by Stefano Vaj
In any case, World War II and the consciously “anti-fascist” world that arose from it in the end represented the definitive break, in particular because of its exemplary demonisation of the actually “biopolitical” aspects of fascist doctrines and practices. On the other hand, it is worth noting that if eugenism and racism today are adopted as arguments for the definitive moral condemnation of fascism in general, and of National Socialism in particular, at the end of the war it was instead…the accusation of fascism that was used to excommunicate biopolitical awareness, which at the end of the forties and into the fifties was still rather widespread and almost obvious.
Of course, the coming of the long wave of demonisation was delayed above all where suspicions of “fascist sympathies” would have appeared ridiculous.
Thus, Charles de Gaulle once in power could still allow himself to proclaim: “It is perfectly all right that there be yellow, black and brown Frenchmen. It shows that France is open to all races and has a universal vocation. But on condition that they remain a tiny minority. Otherwise France would no longer be France. We are first of all an European people of white race.”[249]
And again, in an instruction to the French minister of Justice: “On ethnic matters, it is desirable to limit the influx of Asians and Mediterraneans who for half a century have profoundly altered the composition of the French population. Without going as far as the United States and use a rigid system of quota, it would be appropriate to give priority to the naturalisation of Nordics (Belgians, Luxembourgers, Swiss, Dutch, Danes, Britons, Germans etc.).”[250]
In consequence, the Gaullist High Commission for the Population proposed a strictly limited immigration and subjected to this optimal “recipe”: “50% Nordics, 30% northern Latinos, 20% Slavs.”[251]
Beyond these ethno-demographic concerns, the eugenics movement strictly speaking also continued its action. In 1971 Nouvelle Ecole, the quarterly review directed by Alain de Benoist, published an issue entirely dedicated to eugenics[252], which contains the last and largest study on this topic before the “biotechnological age,” and which made a big scandal in post-1968 France and among the moral majority of the conservative middle-class.
The review revisits with Jean-Jacques Mourreau the roots and ramifications of European eugenic thinking, from its ancient traditions that we have already discussed up to Rabelais, Montaigne, Moro, Campanella, Buffon until the dawn of scientific and philosophical eugenics of Frank, Mai, Lucas, de Gobineau, Morel, Galton, Ploetz, Molinari, Vacher de Lapouge, Schwabe, Lenz, Richet, Mjoen, to then continue to giants like Alexis Carrel and Jean Rostand and to the eugenic legislation of Scandinavian and Central European countries, to arrive at the description of the eugenic stance expressed in…the Soviet Union, where Riazanov, the president of Petrograd’s trade union as well as the director of the Marx-Engels Institute, quotes with approval a party intellectual like Evgenij Preobrazenskij in the 1929 work Communism and Marriage, where the latter argues for “the inalienable right of society to intervene in the sexual domain in order to perfect the race [our italics] by means of artificial sexual selection.”[253]
The conclusion of the leading article by Jean-Yves Christen[254], centered on the contrary on the “state of the art” at the time, already proclaimed the revolution of this century:
We can take it for granted that man will very soon possess ‘biological powers’ that he has never had before and that this stage (should we really regret it?) will be reached before he has solved the correlative ethical problems and those relating to his behaviour in this respect. This is one more reason to forecast in kinetic terms our deliberate future. Current eugenic possibilities will soon be rendered obsolete or surpassed. Enhanced premarital certificates, therapeutic abortion, organised family planning, sterilisation of the best-known hereditary diseases, programmed artificial insemination, will very soon seem nothing more than do-it-yourself or emergency interventions, from the moment when eugenic techniques will allow one a glimpse of the prospect of the programming of desirable types. One may then ask oneself if the ethical conceptions will “adapt” or if there will be a worrying discrepancy, at a majority or a minority level […].
Present-day ideologies do not appear capable of managing the novelty that all this implies. Christen continues:
But even in the worst-case scenario, it is better to run the risk that the human species reveals itself incapable to overcome its past limitations, rather than fall into genetic decadence. Life is not made of absolutes, but of opportunities seized here and there. Of the consciously accepted and calculated risks, the greatest is always to do nothing at all. Thermodynamics, molecular biology, genetics, ethology, resolve as many equations as they leave unknown. It is necessary to choose.
Thirty years later, even the opponents of the “eugenic temptation” are not deceiving themselves, unless maybe in exorcisms of a purely ritual taste. The bioethicist George Annas of the University of Boston, one of the first to propose a mass ban of genetic engineering by the United Nations, has gone so far as to say, during…a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington: “Modern genetics is eugenic.”[255]
Gilbert Meilaender, another member of the Presidential Council on American Bioethics, wrote in 2001: “Our present condition is this: we have once more entered a eugenic age. Science that tries to meliorate the hereditary characteristics of the species, the same that fell so suddenly out of fashion after World War II and the Nazi physicians, now peremptorily resurfaces to gain respectability.”[256].
In such a context, to say with Ramez Naam that “the connection with World War II Germany here is quite explicit”[257] seems effectively a euphemism. However, the incapacitating referral to past “totalitarian” experiences would appear rather problematic for the “anti-eugenicists.” The author remarks in the same page:
What’s interesting is that, in the debate over human enhancement, the only people advocating state control over the genetic makeup of the population are those who would like to see genetic enhancement techniques prohibited. […] It is those who oppose individual and family genetic choice who have, in essence, decided that there is a certain ‘correct’ genetic heritage for humanity (the one we have today) and ‘the populace’ should not be allowed any choice in the matter.”
9. The manipulation of life
The moral objection from a “humanist” standpoint against manipulating life is well expressed in a dialogue reported by Jacquard,[258] from an interview with a journalist: “Question: You allege that it is not possible to improve the human species; however Man has managed to ameliorate many animal and vegetal species; there is not doubt for instance about the improvement of equine races. Answer: If you were a horse, would you really think of it as an improvement?”
The reply is obviously: the breeder, the “second man,” has precisely chosen to take into account his point of view, and not that of the horse, because it is with respect to this point of view that he defines his being-in-the-world, his intrinsic human-ness.
Conversely, it is legitimate to consider that this “subjectivity,” and the process of domestication of reality and of oneself that this implies, does in fact constitute the specifically human, a perhaps tragic specificity, but that one must deem ineluctable and/or to be pursued, especially in the perspective opened by Neolithic revolution.
Besides we have already seen how the “naturality” of the world of the Second Man, the one today in crisis, has been amply overestimated, for the obvious reason that we find it handed down as such, often unaltered for centuries. There is nothing natural about for instance a field of wheat, and the deforestation of central Italy or the elimination of certain predatory species are not the outcome of the industrial revolution, but were already at an advanced stage in pre-Roman times.
The domestication of animals followed closely upon the appearance of organised agriculture; that of the dog, especially as an aid to the hunter, actually seems to have preceded it, as it is believed to have taken place at least twelve t
housand years ago. That of horses, sheep and cattle is more recent, and does not seem to go back more than six thousand years; it was however preceded by far by that of the pig, the first to be bread for its meat, which ended up, interestingly, to become the object of complex symbolic meanings and religious taboo.[259]
As Jacquard admits, this domestication was from the beginning accompanied by an action aimed at developing features that the breeders deemed useful or pleasing; it even seems that the efforts to preserve peculiar traits regarded as pleasant were made long before those tending to improve the “yields” in terms of work, meat, milk or wool.
A systematic action to enhance certain useful characteristics of the livestock through direct interbreeding goes back at least to the 18th century. It is certainly true that there are indirect “unfavourable” consequences of the intended selection, particularly in terms of “frailty” and/or diminished ability to survive or reproduce autonomously, which makes it necessary to renew this process indefinitely.[260] Since the thirties of last century, thanks to progress in population genetics, methods developed empirically throughout the centuries have been given a solid theoretical base. From the initial studies by Fisher,[261] one finds a widespread development of working models that make it possible to direct the breeders’ choices in a more scientific way, and their diffusion and dramatic success are not unconnected to the interest for human eugenics that emerged precisely at that time.
As Jacquard admits, the results achieved already in the pre-biotechnological era cannot be called into question: “The yield of cow’s milk, the rate of growth of pigs, the production of eggs from the hens, all the characteristics of the animals upon whom our food depends have been bettered sometimes in spectacular ways: if in a ‘traditional’ nation [and whose bovine herd is already and everywhere the result of a century-old domestication and selection! A/N] a cow produces 400 liters of milk per year, in the United States the average yield reached 4725 liters in 1955, and in 1967 was over 5500.”
Equally indisputable results have also been obtained in the selection for characteristics such as the performance of racing horses, or the specialisation and trainability of dogs.
The results from the manipulation of vegetal species, for example in the cultivation of cereals, are even more spectacular.[262]
Truth is, there are reasonable theories according to which humans are not really adapted for a diet based on starch and grains– which presupposes sowing, cultivation, tillage and above all cooking (a man naked in a wheat field will starve), so that the intake of such foods has been part of the habits of our species, attested for a much longer time,[263] for only a few millennia.
Thus, studies in paleopathology tend to show than a whole lot of diseases (from caries to diabetes, to cardiovascular dysfunction, to certain types of cancer, not to mention the tendency to obesity), that one easily tends to blame on “modern life,” are much more ancient and go back to dietary changes following the development of agriculture, while leaving almost unscathed the populations that at the same period or also afterwards continued to live in hunting-and-gathering societies.[264]
Here again, it is interesting to observe how the aristocracies of the societies of the “second man” often retained archaic lifestyles also in nutritional terms, through a diet on average much richer in proteins and fresh greens than in cereals.[265]
Be that as it may, a society largely based on an economy of hunting and gathering needs a huge territory to sustain a tiny population, which as a result is forced to nomadism, so that it is precisely the passage to a diet based, for the great majority, on carbohydrates, that allowed the first great population explosion, as well as the change of cultural habits involved in the emergence of urban centres and sedentary life styles. And it is once more the advent of new agricultural technologies that accompanied the explosive development of the global population in the last two centuries, from crop rotation until the “green revolution” of post-World War II.
One example worth mentioning is that of wheat, and of the yields early obtained by the International Centre of Wheat Melioration of the University of Chapingo in Mexico.[266] In this country the cultivation of wheat had not progressed for centuries, until the creation of this centre at the end of the nineteen-forties. At the time the yield reached barely 9 quintal per hectare; the annual harvest of 3 million quintals did not even cover half the country’s need. Norman Burla, head of the centre, sought, among the approximately five thousand varieties grown in the region, for the ones that offered the best resistance to leaf blight; these he cross-bred with a Japanese short culm variety, performed tens of thousands of attempts of hybridisation, and eventually obtained nine varieties that all had the desired characteristics: a plant short enough not to lodge, so as to resist drought, capable of tolerating a high amount of nitrogen fertilisers, and take advantage of these to produce larger and more numerous grains. In ideal conditions, it was possible to obtain a yield of 75 quintals per hectare. From 1965 the near totality of the Mexican farmers utilised the seeds developed by the Institute, and already in the first year the local “wheat war” lead to a harvest of over 22 million quintals.
Goal-oriented research projects in other countries have been equally successful, managing for instance to achieve yields close to 20 quintals per hectare in semi-desertic conditions. The results obtained are not just quantitative. For example, scientists in India succeeded in the sixties, by means of X ray-induced mutations, to obtain novel wheat varieties with a higher content of proteins, and in particular of proteins containing lysine, so as to limit the harm caused by a largely wheat-based diet, for instance in the form of bread.
Other crops have benefited from similar research. The different varieties of rice grown in the research station of the Agricultural University of Punjab in India had, also in 1965, an average yield of one ton per hectare; the creation and spreading of a semi-dwarf variety increased this yield to 1,8 tons in 1970 and 2,6 tons in 1975. Everybody is aware of the extraordinary development of corn cultivation; even before GMO varieties, experimental stations in Iowa and Wisconsin had not only achieved yields, which in earlier centuries would have been considered miraculous, of over 50 quintals per hectare, but a uniformity such that it allowed mechanical harvesting.
The manipulation of such species inevitably involves risks and problems in both strictly biological and medical terms, and politico-economical and cultural terms, as we shall see in more detail when we consider the so-called “genetically modified organisms;”[267] but it should be remarked as of now how neo-primitivist or naively “rightwing” stances in this respect are indefensible.
From a bioluddite, humanist point of view, there remains the obvious conflict between the “sinfulness” intrinsic to these somewhat blasphemous, albeit traditional, manipulations and the humanitarian concerns regarding “world hunger.” From an opposite angle, it is not possible to ignore the significance that the adoption or rejection of these techniques imply with regard to food self-sufficiency, and for this reason ultimately in terms of political independence, and in terms of the capacity of societies who make use of them to support a radically different demography on the same territory, exactly as it happened at the time of the Neolithic revolution and of the birth of agriculture, once more with obvious consequences in terms of survival in the mean/long term of the community of reference and of its biological base, in comparison to those with which it competes at a level of different reproductive success.
We have seen on the other hand how the naïve “progressive,” Ballet Exelsior-style, approach is equally inadequate, for it looks upon the effects of the manipulation of the life and technical progress in an indiscriminately “optimistic” and universalist light, as stages on a road of gradual betterment, understood in essentialist and absolute terms, destined to take us straight to the earthly paradise of abundance and of the end of conflicts and alienation.[268] On the contrary, it is the hard-won contemporary awareness of the unsustainability of such visions which i
s today translated, especially on the political left, into arguments of rejection or at least systematic “doubt” with respect to manipulation of life, also owing to an increasing realisation of its Promethean implications, at the point in time when such manipulations lead to a global determination of man, and of his environment by man himself.
Jacquard writes:
At each stage of their efforts the selectors have improved for instance the species of beans; one can hardly doubt the stake each has in the progress achieved, but is the final result really an amelioration? The resulting varieties have wonderful yields in the very particular conditions in which we grow them; they are unable to survive in the harsh conditions that a natural environment offers most of the times. […] We have ameliorated neither wheat nor horses; we have improved the wheat’s ability to utilise certain fertilisers, the capacity of cows to produce milk, the capacity of horses to run fast. […] Is the quality of the gene pool of these better than that of the ancestral gene pool? Or is it on the contrary worse? To this question no final answer can be given. The result depends on the conditions in which we make the comparison.[269]
This is absolutely true, and even obvious. What on the contrary is purely delusional is the existence of an ancestral gene pool, of a natural environment, that it would today be possible to refer to. Corn, or maize, has been selected and cross-bred for thousands of years, long before the agronomists and the geneticists, by the Maya Indians; even when America had not yet been discovered, the cultivated varieties were already so far from having the characteristics needed for reproduction in nature that they could in fact not perpetuate themselves unaided by humans. Today, if a cataclysm provoked the extinction of the human species, corn would disappear from the surface of the earth at the same time; probably only one variety would remain, the teosinte, unfit for cultivation and today regarded as a weed, but supposed to be the remote ancestor of corn, or at least of a wild ancestor of corn. What then is so natural about the corn with which for centuries one has cooked polenta in the valleys of the Alps, and for thousands of years the pap or roasted cobs of the Andian peoples?