by Stefano Vaj
The outcome of a policy that objectively eliminates the manifestation of an important genetic defect can thus be the increase (desirable, undesirable or indifferent, but which must be taken into account) of the number of heterozygous and healthy individuals who nevertheless carry the gene in question[130]. The “natural” alternative is however…the presence in the population of individuals with full-blown haemophilia – as well as, by extension, of a wide range of people suffering from rickets, malaria, scurvy, smallpox scars, etc.
The recourse to “natural selection,” which in the case of our species appears altogether mythical, therefore risks leading only to the creation of populations analogous to those that nature in fact takes care to select for rats, weeds or jackals.
A proper response to the dysgenic menace could hardly be made to consist in a choice implicitly favouring a population of short stature, suffering from malnutrition and consequent malformations, as well as debilitating illnesses and parasites, mediocre in its physical and mental performance but able to feed on garbage, survive on a dunghill and infest any environment, aggressive but cowardly, indiscriminately promiscuous and stupidly lazy, of a society enfeebled to the point of near cannibalism, with an extremely short mean lifespan – a scenario in which a hypothetical human “natural” selection, maybe post-nuclear[131], would be best expressed.
For instance, endemic plagues or increased levels of chemical, radioactive or biological pollution – provided that they were at least marginally compatible with the species’ survival – would certainly raise the average resistance of survivors, yet it would be difficult to consider them a factor of improvement of the health of the population in question.
Konrad Lorenz insists on how in animals “domestication” would lead to the loss of characteristics commonly viewed as “noble,” and, roughly speaking, to decreased sensory acuity, to a tendency to obesity and a shortening of the limbs, to infantile behaviours and attitudes becoming chronic, to lowered immunity defences and to the inability to survive in nature.[132]
To this one may object that the result of an absolutely artificial selection is not just poodles and farmed rabbits, but also Great Danes, Greyhounds, fighting bulls, Siamese cats, English and Arabic thoroughbreds, certainly more “delicate” in terms of their generic capacity for survival than nags, stray mongrels or coyotes, but that it would be very difficult to consider “inferior” to the latter from any other angle.
The alternative thus is not between on the one hand “natural” selection – which would in any case be artificially maintained – and on the other the abolition of all selective factors. It is between a conscious and deliberate programming of the characteristics, including genetic characteristics, of the population concerned,[133] and the deliberate relinquishment of their determination to factors which are uncontrolled or random, or in any event removed from human and political choice (the market, the “collateral effects of progress,” divine will, the moral imperative in Western countries of indiscriminate humanitarianism to the advantage of members of certain social and ethnic groups…).
Another way to look upon the dysgenic menace consists in interpreting it as the sum of conditions that hide, impede or modify the expression, arbitrarily assumed to be “natural,” of the genes involved (as for example through the administration of insulin to the ill, of those predisposing to diabetes); with the consequence of obliterating or distorting not just the usual selective pressures, but in addition the so-called “sexual selection,” that is, the one linked to choice and inclination of the potential reproductive partners, for instance via the altered “readability of the genetic features of candidate reproductive partners” achieved through dressing or plastic surgery, cosmetic and pharmaceutical treatments, and more generally oriented and culturally-determined lifestyles.
The awareness of such possibilities in terms of “falsification” is very ancient, and cannot be unrelated to the particular sexual significance of nakedness, especially female, in many cultures. An overtly eugenic measure was the for instance Spartan habit to order maidens to show up barechested in gymnasiums to their candidate grooms, and the German nudist movement of the Belle Epoque rested on similar preconceptions. It is not by chance that this sort of idea enters in direct collision with the attitude, not only sexophobic, but more generally and radically anti-eugenic, of all monotheistic religions.
However, the issues confronting us are even more complex. For instance, it would appear perfectly possible that the next few years will see, as is the case in the predictions of the already cited currents of life-extensionism, the rise of techniques that will allow us to reach, if not biological immortality, at least a longevity well beyond our current lifespan.[134] If one accepts the sociobiological hypothesis, peculiarly anti-Darwinian, that the ageing and death of higher, sexed organisms are genetically programmed features, and that their function is especially linked to the perpetuation and the unfolding of genetic information via the periodical elimination of the relative “vehicles,” and the continuous reshuffling allowed by the succession of mating and generations[135], a novelty of this kind could also be interpreted as a dysgenic factor, with huge consequences not only in cultural terms, but with respect to demographic dynamics, to population ageing, to the very identity of the species, especially in view of the dynamics of the groups composing it.[136]
The question of the sustainability of such a change gives rise to problems that it is hard to solve within the framework of egalitarian and humanist values, for example if the techniques enabling longevity would reveal themselves too expensive to be generally applied, even in the short term,[137] and/or to use up resources that would otherwise have been destined for other social projects, for instance those concerned with universal health care.[138] What is to be done? To prohibit unconditionally the relevant technologies (implicitly arrogating the right to be able to decide in advance of the death of the concerned individuals)?[139] To try and avoid the responsibility of choosing what to do and, if necessary, hand it over to allegedly “automatic” mechanisms such as the “Market” (which as is obvious, does also imply a choice, only one more “inhuman” than the others because it is basically founded on a purely monetary “value”)?
On a much smaller scale, we are confronted with similar issues with respect to the distribution of drugs against AIDS in the “developing” countries. We have on the one hand the patent monopoly exerted by the pharmaceutical multinationals, supported by a protective legislation that is justified by its economic “rationality,” a fact that would allegedly allow one to escape the dilemma of a value-dependent choice. On the other hand there is the “humanitarian” obligation to distribute such drugs under their market price, even if this in the logic of the present system clearly undermines the capacity to self-finance further development. But things get even worse inasmuch as drugs do not actually cure the illness, but may be confined to extend the life expectation of infected individuals and, therefore, ultimately aggravate the social costs of the infection itself, allow its greater spread among the population concerned, and are an obstacle to the selective development of a broader immunity or genetically-based resistance to the disease!
Of course, there remains the line of argument according to which the extinction of the species could be regarded as an acceptable price to pay for the respect of demands, of an essentially moral and theological nature, that forbid man to “make himself similar to God” and to himself assume the choice of the biological destiny of the species, or more directly and practically, of his own actual population of reference.
In fact, no Providence guarantees the survival of our species regardless of the circumstances.[140] The dinosaurs used to rule the Earth, and disappeared. Homo sapiens has not been the only intelligent species of the universe; leaving apart aliens based in other solar systems, we know with certainty today that the Neanderthal were “intelligent,” and that they were not a human race but a different species;[141] and yet that species went completely extinct les
s than thirty thousand years ago, as by the way has gone extinct the vast majority of species that at one time or another inhabited the planet.[142]
Even more so, and much more easily – save perhaps for the purpose of the researches of some future paleontologist or archeologist or philologist –, the single, specific population that each of us belongs to can go wholly extinct.
6. Species and races
When today we speak of a “human population” from the perspective of anthropology, we usually refer only to the species – to which would correspond at the other end just individuals taken as a single organism.
The “species,” at least among sexed living beings, does of course have its especial taxonomic relevance, insofar as it is by definition the group, all of it and only it, within which direct genetic exchange can occur, in particular through the ability of its members to give birth to fecund progeny; but this – even without taking into account the foreseeable and gradual fading of such boundaries that will result from genetic splicing – is clearly not the only possible grouping, be it only because the fate of the lineages and germ lines that compose it is not at all necessarily one and the same; in the same way as the fate of a single characteristic present in a given species is not at all uniform, nor is that of its relative dominance within the species itself.[143]
Nevertheless, the logic of repression already described finds a salient expression in the elimination from vocabulary of the concept of race as a specifically biological basis of peoples and the cultures they express. Effectively, there are those who have in all seriousness proposed to ban such a term, though oddly enough only for acceptations that regard the human species.
In other words, it is acceptable to define a cat as being Siamese or Persian, but it appears obligatory to recognise Homo sapiens as the one and only species suffering from a constitutional incapacity to subdivide into “races” and populations that would have any empirical base whatsoever identifiable to the zoologist or the anthropologist (unless of course he is “racially” biased).[144]
The well known musicologist and Indologist Alain Daniélou said in the eighties: “The fear of infringing on a taboo pertaining to the blasphemous use of forbidden words has the effect that the greatest scientists, sociologists, biologists, psychologists, historians resort to stunning circumlocutions to avoid being accused of racism, which would have their work immediately condemned.”[145]
Let’s go back however to the text by Jacquard many times quoted:
Since the moment one began to perceive a complex set such as those of humans, the necessity arose to develop classifications, regroupings that would refer to one and the same category of individuals that appeared more similar. For such a classification to be biologically meaningful, it goes without saying that the traits allowing to point out the differences must be hereditary and maintain a certain stability from one generation to the next. The first attempts at classification were necessarily founded only on data directly provided by observation: the shapes and the colours of the skin of the individuals; these classifications could be subtle, but the manner in which they were construed could only refer to the “world of phenotypes.” […] Depending on the traits retained,[146] the classes or “races” thus defined can vary and there were vivid polemics between those who, like H. Vallois, considered that there were 4 main races and 25 secondary ones, and those who counted 20, or 29, or 40…
This annotation might be interesting from an historical point of view, but it does little to undermine the operative value of the concept that the author attacks, given that still exist in biology such disputes about the number or homogeneity of families or genera or phyla, that by definition must be connected to much more radical and less elusive traits than those that mark off the various races within the same species.
Jacquard continues:
The discoveries of Genetics have finally enabled one to clarify the problem, providing the possibility of giving a more objective content to the concept of race; a race is a set of individuals who share a considerable part of their genetic heritage. In this case, it concerns traits that are intrinsic to the different human groups, independent of their living conditions: the classification touches the “universe of genotypes.” Hence one can hope to obtain clear results that meet with a general consensus. Unfortunately the behaviour of people working in the relevant sciences has been the one the Scriptures describes as “filling new wine in old wineskins,” that is, interpreting new observations in the light of old concepts. Despite remarkable progress in our knowledge, intellectual confusion has only grown.
What follows this presentation is just as sermonising and moralistic:
It is useful, to begin with, to confront these two terms, race and racism:
- the first refers to scientific research, a priori legitimate, founded on objective data: the goal is to develop methods of classification of individuals, which allows the definition of relatively homogenous groups, the “races”;
- the second requires a mental attitude that is necessarily subjective: it is about comparing the different races, attributing a “value” to each and establishing a hierarchy.
It is obvious that these two are distinct activities: one can seek to define the races without being in any way a “racist.” Often, however, this possibility remains purely theoretical. The need to give a definition to the different races is rarely motivated by the meticulous taxonomist’s wish to put order in his data; it results from the desire, very developed in our society [sic!], to distinguish the group to which one belongs from all the other. This corresponds to the Platonic idea of ‘type’. We may define the human species, but it is difficult to give precise details about the ideal type of man; different types are necessary: the White man, the Negro, the Indian, the Eskimo, etc. […] A classification is most often based on a set of criteria, some objective, other subjective, that rarely does not lead to the compilation of some hierarchy: the races are different, therefore some are “better” than others. We know where, when they took this road, some dictators ended up.
Jacquard’s epistemology is outdated and naïve. A scientific category is meaningful because of its descriptive and operative value, not because of its correspondence to an “objective” truth. To say that the perfectly right-angled triangles that are the objects of geometry “do not exist” is a true but trivial statement that in no way alters their conceptual usefulness or the validity of Pythagoras’ theorem. Just as stupid is contesting the value of the concept of quadrilateral based on the fact that it sometimes refers more generically to polygons (that include them) or more specifically to parallelograms (that do not exhaust them). Similarly, the ideal pendulum, the Turing machine, ideal gases and absolutely constant acceleration are “nonexistent things,” which it is nevertheless perfectly legitimate and profitable to study.
The attack on the typological approach in anthropology, the one linked to for instance Theodosius Dobzhansky,[147] is therefore justified only to the extent that the anthropologist concerned has a “realistic,” that is, somehow neo-Platonic, idea of the proposed and studied racial types, as was the case with the 19th century positivist anthropologists, who speculated that the intra-populational variants could only be explained as the result of the mixing and hybridisation of supposedly pre-existing “pure” types.
The operation that consists in identifying, isolating, extrapolating and hightening a model, a ‘type’ on the basis of tendential differences of a set of objects, or in this case of a population or its components individuated a priori, with respect to a background consisting in an inclusive class, for instance the species, appears on the contrary perfectly plausible.[148]
Such a “pure” type is certainly an ideal, and to a certain extent arbitrary, type; but its connotations become even more significant with respect to artificially selected races – and human races can at least partly be considered such, since they are by definition subsequent to hominisation. The perfect Neapolitan mastiff may well never have existed, but t
his does not pose any particular problem to the breeder, or to the jury of a dog show (nor, when there exist ideal canons that are sufficiently agreed on, does the fact that the model of beauty serving as reference may never have been perfectly incarnated create any particular difficulty for the jury of a typical human beauty contest).
In any case, it is the universalistic idea itself of a single and, for moral purposes, “indivisible” Humanity, that of a unique ideal “type” for the entire species, which risks leading to the formulation of value hierarchies according to degrees of similarity and proximity of each population and individual to the type in question.
In this sense, the reference Jacquard makes to “certain dictators” is quite dubious: the anthropology that inspired National Socialism aims on the one hand at the identification (and at the same time the promotion of) biological traits assumed to be “superior” or “desirable” or “characteristic” within a well defined, and altogether relative, ethno-cultural and populational perspective; on the other hand, at their protection, and competitive success, relative to other macro-races. No national socialist theoretician or anthropologist, and least of all Adolf Hitler, ever dreamt that the same racial traits ought to be propagated or considered “superior” from the point of view of an Arab or a Masai or a Japanese, or that their spread would be suitable amongst these ethnic groups – let alone through a process of hybridisation with the Europoid race![149] This is nothing other than the projection of phantasms by universalist ethnocentrism, whose Anglo-Saxon and Jacobinical versions may vary, but which remains invariably “missionary,” “democratic” and “civilising,” and which has no other goal than the “benevolent” aspiration to make everybody the same.[150]