Western Civilization

Review of “Storm of Steel” by Ernst Jünger

When once it is no longer possible to understand how a man gives his life for his country—and the time will come—then all is over with that faith also, and the idea of the Fatherland is dead; and then, perhaps, we shall be envied, as we envy the saints their inward and irresistible strength.
Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger

The end of the greatness of Western Civilization in one man’s death.

*        *        *

On February 17, 1998, a frail centenarian passed away in Wilflingen, Germany. Born in 1895, Ernst Jünger’s life was far more noteworthy than simply its prodigious length — it was a life that epitomized the gallantry, curiosity, patriotism, intelligence, and culture that made Western Civilization what it became — and from what is has descended. Fused in one man were all the qualities — qualities that are not merely in short supply today but positively lacking. It is not hyperbole to say that an era of sorts and an entire civilization was buried with his remains at Wilflingen Cemetery. We simply do not produce men like him — and have not for a very long time.

To say that Jünger’s life was incredible is selling it short — by a longshot. His life almost perfectly corresponded with the entirety of the twentieth century. The changes he witnessed boggle the mind — from the world he inherited to the world that he left. Born less than twenty-five years after Germany’s unification in 1871, he came into the world during the heady optimism of the German Empire. Successively he would be a participant and witness to: World War I and Germany’s partial dismemberment following its defeat at the hand of the allies; the chaos and political upheavals of the Weimar Republic; the rise of the Third Reich and World War II; the complete destruction and dismemberment of Germany following the war; the eras of West and East Germany; and finally, the reunification of Germany in 1991 following the fall of the Soviet Union. During every phase, from a young man to a very old man, Jünger participated and contributed to Germany. Indeed, he is virtually without parallel in what he means to soul of Germany.

He was a man that lived his entire life wrestling with ideas with a creative mind that seemingly never lost its vigor. An active writer from a young age, his books span multiple generations. He consumed life in an almost inexhaustible way — cogitating over things in a way that was almost superhuman. In that sense, he is close to being the personification of Western Civilization in microcosm. Really, it is that unbelievable.

I could recapitulate his life, but perhaps citing to a then-contemporary obituary to give a flavor for the man is more appropriate. While there were many, I found that The Independent gave as good a voice to the extraordinariness of his life as any other — and I cite it in full because it is worth reading in full:

ERNST JUNGER first beheld Halley’s Comet during its 1910 passage, when he was a boy of 15. In 1987, he made a special journey to Malaysia for a second glimpse. He was one of the very few writers to have seen the comet twice in his lifetime.

All this is described in Zwei Mal Halley (“Halley Twice”, 1988), a book filled with Junger’s characteristic meditations on time and place, on dreams, nature, crystals, stars, mountains, the sea, wild animals and insects, especially butterflies, a passion he shared with Nabokov. Throughout his very considerable body of work, there is an obsession with time, with dates, with temporal coincidences, with the fatidic power of numbers over our birth and death. In a volume of his journals covering the years 1965–70, Siebzig verweht (“Past Seventy”, 1980), he makes this revealing entry at Wilfingen, his home between the Danube and the Black Forest, in sight of the castle of Stauffenberg, on 30 March 1965: “I have now reached the biblical age of three score and ten — a rather strange feeling for a man who, in his youth, had never hoped to see his 30th year. Even after my 23rd birthday in 1918, I would gladly have signed a Faustian pact with the Devil: “Give me just 30 years of life, guaranteed, then let it all be ended.”

A similar expression of his fascinated awe of time and numbers appears in an earlier work, An der Zeitmauer (“At the Wall of Time”, 1959). But one of the most extraordinary examples of this obsession can be found in a journal entry for “‘Monday, 8.8.1988’ — a date with four units. 8 is special (four 8’s, and a fifth one by subtracting the 1 from the 9). Odin rides an 8-legged horse. . . . Dates have often brought me surprises.”

One of his many hobbies was the collection of antique sandglasses, on which he was an authority. He also collected sundial inscriptions. Ernst Junger’s birth at Heidelberg is recorded precisely. It fell on 29 March 1895 on the stroke of noon, under Aries, with Cancer in the ascendant. He was the eldest of seven children, one of whom, his beloved brother Friedrich Georg (who died in 1977), was also a writer, a poet and philosopher.

Junger spent the greater part of his childhood and adolescence in Hanover, where his prosperous parents settled shortly after his birth. They possessed a beautiful villa by a lake, where Ernst made his first entomological investigations. He soon developed a dislike for bourgeois life, and spent a couple of unhappy years in boarding schools, whose reports complain of his dreaminess and lack of interest in the boring curriculum. He was later to write: “I had invented for myself a sort of distancing indifference that allowed me to remain connected to reality only by an invisible thread like a spider’s.”

He spent hours reading unauthorised books, and with his brother lived in an exalted universe of their own. They would go wandering round the countryside, and Ernst struck up happy friendships with tramps and gypsies. He was already the Waldganger (wild man of the woods), the anarchist hero of his 1977 novel Eumeswil. It was the beginning of an unending passion for travel and exotic lands. He took the first big step in 1913 by running away from home to join the Foreign Legion, in which he saw service in Oran and Sidi-Bel-Abbes. After five weeks, his father bought him out. Ernst was to write about this escapade in Kinderspielen (“Children’s Games”, 1936). His father promised that if he passed his Abitur (school-leaving examination) he would be allowed to join an expedition to Mount Kilimanjaro. So Junger swotted away at the Gildermeister Institut, whose grim atmosphere is evoked in Die Steinschleuder (“The Catapult“, 1973), a novel in the great tradition of German school stories.

Junger passed his exam in August 1914 and at once volunteered for the army, in which he fought on the French front with exceptional courage all through the First World War. Wounded four times, he received the highest German military honour, the Order of Merit created by Friedrich II: he outlived all those who also received it. Out of his wartime experiences was born Stahlgewittern (“Storm of Steel”, 1920), which he had to publish at his own expense. This story of the horrors of modern warfare was drawn from his wartime notebooks, often written in the heat of battle on the Western Front. It remains one of the greatest works about the First World War, along with those by Erich Maria Remarque, Henri Barbusse, e.e. cummings, David Jones and Lucien Descaves.

Junger stayed in the army until 1923, when he left and began studying zoology at the University of Leipzig and at Naples. He married Gretha von Jeinsen and his son Ernst was born in 1926. In 1927 they moved to Berlin, where he became a member of the national revolutionary group led by Niekisch (arrested by Hitler in 1937 and kept in a concentration camp until the end of the Second World War). He also got to know Ernst von Salomon, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Toller and Alfred Kubin, as well as the publisher Rowohlt. He began travelling widely, to Sicily, Rhodes, the Dalmatian coast, Norway, Brazil and the Canaries, and made the acquaintance of Andre Gide in Paris. These travels had a great influence on all his writings, most noticeable in his superb novel Heliopolis (1949) – the most elegantly learned, eloquently written and hauntingly convincing science- fiction story ever written.

Goebbels tried in vain to draw him into the ranks of the Nazi hierarchy in 1931, and he refused to be elected to the German Academy of Letters because it was dominated by national socialist timeservers. In 1932 Junger produced a very significant book, Der Arbeiter (“The Worker”), which is nevertheless one of his least-known works. It was long out of print until Martin Heidegger, himself besmirched with Nazi collaboration, persuaded him to risk letting it be reissued in 1963. It presents the mythical figure of standardised modern man as “The Worker” whose pragmatism and nihilism destroy the old traditional categories of peasant, soldier and priest, foretelling an unprecedented reversal of temporal power in our collapsing cultures where an intellectual and artistic elite has no place.

Related to this theme is a later work, Das Aladdinproblem (1983), in which he asks who will rub the magic lamp of destructive science and dehumanising technology: “With the heavens empty, we live in the Age of Uranium: how can we believe our modern Aladdin’s lamp will not produce some unimaginable monster?” Der Arbeiter is also an important theoretical study of the political history of the Thirties in Germany, and has been considered by critics like Georg Lukacs and Walter Benjamin to have been the ideological matrix of national-socialist ideas. But Junger’s links with national socialism were infinitely complex. He was a serving officer, partisan of the revolutionary right, a sort of conservative anarchist, hostile to the Weimar Republic, yet he refused all honours and promotions.

Unable to bear the rising tide of Hitlerism, he left Berlin for the quiet of the countryside at Kirchhorst, where in February 1939 he began the painful drafting of Auf den Marmorklippen. Its anti-Nazi tone is obvious, but the book was published in September, the month war was declared. On the Marble Cliffs was part of my wartime reading, and I well remember the excitement it caused when the translation was published by John Lehmann just after the war.

With the outbreak of war, Junger was given the rank of captain and took part in the invasion of France, during which he did his utmost to spare civilians and protect public monuments. Posted to Paris, he became a well-known figure in the literary salons of the time like the Thursday reunions of artists and writers at Florence Gould’s. He made good friends of authors like the acid-tongued critic Leautaud and above all Marcel Jouhandeau, whose scholarly ease and wit in writing seemed to Junger exceptional at a time of growing artistic barbarity. Even after their condemnation for collaboration with the Nazis, Junger praised the characters and writings of Chardonne, Celine (whom he did not like), Brasillach and Drieu de la Rochelle, while his admiration for Cocteau, Sasha Guitry and actresses like Arletty was as sincere as that for artists like Braque and Picasso, whose studios he frequented.

His journals of this period are studded with all these famous names. However, he was indirectly implicated in Stauffenberg’s attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944, and requested to leave the army and return home to Kirchhorst, where he spent the rest of the war, composing a text on Die Friede (“Peace”). His son Ernst, in prison for opposition to Hitler, was despatched to the Italian front and killed on 29 November in the marble quarries at Carrara by Allied snipers.

After German defeat and capitulation, despite his firm denials of having supported Nazism, Junger encountered the shrill hostility of Marxist and so-called liberal critics who accused him of being its predecessor. They even criticised his scholarly, noble, refined style, calling it frigid, elitist and academic. He writes of his experiments with drugs in Annaherungen (“Approaches”, 1970), influenced by Aldous Huxley’s works on the same subject. He finally settled at Wilfingen in the house of the Master Forester attached to the ancestral home of his executed friend Graf Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, where in 1959 he founded the literary review Antaios with Mircea Eliade. By 1977, his father, mother, brother and wife had all died. He remarried, taking as his wife Liselotte Lohrer, a professional archivist and literary scholar.

All through the Seventies and Eighties Junger travelled widely. In 1979, he visited Verdun and was awarded the town’s Peace Medal. In 1982 he received a final literary consecration with the award of the City of Frankfurt’s Goethe Prize, which aroused violent protest among his detractors. In 1984, he again made a pilgrimage to Verdun, with Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President Francois Mitterrand to pay homage to the victims of two world wars. In 1992, there was extraordinary confirmation of Junger’s anti-Nazi stance with the discovery of a top-secret document proving that his fate was in the balance just before the Third Reich’s capitulation and during the final days Hitler spent in the Wolfs-Schanze, the very headquarters where he was wounded by the Stauffenberg bomb.

The document is dated December 1944. It is addressed by Dr Freisler, president of the Volksgericht (People’s Court) to Martin Bormann, Hitler’s right-hand man. Freisler informs Bormann that the proceedings to be taken against Captain Junger are to be cancelled. Junger had been indicted on account of his novel On the Marble Cliffs and the “defeatist” opinions he had expressed at his old colleague Commandant Stulpnagel’s HQ in Paris, not long before the latter’s suicide. Freisler reveals that on 20 November 1944 the Fuhrer himself had given the order by telephone from the Wolfs- Schanze that the matter was not to be pursued any further. Freisler ends his letter with “Heil Hitler!”, then adds a postscript: “I am sending you three dossiers on the affair. The Fuhrer wishes to have his orders executed immediately.”

In his Journals, Junger notes that the Gestapo had described him at that period in Paris as “an impenetrable, highly suspect individual”. He comments in a 1992 interview: “It was no surprise to me. After all, it conformed to the pattern of my horoscope. Ever since my schooldays I’ve been accustomed to that kind of unpleasantness.” Ernst Junger’s work is all of a piece — highly literary, beautifully sonorous, excitingly visual, intellectually profound and stimulating. It is the life work of an aristocrat of letters, and one of the best tributes to it has been made by another literary patriarch, Julien Gracq: “The hard, smooth enamelling that seems to armour his prose against the touch of too great a familiarity would seem to us perhaps a little frigid if we did not know, and if we never lost consciousness of the fact while reading, that it has been tempered in an ordeal of fire.”

That is a fitting eulogy for one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

Ernst Junger, writer: born Heidelberg, Germany 29 March 1895; married 1925 Gretha von Jeinsen (died 1960; two sons deceased), 1962 Liselotte Lohrer; died Wilflingen, Germany 17 February 1998.

Noticeably absent from this obituary is any mention of religion, which is unfortunate. I find great solace that this man, who retained his wits sharply until his death, converted to Roman Catholicism at the ripe age of 101 and died in the bosom and sacraments of the Catholic Church. While there are similar conversion stories of remarkable men who converted after a long lifetime of exhaustive study and moral exploration, his conversion is particularly meaningful to me. While I am no Ernst Jünger, by both blood and conviction, I am northwestern European and a Teutonophile: that the very best modern German man saw fit to do exactly what I did — that is, make an adult conversion to Rome — gladdens me exceedingly. A man such as him — a Western man in the best sense of the term who had lived life to its maximal fullness in every way — decided after seeing virtually everything a man can see and thinking about over in a lifetime came to the conclusion that the ancient faith of Rome was true is inspiring beyond measure. Truly this was a man who drunk deeply of virtually every idea and experienced virtually every political and social movement — all in the great vacillations of the greatest privations intermixed with periods of abundance. From a human perspective, he was someone that saw hope and despair, in both a people and in his heart, wax and wane repeatedly. Such a man knew the scope of life as few ever have — and after surveying all of it, he cast his lot with the Nazarene and the Catholic Church. It is true that we live in an appalling age of nihilism and apostasy in our time, but I am gratified that Rome continues to attract the very best of men even if loses millions more of mediocre and self-centered. It is a testament to the powerful and enduring attraction that is Christ as mediated through the Church He founded — a Church that uniquely fits the soul of the most virtuous men of the West.

Now, the argument from authority is the weakest of all arguments; that said, hostile and indifferent non-Catholics who nonetheless care about the survival of Western Civilization and bemoan the depths of depravity into which we have sunk ought to take something from his conversion. Even if it does not result in a similar conversion, it ought to communicate to every non-Catholic Westerner who cares about the West that Catholicism is not merely a part of our history but a living force that continues to attract men of the highest quality. That means it ought to never be tarnished or mocked even by those men who stand aloof from her.

*        *        *

Jünger, as it clear from above, wrote a great deal — this review only addresses one of his earliest published works: Storm of Steel, which is a first-person account of his experience as a soldier and officer during the First World War. It is a beautiful — if tragic — account of that senseless killing field. It represents the genre of a “soldier’s story” as well as any that I have read, and while it details the horror of the mechanized monster that is modern war, it is neither the glorification of war nor its condemnation. Somewhere in between, Storm of Steel is an account of a man of honor doing his duty without apologizing for it — indeed, if anything, it is the pronouncement of his good fortune to be among the generation that was able to do it. To the modern reader — no doubt a collection of beta men (or, in Nietzsche’s pithier words, “last men”) — such a sentiment after reading the horrors and carnage that Jünger saw and experienced is virtually inexplicable. But then again men of today use words like duty, honor, and fatherland as punchlines — something to be mocked by men who get pedicures. Such is the distance between us and him and the whole of his generation that passed.

The First World War is a confounding — and depressing — topic for me. I have studied it from different angles and perspectives. I have thought about it for seemingly hundreds of hours. I have lamented it and in particular its senselessness. In its essence, WWI was a collective civilizational suicide pact — the destruction of Europe’s finest and the impoverishment of Europe’s future. On the eve of August 1914, European civilization (late-stage Western Civilization) was ascendent around the globe. The war ended that ascent definitively and decisively. What is more, it is virtually impossible to understand why the leaders of Europe decided — in unison — to kill all their best young men and destroy and impoverish their countries simultaneously. The lack of reason or cause, I suppose, bothers me most. Western Civilization was mortally wounded by November 1918 and its self-inflicted wound was utterly meaningless.

But this is not a story of the war’s meaninglessness — it is a story of one of those best men who happened, unbelievably, to survive and tell the tale. Throughout, Jünger speaks for the millions who died — he gives voice to those we lost and what we lost even if we did not lose Jünger. This is a book that communicates the patriotic enthusiasm that swept over Germany, and, by extension, the whole of Europe at the outset of the war. He writes:

We had come from lecture halls, school desks and factory workbenches, and over the brief weeks of training, we had bonded together into one large and enthusiastic group. Grown up in an age of security, we shared a yearning for danger, for the experience of the extraordinary. We were enraptured by war.

The enthusiasm, which he shared with many of his generation, is seemingly out-of-place considering that carnage and hellfire that they would face. Likewise, the enthusiasm did not reflect a belief in the ideological righteousness of the cause beyond the ardent patriotism in the breasts of the men who fought. Consider his view of the enemy, which is infused with a latent sense of chivalry from a bygone era:

Throughout the war, it was always my endeavour to view my opponent without animus, and to form an opinion of him as a man on the basis of the courage he showed. I would always try and seek him out in combat and kill him, and I expected nothing else from him. But never did I entertain mean thoughts of him. When prisoners fell into my hands, later on, I felt responsible for their safety, and would always do everything in my power for them.

We learn early in this book what kind of man this is — and he displays a remarkable consistency throughout in terms of his character.

Jünger’s account is not about military strategy per se although as an officer and leader of men in various battles, the tactics and strategy are always there for consideration. No, this is an account of the primal nature of war — especially the vicious and unforgiving nature of mechanized trench warfare. While this book is not like Guy Sajer’s Forgotten Soldier in that the literary motif of the fog of war is used in the writing itself, there is a distinct chaos that seems never far from the surface in Storm of Steel. But there is something alive — and dare I say beautiful — in the horror of what he describes. It is the continuous paradox of life — man never feels more alive than when he faces death in a real and meaningful way. And death was everywhere in Jünger’s account.

One could almost say that his literary talents created a battlefield aesthetic in which the war was a visual tableau and spectacle — even in its destruction and mangled reality. He paints an intense picture of the trenches, nighttime patrols, and terrifying infantry and storm trooper attacks. Artillery is everywhere and these men lived under constant bombardment. We get a sense of the drip-drip maddening effect of the barrages coupled with the occasional direct hits, which leave multiple men mangled beyond recognition. But we also get a sense of the indomitable esprit de corps of these men; he writes:

Even if ten out of twelve men had fallen, the two survivors would surely meet over a glass on their first evening off, and drink a silent toast to their comrades, and jestingly talk over their shared experiences. There was in these men a quality that both emphasized the savagery of war and transfigured it at the same time: an objective relish for danger, the chevaleresque urge to prevail in battle.

And there is the constant vagaries and senselessness of who dies and how — death is something always lurking and stealing people away in a completely haphazard way. If there is a hidden metaphor in the book as it relates to the meaningless of the war — at least in a geopolitical sense — it is the caprice of who dies and who does not. That said, Jünger does not strike me as intentionally embedding such devices, but it was nonetheless something that struck me repeatedly.

He does not glorify battle per se but there is an unapologetic quality of the writing that conveys the veiled Germanic warrior of an age lost in the mist of time. The suffering and privations — the cold, damp, and hungry conditions — only add laurels of the might and mane of the men who endured and fought. His mode of writing, which builds on a contemporaneous journal that Jünger kept throughout the war, keeps the action moving in an almost herky-jerky fashion that gives us a sense the vicissitudes of soldiers moving hither and thither without always understanding why. Consider this example of his style:

These moments of nocturnal prowling leave an indelible impression. Eyes and ears are tensed to the maximum, the rustling approach of strange feet in the tall grass in an unutterably menacing thing. Your breath comes in shallow bursts; you have to force yourself to stifle any panting or wheezing. There is a little mechanical click as the safety-catch of your pistol is taken off; the sound cuts straight through your nerves. Your teeth are grinding on the fuse-pin of the hand-grenade. The encounter will be short and murderous. You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the huntsmen, and the terror of the quarry. You are a world to yourself, saturated with the appalling aura of the savage landscape.

For those who might have seen it, the recent film 1917 uses the cinematic technique of equating the runtime of the film with the sequence of action presented by the film — i.e., the film is a two-hour film that depicts two hours in 1917; it has some similarities to Storm of Steel, not so much in the passage of time or the length of the book, but the work is action-oriented with little dedicated space for philosophical musings other than what is relevant to the action.

Like other war stories, it is a coming-of-age story — innocence and enthusiasm giving way to death and gravitas. The book details Jünger’s progression of increasing responsibilities and dangers. He is eventually trained as a storm trooper who leads offensive raids towards the end of the war. The experience he and his fellows gain always comes at a cost; he writes, “[i]n war you learn your lessons, and they stay learned, but the tuition fees are high.” The book reaches its crescendo during these accounts of the offensive storm trooper raids including the one in which his final injuries were sustained that effectively put him out of the war for good. Both the glorification and vivification that come from war — especially that war — are recounted by him in an evocative way; for example, he writes of his time as a storm trooper:

Trench fighting is the bloodiest, wildest, most brutal of all. … Of all the war’s exciting moments none is so powerful as the meeting of two storm troop leaders between narrow trench walls. There’s no mercy there, no going back, the blood speaks from a shrill cry of recognition that tears itself from one’s breast like a nightmare.

During his service, Jünger was wounded a dozen or so times, each leading to a brief return home or time in the military hospital for recovery. He writes in detail: “[l]eaving out trifles such as ricochets and grazes, I was hit at least fourteen times, these being five bullets, two shell splinters, one shrapnel ball, four hand-grenade splinters and two bullet splinters, which, with entry and exit wounds, left me an even twenty scars.” Despite the comforts, he yearns for the frontlines — he literally cannot wait to return to the hell of the war. Even in his last — and most serious injury — he is anxiously preparing for the winter offensive of 1919 that never came.

Notably, unlike other stories from the losing side, Jünger’s experiences do not lend themselves to cynicism. While Jünger provides a firsthand account of the brutality of trench warfare and the psychological effects it had on the soldiers, there is no sense of complaining in the slightest even when he gives voice to the various temptations that he had to shirk on occasion. The book may be a gripping and unflinching portrayal of the horrors of war, but it is not a demonization of it or his country on account of it. He simply sees himself as a man who did his duty for fatherland and he never exhibits anything remotely like cynicism of the enterprise even if he complains, from time to time, of the mistakes made by generals far off from the tactical reality that he confronted. In that sense, it is a very different book from All Quiet on the Western Front, notwithstanding the many similarities, which exudes a manifested cynicism.

Jünger begins the war and his memoir with the love of his country:

At the sight of the Neckar [River] slopes wreathed with flowering cherry trees, I had a strong sense of having come home. What a beautiful country it was, and eminently worth our blood and our lives. Never before had I felt its charm so clearly. I had good and serious thoughts, and for the first time I sensed that this war was more than just a great adventure.

After all the destruction and carnage, he ends the book with the same love of his country not only intact but somehow strengthened — even as it is tinged with foreboding of what was to come:

Now these [battles]too are over, and already we see once more in the dim light of the future the tumult of the fresh ones. We—by this I mean those youth of this land who are capable of enthusiasm for an ideal—will not shrink from them. We stand in the memory of the dead who are holy to us, and we believe ourselves entrusted with the true and spiritual welfare of our people. We stand for what will be and for what has been. Though force without and barbarity within conglomerate in sombre clouds, yet so long as the blade of a sword will strike a spark in the night may it be said: Germany lives and Germany shall never go under!

We live today among men, at least in the West, who treat their countries with disdain and ignore that they even belong to a people. Where are the men today who might say that Germany — or England — or France — or Spain — or dare I say America — lives? Where are the men who love their fatherlands and love their kin?

*        *        *

Jünger recounts many men he killed during the war. What stands out to me, however, is the one he did not kill:

A bloody scene with no witnesses was about to happen. It was a relief to me, finally, to have the foe in front of me and within reach. I set the mouth of the pistol at the man’s temple — he was too frightened to move — while my other fist grabbed hold of his tunic, feeling medals and badges of rank. An officer; he must have held some command post in these trenches. With a plaintive sound, he reached into his pocket, not to pull out a weapon, but a photograph which he held up to me. I saw him on it, surrounded by numerous family, all standing on a terrace. It was a plea from another world. Later, I thought it was blind chance that I let him go and plunged onward. That one man of all often appeared in my dreams. I hope that meant he got to see his homeland again.

This was a haunting scene. What a waste that war was — what a waste of men such as these. Hidden in this moment in an otherwise unforgiving war is the recognition of the Western sensibility of humanity. True enough it was his duty to kill, but the hope he articulated for the survival of his enemy is rich in meaning and pregnant with the fraternity that exists — or at least once existed — among European men.

When I took the whole of this book in, what struck me more than anything is that a man of twenty-five could write it. Consider too that four of his twenty-five years were not in graduate school but in muddy and bombed-out trenches. Throughout the book are references to themes of Western Civilization, theology, mythology, and philosophy. By no means is this a book that plumbs any of them deeply but the facility of a twenty-five-year-old with all of them demonstrated a greatness in the German psyche that is simply unrecognizable in virtually any men today regardless of age. True enough, Jünger proved to be a gifted writer after the war, but his talents notwithstanding, the civilization that reared him and existed before World War I was astounding.

Why oh why did we allow them all to be killed?

 *        *        *

Saint Martin of Tours, Pray for us.

 

The West is Desperately in Need of a New Elite: A Review-Essay of Maurice Muret’s The Greatness of Elites, Part 2

Go to Part 1.

The Handsome and Good Greek 

Why are the images of the gods of non-Western civilizations monstrous, or unimpressive, or thirsting for blood? Why are they somewhat pedestrian? Look at the gods of the Aztecs, Africans, Hindus, Chinese, Mesopotamians. It is partly because of the subordinate personality of these people, their lack of free individuality, which made men feel small and powerless in face of the mysterious powers of the unknown, and this psychological state instilled fear and terror. The Greek Olympian gods reflect a radically new state of being. The Greek aristocratic culture—in which every noble was equal in dignity and free to exercise his talent and seek glory—instilled respect among its members, a dignified sense of self, an awareness of what is highest among humans; and this state of being led the aristocratic Greeks to envision their gods in humanistic terms, “removed from the mysteries, from the chthonic darkness and ecstasy” of the earth, as Bruno Snell puts it.

The free individuality of the aristocrats, their unwillingness to submit to despotic rulers, allowed the Greeks to conquer the monstrosity and grossness of the underground, to overcome the crude superstitions of the peasants, to leave the dark powers of the earth, and envision instead sky-dwellikng Olympian gods in charge of order, justice, and beauty. The dark forces, the chthonian elements, which retained their power among Greek peasants and within the old psyche of the Greeks, manifested in their bacchanalian festivals and drunken revelries, would sometimes regain their power, but in Greek art and in the Platonic philosophy of seeking perfection, it was the Olympian gods who set the standards. The Olympian gods are noble in their attractiveness and grandeur, combining in their personalities “vitality, beauty, and lucidity”.

This provides a context for understanding Muret’s argument that the ideal or perfect man for the aristocratic elite of ancient Athens was defined by the term “kalokagathia”, by which it was meant the harmonious combination of bodily, moral and spiritual virtues, the “handsome and good Athenian,” beauty with goodness united. This Athenian man was frugal and sober. He was not cruel; if slaves were inflicted with torture, it was for a reason, not for the sake of pleasure, as it was for Eastern tyrants. While the Athenian would open his doors to the shipwrecked person, pity “was a condemnable weakness”. Avoiding all excess, knowing oneself, doing everything in moderation, was a supreme wisdom. Fanaticism was shunned. A handsome and good man had to express himself with “facility and elegance”. The ancient Greek language had a “sonority, a harmony, a suppleness that no language has ever surpassed”. These men envisaged death with serenity, “without excessive anguish”.

The Athenian was a father but also a citizen, an active participant in the politics of his city state, rather than a mere private person. “The young Athenian lived in the public square, the gymnasium, the spas, in the gardens where he met other young people and where he was instructed at the feet of beloved masters”. Their civic dedication to their city was not oppressive; “born subtle and insubordinate, the Greek had a great deal of the critical spirit”. This culture rose in the sixth century BC, and reached full bloom in the fifth century in Athens. Decadence began in the late fifth century, as young men began deserting the gymnasiums for gaming houses, neglecting the exercises “that maintained that sovereign balance between the body and the soul from which was born the nobility and the greatness of the Athenian civilization”. The Macedonian conquests, the turn towards the East, the absorption of the Greek mainland within the Roman empire, would increase the taste for luxury and a private life, diminishing the virtues of the Athenians.

The Roman (and Greek) Citizen-Farmer-Soldier

The senatorial aristocracy had guided the state, not primarily by virtue of natural right, but by virtue of the highest of all rights of representation—the right of the superior, as contrasted with the mere ordinary man.[1]

Whatever could be demanded of an assembly of burgesses like the Roman, which was not the motive power, but the firm foundation of the whole machinery—a sure perception of the common good, a sagacious deference to the right leader, a steadfast spirit in prosperous and evil days, and, above all, the capacity of sacrificing the individual to the general welfare and common comfort of the present for the advantage of the future—all these qualities the Roman community exhibited in so high a degree that, when we look to its conduct as a whole, all censure is lost in reverent admiration.[2] Theodor Mommsen, The History of Rome, vol. 2

There is a common image about the Roman elite consisting of a “patrician” class with a privileged noble status giving it exclusive access to the main offices of the republic and owning large tracts of land worked by slaves captured in their conquests, while excluding the rest of the general body of free Roman citizens, the plebians, small landowners often in debt. Maurice Muret has it right: “the Roman citizen was originally a man given to working in the fields who took to arms when his territory of Latium or the city of Rome, seat of the royalty, was threatened.” The patricians were originally men who worked the land and constituted the Roman army. These patricians were “aristocratic” but for many centuries they were not men living off the labor of others, though they did have more land, and did hire laborers, and later used slave labor in their extended landholding as Rome defeated one rival after another and thereby accumulated land. The elite Muret is focusing on is that of the Republic, which lasted for about 500 years, starting in the sixth century BC. The “austere crucible” in which the soul of the Roman patrician farmer-soldier was formed was a mixture of rural life and camp life; “commerce and the arts were not worthy of those truly free men; … agricultural work conferred on the one who exercised it an undeniable nobility.” “A Roman citizen, no matter how poor he was, was honoured if he lived on the land, cultivated his estate, raised a numerous family.”

Moreover, while it is true that “originally there was no equality between…the patricians belonging to the…senate and the plebeians, considered as foreigners to the city, deprived like the slaves of all civil and political rights”,  eventually “the plebeians raised their head and claimed their rights”.

Muret does not get into this. But it is worth emphasizing that the Roman patrician aristocracy was open to talent. Beginning in the fifth century, the patricians granted the plebeians the right to annually elect their own leaders, the right to appeal to the people and hold plebiscites binding on the whole community, and the right to marry patricians. During the 300s, plebeians were successively allowed to become consults, censors, praetors, pontiffs, and augurs; and, by 300, they had achieved substantial equality with the patricians, with both patricians and the upper plebeians becoming wealthy landowners. The struggle between classes would henceforth be between the “nobiles” consisting of large landowning and commercialized patricians and plebeians, and the poorer plebeians. These nobiles were far removed from their former austere lives of patricians as farmers, though some would retain to the last days of the Republic the values that made Rome great in the first place.

Before I write about these values, as Muret sees them, it should be emphasized that a class of citizen farmers was also a reality in ancient Greece. In fact, only in Western civilization (beyond ancient times) do we find a legacy of family-owned, privately held, small-to-medium homestead farms. In the ancient civilizations of the Near East, and the civilizations of the world thereafter, including India, China, and the Americas, the ruler and his court of blood relatives, administrators and provincial elites, owned most of the land. They had huge estates, from which they extracted taxes and rents from slaves, serfs, indentured servants, or from faceless peasants with tiny plots owned by their clans. It was Greece, roughly between 700 and 300 BC, that saw the emergence of “an autonomous group of independent farmers” for the first time in history, as Victor David Hanson argues in The Other Greeks, The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (1999).

Muret tends to identify the elite with citizens living in urban areas attending gymnasiums, engaged in athletic contests and discussions, and as creators of art. But perhaps we should integrate the farmers of Greece as members of the elite. If Muret thinks the Roman patrician farmers constituted the founding elite of Republican Rome, the ones who created the virtues that sustained this civilization for centuries, why ignore completely the citizen farmers of ancient Greece, who did enjoy rights as full citizens and took on the defense of their communities? Independent farming instilled upon Greeks the ideal that the true test of manhood, of having a good character, is the ability to sustain a family farm, postpone pleasures today, have self-control and patience, for the sake of ensuring the fruits of one’s hard work in the future.

Citizen farmers, then, were not unique to Rome but also a key component of the elite culture of ancient Greece, though in Rome agrarian values went deeper into the soul, whereas in Greece there was an urbane aristocratic culture of artists, philosophers, literary writers, and scientists. This point is important because beyond Greece and Rome, homestead family farms were an important proportion, in varying degrees, of northwestern European medieval-modern agriculture, and of the settler states of America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Only in Western history do we find farmers, the famous “yeomen” who owned their own land and rose gradually to play a role in the industrialization of the West. The image of yeomen farmers as honest, hardworking, virtuous and independent played a significant role in Western republican thought, which originated in Rome. The founding fathers of the U.S., Jefferson and others, believed yeomen were “the most valuable citizens” trusted to be committed to republican values, as contrasted to financiers, bankers, industrialists with their “cesspools of corruption” in the cites.

Another reason to bring up the citizen farmers of Greece is they represented a new consciousness of moderation and justice between the extremes of wealth and poverty, in opposition to the excessive wealth and unrestrained militaristic behavior of power-hungry aristocrats prone to disrupt the unity of city-states by pursuing the interests of their own clan. Muret recognizes that elites without a sense of justice, duty to their own people, respect for tradition, order and prudence, are bound to become parasitic and effeminate in their decadent affluence, as was the case with non-Western elites. Solon, the great Athenian statesman of the early sixth century, is remembered for passing laws aimed at overcoming the endless, divisive squabbling of clannish aristocratic men in the name of harmony, the interests of the middling segments of the farming population, good order, avoidance of extremes, and the insatiable desire for more honors and wealth on the part of tyrannical rich men. He aimed to promote the general good of the city-state. To this end, debt slavery was abolished and those who had been sold abroad were allowed to return as free men. The intention was to support a free, self-sufficient middling class of farmers against the greed of big landowners.

Connected to these citizen farmers, the reforms by Solon, and subsequent reforms by Cleisthenes and Pericles, is the fact that fifth-century Athens was quite democratic, though not in the sense of universal suffrage and mass popular cultural values, but in the extent to which the state was open to participation by citizens, comprising about one-third of the population, excluding slaves, women, and alien residents. Every decision had to be approved by a popular assembly; every judicial decision was subject to appeal to a popular court of some fifty-one citizens, and every official was subject to public scrutiny before taking office.

By the same token, this should not detract us from the reality that Athens remained a city ruled by a small elite of aristocratic families with the means, knowledge and leisure to regulate the affairs of the state. Moreover, an aristocratic spirit of beauty, honor, and heroism permeated Greek life, as Muret correctly points out.

Finally, emphasizing the citizen farmers is also crucial to understanding the origins and nature of the “republican” form of government of Rome, characterized by a balance between monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. An aristocratic class freed from a despotic ruler does not guarantee a republican government. In their primordial tendencies, aristocratic governments are oligarchic rather than republican, although republicanism presupposes the higher (senatorial) authority of a class of aristocrats. Roman aristocrats despised any noble among their ranks who elevated himself above their peers to rule in the interests of the lower classes. Like the Greeks, they viewed aristocrats who attacked the privileges of their noble peers and sought the popular support of plebeians, as tyrants. But, as the plebeians gained substantial equality in citizen rights through the 300s BC, a “democratic” element was added to the Roman government. This democratic element was controlled by the upper plebeians, not the lower landless plebs, which became a mob in the city of Rome. The monarchical element came in the annual election by the Senate of “Consuls” with extensive powers, often holding in wartime the highest military command. The Founding Fathers of the United States Constitution self-consciously assumed the Roman mantle of “res-publica” as their guiding principle of a government organized for the “public good”.

The values of the Roman citizen-farmer-soldier Muret admires were rooted in the austere rural life of its independent farmers. This life gave these men an “undeniable nobility”, a conservative temperament with a “taste for continuity and traditions”, and exhibiting “extreme piety”. We may add to Muret’s observations that not only were people expected to participate in state-sponsored religious rituals and festivals, but each Roman family was expected to perform daily rituals honoring their ancestors and placating various gods. The patrician farmer was seen as a venerable paterfamilias, the high priest of his own household religion. These customs and rites sustained and reinforced Roman identity and greatness for centuries. Romans also developed a very strong sense of civic identity. The patricians saw themselves both as members of their extended families and clannish patron-client groups, and as members of the Roman republic. For a long time they served their city as a matter of public service with patriotic devotion and without seeking to enrich themselves. “In war, the most affluent wished to fight in the front rank”. Muret estimates that “of all the human societies of antiquity,” the most devoted, honest and competent functionaries of the state were the Romans.

The highest virtue of the Romans was virility, strength, energy, self-control, patience in misfortune and sacrifice for the public good. Roman civilization, says Muret, was “more valuable than those it defeated”. In contrast to Carthage, which was maritime and mercantile, a “city of luxury and pleasure”, with an army of mercenaries from multiple places, Rome was a land-based culture with an army of citizen soldiers who identified with Rome and fought for Rome rather than for private gain. “Rome did not make war in the name of a bloody god that it claimed to be the instrument of” but “in the name of the moral superiority of the Roman citizens over peoples that did not yet belong to Rome”. The conquered within Italy who were closely related ethnically to the Romans, it should be added, were gradually granted the same citizenship rights, a precondition for serving in the army.

But as Rome grew rich from its successes and vast amounts of wealth started pouring in, masses of slaves were pushed into working the lands of the rich, while at the same time soldier-farmers were losing their farms from neglect after years of military service and from debt. Moreover, many in the upper classes were involved in commercial undertakings, acting as tax-farmers milking the provinces, the old Roman spirit of discipline, austerity, and virility slowly died away. Muret does not go into this, but it worth noting that the decline of the Roman character is a pervading theme of Roman historiography; already apparent in Cato the Elder (234–149 BC), author of Origins, of which only fragments survive, about the beginnings of Rome up until the victory over Macedonia in 168 BC. Cato eulogized the “Spartan” austerity and simplicity of the early men who built Rome, and lamented the effeminate influence of Greek learning. In the first century BC, Sallust (86–35 BC) saw the old Roman virtues of frugality and piety decline under the influence of luxury and Asiatic indulgences and taste. As Ernst Breisach notes in his Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, “Growing love of money and the lust for power which followed it engendered every kind of evil. Avarice destroyed honour, integrity and every other virtue, and instead taught men to be proud and cruel, to neglect religion and to hold nothing too sacred to sell. … Rome changed: her government, once so just and admirable, became harsh and unendurable”.[3]

The empire certainly lasted a few more centuries until the fifth century AD, demonstrating the remaining greatness of Rome as it declined slowly. Of all the elites Muret examines, the republican Roman elite was indeed the longest lasting, 500 years counting only the Republican era, not the Imperial era that began in the first century AD. This enduring elite should thus be added as another major achievement of Rome, in addition to its famous aqueducts, invention of concrete, creation of the most sophisticated system of roads in the ancient world, its arches, which allowed the weight of buildings to be evenly distributed along various supports in the construction of their bridges, monuments and buildings, the Julian Calendar, its systematic compilation of juristic writings (corpus juris civilis), and its new types of surgical tools.

But it may be that Rome’s greatest legacy was the honor of its citizen-farmer elite, which cannot be taken away from them.

The Liberated Personality of the Renaissance

The next elite Muret celebrates, from Renaissance Italy, a period covering roughly the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, represents “the blossoming of the human species”, resuscitating in some respects the Roman virtues of virility, courage, and energy—with the difference that these were the “first modern men” in their “exaltation of the liberated personality”, “the primacy of the self”. Muret is clearly following Jacob Burckhardt’s well-known thesis that the Renaissance gave birth to modernity because it gave birth to individualism. In the Middle Ages, Burckhardt wrote, “man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation. … In Italy this veil first melted into air … Man became a spirited individual, and recognized himself as such.” Among the humanists, the painters, architects, and condottiere, he observed “an unbridled subjectivity,” men obsessed with fame, status, appearances. This nurtured an intense self-awareness, unlike their medieval forebears, who were trapped within a collective identity.

Muret does say that in Rome “individualism never prevailed. The submission to the civic ideal began there from the top.” It is a common view that “freedom” in ancient Greece also consisted in the right of citizens to participate in political assemblies, choose their leaders and voice their views, without a modern conception of the right of individuals to enjoy “negative liberties” as private citizens to peacefully pursue their own lifestyle and happiness without interference from the state. This is true; freedom in ancient times was primarily civic in character. He is postulating a higher degree of individualism and free personality among the men of the Renaissance. Muret however is careful not to dismiss the achievements of the Middle Ages, briefly mentioning the attenuating effects on barbarism of the new ethos of chivalry along with “the critical spirit” of the scholastic method with its dialogical way of ascertaining the merits and flaws of different answers. He recognizes the major contribution of Christianity to the humanization of European elites with its virtues of compassion, fidelity, humanity piety, and sincerity, although he knows that even if Machiavelli expediently called upon princes to exhibit these qualities, the more powerful traits of the Renaissance condottiere, the Italian captains in command of mercenary companies, were ambition, excessive pride, and pursuit of power without scruples

The history of the gradual emergence of Western individualism is very intricate. Colin Morris in The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200 (1972) and Larry Siedentop in Inventing the Individual (2017) both believe that “the Western view of the value of the individual owes a great deal to Christianity”, for this was a religion that recognized every individual as worthy of dignity and emphasized the inner conscience and obligation of each person to lay himself open to God. Aaron Gurevich in The Origins of European Individualism (1995) goes further back in time for a latent conception of the human personality seen in the representation of the hero in the pagan Germanic, Scandinavian, Icelandic, and Irish epics of the early Middle Ages. In such sagas, the very idea of the hero speaks of accomplishments performed by a particular name, his acts as an individual and whether they bring him glory and reputation.

Nevertheless, the Renaissance does witness, as Muret says, “an excess of the self”, a belief, in the words of Leon Battista Alberti, that “what man wants he can do”. This was the ideal of the courtier, “equally given to the works of the mind and to the exercises of the body”, trained in riding horses and fencing, educated in the Classics and the fine arts, able to use elegant and brave words, with proper bearing and gestures, and a warrior spirit. Pico della Mirandola argued that central to the dignity of man was the exercise of the free will that God gave man: “You can descend to the level of the beast and you can raise yourself to becoming a divine being”. In the non-Western world, one was born with a pre-given role in life, predetermined norms and forms of behavior, without free will. But we should not forget that before recent decades, the free will of man entailed formidable duties and obligations to aristocratic virtues and respect for ancestors. Only thusly could the Renaissance have produced such a magnificent sequence of great men: Petrarch, Masaccio, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo Da Vinci, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Raphael, Titian.

The Gentilshommes of Seventeenth Century-France

The fourth elite Muret chooses may strike some as unusual: it is not the elite of the Spanish “Golden Age”, from about 1580 to 1680, the age of the great conquistadores led by Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, the magnificent painters El Greco and Velázquez, and the celebrated novel Don Quixote by Cervantes. It is neither the elite of Elizabethan England in the 1500s, Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh, William Shakespeare and Francis Drake. It is the French gentilhomme of the 1600s, men who “delighted in cordial and cheerful conversations”, strongly influenced by the bourgeois urbane values of civility, who knew the art of pleasing the ladies with good conversations, men of letters without being pedantic, able to play the lute, the guitar, and games of chance, men of leisure who did not work to eat—benevolent, tolerant and welcoming.

Muret’s choice reflects his belief that the seventeenth century was the greatest cultural age of France, above the commonly known eighteenth-century Enlightenment. This was the age of La Rochefoucauld, famous for his Maximes, a collection of 500 epigrammatic reflections on human behaviour in which he sees self-interest as the source of all actions; Jean Racine, known for his great tragedies, from Bérénice (1670) to Iphigénie (1675); Blaise Pascal, best known for his Pensées;  the comic genius Molière; Pierre Corneille, the writer of classical tragedies, Horace (1640), Cinna (1643), and Polyeucte (1643), and René Descartes, one of the greatest mathematicians and philosophers in human history. Muret mentions women, including Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet, known for hosting the salon Hôtel de Rambouillet, praised in her day “as a model of respectability, wisdom, gentleness”. Corneille read his tragedies at her salon.

For Muret, this “polite society” was truly aristocratic despite its integration with the bourgeoisie. There was “nothing popular” about this age. Whereas Shakespeare and Schiller in Germany appealed to the hearts of the masses, Racine and Corneille consciously addressed a very exclusive audience. Unlike the men of the next century, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, they were not interested in moralizing and changing society. Muret sees a healthier form of reasoning in this age, not the glorification of reason of the Enlightenment, which sought to recreate society from the ground up out of ideas concocted by intellectuals in complete disregard for tradition, order, and prudence. In Muret’s view, seventeenth-century France achieved the right combination of “innate good taste, acquired refinement, unconscious aestheticism, triumphant reason [of the Cartesian kind which sought to understand nature], and unshakeable good sense”.

For Muret, Mme. de Lafayette and her “masterpiece” novel, La Princesse de Clèves is fully infused with the ideal of the true gentlemen of the age. “The Princess of Clèves is almost a saint by virtue of being a gentlewoman. All her words, her acts betray what one should indeed call that ‘ideal of reason’, the last word in wisdom. … Nothing is more classical than the conception of life in general, and of love in particular, that emerges from The Princesse de Clèves. And in this pure ideal what moral superiority to the sensational and subversive novelties that Romanticism was to set in fashion two centuries later”. The Princesse de Clèves, which I enjoyed reading during the lockdown summer of 2020, is recognized as the “first novel” in French, the prototype of the “modern novel” in its depth of psychological analysis, a quality of which is how feelings are conveyed through internal monologue. Muret could have explored this as a new facet in the exaltation of the individual, this time by way of an “internal dialogue,” that is, the rise of a voice inside one’s head that self-consciously examines one’s thoughts and feelings and subjects them to critical analysis, on the way towards making a decision. In nonwestern societies, this voice barely developed. The voices non-Westerners hear are the voices of pre-established feelings, norms, conventions, not the voices of a self deciding what to do through its own inner reflections. This inner self was to become the source of much creativity in the West, though ultimately it is a very dangerous path, as we are witnessing now, to cut off the self from the surrounding world into a world within that is nevertheless controlled, no longer by traditions and heritage, but by “limbic capitalist” corporations.

The English Victorian Gentleman

The English gentleman of the Victorian era is the fifth and last elite Muret celebrates. Why does Muret define this elite as “aristocratic” even though it was born after the liberal Glorious Revolution of 1688, which established the principles of frequent parliaments and freedom of speech within Parliament, and even though he believes that this elite came to rule Britain only during the mid-nineteenth century when the industrial revolution was spreading and voting rights were being expanded to the middle classes—and even though he believes that this elite was still dominant in the 1930s when he wrote his book.

Muret notes that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there was a British aristocracy “in the sense of noble blood and military customs”. But this class disappeared, and a new “gentry” class that esteemed money and bourgeois comfort over military honor and virtue emerged. This new class with its “rather low ideals” would remain rather uncouth for some time, acquiring refined and courteous manners only slowly during the eighteenth century. By the Victorian age a new aristocratic elite “open to all sorts of talents”—but including big landowners with prestigious family pedigrees—had consolidated itself with new ideals. These were still “practical, down-to-earth” ideals, a fine country house, honest and healthy occupations, but with a strong civic commitment for the laws of the land, piety towards God, and a well-disposed to advance the well-being of the community as a way of showing themselves worthy of their wealth.

Notwithstanding their individualism—their unique “history of liberty”, the British had a strong “group consciousness” in their insular island, a national identity nurtured by their apartness from continental Europe. “On the continent, nobles and bourgeois, workers and peasants detest and fight one another. Not in England; they support one another, but even while maintaining their distance, they are capable of acting in common for the general interest.” The same individualist gentleman who believes in liberty and careers open to talent is “rigorously conformist, respectful of all the rules and all the institutions, the gentleman will bow lower before the most ancient and the most sacred: the monarchy”. This conformism, it should be noted, was not tribal or based on kinship ties; it was conformism to the voluntary or contractually based associations and rules created by the modern Brits.

This group consciousness came along with snobbism, “the superstitious respect for social positions, the caste spirit raised to a system”, which Muret sees as an attribute that has allowed, and will continue to allow, this elite to mould British society for a long time. This snobbism entailed a “high notion of his duties as a man … towards God, towards his neighbour, even towards himself”. “The obligation to comport oneself and maintain one’s respectability … a mask of impassibility … no effusion in public … a hearty handshake and not these resounding kisses that fill the continental railway stations with sounds that seemed vulgar”. This gentleman is “something of a sinner, but he will keep his sin to himself and his partner; he will sin behind doors, secretly”. “To keep one’s mouth shut is indeed an English ideal, just as to speak a lot is a Latin ideal”.

A preference for manly sports at the expense of the intellect was another attribute of this elite. Practical results, accomplishments, were more important than beautiful ideas. Artists and intellectuals can’t be trusted, “they change laws and customs all the time”. Muret notes the seriousness with which English schools took sports, not only to keep young men fit, but to teach them rules, combined with corporal punishment, “they box and they whip, they do fist-fights and wield the cane,” which has nurtured an English temperament that can be “ferocious and indomitable” when there is a need to act. “To act when one must, to refrain when one must, to intervene at the right moment, is a veritable science that is simple only in appearance”.

This English elite made concessions to feminism “with benevolence, from a gentleman to a lady, in a chivalrous spirit, if not a gallant one … but the gentleman has not, for all that, been dashed from his throne. His authority remains the keystone of the edifice”. Yet, a few years after Muret wrote this, the Victorian gentlemen disappeared, England lost its empire, and now it is in a state of self-flagellation about its patriarchal, imperialistic, and racist past. Vilfredo Pareto’s famous observation is quoted in the opening page of The Greatness of Elites: “History is a cemetery of aristocracies”. The difference is that the British elite of the post-World War II years willingly went about condemning and destroying this Victorian heritage for a Britain made up of Africans, Muslims and Asians. Though Britain still produces many White Olympic winners, a culture of genocidal self-denigration, without parallels in history, prevails at the top.

Can We Learn Something Today About the German Elite Between 1750–1914?

So, having read about great elites in history, which one do you prefer? Or, which one has qualities, virtues, that can be realistically adapted to our current times? The answer may seem self-evident enough, the British. They are closest to us in time, existing within a liberal representative society that was undergoing rapid modernization—but then this elite disappeared suddenly, without leaving a legacy. Still, one lesson we can learn from the British case, while it lasted, is that it did showcase for posterity a strong sense of group consciousness and civic conformism in a society that was otherwise liberal in the classical sense of this word.

Many on the right talk about becoming “tribal again” without realizing that tribalism among Whites has been slowly eroded since ancient times, and demolished with the imposition of monogamy and abolition of polygamous clan networks by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages, which led to formation of many civic associations, towns based on citizenship, universities and monasteries, contractual business partnerships. We already see the concept of citizen in the ancient Greek city-states, above tribal identities, developing further in Rome’s republican form of government. But it is worth realizing that, as the British case shows, this civic unity prevailed as long as strong monogamous families existed and there was a strong sense of civic identity within a nation state that presupposed in its origins an ethnic core and a Christian religion, with most citizens deeply rooted in their local communities, marrying and having children, attending schools where they were proud of a British identity.

Muret blames the “masses”, “socialism” and the enlargement of the state. But we may want to examine the inbuilt progressive logic of liberalism, how this ideology has continually been pushing for “progressive reforms”, the elimination of all traditional restraints against freedom of choice, the extension of individual rights to “oppressed minorities”, the promotion of equal voting rights to everyone irrespective of standards, the demonization of aristocratic elites as “hierarchical”, the promotion of the notion that everyone is equally capable and that inequalities are a function of illiberal privileges and monopolies, the allocation of special rights to overcome “systemic inequalities,” the idea that everyone in the world has “human rights” including the right to a nationality of their choice—coupled with a capitalist economy that reduces everyone to rootless consumers and producers, and melts all that is solid into thin air.

I believe that Germany, from about the 1750s to 1914, provides an example of an elite that we can learn from. Muret, a French man, clearly has an animosity towards Germany, though he recognizes its immense cultural achievement during this period. The ideal of this elite can be summed up with the word “Bildung”, which means a state that consciously strives to nurture what Goethe called “the higher human being within us”. Muret dislikes the militarism of this Germany, how it was based on “the exaltation of the masses to the detriment of the individual”, citing Nietzsche’s criticism of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s government, which culminated in World War I. We can agree with Muret insofar as Germany did take a turn in the 1930s and 1940s that was excessively militaristic and against “the good European”.

But before 1914, Germany was the only powerful White nation attempting to create a path that would come to terms with modernity, while advocating a nationalism that emphasized the priority of the freedom of Germans as a people over the rights of abstract individuals. This rejection of the universalist pretensions of Enlightenment liberalism did not amount to a rejection of modernity. The Germans of the post-1850s were the most advanced Europeans in science, technology, military power, levels of education, and culture generally. Germans wanted a path that would be balanced with its unique history, respect for aristocratic authority, together with a propertied and cultured middle class, working in unison with a powerful state acting in the interests of the Germans, with the highest capacity for independence and strength among the competing powers of the world, rather than a state acting at the behest of a dominant capitalist class pursuing its own interests, or at the behest of a democratic mob easily controlled by private companies and media. At the same time, Germans during this period enjoyed considerable individual liberties, universities were open to merit; there as a constitutional monarchy, rule by established procedure, a high degree of economic freedom, and a truly dynamic cultural atmosphere which encouraged the full development of individuality in culture.

It will be very hard for Western nations to recapture the aristocratic-citizen virtues of their past. We are heading into a high-tech, AI-controlled society, driven by the imperatives of capitalist globalism with socialist provisions and mandated racial equity. Can we learn something from the Russian and Chinese elites in their adoption of the newest technologies without embracing Western liberalism? Or is the West inherently liberal, irremediably committed to individual rights? The only way out, as I see it, is a state of affairs characterized by persistent societal breakdown, widespread racial tension, discontent, and delegitimization of the current elite, leading towards a serious consideration of an alternative beyond liberalism.


[1] Theodore Mommsen, The History of Rome, vol. 2, trans. W. P. Dickson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894), 386.

[2] Ibid., 403–404.

[3] Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (University of Chicago Press, 1983).

The West is Desperately in Need of a New Elite: A Review-Essay of Maurice Muret’s “The Greatness of Elites,” Part 1 of 2

A request for me to review Maurice Muret’s The Greatness of Elites could not have come at a more opportune time. I have been thinking a lot about the treacherous character of our ruling class and the possibility of envisioning a new elite capable of leading us out of our ethnocidal trajectory. The masses on their own can’t reverse it, and neither can isolated and powerless dissidents who are educated but have no financial power and no political network within the upper classes.

In Russia a small group of Marxists managed to persuade a wide proportion of the Russian-Jewish educated classes to join them, with considerable influence inside the universities and across the middle and educated classes and professions. This is not the case today in the West. The most we have are some mainstream conservatives who agree with the fundamentals of the left. Dissidents have very little intellectual capital. Educated Whites, school teachers, university professors, doctors, scientists, lawyers, the middle classes, are almost invariably liberal. There are strong chances for populist political movements, but as crucially important as populists are in challenging the worst excesses of liberalism, populism wants a return to an earlier version of liberalism, say, the 1990s version, and even if they take power, all the institutions and the deep state, will remain controlled by the left and the globalist capitalist rulers. Every peasant revolt in history has been suppressed without support from above. Peasants and Parisian shopkeepers and artisans played an important role in the French Revolution of 1789, but it was the “Third Estate” nurtured by the Enlightenment, combined with the power of the bourgeoisie, with its growing wealth, that made the revolution in law and political structures possible. The Trucker Convoy was defeated in Canada without even the support of the Conservative Party, little or untrustworthy support from the mainstream media and the educated professional groups.

These questions have made me think about the nature of the ruling classes at other periods in Western history. There is a strong inclination against elites even among dissidents, rooted in the democratic impulse of Whites, their inclination for equality, despite their statements to the contrary. Nevertheless, in comparison to today’s elites, we can point to various points in American history when the elites were worthy of great admiration. It has been argued by Tom Cutterham in Gentlemen Revolutionaries: Power and Justice in the New American Republic (2017) that the American Revolution was led by men who set themselves above the ordinary, common man—by the merchants, lawyers, planters, and landowners who comprised the independent republic’s elite. Status, “not ideology or equal rights,” motivated these men who emphasized hierarchy and obedience in the 1780s. It can’t be denied, however, that the ideology these men proposed, natural rights liberalism, was about equality, and that their ideal was about the pursuit of private comfort, happiness, pleasure, and riches.

Maurice Muret’s The Greatness of Elites, originally published in 1939, and now published by Arktos, offers only five examples of elites deserving the highest admiration, and Americans are not included. Alexander Jacob, who translated this book with an introduction, deserves much praise for bringing Muret’s book to our attention. I had never heard of Muret. That’s how efficient liberalism has been suppressing the most educated men proposing ideas that question liberal democratic politics. Jacob is the translator of a number of similarly neglected authors and books, including The Future of the Intelligentsia & For a French Awakening by Charles Maurras, The Significance of the German Revolution by Edgar Julius Jung, and several of his translation have appeared in The Occidental Observer and The Occidental Quarterly. He has also written a number of important books about Richard Wagner, Indo-European mythology, Henry More, and, indeed, an essay-book entitled, Nobilitas: A Study of European Aristocratic Philosophy from Ancient Greece to the Early Twentieth Century (2001). This study praises in particular the aristocratic philosophy and “racialistic elitism” of Germany in the nineteenth to early twentieth century.

Muret’s greatest elites in history, however, exclude the Germans. His choice of the best five elites may surprise you:

  • The “handsome and good” Athenian citizen of the age of Pericles, fifth century BC.
  • The “realistic, practical and virile” Roman citizen during the long Republican period.
  • The Renaissance “humanist” courtier with his pride and “liberated personality”.
  • The cordial, pleasant, conversationalist French “gentilhomme” during the age of Louis XIV.
  • The “snobbish” British gentleman of the Victorian age with his fine house, honest occupations, respect for the laws, piety, and love of manly sports.

These elites were capable of moulding society in their own image. Muret believes that without elites there can’t be great periods in history. Democracy and equality of rights are bound to destroy the capacity of elites to mould their nations in their own image, for they imply liberation of the “naturally perverse instincts” of the masses and the creation of tyrannies based on appeals to these instincts by populist demagogues.

The Limbic Capitalist Western Elite

So what exactly are the attributes that Muret found in these elites? Let’s start by saying that the current Western ruling classes are devoid of all the attributes the above elites had. They are simultaneously agents of the imperatives of capitalist global accumulation and ideological advocates of immigration replacement and transexualism. The other day Conrad Black, a wealthy businessman, penned an article allaying fears about the rise of China claiming that the US is the greatest nation in history and that it will resume its advance in the next administration, without displaying any worries about the decomposition of American education, the systematic looting and killings by Blacks, the widespread drug addiction, the spread of uninhabitable cities, and the migrant invasion into the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia. Vdare has just presented evidence showing “that some 145,695 white people—including 35,000 women—have been killed by blacks in the last 53 years”! Conrad Black, a member of the Western elite, is most likely benefitting from this state of affairs. The Pew Research Center reported in 2020 that “income growth was the most rapid for the top 5%” of Americans between 1971 and 2019, which coincided, I might add, with the intensification of mass immigration. On the other hand, the share of American adults who live in middle-income households decreased from 61% in 1971 to 51% in 2019.

Condemning the “capitalist ruling elite” is not popular in conservative and even dissident circles, which prefer blaming leftist professors, journalists, and antifa. Samuel Francis, James Burham, and Paul Gottfried have written about the “therapeutic managerial” elite of the US with its concern with government intervention in favor of welfare, regulation of citizens’ private lives, and enforced political correctness. Lately the term “anarcho-tyranny” introduced by Francis in the 1990s has been the subject of discussion after Tucker Carlson used it. The observation is that Western governments don’t mind allowing criminals to break the law, even if this creates a climate of fear, for what the elite really cares about is regulating the thoughts and lives of law-abiding citizens, imposing stricter limits on gun ownership, enacting hate speech laws, and forcing diversity and rainbow flags.

My disagreement with this view is that it is still caught up with the notion that we have a socialistic/welfare state and a ruling class that is “therapeutic” while ignoring the reality of capitalist ownership and globalism. The elites in charge not only control governments; they are extremely wealthy individuals controlling vast amounts of resources in finance, media, drugs and AI robotics. These individuals welcome welfare therapy, political correctness, and diversity hiring in the lower managerial positions as long as the imperatives of capitalist accumulation are obeyed. This is no longer, as Francis observed, a capitalist class rooted in towns and nations, family oriented, and church-going, but a rootless internationalist class. Perhaps we can call Western elites “limbic capitalists” dedicated to making citizens addicted to consumption by producing “health-demoting products that stimulate habitual consumption and pleasure for maximum profit”. This elite accesses consumers “routinely through everyday digital devices and social media platforms…designed to generate, analyse and apply vast amounts of personalised data in an effort to tune flows of online content to capture users’ time and attention, and influence their moods, emotions and desires in order to increase profits”.

This limbic capitalist elite knows that social media is “central to young people’s socialising, identities, leisure practices and engagement in civic life.” During Covid lockdowns the elite saw large increases in users and traffic, realizing more than ever how it can control totally the minds of consumers by intensifying marketing online and driving online purchases and deliveries of products with limbic appeal that can turn consumers into gambling addicts, sex addicts, internet addicts, and food addicts, completely trapped within the logic of capitalist accumulation. Of course, there is more to the economy than limbic products, but limbic capitalists are the most capable of moulding the minds of Westerners, and thus the ones with “ruling class” power.

Individualism of Western Elites

I believe the only way to escape from the controls of this limbic capitalist elite is through the creation of a new traditionalist elite that makes the collective freedom of European citizens, their heritage, culture, and customs, a priority over the individual rights of private citizens. The difficulty is that the elites of the West have not been commonly traditionalist in the manner of elites in non-Western nations. This becomes apparent in the way Muret defines his five best elites. First, it should be said that for Muret the biggest threat, at the time he was writing, was the rise to political influence of the masses. He believes the Great War, and the formation of powerful socialist states, was a “great victory of the masses over the elites” across the West, with the Soviet Revolution constituting the highest expression of the hegemony of the masses. He feared that Bolshevism would bring down “the Western fortress founded on the rights of the individual … whose essential merit consists in the production, through the centuries, of certain types of eminent individuals”.

Muret, who is a Frenchman by ethnicity, does not like the Fascist elites of Italy and the Third Reich, accusing them of “collectivism, statism, socialism”. The Third Reich was “deprived of personality and regimented”. Is Muret a liberal individualist? No, he is an aristocratic individualist who rejects equal individual rights. What’s the difference between aristocratic individualism and democratic individualism? One of the great difficulties in understanding the West is that this civilization always had room for the expression of personality even when, as was the case in Rome and Athens, individuals were persons only as members of a civic collective. For ancient Athenians, “freedom” was understood to mean the right of the free citizen to participate in the political deliberations of city affairs. And while the Athenians did contrast their ability to engage in critical discussions with the “despotism of Asia”, they lacked the modern idea of freedom as the right of the individual to be left alone to choose his own goals.

It is true that Aristotle valued a contemplative philosophical life, but he did not think that individuals could be worthy of admiration in their private pursuits. There is more, however, to Muret’s conception of an aristocratic personality beyond political membership, and this is why he praises as one of the best elites in history the Athenian over the Spartan aristocracy. In the latter, members of the elite lacked a “free personality” in their complete subsumption under a militaristic collectivist state. There is something else to the “free personality” of the Athenians. We will see that it has to do with their overall “humanist ideal”, which is about striving to express the highest abilities in art, philosophy, literary creations, not just in military and political affairs.

Muret recognizes that, at the beginning of the 1900s, the German nation “was still one of the most cultivated and civilised of Europe.” “It counted in all fields scholars of a remarkable competence and a scrupulous conscience”. But he objects to the “mass regime” that was soon installed in Germany before 1914, and during the Third Reich, which was “deprived of personality and regimented”. The rest of Europe had been falling as well to the “rising tide of the masses” since the Great War of 1914. Bolshevism sanctified the “divine right of the masses”, and the spread of socialism in the West threatens to do the same. But while collectivism and statism are reaching a peak under socialist nations, regimes without aristocratic personalities, without devotion to humanism, have been the norm throughout the nonwestern world. What is new about Western post-Enlightenment times, which led to the eventual rise of socialistic states, with the exception of England, is that the masses had started to become an actual reality with industrialization and, what is worse, a reality that was juridically “gloried” in the French Revolution of 1789 with its proclamation of the Rights of Man.

Didn’t the French Rights of Man sanctify the right of individuals to be free, the right to choose their own governments, freedom of religious and political expression against an oppressive state? Here’s the cardinal difference between aristocratic and democratic individualism. The masses are simply not capable of having a free personality, of making their own decisions. In societies with universal suffrage, the opinions of the masses are taken to be true and forced upon the rest of the population. But are the masses really in control in a democratic society? While Muret’s prose is very literary and pleasant, as translated by Jacob, his arguments are not analytically presented, as I am arguing in this review; but he has a quotation from the Soviet paper Pravda which is very revealing: “The new man is not formed of himself. It is the Party that directs the entire process of social remoulding and of the re-education of the masses”.

Hasn’t this happened in the liberal West today with the relentless advertisement of companies in combination with a therapeutic and multicultural state deciding for everyone what the accepted values are? The mass man can’t mould himself, so a state dedicated to the masses is in charge of moulding everyone alike in their “free choices”, abolishing the possibility for free aristocratic personalities.

Of course, it is more complicated than this, since in a liberal society each individual lifestyle (as long as it does not infringe on the same right of others) is accorded equal moral dignity. There is no elite to mould the society according to humanist ideals; instead, the administrators of contemporary Western states shape individuals into pursuing their own lifestyle without setting up standards—except the standard that anyone who questions progressive free choice will not be tolerated, which means that traditional aristocratic values will not be tolerated as common values for the society. The aristocracy Muret has in mind co-existed for centuries during the modern era with the bourgeoisie, and for a long time with a Christian religion that cherished ancient humanism, in “respect for tradition, the cult of the family, the spirit of order, prudence and economy”. These values are not tolerated in a mass demos controlled by progressive administrators and businesses seeking to encourage everyone to pursue their own lifestyle.

Go to Part 2.

Tristan Tzara and the Jewish Roots of Dada — Part 2 of 3

Tristan Tzara depicted in a contemporary painting

Go to Part 1.

Dada in Paris

By 1919, when Tzara left Switzerland to join the poet André Breton in Paris, he was, according to Richter, regarded as an “Anti-Messiah” and a “prophet”.[1] His 1918 Dada Manifesto had appeared in Paris, and, according to Breton, had “lit the touch paper. Tzara’s 1918 Manifesto was violently explosive. It proclaimed a rupture between art and logic, the necessity of the great negative task to accomplish; it praised spontaneity to the skies.”[2] The editors of the avant-garde literary review Littérature felt that Tzara could fill the gap left by the deaths of Guillaume Apollinaire and Jacques Vaché. Gale notes that “Tzara immediately became the most extreme contributor to Littérature,” and by the end of 1919, “the Littérature editors had to defend his work from nationalistic attacks in the Nouvelle Revue Française.”[3] A coordinated Dada insurgency was not, however, achieved until Tzara’s arrival in Paris in 1920.

In addition to his messianic zeal, Tzara brought to Paris Dada a skill in managing events and audiences, which transformed literary gatherings into public performances that generated enormous publicity. In the five months from January 1920 he helped organize six group performances, two art exhibitions and more than a dozen publications. Dempsey notes how “the popularity of these events with the public soon turned these revolutionary ‘anti-artists’ into celebrities. The cumulative effect of this first ‘Dada season’ as it became known, was to mark the movement as a nihilistic collective force leveled at the noblest ideals of advanced society.”[4] The performances with which Dadaists tested their Parisian audiences were consistently aggressive in nature, and psychological aggression characterized many of their artworks and journals. As one source notes: “Like the plays and stage appearances, individual works produced within Dada emanate a violent humor, ranging from vulgar to sacrilegious language to images of weapons and wounds, or references to taboos great and small: suicide, cannibalism, masturbation, vomiting.”[5]

Tzara (bottom left) with other Dada artists in Paris 1920

It was widely observed at the time that the output of Paris Dada exhibited a “profound violence: physical hurt, damage to language, a wounding of pride or moral spirit,” that to native observers seemed wholly “uncharacteristic of French sensibility.”[6] Comoedia, a Parisian arts daily focused on theatre and cinema, soon became the central forum for debates over Dada and its effects on French audiences. Charges of enemy subversion, lunacy and charlatanism regularly appeared — just as it did in many German newspapers — pretexts to isolate what seemed to many a traitorous insurgency against bedrock national values.[7] Attacks on Dada in Paris soon took on an openly anti-Semitic tone when the French writer Jean Giraudoux, in explaining his rejection of Dada, pointed out: “I write in French, as I am neither Swiss nor Jewish and because I have all requisite honors and degrees.”[8]

The French cultural establishment looked askance at Dada from its arrival in Paris at the beginning of 1920. It was common knowledge that the Dadaists were avowed partisans of revolution and supported the communist uprisings in Berlin and Munich that had barely been put down. Trotsky’s red legions were, at that time, cutting a swathe of death and destruction in Poland, and many perceived a conjoined ethnic agenda behind Trotsky’s Bolshevism and Tzara’s Dada — especially given Dada’s appearance at socialist and anarchist venues throughout Paris. The connection was unambiguous in the mind of the Romanian nationalist Nicolae Rosu who noted that “Dadaism and French Surrealism exploit the moral and spiritual exhaustion of a war-torn society: the aggressive revolutionary currents in art seem to be an explosion of primal instincts detached from reason; post-war German socialism, largely developed by Jews, uses the opportunity of defeat to dictate the Weimar constitution (written by a Jew), and then through Spartakism, to install Bolshevism. Russian Bolshevism is the work of Jewish activists.”[9]

In October 1920, the messianic Jewish Dadaist Walter Serner arrived in Paris and reconvened with Tristan Tzara, who had just returned from his first visit to Romania since 1915. Serner’s campaign of shameless self-promotion, which included placing an advertisement in a Berlin newspaper describing himself as the world leader of Dada, was resented by Tzara, who was eager to establish his own priority as leader. By 1921, many of the original Dadaists had converged on Paris, and arguments among them created difficulties. By 1922, internal fighting between Tzara, Francis Picabia, and André Breton led to the dissolution of Dada.[10] Dada was officially ended in 1924 when Breton issued the first Surrealist Manifesto. Hans Richter claimed that “Surrealism devoured and digested Dada.”[11] Tzara distanced himself from Surrealism, disagreeing with its dream-centered Freudian dynamic, despite its anti-rationalism. Robert Short notes that

for Tzara, automatism [literary and artistic free association] was a visceral spasm, an explosion of the senses and the instinct that expressed the primitive and chaotic intensity in man and Nature. Where Surrealist automatism was introverted and sought to reveal patterns in the human unconscious, Dada art mimicked an objective chaos. … Surrealism was to prospect and exploit a vast substratum of mental resources which the Western cultural and economic tradition had deliberately tried to seal off. In place of science and reason, Surrealism was to cultivate the image and the analogy. In its efforts to restimulate the associative faculties of the mind, it turned its attention with respect and enthusiasm toward the thought processes of children and primitive peoples, towards the lyrical manifestations of lunacy and the synthesizing notions of occultism.[12] 

Tzara also increasingly disagreed with the political orientation of Surrealism which evolved from the near-nihilist anarchism of the Dadaists to a strict adherence to the Communist Party line by the late 1920s, and then to Trotskyism following Breton’s personal meeting with Trotsky in Mexico in 1938.[13] Nonetheless, Tzara willingly reunited with Breton in 1934 to organize a mock trial of the Surrealist Salvador Dalí, who, at the time, was a confessed admirer of Hitler.[14]

Left: Adolf the Superman: Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk by John Heartfield (Herzfeld) (1923). Right: ABCD by Raoul Hausmann (1923—24)

Tzara’s own politics were profoundly radical, and with Hitler’s ascension to power in 1933 effectively marking the end of Germany’s avant-garde, Tzara threw his support behind the French Communist Party (the PCF). Codrescu notes that the secular Jews of Tzara’s parents’ generation “were capitalists whose practical materialism horrified Samuel. The French resistance to the Nazis was, of course, the reason he later joined the Communist Party, but there was also an oedipal reason for his joining the communists: as a mystic, he was viscerally opposed to capitalism. He had to kill his father.”[15] The allegiance of the great majority of Dadaists to Marxism was paradoxical given that Marxist dialectical materialism and forecast of the historical inevitability of communist revolution was based on a kind of mathematical rationalism that ran directly counter to the Dada spirit.

Tzara’s allegiance to Marxism-Leninism was reportedly questioned by the PCF and the Soviet authorities. This was because Tzara’s irregular vision of utopia made use of particularly violent imagery — shocking even by Stalinist standards.[16] Tzara backed Stalinism and rejected Trotskyism (at least publically), and unlike some of the leading Surrealists, even submitted to PCF demands for the adoption of socialist realism during the writers’ congress of 1935. Tzara nevertheless interpreted Dada and Surrealism as revolutionary currents, and presented them as such to the public.[17]

During World War II, Tzara took refuge from the German occupation forces by moving to the southern areas controlled by the Vichy regime. Back in Romania, he was stripped of Romanian citizenship, and his writings were banned by the Antonescu regime, along with 44 other Jewish-Romanian authors. In France, the pro-German publication Je Suis Partout made his whereabouts known to the Gestapo. In late 1940 or early 1941, he joined a group of anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees in Marseille who were seeking to flee Europe. Unable to escape occupied France, he joined the French Resistance and contributed to their published magazines, and managed the cultural broadcast for the Free French Forces clandestine radio station.

During 1945, he served under the Provisional Government of the French Republic as a representative to the National Assembly, and two years later received French citizenship. Tzara remained a spokesman for Dada, and in 1950 delivered a series of radio addresses discussing the topic of “the avant-garde revues in the origin of the new poetry.”[18] Towards the end of his life Tzara returned to his Jewish mystical roots, with Codrescu noting that “after the Second World War, after the Holocaust, after membership of the French Communist Party, Tzara returned to the Kabbalah.”[19]

In 1956, Tzara visited Hungary just as the hated government of Imre Nagy faced a popular revolt (with strong undercurrents of anti-Semitism), and while receptive of the Hungarians’ demand for political liberalization, did not support their emancipation from Soviet control, describing the independence demanded by local writers as “an abstract notion.” He returned to France just as the revolution broke out, triggering a brutal Soviet military response. Ordered by the PCF to be silent on these events, Tzara withdrew from public life, and dedicated himself to promoting the African art he had been collecting for years. He died in 1963 and was buried in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris.

Dada in New York and Germany

According to the account of Marcel Duchamp, in late 1916 or early 1917 he and Francis Picabia received a book sent by an unknown author, one Tristan Tzara. The book was called The First Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine which had just been published in Zurich. In this work, Tzara declared Dada to be “irrevocably opposed to all accepted ideas promoted by the ‘zoo’ of art and literature, whose hallowed walls of tradition he wanted to adorn with multicolored shit.”[20] Duchamp later recalled: “We were intrigued but I didn’t know who Dada was, or even that the word existed.”[21] Tzara’s scatological message was the catalyst for the establishment of the antipatriotic and anti-rationalist Dada message in New York, and it may well have informed Duchamp’s decision to submit his infamous Fountain to the Society of Independent Artists in New York.

In 1917, Duchamp famously sent the Independent an upside-down urinal entitled Fountain, signing it R. Mutt (famously photographed by Alfred Stieglitz). By doing so, Duchamp directed attention away from the work of art as a material object, and instead presented it as an idea — shifting the emphasis from making to thinking. He later did the same with a bottle rack and other items. Through subversive gestures like these, Duchamp parodied the Futurist machine aesthetic by exhibiting untreated objets trouvés or readymade objects. To his great surprise, these readymades became accepted by the mainstream art world.

Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917)

Alongside the Frenchman Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and the French-born Cuban Francis Picabia (1879-1953) were the American Jews Morton Schamberg (1881-1918) and Man Ray (1890-1977). The work of the New York Dadaists was focused around the gallery of the Jewish photographer Alfred Stieglitz and his publication 291, and the art collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg. Picabia later described this group as “a motley international band which turned night into day, conscientious objectors of all nationalities and walks of life into an inconceivable orgy of sexuality, jazz and alcohol.”[22] They hotly debated such topics as art, literature, sex, politics and psychoanalysis. Dada in New York stayed in contact with Dada in Zurich, though it ultimately failed to take hold, and in 1921 Man Ray wrote to Tzara, complaining that “Dada cannot live in New York. All New York is Dada and will not tolerate a rival, will not notice Dada.”[23]

Most of the artists of New York Dada left for Paris. Man Ray arrived there in July 1921, shortly after Duchamp, and remained there until 1940, becoming the youngest member of the Paris Dada group, and later of the Surrealists, even though this did not reflect any real modification of his art. With the arrival of Duchamp and Man Ray in Paris, New York Dada, which had not engaged in the kind of militant cultural protest seen in the European centers of Dada, came to an end. Their experiences were not dissimilar to those of other Dadaists “who were swept along, as they were, by the vehemence of André Breton into the coils of the new Surrealist movement which was, in many ways, an offspring of Dada.”[24]

Early in 1917, Richard Huelsenbeck, a twenty-four-year-old German medical student and poet, returned to Berlin from Zurich, where he had spent the preceding year in the company of the Zurich Dadaists under the leadership of Tristan Tzara. After the war ended, Dada activity in Germany increased as Dadaists dispersed to various sites throughout the country including, most prominently, Berlin, Cologne and Hanover. In Germany, alongside George Grosz, Walter Mehring, Johannes Baader, Hannah Höch and Kurt Schwitters were Jews like Johannes Baargeld (1876–1955), Raoul Hausmann (1886–1971), and Eli Lissitzky (1890–1941).

The political radicalism of the Berlin Dadaists was even more pronounced than that of the Zurich or Paris Dadaists, with most belonging to the League of Spartacus, a radical socialist group that became the German Communist Party in 1919. German Dada was also closer to the Eastern European avant-garde led by Jewish artists like Eli Lissitzky and László Moholy-Nagy. The new Soviet state that emerged after the Bolshevik Revolution initially adopted a policy in favor of radical experimentation. In Berlin, more than anywhere outside the Soviet Union, “a direct equation could be made between political reform and artistic radicalism. Despite the seeming absurdity of some of their activities, the Dadas’ reinvention of poetic language and artistic form could be seen as a prelude to reforming the whole of the decayed social system.”[25] A Dada Manifesto by Huelsenbeck and Hausmann, published in a Cologne newspaper, declared that Dada “is German Bolshevism”[26] and that “Dadaism demands: the international revolutionary union of all creative and intellectual men and women on the basis of radical Communism.” [27]

The Berlin Dadaists even condemned the Weimar Republic as representing a renaissance of “Teutonic barbarity,” and held Communism to be the best hope for freedom.[28] Robert Short notes that, among the German Dadaists, were those for whom “Dada was a political weapon and those for whom communism was a Dadaistical weapon. There was a faction which saw anarchy and anti-art as a sufficient programme in itself, and a second faction which saw anarchy as a provisional precondition for the introduction of new values.”[29]

Falling into the latter category was Johannes Baargeld. Born Alfred Emanuel Ferdinand Gruenwald to a prosperous Romanian-Jewish insurance director, “Baargeld” was the ironic, leftist pseudonym he adopted (Baargeld being the German word for cash or ready money). Growing up in Cologne in a wealthy home, he was exposed from a young age to contemporary art and culture, beginning with his parents’ collection of modernist paintings. He joined the Independent Socialist Party of Germany (USPD) — the radical left wing of the Socialist Party — and in the process “turned his back on his wealthy bourgeois upbringing and became actively involved in the leadership of the Rhineland Marxists.”[30]

Baargeld (also called “Zentrodada”) and Max Ernst cofounded Dada in Cologne in the summer of 1919. Baargeld’s father was anxious about his son’s political leanings and sought Ernst’s help. Robert Short notes that: “They succeeded in convincing him that Dada went further than Communism and that its combination of new-found inner freedom and powerful external expression could do more to set the whole world free. In return, Grunewald senior financed the publication of a new international Dada magazine Die Schammade.”[31]

In April 1920, Cologne Dada staged one of the most memorable of German Dada’s exhibitions. Entered by way of a public lavatory, it included “exhibits” like a young girl in communion dress reciting obscene verses, and a bizarre object by Baargeld consisting of an aquarium filled with red fluid from which protruded a polished wooden arm and on whose surface floated a head of woman’s hair.[32] The First International Dada Fair was held in Berlin in June 1920, and was the most significant Dadaist event organized in the Berlin milieu. The radical political orientation of the organizers was illustrated by a mannequin of a German officer with the head of a pig hanging from the ceiling with a notice “Hanged by the revolution,” which triggered fierce debate about its subversive and anti-military character.[33]

The First International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920

Given such provocative gestures and the extensive Jewish participation in Dada, it was not surprising that, between the two world wars, German nationalists linked Dada (and avant-gardism generally) to Jews, claiming these modern trends aimed to destroy the principles of classical beauty and eradicate national traditions. The Dadaists were said to express the “nihilistic Jewish spirit” (a common phrase at the time), if they were not actually mad. In response to the activities of Jewish Dadaists, “calls for ‘degenerate’ art to be banned were widely published in pre-Nazi and later in Nazi Germany, as well as in France.”[34]

Interestingly, Mein Kampf was composed by Hitler at the time of Paris Dada’s existence, and his comments about Jewish influence on Western art need be understood in this context. He mentions the “artistic aberrations which are classified under the names of Cubism and Dadaism,” and clearly has the Dadaists in mind when he observes that “Culturally, his [the Jew’s] activity consists in bowdlerizing art, literature and the theatre, holding the expressions of national sentiment up to scorn, overturning all concepts of the sublime and the beautiful, the worthy and the good, finally dragging the people to the level of his own low mentality.”[35] Likewise, when he recalls how he once asked himself whether “there was any shady undertaking, any form of foulness, especially in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not participate?,” he subsequently discovered that “On putting the probing knife carefully to that kind of abscess one immediately discovered, like a maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew who was often blinded by the sudden light.”[36]

In 1933, Hitler’s new government announced that: “The custodians of all public and private museums are busily removing the most atrocious creations of a degenerate humanity and of a pathological generation of ‘artists.’ This purge of all works marked by the same western Asiatic stamp has been set in motion in literature as well with the symbolic burning of the most evil products of Jewish scribblers.”[37] At the exhibition of degenerate art held in Munich in 1937 the Dadaist works were considered the most degenerate of all — the epitome of Kulturbolschewismus. In that year the Ministry for Education and Science published a pamphlet in which Dr. Reinhold Krause, a leading educator, wrote that “Dadaism, Futurism, Cubism, and other isms are the poisonous flower of a Jewish parasitical plant.”[38]

Hitler and Goebbels at the Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937

British historian Paul Johnson points out that: “Hitler always referred to degenerate art as ‘Cubism and Dadaism’, maintaining that it started in 1910, and the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition bore a curious resemblance to the big Dada shows of 1920-22, with a lot of writing on the walls and paintings hung without frames.”[39] He also notes that the Nazi campaign against “degenerate art” was “the best thing that could possibly have happened, in the long term, to the Modernist Movement.” This is because since the Nazis, universally reviled by all governments and cultural establishments since 1945, tried to destroy and suppress such art completely, then its merits were self-evident morally, and anything the Nazis opposed was assumed to have merit — on the illogical basis that the enemy of my enemy must be my friend. “These factors,” notes Johnson, “so potent in the second half of the twentieth century, will fade during the twenty-first, but they are still determinant today.”[40]

The Legacy of Dada

Dada’s destructive influence has been seminal and long-lasting. As Dempsey points out, Dada’s notion that: “The presentation of art as idea, its assertion that art could be made from anything and its questioning of societal and artistic mores, irrevocably changed the course of art.”[41] The movement represented “an assertive debunking of the ideas of technical skill, virtuoso technique, and the expression of individual subjectivity. … Dada’s cohesion around these procedures points to one of its primary revolutions — the reconceptualization of artistic practice as a form of tactics.”[42] These tactics consisting, variously, of “intervention into governability, that is, subversions of cultural forms of social authority — breaking down language, working against various modern economies, willfully transgressing boundaries, mixing idioms, celebrating the grotesque body as that which resists discipline and control.”[43]

Dada’s iconoclastic force had enormous influence on later twentieth-century conceptual art. Godfrey notes that: “Dada can be seen as the first wave of conceptual art” which exercised an enormous influence on subsequent art movements. [44] In the late 1950s and 1960s, in opposition to the then dominant Abstract Expressionism and Post-Painterly Abstraction, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns resurrected the Dadaist tradition, describing the works they produced as “Neo-Dada” — a movement that, together with the “pre-emptive kitsch” of Pop Art, effectively relaunched the conceptual art of the original Dadaists, and which has plagued Western art ever since. The Neo-Dadaists themselves left a deeply influential Cultural Marxist legacy insofar as their

visual vocabulary, techniques, and above all, their determination to be heard, were adopted by later artists in their protest against the Vietnam War, racism, sexism, and government policies. The emphasis they laid on participation and performance was reflected in the activism that marked the politics and performance art of the late 1960s; their concept of belonging to a world community anticipated sit-ins, anti-war protests, environmental protests, student protests and civil rights protests that followed later.[45]

Another pernicious influence of Dada stemmed from its rejection of the identity between art and beauty. Crepaldi notes that “many artists before Dada had called into question the aesthetic canons of their contemporaries and had proposed other canons, destined to meet varying degrees of success.” The Dadaists went beyond this, and called into question “the notion according to which the goal of art is the expression of a value called ‘beauty.’”[46]

The Dadaists thus legitimized the idea that the artist has a right (nay a duty) to produce ugly works, and instituted a cult of ugliness in the arts that has since eroded the cultural self-confidence of the West.

Go to Part 3.

Brenton Sanderson is the author of Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence and Anti-Semitism, banned by Amazon, but available here.


[1] Richter, Dada. Art and Anti-art, 168.

[2] Fiona Bradley, Movements in Modern Art — Surrealism (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 2001), 18-19.

[3] Gale, Dada & Surrealism, 180.

[4] Janine Mileaf & Matthew Witkovsky, “Paris,” Leah Dickerman (Ed.) Dada, 349.

[5] Ibid., 358.

[6] Ibid., 350.

[7] Ibid., 352.

[8] Ibid., 366.

[9] Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide: tzara and lenin play chess, 174.

[10] Dempsey, Styles, Schools and Movements — An Encyclopaedic Guide to Modern Art, 119.

[11] Richter, Dada — Art and Anti-art, 119.

[12] Robert Short, Dada and Surrealism (London: Laurence King Publishing, 1994), 69; 83.

[13] Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997), 18.

[14] Carlos Rojas, Salvador Dalí, or the Art of Spitting on Your Mother’s Portrait (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1993), 98.

[15] Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide: tzara and lenin play chess, 215.

[16] Beitchman, I Am a Process with No Subject, 48-9.

[17] Irina Livezeanu, “From Dada to Gaga: The Peripatetic Romanian Avant-Garde Confronts Communism,” Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu & Lucia Dragomir (Eds.), Littératures et pouvoir symbolique (Bucharest: Paralela 45, 2005), 245-6.

[18] Hockensmith, “Artists’ Biographies,” Leah Dickerman (Ed.) Dada, 489.

[19] Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide: tzara and lenin play chess, 211.

[20] Michael Taylor, “New York,” Leah Dickerman (Ed.) Dada, 287.

[21] Pierre Cabanne, Duchamp & Co., (Paris: Finest SA/Editions Pierre Terrail, 1997), 115.

[22] Taylor, “New York,” 278.

[23] Hockensmith, “Artists’ Biographies,” 479.

[24] Schnapp, Art of the Twentieth Century — 1900-1919 — The Avant-garde Movements, 412.

[25] Gale, Dada & Surrealism, 120.

[26] Bernard Blisténe, A History of Twentieth Century Art (Paris: Fammarion, 2001), 62.

[27] Dawn Ades, “Dada and Surrealism,” David Britt (Ed.) Modern Art — Impressionism to Post-Modernism, (London, Thames & Hudson, 1974), 222.

[28] Edina Bernard, Modern Art — 1905-1945 (Paris: Chambers, 2004), 86.

[29] Robert Short, Dada and Surrealism (London: Laurence King Publishing, 1994), 42.

[30] Doherty, “Berlin,” Leah Dickerman (Ed.) Dada, 220.

[31] Short, Dada and Surrealism, 42.

[32] Robert Short, Dada and Surrealism (London: Laurence King Publishing, 1994), 50.

[33] Schnapp, Art of the Twentieth Century — 1900-1919 — The Avant-garde Movements, 399.

[34] Philippe Dagen, “From Dada to Surrealism — Review” (The Guardian, July 19, 2011). http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jul/19/dada-to-surrealism-dagen-review

[35] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (trans. By James Murphy), (London: Imperial Collegiate Publishing, 2010), 281.

[36] Ibid., 58.

[37] Peter Adam, Arts of the Third Reich (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 55.

[38] Ibid., 12-15.

[39] Paul Johnson, Art — A New History (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 707.

[40] Ibid., 709.

[41] Dempsey, Styles, Schools and Movements — An Encylopaedic Guide to Modern Art, 119.

[42] Dickerman, “Introduction & Zurich,” Leah Dickerman (Ed.) Dada, 8.

[43] Ibid., 11.

[44] Godfrey, Conceptual Art, 37.

[45] Dempsey, Styles, Schools and Movements — An Encyclopedic Guide to Modern Art, 204.

[46] Gabriel Crepaldi, Modern Art 1900-1945 — The Age of the Avant-Gardes (London: HarperCollins, 2007) 195.

Tristan Tzara and the Jewish Roots of Dada — Part 1 of 3

Tristan Tzara (Samuel Rosenstock)

The twentieth century saw a proliferation of art inspired by the Jewish culture of critique. The exposure and promotion of this art grew alongside the Jewish penetration and eventual capture of the Western art establishment. Jewish artists sought to rewrite the rules of artistic expression — to accommodate their own technical limitations and facilitate the creation (and elite acceptance) of works intended as a rebuke to Western civilizational norms.

The Jewish intellectual substructure of many of these twentieth-century art movements was manifest in their unfailing hostility toward the political, cultural and religious traditions of Europe and European-derived societies. I have examined how the rise of Abstract Expressionism exemplified this tendency in the United States and coincided with the usurping of the American art establishment by a group of radical Jewish intellectuals. In Europe, Jewish influence on Western art reached a peak during the interwar years. This era, when the work of many artists reflected their radical politics, was the heyday of the Jewish avant-garde.

A prominent example of a cultural movement from this time with important Jewish involvement was Dada. The Dadaists challenged the very foundations of Western civilization which they regarded, in the context of the destruction of World War One, and continuing anti-Semitism throughout Europe, as pathological. The artists and intellectuals of Dada responded to this socio-political diagnosis with assorted acts of cultural subversion. Dada was a movement that was destructive and nihilistic, irrational and absurdist, and which preached the overturning of every cultural tradition of the European past, including rationality itself. The Dadaists “aimed to wipe the philosophical slate clean” and lead “the way to a new world order.”[1] While there were many non-Jews involved in Dada, the Jewish contribution was fundamental to shaping its intellectual tenor as a movement, for Dada was as much an attitude and way of thinking as a mode of artistic output.

Writing for The Forward, Bill Holdsworth observed that Dada “was one of the most radical of the art movements to attack bourgeois society,” and that at “the epicenter of what would become a distinctive movement… were Romanian Jews — notably Marcel and Georges Janco and Tristan Tzara — who were essential to the development of the Dada spirit.”[2] For Menachem Wecker, the works of the Jewish Dadaists represented “not only the aesthetic responses of individuals opposed to the absurdity of war and fascism” but, invoking the well-worn light-unto-the-nations theme, insists they brought a “particularly Jewish perspective to the insistence on justice and what is now called tikkun olam.” Accordingly, for Wecker, “it hardly seems a coincidence that so many of the Dada artists were Jewish.”[3]

It does seem hardly coincidental when we learn that Dada was a genuinely international event, not just because it operated across political frontiers, but because it consciously attacked patriotic nationalism. Dada sought to transcend national boundaries and deride European nationalist ideologies, and within this community of artists in exile (a “double Diaspora” in the case of the Jewish Dadaists) what mattered most was the collective effort to articulate an attitude of revolt against European cultural conventions and institutional frameworks.

First and foremost, Dada wanted to accomplish “a great negative work of destruction.” Presaging the poststructuralists and deconstructionists of the sixties and seventies, they believed the only hope for society “was to destroy those systems based on reason and logic and replace them with ones based on anarchy, the primitive and the irrational.”[4] Robert Short notes that Dada stood for “exacerbated individualism, universal doubt and [an] aggressive iconoclasm” that sought to debunk the traditional Western “canons of reason, taste and hierarchy, of order and discipline in society, of rationally controlled inspiration in imaginative expression.”[5]

Tristan Tzara and Zurich Dada

The man who effectively founded Dada was the Romanian Jewish poet Tristan Tzara (born Samuel Rosenstock in 1896). “Tristan Tzara” was the pseudonym he adopted in 1915 meaning “sad in my country” in French, German and Romanian, and which, according to Gale, was “a disguised protest at the discrimination against Jews in Romania.”[6] It was Tzara who, through his writings, most notably The First Heavenly Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine (1916) and the Seven Dada Manifestos (1924), laid the intellectual foundations of Dada.[7] Tzara’s Dadaist Manifesto of 1918, was the most widely distributed of all Dada texts, and “played a key role in articulating a Dadaist ethos around which a movement could cohere.”[8]

Tzara’s Dada Manifesto of 1918

In his book Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire, Tom Sandqvist notes that Tzara’s intellectual and spiritual background was infused with the Yiddish and Hassidic subcultures of his early twentieth-century Moldavian homeland, and how these were of seminal importance in determining the artistic innovations he would institute as the leader of Dada. He links Tzara’s revolt against European social constraints directly to his Jewish identity, and his perception of the Jewish population of Romania (and particularly of his native Moldavia) was cruelly oppressed by anti-Semitism. Under Romanian law, the Rosenstocks, a family of prosperous timber merchants, were not fully emancipated. Many Russian Jews settled in Romanian Moldova after being driven out of other countries and lived there as guests of the local Jews who only became Romanian citizens after the First World War (as a condition for peace set by the Western powers). For Sandqvist, the treatment of Jews in Romania fueled an attitude of revolt against the socio-political status quo in Tzara, and this was fully consistent with the anarchist impulses he exhibited at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and later in Paris.

Agreeing with this thesis, the ethnocentric Jewish poet and Dada historian, Andrei Codrescu, claims the supposedly ubiquitous anti-Semitism suffered by Romanian Jews like Tzara extends into the present day, insisting: “The Rosenstocks were Jews in an anti-Semitic town that to this day does not list on its website the founder of Dada among the notables born there.” This is considered all the more egregious given that, despite its marginality, Tzara’s hometown Moineşti is, in Codrescu’s opinion, “the center of the modern world, not only because of Tristan Tzara’s invention of Dada, but because its Jews were among the first Zionists, and Moineşti itself was the starting point of a famous exodus of its people on foot from here to the land of dreams, Eretz-Israel.” For Codrescu, Tzara’s Jewish heritage was of profound importance in shaping his contribution to Dada.

The daddy of dada was welcomed at his bar mitzvah in 1910 into the Hassidic community of Moineşti-Bacau by the renowned rabbi Bezalel Zeev Safran, the father of the great Chief Rabbi Alexandre Safran, who saw the Jews of Romania through their darkest hour during the fascist regime and the Second World War. Sammy Rosenstock’s grandfather was the rabbi of Chernowitz, the birthplace of many brilliant Jewish writers, including Paul Celan and Elie Weisel [both of whom wrote about the Holocaust]. … Sammy’s father owned a saw-mill, and his grandfather lived on a large wooded estate, but his family roots were sunk deeply into the mud of the shtetl, a Jewish world turned deeply inward.[9]

For Codrescu, Tzara was one of the many “shtetl escapees” who was “quick to see the possibility of revolution,” and he became a leader within “the revolutionary avant-garde of the 20th century which was in large measure the work of provincial East European Jews.” Crucially, for shaping the intellectual tenor of Dada, Tzara and the other Jewish exiles from Bucharest like the Janco brothers “brought along, wrapped in refugee bundles, an inheritance of centuries of ‘otherness.’”[10] This sense of “otherness” was rendered all the more politically and culturally potent given the “messianic streak [that] drove many Jews from within.” Codrescu notes that: “By the time of Samuel’s birth in 1896, powerful currents of unrest were felt within the traditional Jewish community of Moineşti. The questions of identity, place and belonging, which had been asked innumerable times in Jewish history, needed answers again, 20thcentury answers.”[11] In this need for answers lay the seeds of Dada as a post-Enlightenment (proto-postmodern) manifestation of Jewish ethno-politics.

Tristan Tzara in Romania in 1912 (far left) with Marcel and Jules Janco (third and fourth from left)

While there is some controversy over who exactly invented the name “Dada,” most sources accept that Tzara hit upon the word (which means hobbyhorse in French) by opening a French-German dictionary at random. “Da-da” also means “yes, yes” in Romanian and Russian, and the early Dadaists reveled in the primal quality of its infantile sound, and its appropriateness as a symbol for “beginning Western civilization again at zero.” Crepaldi notes how the choice of the group’s name was “emblematic of their disillusionment and their attitude, deliberately shorn of values and logical references.”[12] Tzara seems to have recognized its propaganda value early with the German Dadaist poet Richard Huelsenbeck recalling that Tzara “had been one of the first to grasp the suggestive power of the word Dada,” and developed it as a kind of brand identity.[13]

Tzara’s own “Dadaist” poetry was marked by “extreme semantic and syntactic incoherence.”[14] When he composed a Dada poem he would cut up newspaper articles into tiny fragments, shake them up in a bag, and scatter them across the table. As they fell, they made the poem; little further work was called for. With regard to such practices, the Jewish Dadaist painter and film-maker Hans Richter commented that “Chance appeared to us as a magical procedure by which we could transcend the barriers of causality and conscious volition, and by which the inner ear and eye became more acute. … For us chance was the ‘unconscious mind,’ which Freud had discovered in 1900.”[15] Codrescu speculates that Tzara’s aleatoric poetry had its likely intellectual and aesthetic wellspring in the mystical knowledge of his Hassidic heritage, where Tzara was inspired by:

the commentaries of other famous Kabbalists, like Rabbi Eliahu Cohen Itamari of Smyrna, who believed that the Bible was composed of an “incoherent mix of letters” on which order was imposed gradually by divine will according to various material phenomena, without any direct influence by the scribe or the copier. Any terrestrial phenomenon was capable of rearranging the cosmic alphabet toward cosmic harmony. A disciple of the Smyrna rabbi wrote, “If the believer keeps repeating daily, even one verse, he may obtain salvation because each day the order of the letters changes according to the state and importance of each moment … .”

An old midrashic commentary holds that repeating everyday even the most seemingly insignificant verse of the Torah has the effect of spreading the light of divinity (consciousness) as much as any other verse, even the ones held as “most important,” because each word of the Law participates in the creation of a “sound world,” superior to the material one, which it directs and organizes. This “sound world” is higher on the Sephiroth (the tree of life that connects the worlds of humans with God), closer to the unnamable, being illuminated by the divine. One doesn’t need to reach far to see that the belief in an autonomous antiworld made out of words is pure Dada. In Tzara’s words, “the light of a magic hard to seize and to address.”[16]

That Tzara returned to study of the Kabbalah towards the end of his life certainly lends weight to Codrescu’s thesis. Finkelstein notes how Tzara’s poetry “sounds eerily like a Kabbalistic ritual rewritten as a Dadaist café performance,” and links Tzara’s Dadaist spirit to the influence of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jewish heresies that were centered on the notion of “redemption through sin” which involved “the violation of Jewish law (sometimes to the point of apostasy) in the name of messianic transformation.” The Jewish-American poet Jerome Rothenberg calls these heresies “libertarian movements” within Judaism and connects them to Jewish receptivity to the forces of secularization and modernity, leading in turn to the “critical role of Jews and ex-Jews in revolutionary politics (Marx, Trotsky etc.) and avant-garde poetics (Tzara, Kafka, Stein etc.).” Rothenberg sees “definite historical linkages between the transgressions of messianism and the transgressions of the avant-garde.”[17] Heyd endorses this thesis, observing that: “Tzara uses terminology that is part and parcel of Judaic thinking and yet subjects these very concepts to his nihilistic attack.”[18] Perhaps not surprisingly, the Kabbalist and Surrealist author Marcel Avramescu, who wrote during the 1930s, was directly inspired by Tzara.

Nicholas Zarbrugg has written detailed studies of the ways that Dada fed into the sound and visual poetry of the first phase of postmodernism.[19] Tzara’s poetry was, for instance, to strongly influence the Absurdist drama of Samuel Beckett, and the poetry of Andrei Codrescu, Jerome Rothenberg, Isidore Isue, and William S. Burroughs. Allen Ginsberg, who encountered Tzara in Paris in 1961, was strongly influenced by Tzara. Codrescu relates that: “A young Allen Ginsberg, seated in a Parisian café in 1961, saw a sober-looking, suited Tzara hurrying by, carrying a briefcase. Ginsburg called to him “Hey Tzara!” but Tzara didn’t so much as look at him, unsympathetic to the unkempt young Americans invading Paris again for cultural nourishment.” For Codrescu, it was a minor tragedy that “the daddy of Dada failed to connect with the daddy of the vast youth movement that would revive, refine and renew Dada in the New World.”[20]

The Cabaret Voltaire

The Cabaret Voltaire was created by the German anarchist poet and pianist Hugo Ball in Zurich in 1916. Rented from its Jewish owner, Jan Ephraim, and with start-up funds provided by a Jewish patroness, Käthe Brodnitz, the Cabaret was established in a seedy part of the city and intended as a place for entertainment and avant-garde culture, where music was played, artwork was exhibited, and poetry was recited. Some of this poetry was later published in the Cabaret’s periodical entitled Dada, which soon became Tristan Tzara’s responsibility. In it he propagated the principles of Dadaist derision, declaring that: “Dada is using all its strength to establish the idiotic everywhere. Doing it deliberately. And is constantly tending towards idiocy itself. … The new artist protests; he no longer paints (this is only a symbolic and illusory reproduction).”[21]

Left: Poster for the Cafe Voltaire, Zurich 1916 / Right: Spiegelgasse 1, Zurich, Location of the Cabaret Voltaire

Evenings at the Cabaret Voltaire were eclectic affairs where “new music by Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg took its turn with readings from Jules Laforgue and Guillaume Apollinaire, demonstrations of ‘Negro dancing’ and a new play by Expressionist painter and playwright Oskar Kokoschka.”[22] The inclusion of dance and music extended Dada activities into areas that allowed a total expression approaching the pre-war (originally Wagnerian) ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk (combined art work). In time the tone of the acts “became more aggressive and violent, and a polemic against bourgeois drabness began to be heard.”[23] Performances sought to shock bourgeois attitudes and openly undermine spectator’s templates for understanding culture. Thus, a June 1917 lecture “on modern art” was delivered by a lecturer who stripped off his clothes in front of the audience before being arrested and jailed for performing obscene acts in public.[24] Godfrey notes that: “This was carnival at its most grotesque and extreme: all the taste and decorum that maintains polite society was overturned.”[25] Robert Wicks:

The Dada scenes conveyed a feeling of chaos, fragmentation, assault on the senses, absurdity, frustration of ordinary norms, pastiche, spontaneity, and posed robotic mechanism. They were scenes from a madhouse, performed by a group of sane and reflective people who were expressing their decided anger and disgust at the world surrounding them.[26]

The outrages committed by Dadaists attacking the traditions and preconceptions of Western art, literature and morality were deliberately extreme and designed to shock, and this tactic extended beyond the Cabaret Voltaire to everyday gestures. For instance, Tzara, “the most demonic activist” of Dada, regularly appalled the dowagers of Zurich by asking them the way to the brothel. For Godfrey, such gestures are redolent of the “propaganda of the deed” of the violent anarchists who, through their random bombings and assassinations of authority figures, sought to “show the rottenness of the system and to shock that system into crisis.”[27] Arnason likewise underscores the serious ideological intent behind such gestures, noting that: “From the very beginning, the Dadaists showed a seriousness of purpose and a search for a new vision and content that went beyond any frivolous desire to outrage the bourgeoisie. … The Zurich Dadaists were making a critical re-examination of the traditions, premises, rules, logical bases, even the concepts of order, coherence, and beauty that had guided the creation of the arts throughout history.”[28] Jewish Frankfurt School intellectual Walter Benjamin, spoke admiringly of Dada’s moral shock effects as anticipating the technical effects of film in the way they “assail the spectator.”[29]

Left: Color lithograph of a painting by Marcel Janco from 1916, “Cabaret Voltaire”; Right: annotations identifying portrayals of Dada artists within the painting

The leadership of Zurich Dada soon passed from Ball to Tzara, who, in the process, “impressed upon it his negativity, his anti-artistic spirit and his profound nihilism.” Soon Ball could no longer identify with the movement and left, remarking: “I examined my conscience scrupulously, I could never welcome chaos.”[30] He moved to a small Swiss village and, from 1920, became removed from social and political life, returning to a devout Catholicism and plunging into a study of fifth- and sixth-century saints. Ball later embraced German nationalism and was to label the Jews “a secret diabolical force in German history,” and when analyzing the potential influence of the Bolshevik Revolution on Germany, concluded that, “Marxism has little prospect of popularity in Germany as it is a ‘Jewish movement.’”[31] Noting the makeup of the new Bolshevik Executive Committee, Ball observed that:

there are at least four Jews among the six men on the Executive Committee. There is certainly no objection to that; on the contrary, the Jews were oppressed in Russia too long and too cruelly. But apart from the honestly indifferent ideology they share and their programmatically material way of thinking, it would be strange if these men, who make decisions about expropriation and terror, did not feel old racial resentments against the Orthodox and pogrommatic Russia.[32]

Tzara, as Ball’s successor, quickly converted Ball’s persona as cabaret master of ceremonies into a role as a savvy media spokesman with grand ambitions. Tzara was “the romantic internationalist” of the movement according to Richard Huelsenbeck in his 1920 history of Dada, “whose propagandistic zeal we have to thank for the enormous growth of Dada.”[33]

In addition to the Jewish mysticism of his Hassidic roots, Tzara was strongly influenced by the Italian Futurists, though, not surprisingly, he rejected the proto-Fascist stance of their leader Marinetti. By 1916, Dada had replaced Futurism as the vanguard of modernism, and according to Jewish Dadaist Hans Richter, “we had swallowed Futurism — bones, feathers and all. It is true that in the process of digestion all sorts of bones and feathers had been regurgitated.”[34]

Nevertheless, the Dadaists’ intent was contrary to that of the Futurists, who extolled the machine world and saw in mechanization, revolution and war the logical means, however brutal, to solving human problems. Dada was never widely popular in the birthplace of Futurism, although quite a few Italian poets became Dadaists, including the poet, painter and future racial theorist Julius Evola, who became a personal friend of Tzara and initially took to Dada with unbridled enthusiasm. He eventually became disillusioned by Dada’s total rejection of European tradition, however, and began the search for an alternative, pursuing a path of philosophical speculation which later led him to esotericism and fascism.[35]

The entry of Romania into the war on the side of Britain, France, and Russia in August 1916 immediately transformed Tzara into a potential conscript. Gale relates that: “In November Tzara was called for examination by a panel ascertaining fitness to fight. He successfully feigned mental instability and received a certificate to that effect.”[36] At this time, living across the street from the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich were Lenin, Karl Radek and Gregory Zinoviev who were preparing for the Bolshevik Revolution.

After the November 1918 Armistice, Tzara and his colleagues began publishing a Dadaist journal called Der Zeltweg aimed at popularizing Dada at time when Europe was reeling from the impact of the war, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, the communist insurrection in Bavaria, and, later, the proclaiming of the Hungarian Soviet Republic under Bela Kun. These events, observed Hans Richter, “had stirred men’s minds, divided men’s interests and diverted energies in the direction of political change.”[37] According to historian Robert Levy, Tzara around this time associated with a group of Romanian communist students, almost certainly including Ana Pauker, who later became the Romanian Communist Party’s Foreign Minister and one of its most prominent and ruthless Jewish functionaries.[38] Tzara’s poems from the period are stridently communist in orientation and, influenced by Freud and Wilhelm Reich, depict extreme revolutionary violence as a healthy means of human expression.[39]

Among the other Jewish artists and intellectuals who joined Tzara in neutral Switzerland to escape involvement in the war were the painter and sculptor Marcel Janco (1895–1984), his brothers Jules and George, the painter and experimental film-maker Hans Richter (1888–1976), the essayist Walter Serner (1889–1942), and the painter and writer Arthur Segal (1875–1944). After Zurich, Dada was to take root in Berlin, Cologne, Hanover, New York and Paris, and each time it was Tzara who forged the links between these groups by organizing (despite the disruption of the war and its aftermath) exchanges of pictures, books and journals. In each of these cities, Dadaists “gathered to vent their rage and agitate for the annihilation of the old to make way for the new.”[40]

Go to:

Brenton Sanderson is the author of Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence and Anti-Semitism, banned by Amazon, but available here.


[1] Menachem Wecker, “Eight Dada Jewish Artists,” The Jewish Press, August 30, 2006. http://www.jewishpress.com/printArticle.cfm?contentid=19293

[2] Bill Holdsworth, “Forgotten Jewish Dada-ists Get Their Due,” The Jewish Daily Forward, September 22, 2011. http://forward.com/articles/143160/#ixzz1ZRAUpOoX

[3] Wecker, “Eight Dada Jewish Artists,” op. cit.

[4] Amy Dempsey, Schools and Movements – An Encyclopaedic Guide to Modern Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002), 115.

[5] Robert Short, Dada and Surrealism (London: Laurence King Publishing, 1994), 7.

[6] Matthew Gale, Dada & Surrealism (London: Phaidon, 2004), 46.

[7] Wecker, “Eight Dada Jewish Artists,” op. cit.

[8] Leah Dickerman, “Introduction & Zurich,” Leah Dickerman (Ed.) Dada (Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, 2005), 10.

[9] Andrei Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide: tzara and lenin play chess (Princeton University Press, 2009), 209.

[10] Ibid., 173.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Gabriele Crepaldi, Modern Art 1900-1945 – The Age of the Avant-Gardes (London: HarperCollins, 2007), 194.

[13] Dickerman, “Introduction & Zurich,” Leah Dickerman (Ed.) Dada, 33.

[14] Alice Armstrong & Roger Cardinal, “Tzara, Tristan,” Justin Wintle (Ed.) Makers of Modern Culture (London: Routledge, 2002), 530.

[15] John Russell, The Meanings of Modern Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1981), 179.

[16] Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide: tzara and lenin play chess, 213.

[17] Jerome Rothenberg in Norman Finkelstein, Not One of Them in Place and Jewish American Identity (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001), 100.

[18] Milly Heyd, “Tristan Tzara/Shmuel Rosenstock: The Hidden/Overt Jewish Agenda,” Washton-Long, Baigel & Heyd (Eds.) Jewish Dimensions in Modern Visual Culture: Anti-Semitism, Assimilation, Affirmation (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2010), 213.

[19] See Nicholas Zurbrugg et al. Critical Vices: The Myths of Postmodern Theory (Amsterdam: OPA, 2000).

[20] Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide: tzara and lenin play chess, 212.

[21] Sarane Alexandrian, Surrealist (London: Thames & Hudson, 1970), 30-1.

[22] Russell, The Meanings of Modern Art, 182.

[23] Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Art of the Twentieth Century – 1900-1919 – The Avant-garde Movements (Italy, Skira, 2006), 392.

[24] Ibid., 389.

[25] Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon, 1998) 41.

[26] Robert J. Wicks, Modern French Philosophy: From Existentialism to Postmodernism (Oxford: Oneworld, 2003), 10.

[27] Godfrey, Conceptual Art, 40.

[28] H. Harvard Arnason, A History of Modern Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986), 224.

[29] Dickerman, “Introduction & Zurich,” Leah Dickerman (Ed.) Dada, 9.

[30] Schnapp, Art of the Twentieth Century – 1900-1919 – The Avant-garde Movements op cit., 396.

[31] Boime, “Dada’s Dark Secret,” Washton-Long, Baigel & Heyd (Eds.) Jewish Dimensions in Modern Visual Culture: Anti-Semitism, Assimilation, Affirmation, 98 & 95-6.

[32] Ibid., 96.

[33] Dickerman, “Introduction & Zurich,” Leah Dickerman (Ed.) Dada, op cit., 35.

[34] Hans Richter, Dada – Art and Anti-art, (London & New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 33.

[35] Gale, Dada & Surrealism, 80.

[36] Ibid., 56.

[37] Richter, Dada – Art and Anti-art, 80.

[38] Robert Levy, Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist (Berkley: University of California Press, 2001), 37.

[39] Philip Beitchman, I Am a Process with No Subject (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1988), 37-42.

[40] Dempsey, Styles, Schools and Movements – An Encylopaedic Guide to Modern Art, op cit., 115.

A Negative Review of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition

A rather negative review of my book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future appeared by someone who calls himself thezman. I am not familiar with his blog, but he seems to be basically on the right side of things as indicated by its blogroll, which includes Vdare.com, AmRen, Steve Sailer, etc. Since most people are not going to wade through a 500+-page book, this is my version of the main ideas.

Thezman’s review will not be helpful to someone who isn’t familiar with the book because it leaves out critical information and basic ideas. The review begins by complaining that I don’t get around to defining individualism until Chapter 8. But a major point, ignored by the reviewer, is that there are two clearly spelled out definitions of individualism in Chapters 2 and 3 respectively, the aristocratic individualism of the Indo-Europeans, and the egalitarian individualism of the northern hunter-gatherers. Unless one discusses these concepts, the entire point of the book is missed because it’s essentially about how these two types of individualism played out in history, with the power of aristocratic individualism gradually decreasing after the English Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century. One would do better by reading some of the reviews on Amazon, such as this one; or even better, read Prof. Ricardo Duchesne’s 9-part review for the Council of European Canadians.

Re aristocratic individualism, from Chapter 2:

The novelty of Indo-European culture was that it was not based on a single king or a typical clan-type organization based on extended kinship groups but on an aristocratic elite that was egalitarian within the group. Critically, this elite was not tied together by kinship bonds as would occur in a clan-based society, but by individual pursuit of fame and fortune, particularly the former. The men who became leaders were not despots, but peers with other warriors—an egalitarianism among aristocrats. Successful warriors individuated themselves in dress, sporting beads, belts, etc., with a flair for ostentation. This resulted in a “vital, action-oriented, and linear picture of the world” [citing Ricardo Duchesne’s The Uniqueness of Western Civilization]i.e., as moving forward in pursuit of the goal of increasing prestige. Leaders commanded by voluntary consent, not servitude, and being a successful leader meant having many clients who pledged their loyalty; often the clients were young unmarried men looking to make their way in the world. The leader was therefore a “first among equals.” …

Oath-bound contracts of reciprocal relationships [not biological relatedness] were characteristic of [Proto-Indo-Europeans] and this practice continued with the various [Indo-European] groups that invaded Europe. These contracts formed the basis of patron-client relationships based on reputation—leaders could expect loyal service from their followers and followers could expect equitable rewards for their service to the leader. This is critical because these relationships are based on talent and accomplishment, not ethnicity (i.e., rewarding people on the basis of closeness of kinship) or despotic subservience (where followers are essentially unfree).

Thus aristocratic individualism is fundamentally about individual accomplishment rather than kinship ties as being at the heart of social organization while retaining a strongly hierarchical social structure. Chapter 3 describes Egalitarian Individualism:

As noted in Chapter 2, there were already strong strands of individualism in Indo-European-derived cultures. Thus the argument here is not that northern [hunter-gatherers; h-gs] are the only basis of Western individualism, but that Indo-European individualism dovetailed significantly with that of h-gs they encountered in northwest Europe. The major difference between these two strands is that I-E-derived cultures are strongly hierarchical and relatively egalitarian only within aristocratic peer groups (aristocratic individualism), while the h-g’s were strongly egalitarian without qualification. The burden of this chapter is to make the case for this.  The contrast and conflict between aristocratic (hierarchical) individualism and egalitarian individualism is of fundamental importance for my later argument.

I really don’t understand how a competent reviewer could miss this, or the material in the following paragraph on the evolutionary basis of egalitarianism in hunter-gatherer groups and the central importance of moral communities as the social glue binding hunter-gatherer communities rather than extensive kinship. This concept is critical for understanding Chapters 6–8. From Chapter 3:

Egalitarianism is a notable trait of hunter-gatherer groups around the world. Such groups have mechanisms that prevent despotism and ensure reciprocity, with punishment ranging from physical harm to shunning and ostracism.[1] Christopher Boehm describes hunter-gatherer societies as moral communities in which women have a major role,[2] and the idea that Western cultures, particularly since the seventeenth century, are moral communities based on a hunter-gatherer egalitarian ethic will play a major role here, particularly in Chapters 6-8. In such societies people are closely scrutinized to note deviations from social norms; violators are shunned, ridiculed, and ostracized. Decisions, including decisions to sanction a person, are by consensus. Adult males treat each other as equals.

Re climate, I certainly agree that climate is important, as emphasized in Chapter 3 on the northern hunter-gatherers, where the harsh climate of Scandinavia resulted in a general deemphasis on extended kinship in favor of nuclear families. The Indo-Europeans originated in what is now Ukraine but developed a very different culture than the hunter-gatherers. Their culture was completely militarized—likely needed to survive and prosper in the steppes where marauding groups were the norm (not the case in Scandinavia). Their individualism, whereby individual merit mattered more than kinship, was highly adaptive in getting the best leaders. I suppose this could have been simply a cultural invention enabled by domain-general processing (see below; the cultural invention approach is emphasized by Joseph Henrich in his The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous re the role of the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages). Or it could have been due to a similar scenario as that sketched in Chapter 3 for the northern hunter-gatherers: Both of these groups lived in areas where one kinship group couldn’t control the basis of economic production. In the case of the northern hunter-gatherers, their source of food on the Scandinavian littoral was not available year-around, forcing them to retreat into small family-based bands where only very close kinship relationships mattered for part of the year (Chapter 3). On the other hand, the proto-Indo-Europeans periodically traveled for extended periods in their wagons in small family-based groups to grazing areas for their cattle and returned to the larger encampment. Again, no kinship group could control the vast steppe region, and relatively intensive kinship typical of hunter-gatherers rather than extensive kinship relations (e.g., in a Middle Eastern clan) would continue as the fundamental basis of social organization. I favor the ecological scenario, but the cultural innovation perspective is also possible. However, a purely cultural shift would have to entail strong social controls to prevent evolved predilections for kinship ties from dominating. Seems difficult and there is no evidence for it.

[thezman:] The first three chapters of the book cover the migration of people into Europe and what we know about the organizational structures. Europe was initially settled by hunter-gatherers with an egalitarian culture. Then nomadic people with an aristocratic warrior class came in from the east. MacDonald argues that the genetic basis for egalitarianism and meritocracy is in these original people. This is not an argument from science, but rather an argument from inference.

Thezman thus ignores the ecological argument of Chapter 3, the clear evidence for individualism in both of these groups, and the genetic cline from northern to southern Europe revealed by population genetic research discussed in Chapter 1.

[thezman:] It cannot be emphasized enough how marriage patterns and family formation helped define what we think of as the West. The rapid decline in cousin marriage, for example, is arguably the great leap forward for Western people. It naturally lead [sic] to the evolution of alternatives to narrow kinship in human cooperation. MacDonald does a good job summarizing how these mating patterns were brought to the West with the aristocratic people who migrated from the East.

But it’s not just the aristocratic peoples from the East that created the familial basis of individualism (i.e., a tendency toward nuclear families rather than, say, compound families common in Southern and Eastern Europe based on brothers living together with their wives). I argue in Chapter 4 that the nuclear family pattern is strongest in Scandinavia, a result I attribute to climate (monogamy is favored in harsh environments because of the difficulty of men provisioning the children of more than one woman) in conjunction with the ecological argument noted above.

[thezman:] In the next chapters the focus shifts to culture and history. Chapter four is about European family formation. The focus is entirely on Europe, so the reader is left to guess why this differs from the rest of the world.

But the arguments from Chapters 2 and 3 make it clear that the roots of individualism in both the Indo-Europeans and the northern hunter-gatherers are essentially primordial, as noted above.

[thezman:] Chapter eight is an interesting chapter in that he finally gets around to providing a definition of individualism. He states at the opening that individualist societies are based on the reputation of the individual. Group cohesion depends on the members judging other members on an individual basis. Each member also accepts that he will be judged by society as an individual. This contrasts with other societies where membership in a tribe or clan is the basis for judging people.

But the theme of the importance of reputation appears long before Chapter 8. Indeed the word ‘reputation’ appears around 80 times in the entire book, beginning with Chapter 1 and throughout the book. The stage is set for developing the importance of reputation in the emphasis on individual military reputation in Chapter 2 on the Indo-Europeans and the concept of moral communities in Chapter 3—individuals were trusted to the extent that they had a good reputation, and trust was not based on kinship distance. This chart contrasting northwestern European hunter-gathers with the Middle Old World culture  is from Chapter 3:

Northwestern

European H-G

Cultural Origins

Middle Old-World

Cultural Origins

Evolutionary

History

Hunting, gathering Pastoralism, agriculture
Kinship 

System

Bilateral;
weakly patricentric
Unilineal;
strongly patricentric
Family System Nuclear family;

simple household

Extended family;
joint household
Marriage  Exogamous;

monogamous

Endogamous,
consanguineous;
polygynous
Marriage

Psychology

Individual choice based on personal characteristics of spouse Utilitarian; based on
family strategizing within kinship group
Position of

Women

Relatively high Relatively low
Ethnocentrism Relatively low Relatively high
Social Status Mainly influenced by reputation Mainly influenced by status in kinship group
Trust Trust based on individual’s reputation Trust based mainly on kinship distance

Contrasts between European and Middle Old-World Cultural Forms

[thezman:] This gets to the major flaw in the book. It needs an editor. The parts are here for a straight line argument that individualism has genetic roots and that it was selected for in European people. As humans adapted to the harsh northern climates, they adopted social structures that rewarded the behaviors necessary to survive as a group in the areas we now call Europe. While we cannot locate an “individualism gene” we can infer it through things like marriage patterns and family formation.

I realize that at 511 pages, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition is something of a tome but I think there is in fact a straight-line—albeit complex—argument. The difficulty is that one is dealing with two different forms of individualism and how they play out in history. The primordial tendencies of all three groups (the Indo-Europeans, the northern hunter-gatherers and Early Farmers) and how they influence family structure (Ch. 4) must be integrated. But one must also include the argument on the role of the Church in accommodating to aristocratic individualism in the early Middle Ages (the Germanization of Christianity) and ultimately facilitating egalitarian individualism (e.g., the canon law of moral universalism, monogamy, exogamy. Canon law swept away the morality of the ancient world based on natural inequality characteristic of the aristocratic moral framework and substituted a morality based on moral egalitarianism and individual conscience, paving the way for outbreaks of Protestant-type individualist thinking about religion during the later Middle Ages) (Ch. 5). This culminated in the Protestant Reformation and the rise to dominance of egalitarian individualism, leading to the English Civil War and the gradual decline of aristocratic individualism (Ch. 6). And then Chapter 7 (which is completely unmentioned in the review) focuses on egalitarian individualism and how it figured in the movement to eradicate slavery by creating a moral community that abhorred slavery. In any case, its tomeishness is no reason to fail to comment on the central differences and the historical dynamic between aristocratic individualism and egalitarian individualism. There is an argument there, but I rather doubt that thezman read it carefully enough to get it.

[thezman:] This [a shorter book] would make for a nice, crisp two-hundred-page book. Instead, these bits are spread over five hundred pages, mixed with material that is highly debatable. People familiar with the history of the early church, for example, will scratch their head at the assertions made in chapter five. The section on Puritanism often seems to contradict what he said in early chapters about individualism. A professional editor could have pointed this out and forced a rethinking of these chapters.

It’s not professional to complain about the statements in Chapter 5 without saying what was puzzling. And the chapter on Puritanism shows that essentially it started out as what one might call a group of individualists (because of their evolutionary background as northern Europeans). This concatenation of individuals formed a cohesive group via powerful social controls embedded in Calvinism. In America, the Puritans originated with the intention of keeping non-Puritans out of Massachusetts (building “the proverbial city on a hill”), but this gradually gave way, mainly because of the colonial policies of the British government preventing the colony from restricting immigration and settlement. During the nineteenth century, several intellectual offshoots of Puritanism, having escaped the powerful social controls of Calvinism, revealed themselves to be radical individualists (e.g., the libertarian anarchists).

[thezman:] Another problem with the book is that it is not really about individualism so much as a way to support his theory of group evolutionary strategy. As a result, he reduces group behavior to individual motivations. This sort of reductionism is common among older right-wing writers for some reason. That generation has always had a fetish for assigning base human desires to the behavior of groups. For some reason, emergent behavior lies beyond their intellectual event horizon.

Sorry, but I don’t get this; I would like to see examples where I reduce group behavior to individual motivations or assign “base human desires to the behavior of groups.” The whole point of cultural group selection theory (which has gradually become eminently respectable) is that groups are a fundamental category of natural selection, that groups are far more than a concatenation of individuals—an idea I first developed regarding the ancient Spartans (Social and Personality Development: An Evolutionary Synthesis (Plenum, 1988) and later applied to traditional Jewish groups (A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (Praeger, 1994). Take a look at Chapter 1 of the latter; it’s a cultural group selection argument. Think of a military unit. Group behavior is not a simple function of individual motivations but of a hierarchical command structure enforced by rigid discipline; cheaters in the ranks are often forced to suffer severe penalties, thereby solving the fundamental problem of group selection: human groups, unlike the vast majority of animals, are able to develop social controls and  ideologies that prevent individual cheating detrimental to group interests. This is a major theme of A People That Shall Dwell Alone where I show that heretical Jews were dealt with harshly.

Moreover, my argument is definitely not biologically reductionist, since there is a major role for cultural innovation via human general intelligence and its control over the modular mechanisms of the lower brain (see here and here on the links between general intelligence and innovation, solving novel problems, and solving old problems in new ways). My view is that ideologies are not reducible to the deterministic output of evolved modules, and this should have been apparent from reading the book, especially Chapters 5 and 8. From Chapter 5:

Religious beliefs are able to motivate behavior because of the ability of explicit representations of religious thoughts (e.g., the traditional Catholic teaching of eternal punishment in Hell as a result of mortal sin) to control sub-cortical modular mechanisms (e.g., sexual desire). In other words, the affective states and action tendencies mediated by implicit [modular] processing are controllable by higher brain centers located in the cortex.[3] For example, people are able to effortfully suppress sexual thoughts, even though there is a strong evolutionary basis for males in particular becoming aroused by sexual imagery. Thus, under experimental conditions, male subjects who were instructed to distance themselves from sexually arousing imagery were able to suppress their sexual arousal. Imagine that instead of a psychologist giving instructions, people were subjected to religious ideas that such thoughts were sinful and would be punished by God.

Ideologies such as the Christian ideology of the sinfulness of sexual thoughts are a particularly important form of explicit processing [i.e., non-modular processing linked to general intelligence] that may result in top-down control over behavior. That is, explicit construals of the world may motivate behavior. For example, explicit construals of costs and benefits of religiously relevant actions mediated by human language and the ability of humans to create [emphasis added here] explicit representations of events may influence individuals to avoid religiously proscribed food or refrain from fornication or adultery in the belief that such actions would lead to punishments in the afterlife.

Ideologies, including religious ideologies, characterize a significant number of people and motivate their behavior in a top-down manner—i.e., the higher cognitive functions involving explicit processing located primarily in the prefrontal cortex are able to control the more primitive (modular, reflexive) parts of the brain such as structures underlying sexual desire. Ideologies are coherent sets of beliefs. These explicitly held beliefs are able to exert a control function over behavior and evolved predispositions.

There is no reason to suppose that ideologies are necessarily adaptive. Ideologies often characterize the vast majority of people who belong to voluntary subgroups within a society (e.g., a particular religious sect). Moreover, ideologies are often intimately intertwined with various social controls—rationalizing the controls but also benefitting from the power of social controls to enforce ideological conformity in schools or in religious institutions [e.g., Marxist control of the educational system in the USSR]. The next section illustrates these themes as applied to regulating monogamy in Western Europe.

Ideologies are cultural creations enabled by human general intelligence and language; they are not a deterministic outcome of evolved psychological mechanisms. In Chapter 8 I discuss the ability of ideologies such as racial egalitarianism created by elites throughout the West that dominate the media and academia to control evolved tendencies toward ethnocentrism—a major problem for White people now. Hence, I absolutely reject biological reductionionism. Thus the title of my book, The Culture of Critique. Culture is critical and underdetermined by our evolutionary history.

[thezman:] The final criticism of the book is that it fails to explain why individualism has led the West to the verge of self-extinction. It has become an article of faith in certain circles that Western individualism is the cause of decline. Some argue that it makes it possible for tribal minority groups to exert undue influence on society to the detriment of the majority population. If so, then why now and not a century ago or five centuries ago when the West was far more fragmented?

Again, I think the argument is quite clear: the rise of a substantially Jewish elite (i.e., thezman’s “tribal minority”) hostile to the traditional people and culture of the West discussed extensively in Chapters 6 and 8, and continued in Chapter 9. From Chapter 9:

So, what went wrong? Why, little more than a half century after the countercultural revolution, is the West on the verge of suicide, everywhere inundated by other peoples—peoples that are typically far more clannish, far more prone to corruption (an endemic problem in much of the Third World where relationships are based primarily on kinship rather than individual merit and trust of non-kin), and often of demonstrably lower intelligence. This has continued to the point that Western peoples are on the verge of becoming minorities in areas they have dominated for hundreds or, in Europe, thousands of years.  Ultimately, if present trends continue, their unique genetic heritage will be lost entirely. One need only look at the demographic trend lines in all Western countries, steady declines in the White percentage of the world population, and generally below-replacement White fertility in the context of massive immigration of non-Whites. Extinction, after all, is just as much a part of the story of life as the evolution of new life forms.

This ongoing disaster for the traditional people of America is the direct result of the rise of a new elite as a result of the 1960s countercultural revolution. This new elite despises the traditional people and culture of America.

The above is essentially a reference to the argument from Chapter 6 on the decline of the WASP elite and the rise of a substantially Jewish elite, culminating in the 1960s countercultural revolution and recounted in my book The Culture of Critique (especially Chapter 3). The above passage continues:

The intellectuals who came to dominate American intellectual discourse and academe were quite aware of the need to appeal to Western proclivities toward individualism, egalitarianism, and moral universalism discussed throughout this volume. A theme of The Culture of Critique is that moral indictments of their opponents have been prominent in the writings of these activist intellectuals, including political radicals and those opposing biological perspectives on individual and group differences in IQ. A sense of moral superiority was also prevalent in the psychoanalytic movement, and the Frankfurt School developed the view that social science was to be judged by moral criteria.

The triumph of these intellectual movements to the point of consensus in the West has created a moral community where people who do not subscribe to their beliefs are seen as not only intellectually deficient but as morally evil.

It was noted in Chapter 6 that during the period of ethnic defense in the 1920s, Darwinist thinking on race was common throughout Western culture and assumed prominence among many U.S. immigration restrictionists, energized by the changing ethnic balance of the United States. A theme of The Culture of Critique is that the intellectuals who became influential beginning in the 1930s (particularly the Boasian school of anthropology) targeted Darwinian theories of race as well as individual identities based on White racial group identity. For example, attacking racial identities in favor of atomized individualism for European-Americans was a central strategy of the Frankfurt School. Group identities based on race and even the family, were portrayed as an indication of psychopathology. Radical individualism was thus promoted by intellectuals who retained a strong allegiance to their own group and self-consciously promoted group interests.

These ideologies fell on particularly fertile soil because they dovetailed with Western European tendencies toward individualism. And whereas individualism has been the key characteristic of Western peoples in their rise to world dominance, these ideologies and their internalization by so many Europeans now play a major role in facilitating Western dispossession.

In particular, the ideology that White identity and having a sense of White interests are signs of psychopathology has made it impossible in mainstream media and academia to argue for the legitimate interests of White people in having homelands and in avoiding becoming minorities in societies they have dominated for hundreds, and in the case of Europe, thousands of years. Such ideologies are disseminated by the mainstream media—including conservative and libertarian media—and throughout the educational system, from elementary school through university.

They have in effect created a moral community that is radically opposed to the interests of Whites. And as with the Puritans, the new elite has been able to create a culture of altruistic punishment in which White people punish fellow Whites who deviate from the dogmas of the moral community created by the new elite, even at the cost of compromising the long-term interests of themselves and their descendants.

These ideologies have been increasingly buttressed by powerful social controls. As discussed in Chapter 8, in much of the West these controls include formal legislation punishing critics of immigration and Western dispossession. Because of the First Amendment, such statutory controls are in their infancy in the United States but are likely to gain traction in the coming years if the left gains power.

However, informal controls are also very effective in the United States and throughout the West. For example, many people have been fired from their jobs as a result of the actions of activist organizations simply phoning their employers. These organizations take advantage of the moral community created by media and academic elites over the last 50 years by limiting the influence of dissident individuals and exposing them to public scrutiny, thereby subjecting them to ostracism and job loss. The effectiveness of these tactics relies on elite consensus and conformist popular attitudes for their effectiveness. Scientifically based ideas that were entirely respectable less than a century ago now result in ostracism and job loss.

You can disagree with that (please do!), but it’s unprofessional to review this book without mentioning the book’s discussion of the role of the rise of the Jews in creating the culture of Western suicide. But once again, a critical piece of the argument is missing from the review. One wonders if thezman did anything more than thumb through the book.


[1] Christopher H. Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

[2] Ibid., 8.

[3] Kevin MacDonald, “Evolution and a Dual Processing Theory of Culture: Applications to Moral Idealism and Political Philosophy,” Politics and Culture (Issue, #1, April, 2010), unpaginated; see also K. MacDonald, K. (2009). Evolution, Psychology, and a Conflict Theory of Culture. Evolutionary Psychology, 7(2), 208–233.

西洋文化をユニークにしたものは何か (“What Makes Western Culture Unique”)

What Makes Western Culture Unique? 翻訳

Kevin MacDonald

西洋文化をユニークにしたものは何か

原文:http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/west-toq.htm

 

一般に、文化のユニークさは自然由来か教育由来かのどちらかである。これは昔から変わらない二項対立である。
しかし我々は現在これらの問題について昔よりもより良く扱える立場にあり、そして自然由来説と教育由来説のどちらも重要であることを説明しようと思う。
西洋文化は、どのような生物学的/進化論的理論でも予測がつかないほどの独特の文化的変貌を経験してきたが、同時にユニークな進化の歴史もあった。
西洋文化は、世界の他の文明や文化を築いた人々とは遺伝的に異なった人々によって構築された。
西洋文化が他の伝統的文明と比較してユニークな文化的プロファイルを持つことを以下で論じる。

1. カトリック教会とキリスト教

2. 一夫一妻制の傾向

3. 核家族が基本のシンプルな家族構造の傾向

4. 結婚が両性の合意に基づいており、相互の愛情を基本にする傾向が強い

5. 拡大血縁(extended kinship relationships)とその互恵関係の重視を避け、エスノセントリズムが比較的弱い

6. 個人主義へ向かう傾向。国家に対する個人の権利、代議制政府、道徳の普遍主義化、自然科学へ向かう傾向

私のバックグラウンドは進化生物学の分野であり、性の進化論を扱った時に最初に感じた疑問の一つは、「なぜ西洋文化は一夫一妻制なのか?」だった。
性の進化論は非常にシンプルである。女性は生殖に多大な投資が必要である。妊娠、授乳、そして育児は大抵膨大な時間を要求する。
その結果、女性の生殖には厳しい制約がある。最高の条件を用意してもらっても、最大でも20人程度の子どもしか育てようがない。
しかし、男性にとっては生殖のコストは低い。結果として、男性は複数の配偶者から恩恵を得ることも可能で、富と力を持つ男性はそれを活用して可能な限り多くの配偶者を確保することも期待できる。
要約すれば、富と力を持つ男性による集中的な一夫多妻制は男性にとって最も適切な戦略であり、個々人の男性の生殖の成功にとって最も適切な振る舞いである。

この理論は十分に支持されている。世界中の伝統的な社会では、富と生殖活動の成功との間に強い関連性がある。裕福で力のある男性は非常の多数の女性をコントロールできる。
中国、インド、イスラム社会、新世界文明、古代エジプト、古代イスラエル等の世界中の全ての伝統的文明のエリート男性は、大抵数百人から数千人にもなる側室を持っていた。
サブサハラ・アフリカでは女性は一般的に男性の扶養なしで子どもを育てることができるので、結果として、男性はできるだけ多くの女性をコントロールするために競争する低レベルの一夫多妻制になった。
これらいずれの社会においても、これらの関係から産まれた子どもは合法的だった。彼らは財産を相続することができ、世間から蔑まれることもなかった。
中国の皇帝には数千人の側室がおり、モロッコのスルタンは888人の子どもを持つことでギネスブックに登録されている。

勿論、一夫一妻制が標準の社会は他にもある。生態学的に課せられた一夫一妻制と社会的に課せられた一夫一妻制とを区別することが一般的である。
一般に、生態学的に課せられた一夫一妻制は、砂漠や寒冷地等の非常に過酷な生態的条件への適応を強いられた社会で見られる。
このような過酷な条件下では、各男性の投資は一人の女性の子供達に向かわざるを得ず、更に多くの女性をコントロールすることは不可能である。
基本的考え方としては、過酷な条件下では女性は一人で子どもを育てることが不可能で、男性からの手助けが必要である。
このような条件が、進化論的に意味を成すほど長期間続いた場合には、人口は一夫一妻制に向かう強い傾向を発達させると予想できる。

実際に、一夫一妻制の傾向が強くなりすぎると、生態学的条件の変化に直面した場合でも一夫一妻制に向かう心理的・文化的傾向へとつながることが予想できる。
私はヨーロッパ人の進化で正にこのことが起きたのだと提案しており、以下で詳述する。

Richard Alexanderは”socially imposed monogamy” (SIM)[社会的に課せられた一夫一妻制]という用語で、過酷な生態的条件なしの一夫一妻制を定義した。
過酷な条件とは男性が直接子供を養育せざるを得ない条件のことを指す。それ以外の状況では、男性は自分にできる限り多数の妻を持つために競争すると予想でき、一般的にもそうなる。

 

西洋のユニークさの最初の例

世界の他の経済的先進地域の文化は、成功した男性による一夫多妻制が特徴であるのに対して、西洋社会には古代ギリシャ・ローマから現代にいたるまで一夫一妻制の強い傾向がある。

古代ローマには、一夫一妻制を志向する様々な政治制度や思想の背景があった。
ローマで社会的に課せられた一夫一妻制の起源は歴史から忘れられているが、一夫一妻制を維持させるための幾つかのメカニズムが存在した。
一夫一妻制の外で生まれた子どもの法的地位を下げる法律、離婚を妨げる習慣、不適合な性的行動に対してネガティブな社会意識、そして一夫一妻制が性的に正統だと定める宗教思想があった。
これらのメカニズムのバリエーションは西洋の歴史を通じて現代まで続いている。

共和制ローマの時代には、コンスルの任期制限、二人のコンスルを同時に存在させるなどで特定の貴族の一族が専制を敷けないようにする仕組みもあった。
下層市民の政治代表権についても、護民官を設置するなど徐々に法整備が進んだ。近親者の結婚を妨げる広範な法律も存在した。
これらの法律が親族集団内での富の集中を防ぎ、特定の貴族の一族の支配を防いだ。

ローマの一夫一妻制は完璧とは程遠かった。
特に帝政期には離婚が増加し、共和制初期の特徴だった一夫一妻制を性的に正統とする思想が衰退したことで、それまでの家族機能が全般的に崩壊した。
それでも法的には、少なくとも理論的には、ローマ文化は最後まで一夫一妻制だった。一夫多妻制は法律で認可されることは無く、一夫一妻制の外で生まれた子どもには相続権は無いままで、母親の社会的・法的地位を受け継ぐことになった。

カトリック教会はエリート男性に一夫一妻制を課そうとしたので、一夫一妻制を巡る争いは中世の重要な特徴となった。
カトリック教会は西洋文化のユニークな一面である。
13世紀に中国に訪れたマルコ・ポーロや1519年にアステカに到着したコルテスは、現地の世襲制貴族・神官・戦士・職人・農民から成る農業社会を観察し、彼ら自身の社会との多数の類似点に気づいた。
社会同士の間には圧倒的な収斂性があった。しかし彼らは、宗教組織が世俗組織より優れていると主張し、世俗エリートの生殖行動の抑制に成功しているような社会は西洋以外に見出せなかった。
また、Louis IX (St. Louis) のような、フランスを統治しながらも一人の妻と一緒に修行僧のような生活をし、聖地解放の十字軍に参加するような王は、西洋以外には見出せなかった。

一夫一妻制が法と慣習として根付いたローマ文明の相続人であったカトリック教会は、中世には勃興してきたヨーロッパ貴族に一夫一妻制を課すようになった。
確かに、中世初期のヨーロッパ貴族の一夫多妻制は、中国やイスラム諸国のハーレムと比べてかなり小規模であったが、それは中世初期のヨーロッパの経済状況が比較的未発達であったことも一因であろう。
なにしろ中国の皇帝は広大で人口の多い莫大な余剰経済生産を持つ国を持っていた。彼らは中世初期ヨーロッパの部族長より遥かに裕福で、その富と力ではるかに多くの女性を手に入れた。

とにかく、一夫多妻制はヨーロッパにも存在しており、中世には教会と貴族の紛争の種となった。
教会は「中世ヨーロッパで最も影響力が強く重要な政府機関」で、世俗的な貴族に対するこの権力の主要な一面が性と生殖の規制だった。
その結果、富裕層にも貧困層にも同じ性的規制が課せられた。
教会の目論見として「信徒の中でも特に最も有力な者に対し、教会の権威に服属して彼らの道徳、特に性道徳を監督させることを要求した。これにより、結婚を通して教会は貴族をコントロールできた。結婚と夫婦間の問題は全て教会に持ち込むことを強いられ、教会のみが解決できるとされていた。」

進化心理学の観点からこの時期の教会の行動を理解する試みは、この論文の範囲外である。
しかし、権力欲は人間の普遍的な欲求であるが、他の全ての人間の欲求と同様、それが必ずしも生殖の成功と関連する必要はないことに注意する必要がある。
同様に、人はセックスの欲求があるが、母なる自然がそのようにデザインしたにもかかわらず、セックスを沢山すれば必ずしも多くの子供を持つことに直結するとは限らない。

教会のユニークな特徴の一つとしては、教会が利他的であるというイメージ(及びその実態)がその人気を支えていた。
中世の教会は、女性をコントロールしたり生殖で高い成功を収めることに教会はあまり関心を持たないと人々に思わせるイメージ戦略に長けていた。
これは常にそうだったわけでは無い。中世の改革以前には、多くの司祭が妻や側室を持っていた。
Saint Bonifaceは742年にフランスの教会について以下のように書き、ローマ教皇に苦言を呈した。「いわゆる司祭補佐は、少年時代から放蕩、姦淫、あらゆる穢れに人生を浪費し、その悪評のままで司祭補佐になり、今やベッドに4、5人の側室を抱えたまま福音書を読む有り様である。」

にもかかわらず、聖職者の改革は本物だった。13世紀のイングランドの高位聖職者で妻や家庭を持った者はいなかったとされる。
この時代のイングランドでは下級聖職者の間でさえ妻帯者は例外的であり、この聖職者のモラルの高さは宗教改革の時代まで保たれた。

教会はこのように貞操と利他主義のイメージを人々に植え付けた。その権力と富は生殖の成功に向けられてはいなかった。
教会の真の生殖利他主義は、極めて禁欲的な修道生活の魅力が非常に広まった要因であったようだ。
この禁欲主義は、中世中期の一般大衆の教会に対する認識において重要な要素であった。
11世紀から12世紀にかけて数千の修道院が建てられた。独身の禁欲的な男性で構成され、主に裕福な層から採用された修道院は、「教会全体の精神性、教育、芸術、そして文化の伝達の雰囲気の担い手だった…」。
修道士の祈りが全てのクリスチャンの助けになるという思想が、修道士の利他主義のイメージを育んだ。

これらの修道会は、非常に人気の大衆イメージを教会にもたらした。
13世紀の間、托鉢修道士達(ドミニコ会、フランシスコ会)は教会に対する教皇の権力を増大させ、聖職者の独身主義の規則を施行し、縁故主義や聖職売買を防止し、世俗権力に対抗する力を教会に与える教会改革に貢献した。それには信徒の性的関係を規制する権力の獲得等が含まれた。
「初期の托鉢僧は、最貧困層の最も搾取される人々に寄り添うように自発的に窮乏し自らに極貧を課していた。それらは世俗の聖職者の出世主義と虚飾、修道院の富と排他性とは全く異なっていた。それらは良心を突き動かし、商業コミュニティの気前の良さを刺激した。」

中世中期に…社会の最も有力で最も富裕、あるいは少なくとも豊かな層の多数のメンバーが、地上の快楽を最大限満喫する最良のチャンスを自ら断念したことは、歴史上最も驚くべき現象の一つである。…
新しい志願者の流れは、禁欲生活(修道生活)の規則が古代の厳格さに戻った地域、それどころか古代以上に厳しくなった地域で特に印象的であった。…
禁欲生活(修道生活)を選ぶ主な動機は、仮に長い人生の中でその原動力の一部を喪失したり、最初から他の動機が混ざっていたとしても、常に禁欲主義の世界終末論的理念があったと考えるべきであろう。

13世紀の間、托鉢修道士は基本的に貴族や地主などの裕福な家族から採用された。彼らの両親は普通の親がそうであるのと同じく孫を待ち望んだため、大抵それに反対した。
「裕福な家族にとって、子どもが修道士になることは悪夢だった」。これらの家族は、子どもが修道生活に勧誘されるのを避けるために子どもを大学に送るのをやめ始めた。

社会の中心にあったのは、人々は利他的であるべきであり、裕福に生まれても禁欲主義に生きるべきだというイデオロギーを持つ機関であった。
これが結婚とセックスに関して教会の権威が認められた理由であるが、そもそも、なぜ裕福な人々が修道院に入って禁欲(独身)を貫くことになるのか不思議である。
好き嫌いは抜きにして、この時期の西ヨーロッパは優生学と無縁であった。

中世の教会は西洋文化のユニークな特徴であったが、この論文のテーマは、批判的な意味で、それが最も非西洋的であったということにある。
なぜなら、中世ヨーロッパはグループアイデンティティとそれへの献身意識が強い集団主義の社会であったからだ。
私は、西洋社会は個人主義への献身においてもユニークであり、実際に個人主義が西洋文明を定義づけると以下で論ずる。

中世後期の西欧社会の集団主義はしっかりしたものだった。
例えば聖地をイスラム教徒の支配から解放しようとする十字軍遠征に伴う多数の巡礼者と宗教的熱狂、イングループ的な熱狂が示すように、社会のあらゆる階層でキリスト教への激しいグループアイデンティティと献身が存在していた。
中世の教会は、ユダヤ人に対するクリスチャングループの経済的利害の鋭い意識を持っていた。大抵の場合でユダヤ人の経済的・政治的影響力を阻止し、クリスチャンとユダヤ人の社会的交流を防ぐべく努力した。

以上のように、特に托鉢修道士、その他多数の宗教者、世俗エリートに至るまで、高レベルの生殖利他主義が存在した。
世俗エリートの生殖利他主義は主に強制の結果であったが、フランスのルイ9世のように自発的な抑制の場合もある。
ルイはクリスチャンの性道徳の模範であっただけではない。
彼はユダヤ人に対するクリスチャングループの経済的利害の鋭い意識も持ち、聖地をクリスチャンの手に取り戻すべく十字軍にも深く関与した。
ヨーロッパ人は、強力かつ脅威であった非クリスチャンのアウトグループ(特にムスリムとユダヤ人)に対し、自分達をクリスチャンのイングループの隊列の一員と見なした。

教会の力に基づく統一されたクリスチャン社会の理想と、エリートの間での性的抑制との間には、確かにギャップがあった。
しかしこれらのギャップに関しては、多くの中世クリスチャン、特に中世社会の主人公である以下の人々の認識を考慮するべきである。
修道院運動、托鉢修道士、改革派教皇、熱狂した十字軍、敬虔な巡礼者、更には多くのエリート貴族でさえ、彼ら自身を高度に統一された超国家的な集団の一員と見なしていた。
この根本的な集団主義志向を理解すれば、心理学の観点から中世の集団への激しい献身と利他主義とが分かる。それは現代の西欧とはあまりにも異質である。

 

西欧の社会的に課せられた一夫一妻制を保つ社会コントロール&イデオロギー

西欧では、教会は貴族の生殖の利益と正反対の教会式結婚モデルを採用した。その結果、12世紀末には家族構成の変化と教会による一夫一妻制の強制が起きた。
一夫一妻制の強制と維持には以下の要因が最も重要であっただろう。

離婚の禁止。
裕福な男性は簡単に再婚できるので、簡単に離婚できる場合の最大の受益者である。
ユーラシアの他の社会では離婚は一般的で、キリスト教以前のヨーロッパ諸部族の間でも合法であった。しかし教会の見解では結婚は一夫一妻制かつ不可逆であった。
クリスチャンローマ皇帝の下で離婚はますます制限され、9世紀から12世紀にかけて教会は貴族の離婚事件を争点にして貴族との紛争に勝利した。
例えば12世紀後半、フランス王フィリップは妻を嫌いでかつ妻が不妊であったにもかかわらず離婚を阻まれた。王はパリの修道院で宗教者グループに対し謝罪させられた。

離婚が許される場合もあったが、それは最初の結婚で男児の跡継ぎを産めなかった場合に限られた。例えば中世フランスのルイ七世とEleanor of Aquitaineの場合が当てはまる。
(しかし教皇は、ヘンリー八世が跡継ぎを産めない妻と離婚することを許可しなかった)
1857年の改革まで、イギリスでは離婚は「一握りの大金持ち以外には不可能だった」。しかしそれ以後でも離婚率は低さを維持し続けた。
「16世紀に離婚を合法化したヨーロッパの地域では、離婚率がグラフの横軸と区別できるようになるまで300年以上かかった」
イギリスでの離婚率は1914年まで0.1/1000以下、1943年まで1/1000以下だった。(Stone 1990)1910年当時、離婚率が0.5/1000を超えるヨーロッパの国は無かった。
私の知る限りでは、離婚を非常に避けるこの傾向は西欧文明特有である。

非嫡出子に対するペナルティ。
進化論の観点から、生殖に関する社会コントロールの最も重要な面は、内縁関係・事実婚のコントロールである。
非嫡出子のコントロールは、内縁関係・事実婚を困難・不可能にし、非嫡出子の財産相続を妨げる等で非嫡出子の将来性を危うくさせることで、裕福な男性の生殖利益を抑制する。

教会は内縁関係、特に正妻を差し置いての内縁関係を熱心に抑え込んだ。
非嫡出子の相続に対する社会コントロールは大抵効果的だったようだ。教会は、合法的結婚が合法の子供を産み、それ以外は法的地位を持たないという姿勢だったが、特定の時代には私生児は他の子供より地位が高かった。(see below)
私生児の相続財産は教会や国が没収したため、私生児に財産を残そうと願っても当局に阻止される可能性があった。
ピューリタン時代のイングランドでは、遺言状に私生児は一切登場しなかった。

教会の直接の影響力以外にも、世俗権力や世論によって、非嫡出子の出生にはその他様々なペナルティが科せられた。
非嫡出子の父親と特に母親には追放や投獄が科せられ、母親はその地域を去ることを含めて妊娠を隠すあらゆる努力をするのが普通だった。
これらの社会コントロールの影響は非嫡出子の死亡率にまで及んだ。近世の英仏では非嫡出子の方が乳児死亡率が高かった。
女性は非嫡出子を大抵捨てた。非嫡出子は大抵死産として報告され、嬰児殺しを暗示しており、女性は時として堕胎によって非嫡出子の出産から逃れようとした。

エリートに対する内縁関係の統制。
中世にはエリート男性に対する内縁関係の統制はますます効果的になった。よって12世紀は極めて重要であろう。
この時代の例には、一夫一妻制を支持する社会・イデオロギー的コントロールをうまく回避したエリート男性たちの話もあり、エリート男性でありながら完全な一夫一妻制を守った話もある。
一般のパターンは、英国王の非嫡出子の数から読み取れる。1066年から1485年までの18人の英国王の内で10人が愛人を持ち、恐らく計41人の非嫡出子を持った。
1100年から1135年のヘンリー一世は、この内20人を持ち、さらに5人の非嫡出子を持つ可能性もある。中世では他に三人以上の非嫡出子を持った王はおらず、八人の王は非嫡出子を持った記録が無い。
ヘンリー一世は領土的野心のために大量の子孫を欲したユニークな王である。それでもヘンリーは非嫡出子を嫡出子より遥かに酷く扱った。嫡出子は甘やかされ、宮廷で手ほどきを受け、大貴族の生活が約束されていた。
一方で私生児は王位継承から除外され、大抵は結婚のチャンスすら無かった。
12世紀に起きた結婚に関する考え方と慣習の大きな変化を反映して、その後数世紀で非嫡出子の数と重要性は低下した。

中世以降の性行動の取り締まり。
中世の教会の主な目標の一つは、一夫一妻制の結婚外での性行為を取り締まることであった。性的違反の取り締まりは中世から少なくとも17世紀末まで教会裁判所の重要な仕事であった。
これらの裁判所は17世紀のイギリスで非常に活発で、淫行・姦通・近親相姦・違法同居などを訴追した。
これらの教会の処罰の有効性は地域と時代により異なるが、「犠牲者は仲間に追い回され、村八分にされて生計を奪われ、追放者として扱われた」という悲惨な結果の例もある。

17世紀の高等宗務官裁判所には、他の司法手続きから免除されそうな富裕層に対し、姦通に対する制裁を含めた制裁を課す権限が認められていた。
「法の下の平等のこのような強制執行により、裁判所は17世紀のイングランドの重要人物たちに嫌われた」。
治安判事などの世俗当局も、それらの犯罪を訴追する用意があった。例えばエリザベス朝の法令に基づき16世紀と17世紀の治安判事たちは、男女の性犯罪者に対し、さらし台に拘束し、腰まで服を脱がせて(女性は「背中が血まみれになるまで」)公開鞭打ち刑に処すと宣告するのが普通だった。

一夫一妻制を促進するイデオロギー。
最終的には社会コントロールに依存していたものの、中世の教会は一夫一妻制と性的抑制を促進するべく巧みなイデオロギーを発展させた。
一般にこれらの著作は、独身主義の道徳的優位性とあらゆる種類の婚外性行為の罪深さを強調した。一夫一妻制の結婚以外での全ての性関係は、近世から現代にいたるまで宗教権威によって例外なく非難された。夫婦のセックスは嘆かわしく罪深いがやむを得ないものとされ、妻に対する過度の情熱は姦淫と見なされた。
18世紀には比較的緩和されたが、19世紀には激しい反快楽主義の宗教的性イデオロギーが台頭した。

結論。
中世以来、社会コントロールとイデオロギーの巧みなシステムが、西欧の広い地域で程度の差はあれ一夫一妻制の完全な押し付けに成功した。
「中世初期の大きな社会成果は、富裕層と貧困層の双方に同じ性行動・家庭行動のルールを課したことにある。王は宮殿にいて、農民は小屋にいたが、例外は無かった。」
とはいえこのシステムは決して完全な平等主義では無かった。工業化以前のヨーロッパでは富と生殖の成功の間の正の相関があった。

西欧では一夫多妻制にペナルティを課して非一夫一妻制を生殖と関わらないものに変えたり、完全に抑圧する等の、驚異的な継続性を持つ様々な慣例があった。
これらの慣例の変化や政治・経済構造の大変化にも関わらず、ローマ文明から始まる西洋の家族制度は明らかに一夫一妻制の社会的押し付けを目指してきた。この努力は大部分成功した。

 

一夫一妻制の効果

一夫一妻制は西洋のユニークさの中心的面であり、複数の重要な効果を持つ。
一夫一妻制はヨーロッパ特有の「低圧」人口動態の必要条件である可能性が高い。この人口動態は、経済的欠乏期に高い割合の女性が晩婚になったり独身になった結果である。
一夫一妻制との関連で言えば、一夫一妻制の結婚では男女ともに貧しい者は結婚すらできない状態になる。しかし一夫多妻制では、貧しい女性が過剰にいても、裕福な男性にとって側室の価格が安くなるだけである。
例えば、17世紀末には40~44歳の未婚率は男女共に約23%であった。しかし経済的チャンスの変化に伴って18世紀初頭にはこの割合が9%まで低下し、それに伴い結婚年齢も下がった。
このパターンは一夫一妻制と同様、ユーラシアの階層社会の中ではユニークであった。

同様に、低圧の人口動態は経済状態にも影響したようだ。
結婚率は、人口増加の主な抑制要因であっただけではない。特にイギリスでは好景気に対応する結婚率の上昇が大きく遅れる傾向があったため、人口増加が食料供給にかける圧力より好景気時の資本蓄積の傾向が強かった。

経済の変動と人口動態の変動の間のローリング調整はこのように緩慢に発生した。実質賃金は緩やかに大きく上昇する傾向にあったので、産業革命以前の全ての国の飛躍を妨げてきた低所得の罠から抜け出すチャンスを得た。
実質賃金の長期的な上昇は需要の構造を変化させ、生活必需品以外の商品の需要を不釣り合いに強く押し上げる傾向がある。産業革命が起きた場合は生活必需品以外の部門の成長こそが特に重要になる。

よって一夫一妻制は、工業化の必要条件である低圧の人口動態をもたらしたと考えることもできる。
全体を見れば、女性の晩婚化・独身化がワンパターンで進んでいるわけでは無い。それより、結婚は経済的制約に左右される。
豊かな時代には男女共に結婚年齢が低下し、子供を残さない女性は減った。その結果、リソースの利用能力に非常に左右される結婚制度になった。
「ヨーロッパの重要かつ飛び抜けた特徴は、システム転換の軸となった、人口を経済に適応させる柔軟な結婚制度であった」
これは、一夫一妻制が西洋近代化に不可欠な基本概念の中心面であった可能性を示唆する。

一夫一妻制と子どもへの投資
一夫多妻では、リソースが生殖に割かれて子供への投資が比較的少なくなる傾向がある。一夫多妻の男性にとっては、追加の妻や側室、投資額が少なく済む彼らの子供に向けて追加投資するのが魅力的である。
一夫多妻社会では、追加の側室に投資すれば報酬が大きい傾向があり、その子供への投資も安く済む。
側室の子供には比較的小さな遺産が与えられ、社会的地位は下がるのが一般的であった。
ハーレム女性の子孫の性比は低く、圧倒的に娘が多い。理論的には、一般的に女性の方が交尾しやすいため、低投資で済む子孫に偏ることを示す。
これら側室の娘は父親に比べて社会的地位は低いものの、交尾はしやすい傾向にある。一方で上流階級の息子は身分の低い一族からの持参金競争の対象となった。
いずれにせよ、父親が側室の子供に時間・労力・金銭を投資する必要は殆ど無い。

しかし一夫一妻では、個々の男性が投資できるのは一人の女性の子供に限られる。
拡大された親族関係が衰退し(see below)、全ての社会階層で一夫一妻が制度化されると、 子どもたちへの支援は独立した核家族次第になった。
後述のように、この「シンプルな」家族こそが西洋近代化の決定的手段であった。

 

拡大血縁(extended kinship relations)の衰退と単純世帯の台頭

一夫一妻制の場合と同じく、拡大血縁の衰退にも教会が関与した。
しかしこの場合の教会の政策は、強力な中央政府の台頭に助けられた。中央政府は拡大された家族関係を抑制し、個人の利害を保証することで拡大家族の役割を継承した。

進化論の観点からは、親族関係の潜在的な重要性を過大評価するのは難しい。
生物学的血縁関係のために親族は共通の利害を持ち、協力や自己犠牲行動への閾値も低いであろう。
ローマ帝国末期に西欧の大部分に定住したゲルマン諸部族は、男性間の生物学的血縁関係に基づく血縁グループとして組織化されていた。彼らは血縁の絆に基づく強いグループ連帯感を持っていた。
「初期のゲルマン人は攻撃や飢饉の脅威に直面しても、官僚的帝国の保護と支援に頼ることができなかったため、共同体の各男女は家族や共同体の連帯の絆が体現するグループ・サバイバルという社会生物学の基本原則に固執する義務があった」。
この部族に基づく血縁集団の世界こそが、王や教会が根絶したいものだった。

拡大血縁に対する反対勢力
大規模かつ強力な血縁グループを根絶することは教会と貴族の双方にとって利益があった。
高度に中央集権化された国家権力は、それ自体で拡大血縁の重要性を下げる傾向があり、その権力が個人の利益を保護する場合には特にそうなる。
進化論の観点から見れば、拡大血縁グループはコストと利益がある。
利点はより広い親族から提供される保護と支援であるが、この利点にはコストも伴う。
1)親族からの互恵的なサービスの要求が高まる
2)親族は、ある個人が親族集団の中で他の人より過度に出世するのを妨害する傾向がある事実
3)平等主義と程遠い親族構造の中で自己を確立する困難さ
結果として、自分の利益が他の制度によって保護されている場合、例えば拡大血縁の利益は無くコストだけがある場合には、個人は拡大血縁グループに絡まるのを避けるであろう。
一般に、中央集権が弱体化すると、個人は拡大血縁グループの保護を求める傾向があり、国家権力が自分達の利益を充分守れる力を持つ場合には、それに伴って拡大血縁グループから逃げ出す。

単純な家族に基づき近親者への義務から解放された貴族が、単純な家族構造の農民を支配し、拡大血縁とは違う隣人や友人から成る社会に組み込まれた。それが、徐々に発展した西洋の図式である。
この社会構造は中世後期の成果である。中世後期には、英仏の農民にとって拡大血縁は重要ではなくなっていた。

教会の政策。
教会の政策の一つとして、教会は近親婚(近い血縁の結婚)に反対し、双方の同意のみに基づく結婚を支持して、西欧での拡大血縁の絆の根絶に貢献した。
近親婚については、教会は拡大し続ける個人の集団の間での結婚を禁じた。六世紀にはまたいとこまで、11世紀までには6th cousins、つまりgreat-great-great-great-great grandfatherが共通になる個人にまで禁止が拡大された。
明らかに、これらの近親婚の禁止の範囲は進化論で予測できる範囲より遥かに広い。
加えて、同様に遠い、婚姻で生じた親族(結婚で親族になった場合)や精神的親族の個人間(代父母としての親族)でも結婚は禁じられており、生物学的血縁は重要とされなかった。
この政策の効果は、拡大血縁のネットワークを弱体化させ、より広い親族グループへの義務から解放された貴族を生み出した。

教会のこれらの禁止命令がどのように正当化されたにせよ、貴族が教会の規則に従った証拠がある。
十世紀から十一世紀のフランス貴族の間で、4th or 5th cousinsより近い親族間の結婚はほとんど起きなかった。
これらの慣習は、近親婚の範囲の拡大が「結婚による血縁の強化」を排除して拡大血縁グループの連帯を妨げたので、拡大血縁グループを弱体化させた。
その結果、生物学的血縁が社会の頂点に集中することなく、貴族全体に分散して広がった。
より広い親族グループだけでなく家族の直系の子孫も恩恵を受けた。「世俗の高い地位の男性は、…自分の直系の子孫のためにできるだけ自分の財産と家族を一元管理しようとし、より広い親族は二の次だった」。

近親婚に対する政策に加えて、結婚における同意という教会の教義が、拡大血縁に対抗する力として働いた。
「家族・部族・氏族は個人に従属していた。もし結婚したいなら、自分で相手を選ぶことができ、教会はその選択を弁護する」。結婚は同意の結果として起こり、性交によって批准された。
結婚の基礎を、家族や世俗支配者の支配から当事者自身に譲渡させることで、教会は伝統的親族・家族の絆に対抗する権威を確立した。
結婚相手の選択の自由は近代を通してイングランドの原則であり、親のコントロールは人口の上位1%でのみ起こった。

 

西洋個人主義の民族的基盤

Magian(東方人)の人間は、上から下に降順で整列しており、「我々」なるものの空っぽな一部分にすぎず、全てのメンバーが代わり映えが無い。
肉体と魂としては彼は自立しているが、異質で高次な別のものも彼の中に宿っている。それは彼の全ての気配と信念とを単なるコンセンサスの一員にする。それは神の放出物として、自我の自己主張の可能性を排除する。
彼にとっての真理は、我々、特にヨーロッパ精神を持つ我々にとっての真理と全く異質である。
個人の判断に基づく我々の認識論的方法は全て、彼にとっては狂気とのぼせ上がりである。その科学的結果は、その真の性質と目的において精神を混乱させ欺く邪悪な所業である。
この洞窟の世界の中にはMagianの究極かつ近寄りがたい秘密がある。自我が考え・信じ・知ることの不可能性こそが、これらの宗教の基礎の前提にある。

ファウストの世界観
「Wolfran von Eschenback、セルバンテス、シェイクスピア、ゲーテにとって、個人の人生の悲劇の線は、内側から外側へ、ダイナミックに、機能的に発展する」。
「…神が見せる、または見せたと言われる仮面の言葉が、殴っても空々しく聞こえるならば、神を疑うことさえする」オズワルド・シュペングラー

これまでのところでは、同意と愛、一夫一妻制、拡大血縁の重要性の低下に基づく個人主義的な核家族の出現は、単に私が述べた社会プロセスの結果に過ぎないと思う人もいるだろう。
しかし実際には、これらの変化が世界の他の地域より遥かに素早くかつ徹底的に発生したのである。
西洋世界は、個人主義の全てのマーカーが基本的な特徴である唯一の文化圏であり続けている。一夫一妻制、夫婦の核家族、国家に対抗する個人の権利としての代議制政府、道徳普遍主義、科学。
更に言えばこの文化は、これら特徴を幾つか備えたローマ文明の強固な基盤の上に築かれた。
よって私は、これらの傾向は西欧文化圏のユニークなものであり、民族的基盤が支えていると提唱する。
西欧人がユニークな生物学的適応を果たしているとまでは思わないが、全人類は適応の特徴の程度にそれぞれ違いがあり、ユニークな文化の進化を可能にするには十分な量の違いがあっただけである。
同様に、全ての人間は象徴表現や言語のような特徴的な精神的能力を備えているが、文化に大きな影響を与えるには十分な量の人種間のIQの違いが存在する。恐らく、少なくとも質的な違いをもたらすには十分な量の違いがある。

私は、最近の進化の過程で、ヨーロッパ人はユダヤ民族やその他の中東の人種集団と比べてグループ間自然選択を受けにくかったと提唱する。
これは元々Fritz Lenzが提唱したもので、氷河期の厳しい環境のために北欧人は少人数グループで進化し、社会的孤立の傾向があるというものだ。
この観点は、北欧人がグループ間競争に必要な集産主義メカニズムを持っていないことを示唆するものでは無い。集産主義メカニズムが比較的巧みではない、そして/またはメカニズム発現に、より激しいグループ間紛争が必要だと示唆している。

この観点は生態学の理論と一致する。生態学的に不利な環境下で、適応は他のグループとの競争よりも不利な物理環境に対処することに向けられる。そのような環境下では、拡大血縁ネットワークや高度集産主義グループに対する選択圧力は弱いであろう。
進化論的なエスノセントリズムの概念化は、イングループ競争でのエスノセントリズムの有用さを強調する。したがってエスノセントリズムは物理環境との格闘では全く重要でない。また、そのような環境は巨大なグループを支えられないであろう。

ヨーロッパ人グループは北ユーラシア・北極周辺の文化圏の一部である。この文化圏は、寒冷で生態学的に不利な気候に適応した狩猟採集民に由来する。
このような気候では男性が家族を養う圧力と一夫一妻制に向かう傾向がある。生態が、進化的に重要になる期間に一夫多妻制と大グループを支えなかったからである。
これらの文化では、男性と女性の両系統が双務的に重要になる親族関係が特徴であり、一夫一妻制の条件下で期待される以上に両親の貢献度が対等になると示唆される。
また、拡大血縁は重視されず、結婚は族外婚、つまり親族グループの外に向かって起こる傾向がある。
これらの特徴は全て、ユーラシア南部の旧世界中央部の文化圏の特徴とは反対である。この文化グループにはユダヤ人やその近縁の近東グループがある。

このシナリオは、北欧人が個人主義に向かいやすいことを示唆する。なぜなら彼らは拡大血縁に基づく巨大な部族グループを支えられない生態的環境に長期間住んでいた。
ミトコンドリアDNAによると、ヨーロッパ人の遺伝子の約80%は三~四万年前に中東からヨーロッパに到着した人々に由来する。
これらの集団は氷河期を生き延びた。四万年間北部の寒い曇りの環境で進化したヨーロッパ人は、金髪と青い目だけでなく環境に適応した気質と生活様式の嗜好を発達させたであろう。

これらの人々は農耕種族ではなく、狩猟採集民であった。経済生産のレベルは比較的低いため、狩猟生活では男性は女性を得やすい。
なぜなら、人間の脳に必要なエネルギー量は質の高い食事でのみ満たされるからである。
人間の脳は体重の2%しかないが、全エネルギーの20%を消費し、胎児期には70%を消費する。
これが、一夫一妻の心理的基盤であるつがいの絆(女性が育成し男性が養育する協力体制)を五十万年前から始めさせた。
狩猟には「相当な経験、質の高い教育、長年の集中的な実践」も必要だった。言い換えればこれは高投資の子育てである。
また人間の狩猟は、走力や体力よりも認知能力に左右されるため、知能も必要である。
狩猟のシナリオは複雑かつ常に変化する。どの動物種、個体も、性別・年齢・気候・地形などの内的条件に応じて固有の行動特性を示す。
これらの傾向は全て、単位面積当たりのエネルギーが少ない北方で強い。

歴史的証拠が示すところでは、ヨーロッパ人、特に北西ヨーロッパ人は、強力な中央政府が台頭して自分達の利害が保護された時、比較的早く拡大血縁ネットワークと集産主義の社会構造を捨てた。
中央の権威が台頭すると、世界の普遍的傾向として拡大血縁のネットワークが衰退する。
しかし北西ヨーロッパの場合では、この傾向は遅くとも中世後期までには早くも台頭し、それ以前に既に西欧特有の「単純世帯」は生まれつつあった。
単純世帯は、一夫一妻とその子供たちが基本である。
この世帯のタイプは、フィンランドを除くスカンジナビア・イギリス諸島・ネーデルラント・ドイツ語圏・北フランスで典型的である。
これはユーラシア他地域で典型的な、兄弟とその妻の二組以上の親族カップルから成る共同世帯構造とは対照的である。
産業革命以前の単純世帯は、結婚年齢は遅く、未婚の若者を使用人として働かせて富裕層の家庭の間をぐるぐる回らせることが特徴であった。
共同世帯は、男女とも結婚年齢は早く、出生率は高く、必要に応じて二つ以上の世帯に分離できることが特徴であった。

この単純世帯システムは、個人主義文化の基礎の特徴である。
個人主義の家族は拡大血縁の義務と制約から解放され、世界の他地域で典型的な息苦しい集産主義の社会構造からも解放され、家族自身の利害を追求できるようになった。
個人の同意と夫婦の愛に基づく結婚が早い時期に、親族関係と懸念事項に基づく結婚に取って代わった。

単純世帯の形成に向かうこの比較的強い傾向は、民族性に基づくであろう。
過酷な気候に適応した人々にとって、単純世帯は生態学的に合理的であるだけではない。以前に指摘したように、この傾向はゲルマン民族の間でより強い。
英仏海峡のサンマロとフランス語圏であるスイスのジュネーブを結ぶ「永遠の線」から北東に住むゲルマン民族の区分に対応して、フランス国内に大きな違いが存在することは興味深い発見である。
この地域は18世紀の農業革命以前から、成長する町や都市を養える大規模農業を発展させていた。
それを支えたのは町の熟練職人たちであり、中規模農家たちが形成する大きな階層であった。
彼らは「馬、銅のボウル、ガラスの杯、大抵は靴も持っていた。彼らの子供達は頬がふっくらしており、肩幅は広く、赤ちゃんまで小さな靴を履いていた。これら子供たちは誰も第三世界のくる病の膨れた腹をしていなかった。」
北東部はフランスの工業化と世界貿易の中心になった。

北東部は識字率でも南西部と差があった。19世紀初頭、フランス全体の識字率は約50%に対し、北東部は100%近く、少なくとも17世紀から差が生じていた。
更に身長でも顕著な差があり、18世紀の新兵のサンプルでは北東部の人々の方が2センチ近くも背が高かった。
Ladurieは以下のように指摘した。軍は南西部の背の低い人々をあまり受け入れないため、人口全体で見ればその差はもっと大きいであろう。
家族史家は以下のように指摘した。経済的に独立した核家族への傾向は北部で顕著であり、南東部に移るにつれて共同世帯への傾向が見られる。

これら調査結果は、民族の違いがヨーロッパでの家族形態の地理的違いに寄与していることを強く示唆する。
ゲルマン民族は進化の過程で資源が乏しい北欧で自然選択されたため、個人主義に向かう生物学的傾向が強く、核家族の社会構造へ向かう傾向も強いことが示唆された。
これらグループは拡大血縁グループにあまり魅了されず、拡大血縁ネットワークの衰退に伴って状況が変化すると、単純世帯の構造が素早く出現した。
この単純世帯の構造が比較的容易に採用されたのは、このグループがすでにそのユニークな進化の歴史によって、単純世帯システムに向かう比較的強い心理的素因を持っていたからである。

ゲルマン民族とヨーロッパ他地域の間のシステムの違いは重要ではあるものの、西欧とユーラシア他地域との間の全般的違いほど大きくはない。
単純世帯に向かう傾向と人口動態の変動は北西ヨーロッパで最初に生じたが、比較的早期に全ての西洋諸国に広がった。

西洋のユニークさのもう一つの要素として、単純世帯を特徴とする北西ヨーロッパの農民家庭では、若者を他の家庭の使用人に送り出す慣習があった。
工業化以前のイギリスでは30~40%の若者は他人の家庭に使用人として出向いており、使用人は20世紀まで最大の職業グループであった。
使用人を雇う慣習は、単に外部の人間を導入して誰かのニーズを満たすだけにとどまらない。
人々は時には自分の子供達を使用人に送り出すと共に、同時に縁のない使用人を受け入れた。
使用人になったのは貧しい土地を持たない人々の子供達だけではない。裕福な大農家でさえ子供たちを使用人としてよそに送り出した。
17、18世紀には、人々は結婚後早い段階で、自分の子供達が仕事を手伝えるようになる前に使用人を受け入れ、子供が十分成長して人手が余ったら子供をよその家庭に使用人として送り出した。

これは、深く根付いた文化的慣習が、結果として親族関係に基づかない高水準の互恵関係に結びついたことを示唆する。
この慣習はまた、非親族を世帯の一員に迎え入れるという、相対的なエスノセントリズムの欠如も物語っている。
これらの工業化以前の社会は、拡大血縁を中心に組織されたものでは無く、産業革命と近代世界にあらかじめ適応していたことが容易に理解できる。
ユーラシア他地域では、世帯は親族だけで構成される傾向が強かった。

興味深いことに、古典的中国のような性競争社会では、女性使用人は家長の側室になりやすく、世帯のリソースを直接生殖に回すことができた。
よって西欧モデルでは、裕福な男性はユーラシアの性競争社会よりもはるかに多くの非親族を養っていた。
過酷な気候で生きる狩猟採集社会が大抵、肉などのリソースの共有を目指す非常に巧みな相互扶助のシステムを持つことは興味深い。
工業化以前の西欧に非常に典型的な、非親族同士の相互扶助のシステムも、過酷な北方の気候で長期間進化してきた遺品の一つではないだろうか。

親族社会のしがらみから解放された単純世帯の確立の後には、西洋近代化の他の全てのマーカーが続いた。
個人が国家に対して権利を有する制限された政府、個人の経済的権利に基づく資本主義経済企業、個人主義的な真理の探究としての科学。
個人主義社会は共和制の政治制度と科学的探究の制度を発達させ、グループは最大限の透過性を持ち、個々のニーズを満たせない場合には離反される可能性が高いであろう。

 

個人主義の結婚。結婚の基礎である同意・愛・伴侶関係。

夫婦の同意に基づく単純世帯の台頭は、家族が拡大血縁のしがらみの中にある状況と比較して、結婚相手の個人的な資質がより重要になったことを意味した。
拡大家族が支配する状況では、結婚は一般的に血族婚になり、家族の戦略に左右される。
単純世帯システムでは、結婚相手の個人的特性がより重視される。知能、性格、心理的相性、社会経済的地位などである。

集産主義社会が結婚の際に家系や遺伝的血縁の程度を重視するのに対して、個人主義社会は個人的魅力、例えば恋愛や共通の利害を重視する傾向がある。
ジョン・マネーは、北欧人のグループが結婚の基礎として恋愛を重視する傾向が比較的強いことを指摘した。
Frank Salterは以下のように提唱した。北欧人グループは性行動に関して多くの個人主義的適応を持つ。それには寝取られを防ぐための社会コントロール機構よりむしろ、恋愛や遺伝特性へのより強い傾向がある。
心理的なレベルでは、個人主義の進化論的基盤には、集産主義文化のように家族の戦略や強制によって課されるのではなく、適応的行動が本質的にやりがいがある、恋愛のようなメカニズムが含まれる。
これは、自由に同意できる多かれ少なかれ平等なパートナー間の個人的な求愛と、女性の見合い結婚が成立するまで男性親族に隔離・管理される近東のpurdahの制度の違いである。

中世からパートナー間の愛情と同意に基づく伴侶結婚に向かう傾向が始まり、最終的には高位の貴族の結婚の決定まで左右するようになった。
「大半の社会とは違い、西洋の工業社会では男性と妻の感情の関係が第一優先される」
実際、これは東洋と西洋の階層社会の間で普遍的に異なる点である。
一夫一妻の結婚の基礎としての恋愛の理想化は、古代末期のストア派や19世紀のロマン主義などの西洋の世俗知的運動をも周期的に特徴づけてきた。
他の社会で配偶者間の愛情が存在しないという訳ではない。西洋社会ではそれがより重要であるというだけだ。

中世以来の西洋の結婚の特徴としての、結婚への個人の同意は、結婚相手の個人的な特徴をより重視する個人を生み出すであろう。
その効果の一つは、結婚相手の年齢の平準化である。結婚年齢が比較的平準であることと晩婚化は、西欧結婚システムの特徴である。
女性の結婚年齢は、西欧ではユーラシアやアフリカの他地域よりも高く、これは共同家族が特徴の西欧農民社会を含めても同じ傾向だった。
実際、1550-1775年のイギリスの大規模なサンプルでは、女性の平均結婚年齢は1675年まで26歳前後で変動していたが、1800年には24歳過ぎにまで低下し始めた。

単純世帯がもたらしたもう一つの結果は、愛情とつがいの絆が結婚の基礎になったことである。
結婚は、親族グループ間や親族グループ内での政治同盟、純粋な経済関係、単なる性的競争の側面としては重要性を失い、愛情を含む対人魅力に基づくようになった。
結婚生活での愛情は、単純世帯の台頭と共に文化的な規範となった。
西洋の求愛現象(ユーラシア・アフリカ文化の中でユニークな)は、将来の結婚相手が個人の相性を評価できる期間を提供した。
マルサスの言葉を借りれば、両性に「同類の気質を見出し、結婚生活が幸福より不幸を多く生むことにならないよう、強く持続的な愛着を形成する」機会を与えた。

 

ヨーロッパ人の個人主義と民族意識の低下

ここまでで私が描いたシナリオの要約は以下である。西ヨーロッパ人が比較的エスノセントリックでないのは、拡大血縁が比較的機能しない悪環境の下で長期間自然選択されてきた結果である。
西欧人は拡大血縁の束縛から解放され、原点回帰し、近代化の原動力となった単純世帯を容易に採用した。伴侶結婚、国家に対抗する個人の権利、代議制政府、道徳普遍主義、科学。
その結果、創造性、征服、富の創造などの、現代まで続く並外れた時代が到来した。
しかし、ユダヤ教に関する私の著作のテーマの一つは以下である。個人主義は、凝集的グループ戦略に対して貧弱で無力な戦略である。

西洋では、近代化に必要な前段階として拡大血縁グループが排除されたが、グループ間競争が全面的に排除されたわけでは無い。
19世紀以降、集産主義者で民族意識が強いユダヤ人たちと、西洋個人主義エリートたちとの間で競争が起きた。

人類学的には、ユダヤ人は旧世界中部の文化圏に由来する。
この文化圏は、西洋社会組織の特徴とは正反対である。Table 1に示すように、ユダヤ教は集産主義であり、エスノセントリズム・xenophobia(外国人憎悪)・moral particularism(道徳非普遍主義)に陥りやすい。

Table 1 省略

ユダヤ教に関する私の著作では、個人主義社会は、歴史的にはユダヤ教が代表する凝集的グループの侵略に対して特に脆弱であるというテーマが随所に登場する。
進化経済学者の最近の研究は、個人主義文化と集産主義文化の違いについて、興味深い洞察を提供する。
この研究の重要な面は、個人主義グループ間の協力の進化をモデル化する点にある。
人々は「ワンショットゲーム」で離反者を利他的に罰する。このゲームでは参加者同士は一度しか交流せず、交流相手の評判はゲームを左右できない。
この状況は、参加者は親戚関係のない他人であるため、個人主義文化をモデル化している。
驚くべき発見として、公共財の寄付を高水準で行った被験者は、寄付しない参加者を、罰するコストをわざわざ費やしてまで罰する傾向があった。
そして、罰せられた人は、以降のラウンドの参加者が前のと違うのを知っていたにもかかわらず、戦略変更してより多くの寄付をするようになった。
研究者たちは以下のことを提唱した。個人主義文化圏の人々は、free ridingに対するネガティヴな感情反応を進化させ、自分がコストを払ってでもフリーライダーを罰するようになった。これは”altruistic punishment”(利他的罰)と呼ばれる。

この研究は本質的に、個人主義の人々の間の協力の進化モデルを提供する。
彼らの結果は個人主義グループに最も当てはまる。なぜなら、そのようなグループは拡大血縁グループに基づいていないため、離反がより起きやすい。
高レベルの利他的罰は一般的に、拡大家族を基盤とする親族ベースの社会より、個人主義の狩猟採集社会で多く見られる。
彼らの結果は、ユダヤ人グループや他の高度集産主義グループのような、伝統社会では拡大血縁・既知の親族関係・メンバー間の繰り返しの相互関係に基づくグループには、ほとんど当てはまらない。
そのような状況では主体者は拡大血縁ネットワークに巻き込まれており、もしくはユダヤ人のように民族グループで固まっているため、協力者を知っており、将来の協力への期待も込みである。

よって、ヨーロッパ人は正にこの研究がモデル化した類のグループである。
彼らは拡大家族のメンバーとよりも見知らぬ人との協調性が高いグループであり、マーケットでの関係や個人主義に傾倒しやすい。

これは以下のような魅力的な可能性を示唆する。ヨーロッパ人同士を互いに離反させようとするグループにとっての鍵は、ヨーロッパ人自身が道徳的非難に値することを彼らに納得させることで、ヨーロッパ人同士の間で利他的罰を引き起こさせる点にある。
ヨーロッパ人は根っからの個人主義者であり、他のヨーロッパ人がフリーライダーであり道徳的非難に値すると見なすと、道徳的怒りでそのヨーロッパ人に対して容易に決起する。これは、狩猟採集民として進化した過去に由来する、利他的罰への強い傾向の発現である。
利他的罰の判断を下すのに、相対的な遺伝距離は無関係である。フリーライダーはマーケットにおいて見知らぬ人であり、つまり彼らは利他的罰を行う側とは家族・部族のつながりは無い。

ピューリタンは、利他的罰を求めるこの傾向の典型例として、非常に興味深く影響力のあるヨーロッパ人グループである。
ピューリタンの決定的特徴は、道徳問題としてユートピアの大義を追求する傾向である。彼らは’よりハイレベルの法’に対するユートピア的訴えや、政府の主要目標は道徳にあるという信念に左右されやすい。
ニューイングランドは「人間の信念を完成させ」、「沢山の’isms(主義)’の生みの親」になるのに最も適した肥沃な土地であった。
政治的代替案を、一方を悪魔の化身として、他方を道徳的に必要不可欠なものとして、極端に物事を対照的に考える傾向があった。
ピューリタンの道徳的熱情は、彼らの「深い個人的な敬虔さ」、つまり聖なる生活だけでなく厳格で勤勉な生活を送りたいという彼らの献身への熱意にも見て取れる。

ピューリタンは道徳的正しさを求めて、自分達の遺伝的いとこに対してさえ聖戦を繰り広げた。
これは、拡大血縁に基づくグループよりも、協力的な狩猟採集グループの間で多く見られる利他的罰の一形態であることが示唆される。
例えば、南北戦争につながった政治・経済の複雑さがどうであれ、ヤンキーの奴隷制に対する道徳的非難がレトリックを左右し、アフリカからの奴隷の代理人として英米人の近親者同士が行った大規模な殺戮はピューリタンの中で正当化された。
軍事的には南部連合との戦争は、アメリカ人の生命と財産にこれまでで最大の犠牲を強いた。
ピューリタンの道徳熱と、悪人への厳罰を正当化する傾向は、以下のコメントにも見て取れる。「ニューヨークのHenry Ward Beecher’s Old Plymouth Churchの会衆派牧師は’ドイツ人を絶滅させ…1000万人のドイツ兵の不妊手術と女性の隔離’を呼び掛けるほどだった」。

これらが現代西洋文明に特徴的な、現在見られるような利他的罰である。
一度ヨーロッパ人が自分達自身の民族が道徳的に破産したと確信したら、あらゆる罰の手段を自分達の民族自身に対して用いるであろう。
他のヨーロッパ人を包括的な民族・部族共同体の一部と見なすよりも、同じヨーロッパ人を道徳的非難に値する存在と見なし、利他的罰の標的と見なした。
西洋人にとっては道徳は個人主義的である。フリーライダーが共同体規範を侵害すると、利他的攻撃で罰せられる。

一方で、ユダヤ教のような集産主義文化に由来するグループ戦略は、親族関係やグループの絆が優先されるため、それら策略に対して免疫がある。
彼らの道徳は非普遍主義である。グループの利害のためならどのようなことも正当化する。
これらグループの進化の歴史は、見知らぬ人とではなく親族同士との協力が中心であったため、利他的罰の伝統を持たない。

よって、ヨーロッパ人を破滅させる最良の戦略は、ヨーロッパ人に自身の道徳的破産を確信させることである。
私の著作「The Culture of Critique(批判の文化): An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements」の主題は、これこそがユダヤ人知的運動がやってきたことだと証明する点にあった。
彼らは、ユダヤ教はヨーロッパ文明よりも道徳的に優れており、ヨーロッパ文明は道徳的に破綻しており、利他的罰の標的に相応しいと訴えてきたのだ。
その結果、ヨーロッパ人は自身の道徳的堕落を一たび確信すれば、利他的罰の発作で自分達自身を破滅させようとする。
道徳的な猛攻が利他的罰の発作を誘発した結果として、西洋の文化が全面的に解体され、最終的に民族の実体のようなものさえ死滅するようなことが起きる。
こうしてユダヤ人知識人たちの間では以下の激しい努力が見られる。ユダヤ教の道徳的優越性と歴史上の不当な被害者の役割のイデオロギーを維持する努力。同時に、西洋の道徳的正当性を猛攻撃する継続的努力。

つまり、個人主義社会は、ユダヤ教のような高度集産主義・グループ最優先の戦略を持つ人々にとって望ましい環境である。
非ヨーロッパ系移民の問題が、米国のみならず西洋世界全体で深刻かつ争点だらけの問題となり、他地域では全くそうなっていないことは重要である。
ヨーロッパ起源の民族だけが、世界の他の民族に門戸を開いて、数百年占有してきた自民族の領土の支配権を失う危険にさらされている。
そして彼らは大部分、移民活動家たちが自身の民族的目標を達成するべく巧みに利用した道徳的反省に、引っ張られ誘導されていた。

西洋社会には個人主義ヒューマニズムの伝統があり、それが移民制限を困難にしている。
例えば19世紀には最高裁は、中国人排斥法を、個人に対してではなくグループに対して立法しているという理由で二度却下している。
移民制限の知的根拠を構築する努力の道には紆余曲折があった。
1920年まで、移民制限論は北西ヨーロッパ人の民族的利害の正当性を根拠としており、人種主義の思想を帯びていた。
これらの発想はいずれも、Israel Zangwill等のユダヤ人移民推進活動家が強調したように、人種・民族グループへの帰属が公的な知的是非を問われない共和制・民主主義社会の政治・道徳・人道イデオロギーとの調和が困難なものであった。
1952年のMcCarran-Walter act immigration actを巡る論争で、これら民族的自己利害の主張が「同化可能性」のイデオロギーに置き換えられたことは、反対派にとっては「racism(人種主義)」の煙幕に過ぎないと受け取られた。
結局この知的伝統は、本書で検討した知的運動の猛攻の結果として倒壊し、ヨーロッパ出身諸民族の民族利害を守る中心の柱も倒壊した。

ユダヤ人知識人の非常に顕著な戦略の一つは、社会の民族基盤が全般的に損なわれるほどの radical individualism(急進的個人主義)とmoral universalism(道徳普遍主義)の促進であった。
言い換えればこれら運動は、西洋社会がすでに個人主義と道徳普遍主義のパラダイムを採用しており、自民族に対する利他的罰を行う傾向が強い点を利用した。
これら運動は、ユダヤ教を強い凝集力のあるグループベースの運動として無傷で残したまま、ヨーロッパ人に残っていたグループ凝集の源泉を弱体化させた。
この戦略の手本はフランクフルト社会研究学派の取り組みである。左翼の政治イデオロギーや精神分析家たちについても同様であろう。
端的に言えば、非ユダヤ人グループ(特にヨーロッパ系)のアイデンティティは精神病の指標とされている。

拡大血縁の衰退と個人主義の台頭にもかかわらず、ヨーロッパ人はより大きな共同体の一員としての意識を完全に放棄してはいなかった。
米国のヨーロッパ人は20世紀に入っても、人種に基づく民族感覚を保ち続けていた。
この民族感覚、人種の一員であるという意識は、ダーウィン主義の学問が支えていた。ダーウィン主義者たちは、人種間の差異を確立された科学的知見と考えただけでなく、白色人種をユニークな才能を持つ人種と考えていた。
しかし、生物学の視点で民族感覚を見出そうとするこの最後の試みは急激に衰退した。The Culture of Critiqueで論じたような知的運動の結果、今日では学界で恐怖の目で見られている。

 

Conclusion

西洋の個人主義社会が、ヨーロッパ起源の人々の正当な利害を守ることができるかどうか、疑わしい。
現在の傾向から言って、個人主義を放棄できないなら、最終的にはヨーロッパ人の遺伝・政治・文化影響力はかなり減少していくと予想できる。
これはパワーの前代未聞の自主放棄である。進化論者は、どこかの段階で人口の大部分がそのような自主放棄に抵抗すると予想する。
抵抗する彼らは恐らく、我々の中のよりエスノセントリックな人々であろう。
皮肉なことにこの抵抗反応は、グループに奉仕する集産主義のイデオロギーと社会組織を採用し、ユダヤ教の一面を模倣するであろう。
ヨーロッパ人の衰退が進むか止まるかに関わらず、グループ進化戦略としてのユダヤ教が西洋社会の針路を左右し続けるであろう。

 

引用・参考文献等は原文を参照