The social and political meaning of breeding, even the word breeding itself, is all very uncomfortable: it is a question that is deeply painful to mankind at all times, and that therefore has been treated, by both religions and great philosophers, with circumspection and reserve. But it is a subject especially unpleasant to us moderns. It touches on many things modern people thought had been settled or best no longer talked about. It is a question almost identical to the question of human superiority and inferiority. It is easy to see that this is so from two points of view, the classical and the modern.
From the classical point of view, once one accepts the necessity of this question of the centrality of human breeding, for example as the founder of a political state, or the founder of a religion, or as a lawgiver, it becomes intimately tied with the second. For it is of greatest importance which qualities a wife also selects for in husband, what types of men are rewarded and given chance to have a posterity. It concerns the next generation of citizens or subjects. How they are to be raised, provided for, educated, what kinds of men and women they are to become. But most importantly, who is to be born. Many ancient traditions assumed that human pairings are not, or should not be, random: they assumed, unconsciously or not, the hereditary nature of various qualities, and therefore assumed that great care must go into matchmaking. In political philosophy starting with the Greeks this question becomes explicit. A point of view like that implied in John Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance, or any idea of “accident of birth,” would have seemed absurd for the simple reason that neither marriages nor births are random or incidental. Indeed, both men and women, and, in the classical case, governments, put the greatest care in this question above all.
Nevertheless from the modern point of view this orientation seems cold, uncongenial, remote, inauthentic and authoritarian. It denies the intrinsic worth of everyone and also the absolute freedom to be whatever we want to be—two articles of modern faith, at least in theory. It subsumes our most cherished intimacy to requirements of religion or state, blots out our intrinsic human worth in favor of something worse than utilitarianism, at least from the sound of it—it blots us out in favor of biology, even; or animal husbandry. It seems to reduce us to livestock. It reminds some, rightly or wrongly, of Nazism to think of human beings this way. It offends the modern moral sense on both right and left, though each wants to blame the other for views of this kind.
From the classical point of view, the modern objection is not so much immoral or dangerous, as it is self-defeating. Consider the following especially unpleasant and tangential comparison: authoritarian regimes are blamed for inducing women to have forced abortions or even committing murder—“euthanasia”—for eugenic or political reasons. North Korea will forcibly abort the fetus of any woman if the child is to be born half Chinese. [xxiv] Nazi Germany of course is notorious for its programs to euthanize the mentally impaired or disabled—and the added justification that it was to be done out of compassion is seen as especially grotesque. This may be so. And such actions are today seen as the pinnacle of evil by the modern liberal West. But parents or mothers in the modern liberal West are eliminating the existence of people with, for example, Down’s syndrome, by aborting a very great percentage in the womb. Freedom and modern science has allowed a far more “humane” method of eugenics, and also a far more thorough-going one, than could have ever been carried out by Nazi Germany—although not a more efficient or effective one.[xxv] It’s easy to guess what will happen if, say, genes correlating with homosexuality are to be discovered soon with any certainty. [xxvi] There is an old saying, “if you cut off the left side of a log, it will still have a left side.” What we call “eugenics” with moral alarm is going to happen one way or another. The only question is which way one prefers it to happen—moderns have chosen a decentralized form that, through the morality of liberalism and through the methods provided by the latest science, puts this power in the hands of parents or mothers. That is fine, it may be superior: but recognize that, whichever way you have it, it will still happen.
It is the same in general with the problem of sex, marriage, and breeding. Substituting the remote and “political” classical orientation with the modern individualist and subjective orientation will still result in arrangements that are in the end, not egalitarian, not random, not a chance result of absolute individual freedom. It will still result in group-based patterns of mating and childbearing that will affect society as a whole and change its structure in fundamental ways. Sexual choices of “free individuals” will still result in inequality, although not necessarily eugenic inequality.
Followers of Marx have understood, even if indirectly, this great problem. One great weakness of Marxism is that even if the End State of freedom from material necessity were achieved, scarcity in the sexual market would remain, and would be, like it always has been, the fundamental cause of social division and political upheaval. Given freedom from labor and infinite access to goods, humans would be faced with scarcity of sexual access to the most desirable males and females. That Marxists intuited this great problem, which would remain even if family, property, and monogamy were abolished, is reflected in the great measures some later thinkers undertook to correct for it: for example with the claim that the End State would be a condition of “polymorphous perversity.” So much work to arrive at an insight Aristophanes frankly and humorously manifested 2500 years ago—the fundamental desire in a revolution is not for access to goods or leisure or honor, but for sexual access to the desirable.[xxvii]
Modern regimes have nominally experimented with something called sexual liberation, or, alternatively, with the liberation of women from domination by men and by traditional institutions. This is true not just of liberal regimes in the West—the Soviet states and the Eastern Bloc were in some ways even more advanced in this regard.[xxviii] But what has resulted is not freedom, but rather despair, loneliness and confusion. This isn’t a matter of defending traditional morality—this book, as you will see, takes a very mercenary view of traditional morality—but rather of pointing to the fact that this question of sexual access and romantic success has no easy solutions: pain, exclusion, inequality, oppression, will be the result no matter what. Abandoning conventional and traditional hierarchies that were no doubt oppressive has brought pain because modern man now comes face to face with a more primordial hierarchy, one that is inescapable and uncanny.
No question is more painful for young people today.[xxix] No subject seems to inflict more emotional scars and batter more egos than one’s worth on the sexual market, the degree to which one is desirable to mates of one’s choosing, or what are one’s opportunities in life for romance or intercourse or committed relationships, if not for family. It is a question in which all theoretical musings on equality or inequality, on freedom or lack of freedom, become concrete and embodied, become supremely personal and very immediate. Look at the pages of any popular magazine, and you see the youth, both men and women, and not just the youth, cast adrift in confusion and pain. Freedom from socially- and legally-enforced monogamy—one boy for every girl, and vice versa—has led not to equality and happiness, but laid bare the unadorned and brutal hierarchy of nature. The most desirable males and females, who are in a minority, have lives full of sexual and romantic opportunities, adventures, the choice for excess, and numerous options should they decide to marry and have a family life. For the rest—for both men and women, the vast majority—there is lack of fulfillment, even desolation in youth, and, later on, unsuitable options and unhappy, very late marriages marred by resentments and dashed hopes. Often there are no marriages, nor any long-term pairings after a certain age.
Transposed into the modern, individual, subjective perspective, there still remains then the identity of these two problems, of sex and breeding on one hand and of human inequality on the other. The books of Michel Houellebecq, and especially Whatever and The Elementary Particles, express better than any other modern text the desolation that the sexual revolution has brought to the lives of most average people, and the fundamental natural inequality that has surfaced as a result of the changes in the 1960’s and after. The few premodern and ancient examples briefly covered above are surely alienating and even frightening, with their weird caste- and race-based forms of breeding and marriage laws, whether it be Sparta’s alien eugenics or the Bible’s harsh sexual prohibitions. Something like the Law of Manu or Plato’s Republic may well seem to come out of a science fiction dystopia. But it’s been replaced, in our age, by just a different kind of hierarchy and inequality. This isn’t a matter of deciding which is better or worse, or advocating for one or another, but of realizing the substance of this claim, that breeding practices and human inequality are connected at the root.
It is possible that the sexual hierarchy and de facto breeding laws of our time are more just than those others. But it is a hierarchy and inequality nonetheless. The difference is that something like the Law of Manu, or the breeding and marriage laws of Sparta, were consciously crafted with a view to breeding a certain type of man or citizen who would embody the driving goal of the regime or society. The laws were meant to harmonize or “coordinate” man’s intense desire for sexual love and for posterity with the regime’s overarching goals and its needs. They were meant to promote certain qualities that were seen to be, and probably were, hereditary, and which the regime intended to promote in the population. We are now driven instead by a different and more primitive “law,” and this, in combination with poorly-thought-out government programs, is creating a certain type of man and society as well, only no one yet knows exactly what. Some few, like Charles Murray, have put a lot of thought into this and have painted for our age an emergent dystopia in which assortative mating is causing a bifurcation of society into mutually hostile castes that hate and misunderstand each other.[xxx] Maybe so, or maybe something good will come out of it instead. But with us, as with Sparta or the ancient Hebrews, our sexual and marriage laws result in inequality and the establishment of concrete social and demographic patterns, whether we intend it to be so or not. It is also very likely that medieval Christianity—which exerted powerful long-term effects on Europe by essentially breeding a new kind of European man—also did so unintentionally. But it did so nevertheless, despite itself, because the question of sex and breeding will continue to be at the center of social and political life, whether nations and lawmakers are aware of this fact or no.
The question then arises of whether a society is aware of this problem of breeding, which is to say, whether it is aware of nature.
The ancient Greeks embody more than any other nation in history the profound connection between attention to breeding laws or practices on one hand and the development, even exaggeration, of human inequality on the other. Their culture is the subject of so much interest now, and, rightly or wrongly, they are recognized as the foundation of Western civilization. Nietzsche understood, however, that a modern would shudder if he were to perceive the real root of Greek civilization. We don’t appreciate the immense cruelty and suffering that was necessary to create the serene, lightfilled culture that gave birth to our artistic, literary, and philosophical traditions. The alien harshness that was a precondition for Greek culture was noted by, among many, the historian Jakob Burckhardt; consider this passage about the splendor of the Ionian aristocracy:
An important difference between that age and our own consists in their having (somewhat as the French still do) more respect for quality than for size of population. Besides, when full democracy emerged, it consisted in reality of an aristocratic minority as opposed to the metics and the slaves. It is only in modern times that men earn as much money as possible to support the maximum number of children, no matter what the privation and drudgery involved and however the quality of the population may suffer in the process; we have already spoken of the means, ruthless as they were, that the Greeks adopted to limit numbers. In any case, this society was a splendid one to contemplate; the poet of the Homeric hymn to Apollo can say of the Ionians (151-5) as they appeared at the festival of Delos: ‘He who meets them all assembled would say that they are immortal and ageless, he would see how graceful they all are and would rejoice in his heart when he saw the men, and the women finely clad, and the swift ships and their many riches.’ Then follows special praise for the maidens of Delos and their song, which set the seal of perfection on this magnificent existence.[xxxi]
This magnificent existence depended on ruthless methods of population control and pruning. Burckhardt, writing in the 19th Century, adds that a modern has no clue about the immense hardship, cruelty, and pain that had to happen to create this radiant type of human. Simply put, behind this image of human flourishing lie generations of attention to citizen quality rather than quantity, which is to say, to eugenics, with all its cruelty, an orientation that never left the Greek world. Behind this innocent-sounding formula lie all manner of exclusionary, forceful measures: the removal from the city rolls of citizens who don’t live up to the moral, physical, and intellectual standards befitting a member of the polis; the ruthless subsuming of village life to city life; eugenics, infanticide, sexual apartheid, “classism,” “racism”; the intense physical and moral discipline and rigor entailing mercilessness towards both others and oneself. Finally, and most chilling for a modern audience, force and violence: slavery on one hand, and training for war on the other, as the absolute prerequisites of this type of society and this type of man.
Friedrich Nietzsche, speaking of the different goals of different peoples, states of the Greeks,
“You shall always be the first and excel all others: your jealous soul shall love no one, unless it be the friend”—that made the soul of the Greek quiver: thus he walked the path of his greatness.[xxxii]
The pursuit of excellence, the desire to be proven the best compared to all other men, is the foundation of all of Greek culture. Victory in the contest or agon is taken to be the demonstration of such excellence and superiority. The clearest and most manifest exhibition of this superiority was in physical contest, in victory in physical contest, and in the exhibition of bodily beauty:
The aim was now to develop the body to the highest perfection of beauty, a purpose for which each individual had to submit to a methodical discipline just as severe as training in the arts, denying himself any personal manifestations of ‘genius’.[xxxiii] The central institution of the polis was the gymnasium—the gymnasium was the center of Greek social life in the cities. The original meaning of virtue or arête is precisely this type of excellence in which superiority over others is manifested in various struggles, whether athletic or intellectual, but both having their origins in the military training of the citizen.
The corollary to all of this is that the Greek state or polis, which today we are likely to imagine as the origin of our democracy, was in fact nothing more or less than a breeding project for superior specimens. Such, again, was how Critias saw the Spartan constitution.[xxxiv] And Plato’s Republic, as we will see, is argued by Nietzsche, and not only by Nietzsche, to be the “best regime” or idealization of the Greek city with everything nonessential removed, so that it is shown, in its final manifestation in speech, to be a project for the breeding and production of genius.[xxxv] Greek culture is thus “universal” in the sense that it is the first culture which, with awareness of nature, that is, of biology, undertook to cultivate and breed itself into a higher form.
Again we recoil from such language and such projects. But what is important here is not to morally approve or reject: the point of this book has to do with an argument that awareness of nature—the prerequisite of philosophy and later of science—is identical with awareness of breeding or what we might crudely term “eugenics.” Whether this is a good or bad thing is another matter. Indeed there are thinkers who reject or want to condemn Western history precisely because they partially intuited that it is based on this principle.[xxxvi] That is fine: only, one must understand what is in play.
Behind the Greek obsession with citizen quality, with excellence, with personal and generational biological improvement, lies the converse, a depreciation of the life of the slave, or, more generally, of the type of man who lives only to live, who is willing to survive at any cost, or who is willing to accept subservience to avoid death. To speak of superior and inferior ways of life is necessarily to deny that every form of life has dignity or meaning. But, in particular, the net effect is to deny that mere life has any worth.
If one can speak of one type of life being superior and another being inferior, it’s only a few steps to this conclusion. For this reason Nietzsche begins his early essay on the Greek state by pointing out that the Greeks would have rejected as vile lies and cant our modern ideas of the dignity of human life and the dignity of labor. Labor, as the mere maintenance or preservation of mere life, has no value in and of itself, because mere life has no value. The fundamental Greek insight is the “nihilistic” insight of Silenus: “Better never to have been born, and if born, to die as soon as possible.”[xxxvii] Mere life, a drudgery and bleak terror, is not worth the trouble. This is fundamentally where speculations about breeding, about human inferiority and superiority, ultimately lead. And it may be argued, maybe by a cynic, that this is maybe the most profound reason that speculations about human inequality are so painful to modern people, and outrage our moral sense.
The second and related reason ideas of human breeding and human inequality make us feel uncomfortable is easier to understand and has already been mentioned: it is a radical denial of every principle on which we base our morality of egalitarianism and our democratic politics. It reminds one, worst of all, of Nazism. The postwar international liberal order is built on the back of the Nuremberg trials, and correspondingly our image of Satanic evil is the Third Reich, with its supposed ideals of breeding humans like livestock, culling human herds through genocide, and its teaching of fundamental biological inequality. It certainly won’t do to point out that most of these ideas were inherited by the Nazis from progressive and liberal Protestant Anglo-American thought—I mean specifically Darwin, Galton and their followers. Nor will it do to point out that the electoral success of Nazism, as of other fascist movements in interwar Europe, had little or nothing to do with a platform based on these or similar ideas. These ideas, rightly or not, are tainted by this association, which is a big reason they are so taboo today. In a book such as I present here, about human inequality and human breeding as the foundation of Western thought and of philosophy, this is a question I must briefly and explicitly address. I do so at the end of this introduction in the form of a “political detour,” an appendix that explains the relationship between the argument here and events in our decade and the next.