[3] The false idea of the radical and essential distinction between nature and culture, which has given intellectuals plenty to write about, is of Judeo-Christian origin and of no pertinence to scientific reality. For example, a chemical product, a product of synthesis, is not unnatural; it is perfectly natural. A manipulation of nature by natural beings yields ‘second generation’ natural products.
[4] Available in English in e-book format as Biopolitics: A Transhumanist Paradigm (La Carmelina Edizioni, 2014). –Tr.
[5] A famous Parisian veterinarian has assured me of the following: If perfectly simple techniques of selective reproduction which have been used for dogs, horses, and many domestic species for more than a thousand years had been applied to humans, stunning results would have been achieved; giant or miniscule humans might have been born, variable in all dispositions. But the moral barrier of humanism prevented it, along with the late fertility of human females which slows down the process of specialisation. There is no significant difference between the genetic functioning of the various species of vertebrate.
[6] Senile timidity towards the nuclear industry, genetically modified organisms, the exploitation of schist gas, etc. [The ‘precautionary principle’ has been the subject of much discussion since the 1980s, although there is no universally recognised formulation of it. The general idea seems to be that the burden of proof lies with research scientists to show that what they are doing cannot harm people or the environment. It has been suggested that the principle should be paraphrased as ‘Never do anything for the first time.’ –Tr.]
[7] In the Aristotelian vision, God is an unmoved mover, without any plan or morality. This is a central theological problem of Christianity, to which various responses have been made, namely that nature does not correspond to the merciful divine plan, since it is pitiless. Pope Benedict XVI’s frequent reminders of ‘natural law’ can thus be considered ‘anti-natural’, except on the level of the condemnation of pathologies, especially sexual pathologies. The ideologies which the latter preach (equivalence of homosexuality and heterosexuality, gender theory, etc.) are anti-natural but not unnatural, because all anomalies (the abnormal) belong to sick nature, which must be eradicated according to the principal of life.
[8] They amount to a dispute over words, to follow the expression of the Emperor Julian. On this subject, see Lucien Jerphagnon, Julien dit l’Apostat (Tallandier, 2010).
[9] A proposition or hypothesis is ‘unfalsifiable’ when it cannot be put to the test, and therefore cannot be falsified. This is distinct, however, from logical propositions which do not require empirical testing as they are necessarily true by definition, i.e., the truth is logically contained in the proposition itself (e.g. ‘All bachelors are unmarried’). See Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1963). –Ed.
[10] See Marylène Patou-Mathis, Neanderthal, une autre humanité (Perrin, 2006).
[11] Louis-Vincent Thomas, Anthropologie de la mort (Payot, 1988).
[12] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (London: Penguin Books, 1978).
[13] Anthropocene: the period which began at the start of the industrial revolution (beginning of the nineteenth century) in the course of which, for the first time, human activity is modifying the terrestrial ecosystem, in the same way as volcanism, solar phases, etc. However, it is by no means the first time that a living species has modified the ecosystem (or formed it).
[14] A technology can disappear or stagnate. In general, a technique’s progression curve passes through a phase of rapid acceleration, then of slowing down and levelling, and even of decline followed by abandonment. Examples: the conquest of space, aeronautic velocity, and life expectancy thanks to medicine and hygiene. In all domains put together, if one is looking at the West, the strongest phase of acceleration went from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth centuries. Deceleration since then has been notable. Between 1960 and 2010 (50 years), the technomorphic lifestyle of the Western and Japanese middle classes and the technological landscape of these societies changed much less than in the fifty years between 1910 and 1960; and the acceleration between these dates was clearly less than between 1860 and 1910. The majority of great technical inventions which deeply transformed social and individual life appeared between 1890 and 1950. Innovations that have appeared in all domains since 1960 have merely improved what existed, without upsetting anything. A single highly indicative example from the field of transportation: in 1850, it took a month to connect Paris and Marseille (by stagecoach); in 1875, ten hours (by steam train); in 1960, six hours (by electrical train); in 1982, an hour and a half (by aeroplane) or four and a half hours (by high-speed train); in 2010, still an hour and a half (by aeroplane) or three hours (by high-speed train). So we see that the great revolution occurred between 1850 and 1875. Since then, the rate of travel has been improved, but by a constantly diminishing fraction.
[15] See especially: Guillaume Faye, Convergence of Catastrophes (London: Arktos, 2012). –Ed.
Conclusion
In conclusion, and in a highly summarised form, here are the principal theses and observations of this work, along with a few sketchy reflections. Sexuality is one of the essential keys of civilisations and peoples, for it conditions their reproduction, their collective biological conformation, and the structure of the family unit, that is, the whole social edifice down through the generations. Now, in Europe we notice two parallel revolutions: a destabilising of sexual behavioural norms, and a collapse in fertility and renewal of the generations, aggravated by demographic immigration.
* * *
The peoples of European origin, especially in the central laboratory which is France, are familiar with several parallel symptoms: a collapsing birthrate and the ageing of the population; the disintegration of the family unit; uncontrolled migratory colonisation (along with accelerating Islamisation); racial mixture on a grand scale (lauded by the official ideology as morally exemplary); loss of manliness; ethnomasochism and xenophilia among the natives; the triumph of homosexuality both ideologically and in the media; senile feminism, prompt to impose artificial, ineffective, and hypocritical sexual ‘parity’, without doing a thing in retaliation to the oppression of women provoked by Islamic immigration; and universal addiction of the masses to pornographic, often deviant and pathological, spectacles.
All these symptoms are bound together with the same crimson thread; they are not independent, but depend on one another. They are signs of collective pathology.
* * *
In this work, I am defending theses somewhat at cross purposes with contemporary ideological blocks. Against romantic or arranged marriage and for rational marriage; against feminism and machismo, for the economic equality of women and men which is not presently assured; against homosexual unions, homosexual parenthood and ‘gender theory’, for a guarantee that all homosexuals be left in peace; against pornography and sexual perversion, for eroticism and the establishment of regulated public prostitution; against the neo-totalitarian ideology of race-mixing, for a counter-ideology of native European natalism; for a rehabilitation of the stable traditional couple and the encouragement of strictly European natality, but also for biotechnologies, genetic manipulation, artificial intelligence, and incubator births.
* * *
This book is opposed to the central principles of Christianity, whether according to their religious or secularised Rights-of-Man version. However, I have tried not to injure the religious and sacramental feelings of Christians, whose greatness and depth I respect, and with whom I have several points of agreement. On the other hand, I have no reason to hide my profound antipathy for Islam, particularly with its obscurantism and imperialism — a point on which I shall never waiver. M
y opinions belong to the Greco-Latin, and more specifically Aristotelian, philosophical tradition. I am perfectly used to seeing my positions described as extremist when in fact they are merely radical, and thus sober. What I express has no truth-value and comes simply from my own opinion and intuition. I welcome contradictors.
Appendix A
Critique of the Church’s Position on Anthropology and Sexuality from a Neo-Aristotelian Point of View
Pope Benedict XVI, who is also a theologian, has defined the natural law position of the Church in the face of human sexuality and genetic manipulation. This position, expressed in the course of the 2009 Christmas greetings at the Roman Curia and over the course of a series of interviews published at the end of 2010, conforms with the Christian doctrine of natural law, that is to say, it conforms with anthropocentrism limited by theocentrism. This formula means that man is a holy creature, the supreme work of God (in whose image he is made), unique in the universe, radically different from the rest of living beings, but who must respect his own untouchable nature as created by God and who must not try to depart from it or modify it. This anthropocentrism denies man any demiurgic ambitions, for instance, self-transformation. Man cannot be the creator or recreator of himself. Such a dogma amounts to putting medicine and biology under surveillance.
Benedict recalled the Church’s responsibility to defend Creation, understood as an immutable and unsurpassable act, God’s monopoly. Man is forbidden from modifying the course of nature, God’s work. Benedict XVI uses a strikingly contemporary term in speaking of an ‘ecology of man’, which it is imperative to respect. In other words, human sexuality must not deviate from the natural laws established by God, and man must not take himself for a field of experiment and turn himself into a GMO [genetically modified organism]. The problem is that the Church understands these divine (‘theogenerated’) natural laws in a very restricted way, especially in what concerns the nature of human sexuality.
I. According to the Pope, ‘the nature of the human being as man and woman must be respected’, because this is ‘the language of creation’. Benedict XVI thus denounces the American ‘gender’ theory which inspires feminists and homophiles, according to which we must distinguish the biological sex of the individual from the role assigned to them by society according to that belonging; this theory, which justifies free and chosen homosexuality, separates the objective sex of individuals from their choice of sexuality, denying all sexual determinism and cutting biological sex off totally from the social roles of individuals. Benedict XVI recalls that theologians speak of ‘the marriage of a man and a woman as a sacrament of creation’, which is a condemnation without appeal of the normalisation of homosexuality, of unions and adoptions carried out by homosexual couples. Implicitly, the Pope is also distancing himself from the confusion of gender roles in contemporary society, and distinguishing what devolves upon men from what devolves upon women by nature. Hence, obviously, the persistent refusal to ordain women in the Church.
On these points, the rejection of the normality of homosexuality and its institutionalisation, as well as the affirmation of a necessary separation of sexual roles in society, the Aristotelian point of view is similar to that of the Church, but for different reasons. According to this point of view, one should indeed oppose the legalisation of homosexuality and its being made equivalent to heterosexuality, as well as the confusion of male and female social roles, but for practical and political reasons, not theological, ontological, and metaphysical reasons.
In fact, homosexuality, as the tendency of a minority, is part of human nature, which confronts Christian theology with a serious contradiction: since it is indeed that ‘nature created by God’ which endowed human beings with homosexual impulses, has this nature shown itself to be imperfect, and God along with it? If God is perfect, why is the nature he created not also perfect? Parenthetically, the same philosophical questions arise with natural imperfections such as handicaps and birth defects, especially hermaphroditism. In declaring homosexuality ‘contrary to nature’, Christian natural law shows itself superficial and unreflective. For nature, especially human nature, is not monolithic — its anomalies are natural.
On the contrary, pagan philosophy (a pleonasm) and especially Aristotelian philosophy (although Aristotle was not a pagan in the religious, superstitious sense) recognised that homosexuality is part of human, and not animal, nature, but that it cannot acquire any legal, marital, or familial status, for that would lead to social disturbances in the City [polis]. So it can be said that Christian theology, following in this the teaching of Judaism, condemns homosexuality on grounds of being unnatural, while Aristotelian philosophy does not condemn it morally, but judges it as sick nature, or deviant, abnormal, nature — but which is still part of nature (anti-natural but not unnatural). Christian theology excludes homosexual practices in all cases; pagan Aristotelian philosophy conceives it as limited to the private sphere, but rejects it absolutely for the public sphere, especially that of marriage.
In Christian dogma, homosexuality and the equivalence of the sexes, along with sexual perversions of all kinds, are condemned in the name of God and his supreme morality, without explanation. Christian reasons (along with those of all the monotheistic religions) are based on a theological way of thought: dogmatic, abstract, and metaphysical. Pagan and especially Aristotelian reasons are based on a much more concrete way of thought. The question is not ‘What is moral? What is not moral? What is pleasing to God and what displeasing to him?’ but ‘What is right [le Juste]?’ In other words, ‘What forms of behaviour and what laws are the most useful and effective for society, the health, and equilibrium of the City?’
Nevertheless, there is an objective, and not causal, convergence between pagan Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theological ethics on the opposition to the institutionalisation of homosexual couples and to sexual egalitarianism. The vision of nature that Christian theology has differs radically to that of pagan philosophy in their principles (the former founded on metaphysics, the second on physics) but an understanding between them is possible in certain domains. Still, in relation to the question of sodomy, pagan antiquity, for example, was much more tolerant. The private realms was perfectly indifferent to authority. On the other hand, beginning with the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century, sodomites — homosexual or heterosexual — were persecuted. Practices such as masturbation and oral-sexual caresses became forbidden abominations. In general, Christianity banned eroticism definitively. There is nothing naturalistic about this.
In many domains, the revealed monotheistic religions — especially Christianity, and including that secular and atheistic ‘Rights of Man’ Christianity which is the currently dominant ideology — refer to a principle of metaphysical obedience, always asking: ‘Is this or that thing conformable to dogma?’ According to Aristotelian logic, things are seen differently: one considers separately from any general idea whether this or that good or bad, concretely, for the individual or the City? There is a gulf between the two mentalities.
II. Benedict XVI, in his theological address to the Curia, continued in these terms, putting the legalisation of homosexuality, the sexual confusion of social roles, and genetic engineering on the same level:
By this self-emancipation, man can make himself [...] but he is living contrary to the truth of the creative Spirit. And he is risking his own destruction. [...] Yes, the tropical forests deserve our protection, but man as a creature deserves it no less. In man is written a message that does not mean the contradiction of our freedom but its condition [...]. The Church must render witness in favour of the creative Spirit, present in the whole of nature and in a particular way in the nature of man, created in the image of God.
This is a very dense text, and perfectly summarises the Church’s position. A pagan Aristotelian critic would object that, first, it is contradictory to condemn this self-liberation of man in
respect of God while affirming man’s liberty. Man is free, of course, but if he emancipates himself from the divine natural order, he will be punished and lost. A ‘conditional’ freedom is, as St Peter suggests, not a freedom. This is a sophistry, habitual to the Christian theological tradition, which confuses faculty and freedom, two entirely distinct categories defined by Aristotelian logic.[1]
Secondly, we find in the address of the Holy Father the idea of a two-speed nature, with man in the image of God at the summit, and the rest respectable but inferior. This is anthropo-theocentrism, the same which, at the end of the Roman Empire, imposed itself dogmatically upon Greek philosophy and produced a retreat of European thought and science for several centuries. Several unlikely contradictions of Christian theology are plain as day, never resolved, namely: If man is the most perfect being created by God in his image, why is he self-destructive, occasioning Evil much more than do animals, the plants, or the mineral world? The response by way of original sin (Adam’s sin) is another sophistry that would have made Celsus[2] laugh, one of the last defenders of philosophy against the return of magic thinking (Jewish theology has never ventured on these kinds of paths, out of both a prudent pragmatism and an impermeability between the esoteric and exoteric).
Another insoluble question that can be posed to theologians who affirm the intrinsic superiority of man, divine creature who alone is endowed with a soul, is the following: From what moment in the course of sexual reproduction, in the chain of evolution, did the immortal ‘soul’ make its appearance? The only correct response for Christian theologians would be to follow the theses of creationism: man appeared spontaneously, created by God — like Athena from Jupiter’s thigh. The Church has still not finished digesting Darwinism and evolutionism, which they cannot seriously oppose, even though it destroys the basis of its anthropo-theocentrism. The Neanderthals, Java Man, and all our hominid ancestors — did they possess a soul? Were they creatures made in the image of God?
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