically speaking, Richard Dawkins has followed the same strategy as Jean-Pierre Blanchard. He had to jettison certain material from Flights of Fancy or it too would have failed to reach its destination. The material that’s missing from the book is about race, because one thing is very clear from the history of mankind’s conquest of the air. Flight is White and aviation is a creation of the stale pale nation. In other words, it was European Whites who invented or perfected all the amazing ways in which human beings can imitate birds and take to the air. The airplane, the helicopter, the rocket, the balloon, the glider, the jet-pack and more — all of these are the product of White ingenuity and effort. And also of White audacity. Many White men have died or been horribly injured in the quest to conquer the air, just as many White men have died or been horribly injured in the quest to conquer mountains like Everest and the Eiger.

The Whiteness of Flight

In essence, flight and mountaineering are the same quest — a Faustian quest to ascend, overcome and go beyond the boundaries imposed on mankind by nature. There was hubris in the early attempts on the air and Nemesis often punished that hubris. But now flight is one of the safest forms of transport and human beings can cross the Atlantic with less risk than they cross a city-street. We owe all of that to White men like Jean-Pierre Blanchard and the Wright Brothers. But suppose Richard Dawkins had written about the Whiteness of human flight in his book and had drawn on the work of Kevin MacDonald to explain why and how it was Whites who pioneered and perfected aviation. If Dawkins had done that, his book would never have taken wing itself. It wouldn’t have been published by a mainstream company or been praised by mainstream reviewers.

Instead, it would have been condemned as vile, racist and “White-supremacist.” In the modern West, two leftist dogmas are absolute and unassailable. The first dogma states that “There is Only One Race — the Human Race.” The second dogma states that Whites are innately villainous and non-Whites are innately virtuous. The two dogmas contradict each other, of course, but that’s the doublethink of leftism. As Orwell described in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), leftists have the ability “to hold simultaneously two opinions which [cancel] out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them.” By proclaiming the equality of all human groups, leftists feed the self-regard that powers their lust for power and punishment. The power will be for themselves and the punishment will be for their enemies. They want to wreck the West and rule the ruins.

Noxious and nonsensical

The enemies of leftism therefore include all those who recognize racial reality, like everyone who writes for the Occidental Observer and most of those who write for the Unz Review. We race-realists know that the dogma of human equality is both noxious and nonsensical. Human races are not all equal and Whites have achieved exceptional things. Aviation is one soaring example: it’s a true creation of the pale stale nation. But leftism hates the truth and Dawkins couldn’t have talked about the Whiteness of flight in his book. If he’d done that, he would have contradicted the leftist dogma of White villainy and non-White virtue. According to leftism, all apparent White achievements and inventions were in fact stolen or “appropriated” from geniuses of color. That’s why the article on the “History of aviation” at leftist Wikipedia makes sure to refer right away to Chinese kites as “the earliest example of man-made flight.” Some of those kites could lift a grown man into the air. In other words, non-Whites were there first, as always. But the article can’t deny that White men were the pioneers of flight in its truest and fullest forms. From the Montgolfier Brothers to the Moon-landings and beyond, Flight has been White.

And so has the understanding of flight in all its forms, as Dawkins’ book describes. White scientists have elucidated the physics of flight and explained how flight has evolved again and again among animals and plants. It’s a fascinating story excellently told in Flights of Fancy by the words of Richard Dawkins and the pictures of Jana Lenzová. That’s why I enjoyed the book so much. And I couldn’t help contrasting Flights of Fancy with another book that has recently made a strong impression on me. The other book is very different in content and style. And it makes explicit what is only implicit in Flights of Fancy: the importance of race and racial difference in all parts of human existence.

Blackety-Blackety Yack

What is the other book called? It’s called Black British Lives Matter: A Clarion Call for Equality (2021) and is an entry in the ever-fascinating and ever-essential field of what John Derbyshire would call Blackety Blackety Black Black Black Blackety-Blackness Studies. Derbyshire captures the full intellectual richness and profundity of the book in that formulation. In other words, the book has no intellectual richness or profundity whatsoever. It’s a collection of essays by nineteen self-obsessed and self-righteous Blacks living in Britain. The essays have titles like “Black British Architecture Matters” and “Black British Mothers Matter.” If the book as a whole had been given an honest subtitle rather than a dishonest one, that subtitle would have been “A Clarion Call for Black Narcissism and Anti-White Grievance.” And I’ll be honest myself: I’m not Hercules and I couldn’t have tackled Hercules’ Fifth Labor of cleaning the Augean Stables, which were heaped high with decades of bullshit. In a similar way, I can’t tackle the bullshit heaped high in Black British Lives Matter. There’s too much of it and I didn’t have the time or the masochistic inclination to even read the book, let alone attempt to dissect all its distortions and dim-wittedness.

Black Bullshit Masters: nineteen melanin-enriched dim-wits issue a Clarion Call for Black Narcissism and Anti-White Grievance

But you won’t be surprised to learn that the book rests firmly on the second great dogma of leftism, namely, that Whites are innately villainous and non-Whites are innately virtuous. Blacks especially are innately virtuous and social outcomes that disfavor Blacks must always be attributed to White wickedness, never to Black imperfection or immorality. For example, one essay in the book adduces this irrefutable proof of White wickedness: that “Black women [in Britain] die in pregnancy or childbirth at four times the rate of White women.” After all, what else could explain such a glaring “inequality” but White wickedness? To leftists, nothing else. To thought-criminals like me, other explanations are obvious: for example, the different biology and reproductive strategies of Black women, as evolved in the distinct environments of sub-Saharan Africa, and their higher, self-inflicted rates of venereal disease and ill-health.

“B” is for Black

Black British Lives Matter is full of similar proclamations of Black suffering and White villainy. It’s a self-righteous and self-obsessed book. That’s part of why it’s also an ugly book. Another part of its ugliness is the poor quality of its prose and its reasoning. That’s why I found it such a contrast with Flights of Fancy, which is a beautiful book, well-written, well-reasoned, and well-illustrated, and most certainly not self-obsessed. As I noted above, Whites like Richard Dawkins are interested in birds, bats, bees, balloons and lots of other things starting with “B.” Blacks, by contrast, are interested in only one thing starting with “B,” namely, Blacks. In other words, Whites are exotropic, directed towards what’s outside themselves. Blacks are endotropic, directed towards themselves and their own concerns. That’s why Whites have been inventors, innovators and explorers of the Universe. And why Blacks have been none of those things.

You can see that stark difference between Whites and Blacks by comparing Flights of Fancy with Black British Lives Matter. Books in their modern form were also a White invention, but in the 21st century books are part of the leftist war on the White West. On their own, Blacks never even invented writing, let alone the arts of paper-manufacture and printing. And on their own they wouldn’t have been able to use books to attack Whites and express their self-righteous self-obsession. Blacks are not intelligent, literate or well-organised enough to have created the modern cult of minority-worship and to have set themselves at the heart of leftist ideology. Instead, minority-worship was created and Blacks were sacralized by the highly intelligent, literate and well-organized group known as Jews, who were trying to fight anti-Semitism by remote control. As I’ve pointed out before, if birds had language, then cuckoos would be the loudest exponents of the Brotherhood of Birds. They would coo seductively that “There Is Only One Species — the Avian Species.”

Predators and parasites

But birds aren’t in fact brothers, and different species most certainly may well have conflicts of interest. Although birds have a common ancestor and their similarities are far greater than their differences, those differences are literally a matter of life and death. Some birds prey on other birds and some birds, like cuckoos, parasitize other birds. As biologists like Richard Dawkins are well-aware, predation and parasitism are strategies that have evolved independently again and again among animals. I don’t think human beings are an exception. What is exceptional among humans is the way that our predators and parasites often operate. A cuckoo doesn’t use language to fool its hosts into working against their own interests and spreading alien genes. The human cuckoo Stephen Jay Gould used nothing but language to fool gullible Whites into doing the same thing.

Black British Lives Matter is a Gouldean book, but Flights of Fancy is a golden book. And I hope that Richard Dawkins one day uses his undoubted literary ability to champion the race to which he belongs and to which the world owes so much artistic beauty and scientific knowledge. Dawkins already knows about the existence of race and is fast learning about the malignancy of leftism. If he abandons atheism and embraces race-realism, I think he’ll earn his angel’s wings.

Wigmore Hall is not a place that one would typically expect to find out is intimately connected with the subversion of the sexual morals of the West. If you aren’t a fan of classical music, then its name probably means little to you, but since 1901 this concert hall located in central London has been one of the world’s premier chamber music and recital venues, a space specially designed for the exhibition of Europe’s unmatched musical achievements. Sadly, even places such as this have not been spared from the modern forms of “enrichment” that are becoming all too common within our cultural institutions. In-between performances of Schubert or Beethoven, the venue now hosts things like an “African Concert Series” and refugee art installations, and the hall is regularly used for music lessons for London’s depressingly multiracial youth. The sight of an ensemble of British primary school students—where almost not a single child is white—singing about diversity on a stage that should be reserved for the celebration of White people and not their denigration and replacement, is a particularly egregious example of our predicament.

As this writer recently discovered, such hostile acts are not a new occurrence at Wigmore Hall, as nearly 100 years ago it was being defiled in an altogether different sort of way. The year was 1929, and between the 8^th and 14^th of September the chamber hall was rented out for a congress that attracted almost 350 delegates. Present were luminaries from around the world, academics and experts in their field, seated alongside famous activists and British cultural figures. On the opening day they sat to listen not to a musical performance but to an opening speech about sexology. For this was no ordinary gathering of people, they were delegates of the Third International Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform (WLSR) and the opening speaker was none other than Magnus Hirschfeld, the president of the league.        Readers of The Occidental Observer will need no introduction to Magnus Hirschfeld, a man once described by Hitler as “the most dangerous Jew in Germany,” but the name of Australian-born sexologist Norman Haire—the subject of this essay and the man who organized the London congress—has been largely forgotten to history. His exploits are now only known to a handful of writers and historians, but during the 1920s and 1930s, Haire was one of Hirschfeld’s more prominent disciples in the world of sexology and at one point the co-president of the WLSR, an organization that played more than a passing role in seeding the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the modern toleration for every form of sexual depravity imaginable. Haire’s works widely circulated in the elite and socialist circles of pre-war anglosphere, with Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm claiming in 1939 that he was one of the few people of his generation that did not read Haire.[1]

When it comes to “sexology” or the study of human sexuality and behaviour, Andrew Joyce has previously identified[2] the two distinct strains within the modern discipline as it emerged in the early years of the twentieth century, noting that it was never proclaimed as an explicitly Jewish discipline. One was the gentile strain, a forensic study of the “sex question” that medicalized sinful behavior, gaining prominence with the writings of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and was pioneered in the anglosphere by Havelock Ellis. The other was the now-dominant Jewish strain, the one to which “the modern toleration and promotion of sexual delinquency owes its most significant debt.”[3] This came out of the German-speaking world, originating with Albert Moll, Iwan Bloch, Magnus Hirschfeld and Albert Eulenberg, and was strongly supplemented by Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis.

Both strains sought to extract inquiries on sexual behavior from the constraints of religious discourse, but where gentile sexology largely contextualized sexual deviance within theories of degeneration and came to dovetail closely with the birth control and eugenics movements (which directed inquires on sex through the lens of demographic issues as they related to the health of the race), Joyce notes that:

these Jewish sexologists and social commentators were united in advancing theories of sexual inversion [homosexuality] that moved away from interpretations involving themes like degeneration, demographic decline and biological reality, and instead towards Talmudic abstractions involving the nature of romantic love and the allegedly fluid nature of gender and sex. As one might predict, running through all of their works is a clear preoccupation with the need for “tolerance” and social pluralism, the denial of human difference, and a fanatical opposition towards non-Jewish attempts to develop racial science.[4]

Bloch in particular can be credited with originating the critique of the “degenerative theory” that defined the gentile strain, arguing instead that sexual deviance was an isolated anthropological phenomenon that had no capacity to undermine civilization and result in cultural decline.[5]

Haire’s origins in the anglosphere saw him begin his career in the former strain, which imbued his writings with a degree of rhetoric on race improvement. But driven by his own Jewish background and homosexuality, as well as an underlying desire for sexual tolerance, it is obvious to which side he spiritually belonged to from the start. In a statement on the aims of the WLSR, Haire himself clearly articulated the ultimate point of Jewish sexology as a weapon of cultural warfare, namely to

establish sexual ethics and sociology on a scientific, biological and psychological basis instead of the present theological basis. … The Stronger our organisation [the WLSR] and the greater our resources, the sooner we shall attain our object, which is freedom of humanity from the sexual persecution and sexual starvation which ignorance and intolerance have imposed upon it.[6]

Though he was only of secondary importance in the history of sexology and twentieth-century sexual reform, Haire—as apologist and enabler—bridged the gap between the trailblazers of Jewish sexology and the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Following in Hirschfeld’s wake were people such as Haire, who worked diligently to mould public opinion and popularize the sexual ideals that achieved dominance by the end of the twentieth century. According to Diana Wyndham, the author of his biography, Haire exemplified the Jewish virtue of Tikkun Olam (“healing the world”),[7] by which she means he dedicated his life’s work to the dissolution of Western, Christian norms on sexual morality and the aggressive promotion of the use of contraception. The following critical review of the contours of his life illustrates the poisonous influence that even a secondary player like Haire had, as a prophet of sexual reform and a prominent contributor to the sexually radical climate of pre-war intelligentsia, in bringing about the current sexual perversion of the West.

Australian Origins

Norman Haire was born Norman Zions in Sydney in 1892, the youngest of 11 children in a non-observant Jewish family. The Zions family (originally Zajac) originated from Poland and were one of the many thousands of Jews that migrated to London during the nineteenth century to escape the Tsar’s failed attempts at turning them into Russian citizens. Sexual deviance to some degree or another was common to the major proponents of sexology, leading to the obvious hypothesis that sexology became, at least in-part, the vehicle for legitimizing their own sexual deviance, and Haire was no exception to this rule. There was Alfred Kinsey the sado-masochist who physically abused his genitals, Hirschfeld the nudist homosexual, and Havelock Ellis’ private life was far from conventional, being in an “open marriage” with a lesbian. Haire’s own homosexuality was a matter of conjecture to even his colleagues within the sex reform movement, known only to or suspected by close confidants—one can theorize that Haire, who regularly interacted with the general public, felt the level of secrecy was necessary to avoid him and his clinic being ostracised. It was at the Sydney Library that an 18-year-old Haire encountered the first two volumes of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Within he discovered a discussion on sexual inversion (homosexuality) that, whilst still describing it as a disorder, was absent from guilt-inducing religious rhetoric that located the origins of the behaviour solely in sin. This apparently relieved his youthful sexual anxieties and sparked a lifelong desire to study sex and reform the views of Christian society that he felt caused unnecessary suffering.[8]

In 1915, Haire graduated from the University of Sydney with a medical degree and he relocated to work at a hospital in London in 1919, whereupon he made contact with Havelock Ellis. Ellis had spent a number of his formative years in Australia—of which he had fond memories—and even taught at the same Sydney high school Haire attended, and accordingly accepted his Australian admirer with open arms. With introductions from Ellis, Haire ingratiated himself and soon became a leading member of Britain’s birth control movement, moving in the circles of all the prominent figures—Margaret Sanger, Marie Stopes, Stella Browne and C.V. Drysdale. Within three years he was on the executive committee of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology (BSSSP) and a medical officer of the Malthusian League, and his pioneering articles on birth control methods were being published in The Lancet and the British Medical Journal, both prominent medical journals. However, he was an ethnic outsider within the country’s birth control scene; Jews had entered into prominent roles in birth control endeavors elsewhere, such as Gregory Pincus and Abraham and Hannah Stone in America or Hans Lehfeldt in Germany, but in Britain, Haire took a backseat to what was primarily a gentile venture. Haire quickly moved on from hospital duties and set up a gynaecology practice on Harley Street and provided birth control advice to the poor at a free clinic he set up with the Malthusian League called the Walworth Women’s Welfare Centre—among the earliest such clinics in the world. A number of foreign contraceptives made their way to England through promotion by Haire, such as the Dutch-designed rubber pessary and the Gräfenberg Ring (designed by Jewish researcher Ernst Gräfenberg) a precursor to the IUD.

Haire’s most well-known and accessible book was Hymen, or the Future of Marriage (1927) wherein he outlined his predictions (or more accurately his desires) about the nature of marriage and sexual relations in the future. Alongside his defenses for no-fault divorce, euthanasia, pre-marital sex and sterilization, Haire predicted that every city in the world would have an Institute for Sexual Research like Hirschfeld’s, and he promoted the benefits of polygamy.

Lifelong monogamous marriage is, I believe, the ideal to aim at; but it is an ideal that is at present suitable to, and attainable by, only a very small minority of people. Most men are polygamous, in their desires at least: a large number are polygamous in practice; and, of those who remain physically faithful to one woman, the majority do so only because of the fear of consequences in this life, or punishment in that after-life which has been invented and exploited by theologians.[9]

At the heart of his book is the now-ubiquitous rhetoric of “live and let live” and the toleration of sexual difference, namely that unless a deviant sexual behaviour directly harms another individual, it should be left undisturbed:

But so long as the sexual rights of others are not interfered with…the sexual relations of two mutually consenting adults will probably be considered the private concern of the two individuals involved. We shall cease to persecute the unfortunate abnormals; and instead, we shall endeavour to cure them. Where cure is impossible, we shall not interfere with their rights as long as they do not interfere with the rights of others.[10]

The integration of homosexual toleration within the wider discourse of sexual reform, particularly through association with popular endeavors such as sex equality, was a longstanding Hirschfeld tactic of legitimization that Haire was more than happy to also utilize.

Rejuvenation and Conflict with the BSSSP

Other than his support for a form of compulsory sterilization, one of the more embarrassing aspects of Haire’s career for his modern-day defenders is his involvement with the Jewish-instigated medical quackery known as “rejuvenation therapy,” invented by Eugen Steinach and Serge Voronoff. Steinach, an endocrinologist born to an Austrian Jewish family, and Voronoff, a surgeon born to a Russian Jewish family, both purported to have discovered, through experimentation on the endocrine systems of animals, the medical answer to the “fountain of youth.” Through surgical alterations to the endocrine and reproductive systems, they claimed that mankind could be “rejuvenated” from old age, with the operations allegedly increasing the vigor and sexual potency of the subject. The Vonoroff method involved surgically grafting slices of monkey testicles to the scrotum of the patient, a procedure which earned him the moniker of the “monkey gland man.” Steinach’s method was more mundane, being essentially a partial vasectomy.                                                                                                                                         Haire learnt of the procedures from a lecture given by his colleague Eden Paul[11] to the BSSSP and opted for the Steinach method, earning a small fortune “rejuvenating” famous elderly clients like W.B Yeats and H.G Wells by charging exorbitant surgical fees. In 1924, he published Rejuvenation:Tthe Work of Steinach, Voronoff, and Others which popularised the fad. Needless to say, none of these operations resulted in anything more than a placebo effect, but what they did do is provide the perfect guinea pigs for experimentation on Steinach’s more enduring achievement—sex-reassignment surgery. Steinach’s experiments on the function of sex hormones guided Hirschfeld and two Jewish doctors (Ludwig Levy-Lenz and Felix Abraham) at the Institute for Sexual Research in 1931 in performing the world’s first full sex-transition surgery on a German man called Rudolph Richter.

Though originally founded under the chairmanship of Hirschfeld, the BSSSP was little more than a lacklustre discussion forum for upper-class sexual radicals,[12] and the majority of its members were not interested in the goal Haire aspired to, namely bold, public sexual reform. Haire, now a prominent figure in the society and the British birth control scene, was not impressed by the BSSSP and its low membership numbers, and described other prominent members as “unbalanced,” “timid,” and “carries discretion to the extreme.”[13] By mid-1923, a minor power struggle over the direction of the society had resulted, but Haire backed down after Ellis reprimanded him in January 1924 after giving a speech at a BSSSP meeting that took the case for homosexual liberation a little too far, telling him that “the usefulness of the society will be largely destroyed if it comes to be regarded as simply a homo club.”[14] Alongside his flair for self-promotion, Haire’s abrasive personality and chutzpah had previously caused friction and interpersonal disputes with prominent members of the British birth control movement,[15] but the conflict over the direction of the BSSSP saw Haire begin to gravitate away from his childhood idol[16] and into the orbit of Magnus Hirschfeld and the Jewish strain of sexology in the German-speaking world—a place Haire would later call his spiritual home.

Hirschfeld and the Third Sexual Congress

First contact with Hirschfeld was made on a trip to Berlin in 1923 with a letter of introduction from Ellis. Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research (ISR) made a strong impression on Haire, as did the “openness of homosexuality” that he encountered in the Berlin bars Hirschfeld invited him along to.[17] In Hirschfeld and the ISR, Haire found an outwardly confident movement that since 1897 already had a trailblazing track record of strong public support for the cause of sexual reform and homosexual liberation. Haire was present at the 1928 Copenhagen conference which founded the World League for Sexual Reform and also attended Albert Moll’s rival Berlin sexology congress in 1926, the International Congress for Sex Research.

Norman Haire (on the left) standing outside a WLSR meeting with Hirschfeld and his lover Karl Giese.   

Haire took up leadership roles in the WLSR, including as co-president with Hirschfeld from 1930 onwards, and he proved particularly influential in the transmission of the currents of Jewish sexology into the anglosphere. Proficient in both French and German, he put his language skills to use not only in attending conferences that were out of reach to most English speakers, but also in personally translating and editing German-language sexology books. From 1929, Haire edited The International Library of Sexology and Psychology series, which provided cheap translations and reprints of all the major sexology works, and edited and contributed to the English editions of Arthur Koestler’s bestseller The Encyclopaedia of Sexual Knowledge (1934). Translations of Wilhelm Aldor’s[18] Encyclopedia of Sex Practice (1934) and Wilhelm Stekel’s Sadism and Masochism (1929) brought Haire into legal trouble as they were being sold as titillating works alongside pornographic books and were considered “unlikely to be read in a scientific manner.”[19]

Haire’s role at the junction between Jewish sexology and the English-speaking world became most evident when he organized the aforementioned Third Congress of the WLSR in London, the first outside continental Europe and a high point for sexual reform in Britain. In total, the congress drew 350 delegates, a mixture of prominent sexologists and birth control activists from around the world and liberal reformers in Britain. Papers from prominent names such as Julian and Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell (Russell’s 2^nd wife Dora assisted Haire in organising the congress) and George Bernard Shaw were presented. Havelock Ellis, now dealing with Haire at arm’s length, did not support the London congress and refused to attend, and Margaret Sanger abruptly defected, apparently for fear of her birth control endeavours being tainted with the accusation of involvement with communism and homosexual activism.[20]

The Planks of the WLSR

The topic of homosexuality did not in-fact receive much discussion at the London WLSR, struck from the agenda by Haire in order to align the congress with the more conservative English sensibility, and despite him bemoaning the “conspiracy of silence” against homosexuals.[21] Sex censorship on the other hand received particular attention (as did psychoanalysis), an issue on the minds of British participants given that many of them had recently come to the defense of Raclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), charged with obscenity due to its presentation of lesbianism. Haire gave evidence in support of the book during the trial, invited by the publisher’s solicitor Harold Rubinstein,[22] and Rubinstein returned the favor by presenting a paper on censorship at the congress. The “planks”
of the WLSR platform, as re-drawn (and somewhat watered down[23]) by Haire for the London congress, read as follows:

1. Political, economic and sexual equality of men and women.
2. The liberation of marriage (and especially divorce) from the present Church and State tyranny.
3. Control of conception, so that procreation may be undertaken only deliberately and with a due sense of responsibility.
4. Race betterment by the application of the knowledge of Eugenics.
5. Protection of the unmarried mother and illegitimate child.
6. A rational attitude towards sexually abnormal persons, and especially towards homosexuals, both male and female.
7. Prevention of prostitution and venereal disease
8. Disturbances of the sexual impulse to be regarded as more or less pathological phenomena, and not, as in the past, merely as crimes, vices, or sins.
9. Only those sexual acts to be considered criminal which infringe the sexual rights of another person. Sexual acts between responsible adults, undertaken by mutual consent, to be regarded as the private concern of those adults.
10. Systematic sexual education.[24]

Minus some changes to the language, and with the notable exception of the eugenics plank, it stands as almost a complete ideological framing of the sexual revolution that was still nearly 40 years away, with all the suggested reforms having now been implemented throughout the Western world.

Following the 1929 London congress came the Vienna congress in 1930, which attracted 1,000 delegates. However, a subsequent congress held in Brno prior to Hirschfeld’s death failed to attract as much publicity, and sexual reform was overshadowed by the worsening political and economic situation. Haire was in London when he heard of the burning of the archives of the ISR by the National Socialists in May 1933 (which included Haire’s works) and sent a frantic letter to Hirschfeld’s lover Karl Giese to inquire if any of the more precious books and papers had been spared from consignment to the flames.[25]

Haire and Race

A more difficult aspect of Haire’s career to parse out is how he approached the question of race. Haire did not (to this writer’s knowledge, based on his publicly available works) make any outwardly hostile statements on racialism or race science and his writings express a broad support for sterilization for reasons of “race improvement.” For example, in Hymen Haire critiques a funding appeal in a newspaper for a family suffering a case of hereditary blindness:

Such an appeal is possible only because Society has a false standard of values—a standard which is hurrying us to national and racial disaster.[26]

His rhetoric on race is nevertheless highly generalized and medicalized and can be seen far more as the desires of a utopian (Haire considered himself a socialist) seeking to eradicate physical and mental deformities in all peoples of the world, utilizing the linguistic rhetoric popular in Britain at the time, rather than as a manifestation of a commitment to the health of the race derived from a wider worldview of racial nationalism.

Degenerative theory is absent from his writings on sexuality and it is difficult to see Haire, the “world citizen” equally at home in London as he was in Berlin and Paris, offering support to racial nationalism or engaging in rhetoric against miscegenation. Furthermore, Haire was concerned about rising anti-Semitism and “jew baiting” in Germany, and he helped a number of his fellow Jewish sexologists who came to England as refugees after 1933. The most generous interpretation is that the issue was largely not of interest to him, a distraction from his pet topic of birth control, but his idol Magnus Hirschfeld’s position on race offers us a clue as to what Haire’s view most likely was (see Andrew Joyce’s Magnus Hirschfeld’s Racism” (1934)).

Wykeham Terriss and the Population Debate

Haire continued his medical practice and involvement with the WLSR and Sanger’s birth control conferences throughout the 1930s, but war and poor health saw him decide to return to Australia in 1940, setting up a clinic in Macquarie Street, Sydney. When it came to movements for sexual reform, not much had changed in the country of his birth since he had left it nearly 20 years prior. There were only two operating birth control clinics, set up by Australia’s small but dedicated birth control movement (one by the Racial Hygiene Association in New South Wales (NSW) and another by the Eugenics Society of Victoria), local condom manufactures like Ansell Rubber (founded by London-born Jew Eric Ansell) still operated discreetly, and little of the currents of Jewish sexology had reached Australia’s shores other than isolated eccentrics who ran afoul of obscenity laws.[27]

After experiencing the liberated scenes of Weimar Germany, Australia was still stuck in what Haire considered to be a sexual dark age, wracked with sexual ignorance and religious dogma,[28] and before long he was at war with Australia’s even more conservative standards on sex, though public discussion of homosexuality was still out of the question. Churches and Christian societies targeted his sex education seminars held at universities and Haire penned a series of articles for The World News on “Sex and Censorship” where he decried Australia’s international reputation on the censorship of sexual publications, arguing that “the present method of censorship is very imperfect, harmful to the public interest and an unwarranted interference with the liberty of the individual.”[29]

In March 1941, Haire scored a major coup in the promotion of sexual reform in Australia when he was appointed to write a series of sex advice articles for a popular weekly magazine (Woman) using the pseudonym “Wykeham Terriss.” Australian women’s magazines of the day were still respectable affairs that catered to the middle-aged woman as the enforcer of morality in society—it would be another 50 years before Jewish editor Nene King turned Australia’s most popular women’s magazines into trashy gossip rags, filled with sex and scandal. Until it ceased publication in 1951, Haire contributed more than 400 articles, which were taboo-breaking endeavours guaranteed to provoke and enrage. Haire refused to use “code words” or religious rhetoric for describing behaviours and body parts, and provided he avoided the obscene, the only topics forbidden in his “freethinking” articles were masturbation and homosexuality. Highlights include Haire blaming the spread of venereal disease on the closing of shops and entertainment on Sundays. Haire’s claim that his articles were the first mass presentations of sex advice in Australia is difficult to quantify,[30] but there is no doubt that they had a wide readership that moulded public opinion in the direction of openness in talking about sex and sexual reform.

Alongside the Wykeham Terriss articles, Haire’s most notorious contribution to Australia was a radio debate in August 1944 which brought him wide censure from Australian politicians. Held as part of the Nations Forum of the Air series, which presented topics that looked towards post-war reconstruction, the debate asked the question “Population Unlimited?” and invited four participants for an unscripted hour-long debate. For the affirmative were two Catholics, Dame Enid Lions, member for parliament and wife of the former prime minister, and the economist Colin Clark, who later advised on the 1967 papal encyclical Populorum Progressio. The feminist Jessie Street took the negative alongside Haire. Whilst he conceded the need for Australia to “cautiously” grow (unlike in Europe, where he felt it best to decrease growth due to “over-population”), Haire presented a staunch defense of birth control methods of the sort that was almost never articulated on national radio, let alone in public discourse. During the debate, Haire referred to his mother as little more than a “prize cow” stuck in a cycle of fertility and child-rearing. The comment was taken as a broadside against Australian motherhood, and the outcry resulted in a government ban being imposed on both the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and commercial radio from broadcasting talks on sexual matters and venereal disease.[31]

The Legacy of Haire

“Norman Haire became a sort of hero. … Since then his followers have spread out, infiltrating not only the medical profession, but universities, schools, churches.”[32]

Haire returned to London in August 1946 to find that sexual reform had run out of steam due to the war, and that the fervor over birth control had subsided. As Haire no doubt understood from the radio debate in Australia and its vituperative aftermath, promotion of birth control strongly conflicted with the goal of using population growth as a form of economic stimulation to counter wartime death and destruction, and the field of eugenics had been rendered morally reprehensible by association with the National Socialist regime and its sterilization policies.

Haire kept pre-war sexual reform alive by establishing the Sex Education Society and its accompanying journal, and he became more public in support of abortion and reform of homosexual law, but he continued to be plagued by ill health. His last venture was a speaking tour in the US in 1952, where he met all the Jewish leading lights of American sexology and gay rights activism—Edward Sagarin, Albert Ellis, Hugo Gernsback and Edwin W. Hirsch—and received a visit from Harry Benjamin and Alfred Kinsey whilst resting in a New York hospital.[33] The trip was interrupted by intermittent hospital visits due to heart failure and he died in the UK a few months later. Haire’s papers, which contained many intimate details about well-known English and Australian political and cultural figures, were burned, but his sexology library was donated to the University of Sydney, which in 2020 established the Norman Haire Fund for Sexology Studies.

The legacy of Norman Haire was not immediately apparent in Australia after his departure, as the local sexology scene continued along the gentile strain for a number of years, i.e., it was concerned primarily with family and racial health to the exclusion of radical sexual reform.[34] By the mid-1950s however, the world that he had prophesized back in 1927 was beginning to emerge, a radical world of sexual license and the “toleration of difference”(as a proxy for the toleration of Jews) driven by Jewish ethno-political activism that was intrinsically hostile to any notion of race or racial improvement. The spirit of Hirschfeld, Haire, and the WLSR lived on in the form of Freudianism, Wilhelm Reich and the Frankfurt School, championing the subversive cause of sexual liberation and cultural pluralism throughout the West, and the trickle of pornography and sexual publications turned into a flood. As a sign of the times, the NSW Racial Hygiene Association renamed itself the Family Planning Association in 1960 to align with the new goal of sexual liberation and remove any pretext that it was interested in the biological strengthening of White Australia. The strongly Jewish nature of this endeavour in the Australian context, particularly in the war on obscenity laws and Australia’s conservative sexual morality, has previously been discussed in detail by this writer; see his four-part series The Plot Against Australia (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4).

Once all the legal and cultural prohibitions on open discissions of sex had been dismantled, the field of sexology itself emerged in Australia in full bloom during the 1970s, and as one would expect with Jews playing leading roles. The first professional organization for sexology, the Australian Association of Sex Educators, Counsellors and Therapists (ASSERT), was founded under the leadership of Greta Goldberg as its convener and first president. Jewish doctors Jules Black (also a founding director of ASSERT) and Elsie Koadlow later jockeyed amongst themselves for the accolade of who set up Australia’s first sex-therapy clinic,[35] and Viennese-born doctor Herbert Bower pioneered a gender-dysphoria clinic at a Melbourne hospital, later graduating to an in-house psychiatrist at the first sex-reassignment surgery clinic in Australia at Monash University—in 1999 he was called the man who “approves every sex change operation in Australia.”[36] Sexologists like Bettina Arndt[37] began appearing on mainstream radio and television networks and Dennis Altman’s Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (1971) was a worthy successor to Haire and Hirschfeld’s quest for sexual reform.

Once the love that dare not speak its name, now the love one dare not oppose – Current prime minister Anthony Albanese and leading members of the Australian Labor Party celebrating the passing of the gay marriage bill at the Labor caucus.

Around the world, Jews abound in the history of the sexual revolution and its precursors, but like Norman Haire, most of them are now hidden away in the margins of books and journal articles (or uncritical Wikipedia entries), their lives which brim with subversion and intrigue unknown to all but the most esoteric readers. Perhaps someday writers on the Jewish Question will uncover them all, but for now this writer leaves you with the Australian piece in this puzzle, an individual that Australian patriots would prefer to forget was produced on our shores.

Select Bibliography

• Bongiorno, F 2012, The Sex Lives of Australians: A History, Black Inc, Australia.
• Grosskurth, P 1985, Havelock Ellis: A Biography, New York University Press, USA.
• Haire, N 1927, Hymen: Or the Future of Marriage, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd, London, UK.
• Haire, N 1943, Sex Problems of To-day, Angus & Robertson Ltd, Sydney, Australia.
• Leck, R.M 2016, Vita Sexualis: Karl Ulrichs and the Origins of Sexual Science, University of Illinois Press, USA.
• Mancini, E 2010, Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom: A History of the First International Sexual Freedom Movement, Palgrave Macmillan, USA.
• Wyndham, D 2012, Norman Haire and the study of sex, Sydney University Press, Australia.

[1]Munster, G 1983 ‘Only shadowy clues left by a reviled prophet of sexual liberation’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday 24 September, p.38.

[2] Joyce, A 2015 ‘The Assault on Gender and the Family Jewish Sexology and the Legacy of the Frankfurt School, Part 1, The Occidental Observer, retrieved from: https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2015/12/26/the-assault-on-gender-and-the-family-jewish-sexology-and-the-legacy-of-the-frankfurt-school-part-one/

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Leck, R.M 2016, Vita Sexualis: Karl Ulrichs and the Origins of Sexual Science, University of Illinois Press, USA, p.185.

[6] Wyndham, D 2012, Norman Haire and the study of sex, Sydney University Press, Australia, p.184

[7] Ibid., p.425.

[8] Wyndham, Op. Cit., p.35.

[9] Haire, N 1927, Hymen or The Future of Marriage, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Lt. London, p.95. Retrieved from: 04.us.archive.org/26/items/dli.ministry.14394/E09677_Hymen_Or_The_Future_Of_Marriage_text.pdf

[10] Ibid., p.59.

[11] A member of the Communist Party, Paul was another prominent translator of Jewish sexology books from Germany.

[12] “The Society’s contemporary impact in terms of reform of laws, or even moderating more than a small corner of public opinion, was apparently minimal.”- See Hall, L.A 1995, ‘’Disinterested Enthusiasm for Sexual Misconduct’: The British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, 1913-47’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol.8(4), pp.665-686.

[13] Crozier, I 2003, ‘“All the World’s a Stage”: Dora Russell, Norman Haire and the 1929 London World League for Sexual Reform Congress’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol.12(1), pp16-37, p.21-22

[14] Wyndham, Op. Cit., p.116.

[15] See Crozier, I 2001 ‘Becoming a Sexologist: Norman Haire, the 1929 London World League for Sexual Reform Congress, and Organizing Medical Knowledge about Sex in Interwar England’, History of Science, Vol.39, pp.299-329.

[16] Wyndham’s account of the correspondence between Ellis and Haire from this point up until Ellis’ death in 1939 give the impression of a tense but still professional relationship, with Ellis less than pleased by Haire’s manoeuvrings with the WLSR.

[17] Wyndham, Op. Cit., p.112.

[18] The cousin of Arthur Koestler.

[19] Cocks, H.G 2004, ‘Saucy stories: Pornography, sexology and the marketing of sexual knowledge in Britain, c. 1918-70’, Social History, Vol.29(4), pp.465-484, p.481.

[20] Wyndham, Op. Cit., p.183

[21] Ibid., p.184.

[22] Rubinstein’s son Michael was the defence solicitor for Penguin Books in the landmark 1960 obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

[23] Haire for example removed the plank, originally written by Hirschfeld, on the “tolerance of free sexual relations” and re-wrote the eugenics plank with more racialist language. See Dose, R 2003, ‘The World League for Sexual Reform: Some Possible Approaches’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol.12(1), pp.1-15.

[24] Crozier 2003, Op. Cit., p.28-29

[25]Wyndham, Op. Cit., p.228

[26] Haire, Op. Cit., p.32.

[27] Notably George Southern, the only Australian-based member of the WLSR.

[28] Wyndham Op. Cit. p.320-321.

[29] Haire, N 1941, ‘Sex and Censorship’, The World’s News Sydney, Saturday 25 October, p.2, retrieved from: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/139906663/16086749.

[30] Wyndham, Op. Cit., p.412 – The NSW Racial Hygiene Association had in fact produced sex education pamphlets during the 1930s. The guarded religious language used within these pamphlets about the spiritual uplift of marriage and sexual relations and the opposition to masturbation are a world apart from Haire’s writings on the topic.

[31] Inglis, K.S 1983, This is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting Commission 1932-1983, 2^nd Edition, Black Inc., Australia, p.188.

[32] Buckley, B 1966, ‘Morals: The Sexual Revolution’, The Bulletin, p.19, retrieved from: https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-674029485/view?partId=nla.obj-674142795

[33] Wyndham, Op.Cit., p.391-392

[34] This came in the form of contemporary practitioners such as Victor Hugo Wallace, the Australian editor of the journal Marriage Hygiene (later the International Journal of Sexology) from 1947 to 1955 and a leading member of the Eugenics Society of Victoria.

[35] See https://john.curtin.edu.au/julesblack/launch.html

[36] Bock, A 1999, ‘Gender Bender’, The Age, Saturday 9 October, p.113.

[37] Not Jewish, but with a Jewish background; her family were Lutheran converts.