BREEDING
The sexual market is the pinnacle of every other market. Men in particular are motivated to do only what it takes to secure sexual intercourse with mates of their choosing, and in many cases certainty over the issue of intercourse, which is offspring. At least for average men under average circumstances, they’re not motivated to work for anything more than this, though of course this isn’t the only drive. For both men and women the striving for access to sexual intercourse, to mates of one’s liking, and to opportunities to father or bear children, determines every other economic, political and social regime.
Knowledge of this fundamental not-so-secret about human nature was the cornerstone of every great and lasting state, religion, or order from antiquity.
Many traditions claim that mythical founders paid attention to marriage or breeding laws first and most of all, or otherwise make clear that this act of foundation is more fundamental than any other. Cecrops, the divine half-snake founder of Athens, who rose out of the earth, is said to have first of all created its laws of marriage.[i] Solon, legendary founder of Athens, reformed its laws of marriage to ensure that pairings would happen not for personal gain or financial purposes, but for what we might call “eugenic” reasons, to ensure citizen quality. Some of the laws even regulated the number of times intercourse had to minimally take place, to ensure harmony of the household.[ii]
Rome begins with an act of planned rape, or marriage-by-abduction, carried out by its warlike founder Romulus and his warband of outcasts and misfits. The rape of the Sabine women is simultaneously the founding act of the Roman people and the foundation of Roman marriage law and of relations between Roman men and women.[iii] The Emperor Julian, writing of Rome’s legendary lawgiver Numa Pompilius,[iv] praises him as the founder of Rome, a man who communed with goddesses in the wilderness, in the purity of his heart; Julian explicitly mentions, using a common traditional formula, that Numa first of all created Rome’s laws of temple worship, that is, that the foundation of religion was subsequent to the establishment of the city through rites of marriage and breeding. But Numa’s religion itself was based on a more primordial “marriage” between the sovereign king and the local goddess. At the foundation of the Empire, or, as some might have it, at the refoundation of the Republic with Caesar Augustus, Octavian’s most important legislation, on separate occasions during his reign, had to do with the reestablishment of marriage law. [v]
In the Bible three of the Ten Commandments deal specifically with this matter: do not covet another man’s wife, do not commit adultery, and honor mother and father; the last is the first “substantial” commandment that doesn’t directly involve honoring God but that concerns human behavior as such, and for this reason among others Nietzsche believed it was the constitutive goal of the Hebrews, the striving that defined them as a people. In Judaism during the holiest day of Yom Kippur the prohibition specifically against incest at Leviticus 18 is traditionally repeated, which, as Leo Strauss mentions, agreeing with Nietzsche, is the precondition for honoring mother and father. But the language of Leviticus 18 with its list of sexual prohibitions is especially powerful, contrasting the new laws of the Hebrews with those of the Egyptians and with others who came before them, who defiled the land, and who were vomited out by the land.[vi]
God had previously attempted to establish his rule with the first man, Adam, or what we could maybe in jest call “ideal man,” and failed. He then attempted to establish his rule with universal man after Noah, and that also failed. The failure of God’s plan for Adam, and thereafter the debacles of the generations following Adam that led to the flood, all had to do with matters of sexual transgression or of misbreeding. After his failures first with ideal man and then with universal man after Noah God decided to establish his law within a tribe or nation.[vii] And the cornerstone of this foundation is the set of laws that has to do with breeding, marriage, and management of sexual relations. The Hebrews believed these laws to be constitutive of themselves, and outsiders felt this way too, even if they may have expressed it at times unfairly. Much later, a hostile Tacitus, a Roman who highly valued monogamy, deplored its loss among the civilized, and praised it among the ancient tribal Germans, sought to distinguish the Jews most of all by their sexual and marriage habits or laws.[viii]
Social conservatives, among others, often remark on ancient man’s or at least on the Bible’s care for these matters, but reduce it very frequently to the formula “the family is the basic unity of society.” Even if this were true, it is not the ultimate reason ancient legislators among the Hebrews, Romans, or Greeks—three unusually monogamous societies in the ancient world—but also others, paid such attention to these types of laws. If an average man’s natural desire were to be a good husband and father, then their work would have been easy. But in early Rome, for example, bachelorhood had to be forbidden by law. [ix] The problem with the view of the social conservative is that it assumes a man’s duty to his wife and children is more natural, and therefore more easily enforced, than it actually is. They often do not see the immense work that had to go into making men good husbands or fathers, nor the great privileges through which men had to be enticed to accept these duties; still less do they see or dare to mention the great work—some would say oppression—that had to be exerted to make women faithful wives and mothers.[x]
Social liberals and feminists make the same mistake. They assume the problem is that men desire patriarchy and ownership over the wife and family, that men desire dominion over wife and children. They do not see these are, in part, methods some civilizations resorted to in order to induce men to accept the responsibilities of father and husband. Men deprived of patriarchy have no reason to accept duty or responsibility, nor the loss of freedom that goes with family life. Modern societies are faced with men who either reap the fruits of sexual liberation through easy copulation, or men who for any number of reasons won’t or can’t put up with the stress of this chase and instead become apathetic, at least so far as women are concerned. The problem, as social liberals and feminists are finding out, isn’t that men seek by nature or education to dominate wives or children, but that men simply don’t care.[xi]
It is very telling that, to solve this problem, both social conservatives and some feminists are resorting to shaming men into accepting the responsibilities of father and husband. Both often exhort, and even hector, unmarried men to “man up”; this happens so often that it’s become a running joke or cliché in some circles.[xii] The prospects of their successfully shaming men into the duties of husband and father are, however, very slim as things stand. Octavian, as Emperor, tried to reestablish family life among the patrician class in Rome with far greater insight, far more power to shame, and far greater latitude to give rewards. But he failed. Alas, simply shaming men into being fathers and husbands is never going to work. Those who seek to shame men into accepting fatherhood have it backwards: they believe, wrongly, that men primarily seek status or praise and that they would be willing to accept praise or status without the rewards of praise or status. Men seek status above all because it is attractive to women and results in intercourse or breeding—in fact, in social animals, where status and hierarchy clearly exists, status serves precisely this purpose. Only males of high status breed.[xiii] Men can’t be induced through shame or through praise into accepting the nominal status without the natural rewards of status, into accepting duties without commensurate rewards.
Who wins in the sexual market as it is formed in a particular society, who gets to breed, is closely related, nearly identical to the question of how the next generation in that society is to be constituted. The question of the sexual and breeding laws is therefore identical to the question of regime, constitution, or foundation as such.
So far we have briefly mentioned the Bible, the Romans, and the Greeks to see that the question of marriage or breeding law was the most important foundational act in these societies, but so many other examples, from all across the world, abound. Many of these examples point to darker and uncomfortable truths we have suppressed.
In the Law of Manu the laws of marriage, breeding, sex, the proper behavior of women, the production and status of mixed castes, is discussed with great intensity and in minute detail. It is, following reverence for the Gurus, the first really substantive mention of the laws to be treated. The third chapter deals entirely with these matters of marriage and proper breeding, and with the crucial problem of mixed castes. The sexual apartheid and breeding rules that are listed are the cornerstone of the entire society in question. The Sudra is at the lowest rung of society and therefore may only wed other Sudra. As you go up the ladder of castes, the men are allowed wives from lower rungs. And yet also, with some apparent inconsistency, the direst consequences are to befall an Aryan man or Brahmin who fathers a child with a Sudra.[xiv]
After the Manchus took over China they were acutely aware of what had happened to other previous conquerors and how they had been ultimately assimilated by the subordinate native population. They resolved to prevent this from happening to themselves and enforced, as in the Law of Manu, a caste- and race-based system of sexual apartheid.[xv] They were distinguished from the native Han in many other respects that, from some higher-minded point of view, one can say are more important: for example in their political orientation they were expansionist and thought in geopolitical terms alien to Chinese tradition. But whatever other ways of life or ideals they may have eagerly held to, they were also aware that without a next generation of Manchus there would be no one to carry forth these ways of life or teachings, or rather, to embody them. For this reason among others every people and every founder of a people has had to pay attention to these type of laws first, at times despite themselves.
Although a devoutly Christian society, pre-modern colonial Spain employed a roughly similar racial casta system. The founding groups were the peninsulares, or those born in Iberia and Europe, criollos, or Spaniards born in the colonies, the native indios, and the Africans. In Cape Verde, one of the first colonial ventures, the Portuguese deliberately created a mixedrace population to manage the slave trade. In the New World colonies there were pictorial guides, denoting the particular look, trade, and place in society of each mixed group—a mestizo, the issue of a criollo and indio, had a different place in society and function from a castizo, or the issue of a mestizo and criollo. There were ways to regain criollo or Spanish status but only by “breeding up” the casta ladder. A similar situation persisted in the American South, for example in South Carolina, where an octoroon was considered legally white—few realize that, e.g., the “one drop rule,” was a Northern device, not a Southern. As concerns the situation in the Spanish colonies, the racial caste system was not felt to contradict the teaching of Christianity regarding man or marriage, but regardless—it was seen as necessary. Although the casta system is no longer used in Latin America, it has affected marriage choices arguably to this day; it has shaped and continues to shape the social stratification, the nature of the elites, the culture as a whole in these countries.[xvi]
The subject of sexual and marriage law, of breeding law, in a devoutly Christian society may seem unusual or surprising. In Christianity we see a religion that may seem to contradict much of what was said so far. Its prophet did not father children, its scriptures are explicit that the perfect Christian is to be chaste; its heroes, holy men and—at least in its two largest branches—its hierarchy, are to be chaste or at least celibate. Nevertheless it is very clear in so many ways that it is through its laws of marriage and breeding that Christianity affected European society and political life most of all.
First, precisely through the ideal of chastity, and the grudging concessions made therefore to monogamy alone, it is possible that Christianity stabilized family life and thereby promoted in many cases a salutary and steady but not Malthusian increase in population.
But one need not speculate about how the Church exerted its power throughout medieval Europe, which was precisely through its control over marriage. It is through its power to carry out marriages and therefore through its effect on inheritance, among other things, that the priesthood was able to exert such temporal power. How disputes over the Church’s control over marriage led to later disruptions and cleavages within Christendom is well known, a subject of considerable attention, and treated already by others elsewhere.
There is a second and very important way in which Christianity can be shown to have effected the most profound consequences in Europe precisely through its control over sex, marriage, and breeding. The Church disapproved of arranged marriages and in most of Europe it forbad cousin marriage. In the northwest of Europe in particular, under the manorial system, the Church entirely did away with the types of cousin marriage that would allow for the perpetuation of tribes or clans. Accordingly there developed a de facto practice of outgroup marriage in certain parts of Europe, which did away with clan identity and which encouraged broaderbased political identities, universal morality, and altruistic orientation toward non-family strangers.[xvii]
Others have made the related point that in England, Holland, and Denmark, among a few other areas of northwest Europe, family formation and structure has worked much the same way it does now in the Anglosphere, at least since the 12 th Century. Contrary to the stereotype that premodern family life is characterized by early marriage and by the extended family, it appears that in premodern England and Holland the ideal was the nuclear family, late marriage, adult children leaving the family home, and romantic love as opposed to tribal arranged marriage. Shakespeare’s audience empathized with the troubles of Romeo and Juliet who fulfilled the English ideal of romantic marriage, encouraged in northwest Europe by the manorial system and by the Christian religion.[xviii]
The social and political consequences of the change described in the last two paragraphs are profound. Modern liberalism and capitalism, modern universal ethics or morality, are latecomers and piggyback on the fundamental and centuries-long work done by the manorial system and Christianity in reshaping and perhaps rebreeding European man—for there is strong evidence that many of the behaviors described, such as altruism toward strangers, are by now hereditary in certain populations. The culture of civility on which liberal, private society is built is inconceivable without this preparatory work done by Christianity, and which was carried out most effectively at the root, determining who married who, and therefore what kind of children were to be born. Thus it is arguably precisely through its marriage and breeding laws that Christianity shaped the modern world.
Friedrich Nietzsche thought likewise, and in this book we are going to see the same argument regarding Christianity that has just been made, but from a different, and hostile, point of view. For Nietzsche, Christianity laid the groundwork for the calamity of modern liberalism, modern democracy, and modern socialism, which threatened to destroy, maybe permanently, not only the possibility of philosophy, but of life in the full sense of the word. And yet this same phenomenon was for Nietzsche a great opportunity. The root of all of Nietzsche’s concerns about the possibility of the rebirth of philosophy, and about the future of mankind, is his “strange concern with breeding,” which according to a recent interpreter he “inherited” from Plato and not from any of his contemporaries—although surely this can’t be completely true…at the very least it would have also been motivated by the need to respond to Darwin’s lifting of the veil from this matter. [xix] It would be more accurate to say that Nietzsche and Plato are prominent in having explicitly brought out the fundamental problem of human life, political life, and of nature itself, which, indeed, does have to do with breeding. This is what this book is about.
The treatment of the problem of marriage and breeding in political philosophy, especially classical political philosophy, has been a lot more explicit and matter-of-fact than it was in the religious traditions we briefly looked at. Throughout the works of Xenophon the preoccupation with marriage, matchmaking, and breeding is very marked: for example, at the beginning of his short treatise on hunting with dogs, he tells a story about how the centaur Chiron, a brother of Zeus and a demon of the wild, taught hunting and other skills to heroes and demigods, and arranged for them fortuitous marriages—the marriages from which issued the noble bloodlines of the Greeks. The text itself is of course much concerned with the breeding, grooming and training of dogs. In his Economicus, which is literally “the art of household management,” the principal concern seems to be the estate holder’s relationship with his wife, including their meeting and courtship. Xenophon begins the Constitution of the Spartans with the laws regarding the begetting of children—in quite technical, even biological detail—and the laws of marriage even only after that.
In a famous passage Aristotle explains the end of the Spartan constitution, the decline of Sparta, specifically by showing fault with its laws that regulated the conduct of women, of marriage and of inheritance. [xx] The result was a misbreeding, or rather absence of breeding, that led to the downfall of the regime: “the want of men was their ruin.” In general, although Aristotle famously says that the city is prior to all other partnerships and to us, yet on the other hand by many such concrete examples, he nevertheless shows the primacy of marriage and breeding law to the constitution of the city. Of all human partnerships that are formed by necessity, Aristotle names first that between man and woman. Reflections that we might properly term “eugenics theory,” such as at what ages a man is most likely to beget strong offspring, and many similar insights, abound in Aristotle.[xxi]
It is almost a commonplace to mention Plato’s preoccupation with breeding and eugenics, but it is just as common to misunderstand it or not really take it seriously. The best regime, the Republic, is a eugenic state, crafted exclusively with a view to eugenics, and its downfall is because of dysgenic unions. No one has so far really understood why Plato has this concern; no one has given a convincing treatment of why he presents this view the way that he does. This book aims at a correction. I offer, I believe, the first comprehensive account for Plato’s eugenic teaching. It is a view, in the end, not so different from Socrates’ other student Critias, who wrote a treatise on the Spartan constitution and intuited the meaning of it as a project for the breeding of a supreme biological specimen. Plato’s relatives were known for their special interest in breeding ornamental and other animals—a persistent concern, an obsession even, of almost all Western aristocracies in history, down to Charles Darwin, member of the Gentry and well-known as a fanatical breeder of fancy pigeons.[xxii]
In one way or another, the concern with marriage and specifically with biological breeding has never disappeared from the Western philosophical tradition. The Abbé Sieyès proposed during the French Revolution the creation of half-human worker castes, bred from unions between humans and various apes, which would take care of different types of manual labor and free mankind from this necessity.[xxiii] A book, a very exciting book, could be written on the history of the problem of breeding in Western philosophy. That will have to wait. In what follows I aim for the more fundamental question: I aim to show, among other things, why this question, the problem of breeding, is in many respects identical to philosophy, or at least identical to political philosophy. This is an admittedly unusual claim to make, and may be shocking to some, but the historical and textual record is, I believe, very clear. Ignoring this question because it is unpleasant and because it offends contemporary moral commitments—by whatever other name they may happen to go—is not going to be an option in the next few years given the very rapid progress of genetic research.