by Stefano Vaj
[64] A climax that is artificially maintained by man is given the distinct appellation plagioclimax.
[65] For a more extensive general account on the matter of evolution see Stefano Vaj, “L’Uomo e l’ambiente,” in l’Uomo libero no. 7, op. cit.
[66] Alain de Benoist, who in the seventies and the early eighties supported postmodern and posthumanist positions, along with everything that was soon to become the Nouvelle Droite, and perhaps also as a result of the “overhumanist” influence of Giorgio Locchi, which he combined with “technocratic” residues from an even earlier period, ended up in the present century to near, albeit with some differences, the stances of this “radical ecology”. See the text Sur l’écologie, available online on the site http://www.alaindebenoist.com/, as well as his interview with Alessandro Bedini in Diorama letterario, June-July 2002. Actually, the difference of Alain de Benoist’s thinking today, besides what can be expected from his increasingly “traditionalist” retraction, is mostly apparent, given that the very same arguments used at the time of the special issue of Eléments nos. 21-22 (“Dossier Ecologie”) to “denounce” environmentalism, are currently used instead to propose “complements” and “amendments” of the issues and stances of “deep ecology,” today viewed with great interest. On the other hand, Guillaume Faye, as is well illustrated by already mentioned essay Archéofuturisme, remains resolutely postmodern, but appears to hope that the inability of the System to manage its relation with the environment will turn into one of the factors that are composing the mosaic of “convergent crises,” of catastrophes in the etymological sense of the term, that will lead to the overthrow of its present day hegemony.
[67] See for instance Giovanni Monastra, actively protesting against the “French” rediscovery of this legacy already at the end of the seventies, since always the Italian champion of “anti-evolutionism,” and today the author of “Maschera e volto” degli OGM. Fatti e misfatti degli organismi geneticamente modificati” Edizioni Settimo Sigillo, Rome 2002, a kind of popular catechism in support of the views of the former Italian minister of Agriculture and leader of the “Social Right” Giovanni Alemanno, where Monastra does not hesitate to stand with the custodians of more extremist Judeo-Christian and neo-Marxist political correctness like Richard Lewontin; his use at least a dozen of the terms “Faustian” and “Promethean,” that he himself clearly regards as derogatory, is a tell-tale sign of this. On the contrary, in the perspective that the author preaches against such deviations, “Nature becomes viewed as a reality, at least potentially perfect, mother and mistress, […] that is, as the best of all possible worlds for existence at our own level” (p. 22). See also the legislative bill presented in parliament by Martinat, Rizzo, Mazzotti et Bono on IVF, which makes the the current law pale in comparison, and which is made up of a single article: “Any form of assisted reproduction is prohibited” (! – see Fecondazione extra-corporea. Pro o contro l’uomo? Op. cit. p. 100) Even if they are perhaps at least partly inspired by fuzzily “libertarian” or “feminist” values, on this last topic one should mention Alessandra Mussolini’s brave opposition to the official position of the right-wing representatives already at the time when she was still part of the parliamentary group of Ugo Martinat (however she would apparently change her mind as soon as she herself had established her own party); and later the decision by Gianfranco Fini to give a positive vote to all of the unsuccessful referendums on reprogenetic technology law. Tomaso Staiti di Cuddia, once the most popular MSI represenative and candidate for the position of party’s leader party against Almirante in 1984, did not hesitate in turn to support those referendums.
[68] Walter F. Bodmer and Alan Jones, Our Future Inheritance: Chance or Choice, Oxford University Press 1974. Italian version: Futuro biologico, Bollati Boringhieri, Bologna 1979.
[69] Just a few years ago, Arthur R. Jensen, now professor emeritus of educational psychology at the university of Berkeley, tells us in Intelligence, Race and Genetics. Conversations with Arthur R. Jensen (ed. Frank Miele), Westview Press, New York 2002, to “keep in mind that the scientific evidence is stronger today than it was in 1969 [the year of publication of the famous scandal-article in Harvard Educational Review] that IQ is highly genetic, that race is a biological reality rather than a social construct and the cause of the mean fifteen points difference between whites and blacks in America is partly genetic”. The discussion on this topic heated up in the nineties with the publication of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, by Richard Herrnstein (Free Press, San Francisco 1994), which analyses the classical “bell-shaped” distribution of intelligence quotients in the population and its genetic determinants. This book has never been translated in Italy, while the usual scandalised reaction by Stephen J. Gould The Mismeasure of Man, W.W. Norton & Co 1996, has (Italian: Intelligenza e pregiudizio, Il Saggiatore, Milan 1996).
[70] Stefano Vaj, “L’etologia” in l’Uomo libero no. 5. See also Alain de Benoist Intervista sull’etologia (with Konrad Lorenz), Il Labirinto, Sanremo 1969.
[71] In particular with the publication by Edward O. Wilson of a study fittingly called Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, available today in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition (Belknap Press, Harvard 2000, Italian translation: Sociobiologia. La nuova sintesi, Zanichelli, Bologna 1979.) At the time of its publication Stephen J. Gould commented in particular that “theories like these have provided important support […] for the politics of eugenics that would lead to the creation of the gas chambers in Nazi Germany” (in New York Review of Books, quoted in T. Wolf, “What Do a Jesuit Priest, a Canadian Communications Theorist and Darwin II all have in Common? Digibabble, Fairy Dust and Human Anthill” in Forbes, October 1999). See also, by Wilson, the article “Stalking the Wild Taboo,” and Yves Christen’s already mentioned book, L’heure de la sociobiologie (Albin Michel, Paris 1979(. Among other exponents of the sociobiological school that have been translated into Italian can be mentioned Dawkins and Barash, who many years later will sum up his views on Gouldian “biology” in “Grappling with the Ghost of Gould” in Human Nature Review, July 2002, vol. 2, p. 283-292.
[72] The names of the scholars in question come up effectively and often as the leading figures of a kind of “psychopolice,” at the service of political correctness in the scientific field.
[73] Cristian Fuschetto, Fabbricare l’uomo. L’eugenetica tra biologia e ideologia, op. cit., p. 12.
[74] Cf. the estimates that attempt to establish in percentage the influence of genetic factors on individual features considered significant, and which yield results that span an interval from 35 to 75%.
[75] Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans, op. cit., p. 100. In this sense, the humanist duty to render homage to individual autonomy collides head on with its interpretation of every individual variation as the effect of the environment, which in this case would only need to be “rectified”. To minimize the effects of heredity, the only consistent choice would in fact be to limit and thwart the expression of an individual’s own genetic inclinations and identity, throughout his entire life.
[76] As to the ideological significance of Charles Darwin’s work, the questions are much more complex and break away to some extent from the political opinions of the naturalist – who were basically aligned with his “enlightened middle-class” background. Social Darwinism, long regarded as “leftwing,” because potentially subversive of the privileges granted to ruling classes sheltered from social competition, was soon to be denounced as “rightwing” from the moment that its conceptions would justify the recognition and the free deployment of differences between men, possibly…in a capitalist sense. Moreover, Darwinism, soon condemned by the Archbishop of Canterbury and other magnates, essentially because it was considered an affront to their dignity, did not remain for long without an echo even in fascist circles, to the point that even Goebbels wrote in his diary about a visit to the Berlin zoo where, observing a bunch of chimpanzees, he had “once more admired the
evolution that these had accomplished to arrive at the beauty and nobility of the Nordic man” ((! – ?) quotation found in among others Anna Sigmund, Women of the Third Reich, NDE Publishing 2000, Italian translation: Le donne dei nazisti, Corbaccio, Milan 2003). On their side, some traditionalist and neo-fascist Italian intellectuals and scholars (Giuseppe Sermonti, Giovanni Mostra, Maurizio Blondet, Roberto Fondi) make of Darwin the very icon of the worst, most sterile and most dogmatic progressism and scientism. At the same time, while some disciples of Guénon and Mgr. Lefèbvre do not hesitate in this regard to enroll as anti-Darwinians under the “creationist” flag of colourful and bearded American characters who hold that Calvin was too papist, or that Israel is governed by a bunch of renegade adepts of secularism, various authors of what will later be defined as the Nouvelle Droite do, at least for a time, assume diametrically opposite positions. In particular Yves Christen goes as far as to call one book Marx et Darwin, le grand affrontement (Albin Michel, Paris 1981), seeing those authors as the archetypical symbols of the two ideologies the clash of which is expected to determine the eventual values of our time – with an implicit choice in favour of the latter. Under a more strictly scientific profile, the “enemy” of Christen is not creationism (which at the time was anyhow not yet aspiring to the status of “scientific theory,” or even to academic dignity), but Lamarckism, that is the idea that living being evolve towards perfection via the inheritance of acquired features, that is, as a result of the cumulative forces of the generations. Such a theory, already outdated at the time of Darwin, actually became the official doctrine in the Soviet Union at least up, and during, the Stalinist era (cf. D. Buican, L’éternel retour de Lyssenko, Copernic, Paris 1978, and Joël and Dan Kotek, L’affaire Lyssenko, Editions Complexe, Paris 1986, that tell the story of Stalin’s leading biologist and his notorious falsification of data, by using ink on some frogs’ feet.) The idea that education, assistance, good sentiments, a virtuous life and social reforms can not only completely change individuals (as in the Lockian theory of the tabula rasa), but even mould – for the better – the biology of future generations, is in fact so consoling and conform to the prevailing ideology that it constantly shows up in the collective unconscious. More complex is the question of the relationship between Darwin and Friedrich Nietzsche. The German philosopher naturally greets Darwinism as a demystification of the metaphysical foundation of the natural world, and many authors have stressed the similarity of some of his themes (selection, struggle as the principle of unfolding and becoming) with the English naturalist, to the point that John Richardson suggests a rereading of all of Nietzschean thinking in the light of Darwin (Nietzsche’s New Darwinism, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004), even recognising that Nietzsche in fact goes well beyond Darwin and Spencer, whose residual metaphysical and finalist leanings he clearly cannot accept (and will bitterly criticise all his life). Pierre Chassard writes: “It would be astonishing if, at a time in which transformism has gained the sharpest minds to its cause, that things would go otherwise with Nietzsche, given his categorical refusal of any form of creationism. […] His critique of Darwinism and of Larmarckism cannot serve as a basis for arguing that the doctrine of the Overman would not be open to a biological interpretation. What Nietzsche rejects is not transformism, but the Darwinian and Lamarckian ‘explanations’, because these do not explain much and because they are contaminated by the fundamental flaw of being still conditioned by the old metaphysics, professing a finalism that is unacceptable to Nietzsche” (Nietzsche, finalisme et histoire, latest original ed. Mengal, Brussels 1999. Italian translation, Nietzsche, finalismo e storia, ed. Adriano Scianca, Barbarossa, Milan 2006). An attempt to enroll Nietzsche under the flag of anti-evolutionism (plausible only if by “evolution” one understands a directional process directed towards some form of amelioration contrary to “involution”) is furthermore present in Nietzsche e l’evoluzionismo by Enrico Goni (Edizioni del Veltro, Parma 1989), with a “preamble” and “introductory essay” respectively by the usual Sermonti and Fondi. And yet the idea that species do not quite correspond to archetypes of an essentially neo-Platonic nature, even less that they would have parachuted into nature from some kind of transcendent intelligent design, but to products of a chaotic process of which today’s man is but an expression and a phase, is expressed by Zarathustra in unequivocal terms: “Each being has until now created something above himself: and you want to travel upstream on this great river and return to the beast, instead of surpassing man? […] Until now you have travelled on the road that goes from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once upon a time you were apes… (Thus Spake Zarathustra I, 3).
[77] Cf. Richard A. Posner, Economic Analysis of Law, ult. ed. Aspen Publishers, Chicago 2002.
[78] In this sense Spengler points out: “In truth, every theory in natural science is an intellectual myth relative to the forces of nature. But here [that is in the Faustian and European perspective], and only here, the theory is, from the start, a working hypothesis. A working hypothesis does not need to be exact; it is enough if it is useful in practice. It does not offer to unveil the mysteries of the surrounding universe, but wants to make it utilisable to specific ends” (Der Mensch und die Technik. Beitrag zu einer Philosophie des Leben, op. cit). In fact, in this case too, a near perfect coincidence appears between the ‘overhumanist’ and posthumanist analyses on the one hand, and those of the Frankfurt School, as well as of its more aware and radical contemporary imitators, on the other. What makes all the difference is their respective value judgement, polarily opposed, formulated from the conclusions of the same analyses. In this sense the denunciations by the Nouvelle Droite against those alleged to be arbitrary “demonisations” by this circle are misleading: in reality it is perfectly justified, from its point of view, to consider what it denounces as “demonic.”
[79] Maria Teresa Pansera, L’uomo e i sentieri della tecnica: Heidegger, Gehlen, Marcuse, op. cit., p. 89. See also Arnold Gehlen, Man, his nature and place in the world, Columbia University Press 1988 (original title: Der Mensch, Sein Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt, Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, Wiesbaden 1978. Italian translation: L’uomo, sua natura e suo posto nel mondo, Feltrinelli, Milan 1983, p. 190).
[80] Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, British ed. Routledge 1991, p. 158. Original edition: Beacon Press, Boston 1964. Italian translation: L’uomo a una dimensione, Einaudi, Turin 1972.
[81] On the surprising but frequent coincidence between the points of view of Heidegger and Marcuse, cf. Rolf Wiggerhaus, Die Frankfurter Schule, C. Hanser Verlag, Monaco 1986. English edition: The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theory and Political Significance, Polity Press, 1995. Italian translation: La Scuola di Francoforte, Boringhieri, Turin 1992.
[82] As said, it is the selfsame imperative that ended up “forcing” the civil and religious taboos against the dissection of corpses (that was already the object of a prohibition on perfectly similar grounds until relatively recently), in such a way as to indirectly allow, for the first time in centuries, the enrichment of available knowledge about human anatomy.
[83] National legislators, governors and other State and international agencies have naturally not omitted to make their contribution by way of public declarations and concrete measures, especially on reproductive matters. Germany for example, obsessed with its National Socialist past, has always been at the forefront of the opposition to experimentation in areas of human reprogenetic technologies. And in 1991 it passed a “statute for the protection of the embryo” that was the world’s most restrictive. Soon, however, it became aware in 1993 that such a law had severed the nation from advancements in the field of biotechnology, and the legislator tempered the severe restrictions in force in various areas of genetic research. In 2000, further modifications of the law were introduced via the parliament. In Switzerland, despite the importance of the pharmaceutical sector for the national economy, a 1997 ref
erendum almost succeeded in banning research in these sectors, and a new referendum in 2000 was crushed with a margin of over 30% only because in the meantime it had become clear that the opposite choice risked sooner or later pushing the pharmaceutical companies to move elsewhere (cf. what has been reported by Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans, op. cit., p. 126). In turn, France has repeatedly labelled the manipulation of germlines an attack on human dignity and a violation of the “human right” to an unaltered genetic inheritance, moreover declaring, in a sense clearly different to what is herein maintained, that the human gene pool is “a heritage of humanity”. In 1997 the Council of Europe enacted a Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with regard to the Application of Biology and Medicine in which it states that “An intervention seeking to modify the human genome may only be undertaken for preventive, diagnostic or therapeutic purposes and only if its aim is not to introduce any modification in the genome of any descendants”. UNESCO itself, although being somewhat less curt in its recent Universal Declaration on the Human Genome (sic!), by deference to concerns expressed by the German delegate, has called for further studies on the practices that might reveal themselves contrary to “human dignity”. Gregory Stock remarks: “Most of us would shake our heads in disbelief at anyone who argued that a child had an inherent right to an unaltered biological constitution and should undergo no surgical alterations before adulthood. When we hear the same argument against genetic manipulation, however, we take it seriously, though it is just as out of line with our values” (ibidem, p. 130). See also the Declaration adopted by the United Nations, pressured to do so by the Bush administration, on matters, among others, of human cloning.