Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy Costin Alamariu

[R Crowley the White]

These are the philosophers, poets and mythic figures discussed in BAP’s thesis:
Xenophon, Socrates, Chiron, the gods generally, Spartans, Silenus, Burckhardt, Darwin, Galton, Nazis, Archaic Greeks, Nietzsche, George Frazer, Christianity, Hellenism, Pindar, Dorians, Dialogues of Plato, Sophism, Critias, Alcibiades, Leo Strauss, Schmitt, Herodotus, Homer, Anglo Saxons, Robert Drews, Machiavelli, Lucretius, Hobbes, Plutarch, Epicurus, aristocratic morality, the pre Socratics generally, and more, with chapters devoted to Frazer, Pindar, Nomos, Nietzsche, Strauss, and the “wily Plato”.

Overall it is a book devoted to Nietzsche, Plato, and the ancient Greeks with wide divergence throughout Western history where relevant.

This is of course an academic paper, so he does a proper job outlining his thesis in the introduction, which I will quote from.

All that follows are quotations from the Introduction,

I also added a long introduction to explain more clearly what this thesis is really about: the problem of biology, breeding, and eugenics in the discovery of the concept of nature by Greeks some 2600 years ago.

Aside from this you will notice maybe some Straussian language and stuffy Straussian affectations,

Critias, Socrates’ student, was the Hitler of the ancient Greek world. He and his friends established a regime based on atheistic biologism so to speak; on “Sparta radicalized,” a eugenic antinomian dictatorship.

Men deprived of patriarchy have no reason to accept duty or responsibility, nor the loss of freedom that goes with family life.

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

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.

The Church disapproved of arranged marriages and in most of Europe it forbad cousin marriage.

Thus it is arguably precisely through its marriage and breeding laws that Christianity shaped the modern world.

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.

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.

The second and related reason ideas of human breeding and human inequality make us feel uncomfortable is easier to understand and has already been mentioned: it is a radical denial of every principle on which we base our morality of egalitarianism and our democratic politics. It reminds one, worst of all, of Nazism. The postwar international liberal order is built on the back of the Nuremberg trials, and correspondingly our image of Satanic evil is the Third Reich, with its supposed ideals of breeding humans like livestock, culling human herds through genocide, and its teaching of fundamental biological inequality. It certainly won’t do to point out that most of these ideas were inherited by the Nazis from progressive and liberal Protestant Anglo-American thought—I mean specifically Darwin, Galton and their followers.

In the case of some peoples, like Icelanders, or Ashkenazi Jews, this is very obvious—almost all Ashkenazi Jews, for example, are related to each other at around the level of fifth cousins.

Philosophers and tyrants were both perceived by the cities of the time as kindred criminal spirits.

The great concern some, and especially Plato and Xenophon, had in arguing precisely against this accusation against philosophy,

I found the most developed argument for the identity of philosophy and tyranny in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche.

The argument I make here is that the precondition for philosophy is the decay of a certain type of aristocracy. For with Nietzsche, and, I believe not only with him, the argument is made that both philosophy and tyranny develop in late or declining aristocracies, as a kind of refinement, abstraction, or radicalization of the aristocratic way of life and of the principle that underlies aristocratic life and the aristocratic worldview. This is the principle of blood or breeding which, intellectualized and abstracted, is nothing other than the idea of nature. Indeed this is the origin of the idea of nature, without which it could have never dawned on them.

My study of prehistoric life, or of the human mind as it existed before the idea of nature was discovered and therefore before philosophy or science was known, relies heavily on George Frazer, whose work is being slowly rehabilitated.

The answer is that it could not. The momentous discovery of nature—the precondition for both philosophy and science—is the preserve of one very unusual people, the ancient Greeks, and, for long thereafter, those parts of Europe where Hellenistic civilization was promoted, first by Rome, and later in a considerably modified form by Christianity and various Christian states that had inherited some of the Roman institutions. It is the birth of this concept among the Archaic Greeks, however, that has been entirely my focus in this book, and in the first chapter I try to understand how it could have possibly dawned on them.

Only through external conquest could a principle different from, and antithetical to, the totalitarian, homogenous, and egalitarian primal nomos have emerged in some society.

The Greeks, with their hungry curiosity for other peoples, for their histories, ways, excellences and foibles—an absolute prerequisite for the discovery of nature, which abhors petty parochialism—possessed the outlook of a “conquering people.”

The observation that certain qualities, physical traits, and even behaviors are passed through the breeding of various animal stocks is the source of the realization that there exists a principle apart from tribal custom or convention, that endures through generations entirely apart from the oral transmission and social enforcement of customs, and that operates entirely apart from education or indoctrination simply.

Plato is an environmental protection activist who wants to preserve a virtual “ecological reserve” within political society.

Plato invented the image of the philosopher as defender of moral virtue, in other words, invented the image of the philosopher as priest. After Plato the philosopher begins to put on the mask of the priest.

At one point Leo Strauss is supposed to have said that he was glad to be born in our time, because we are allowed the books of Plato, which include the most comprehensive vision of existence, and the books of Nietzsche, which include the most comprehensive criticism of that vision. At one point Leo Strauss is supposed to have said that he was glad to be born in our time, because we are allowed the books of Plato, which include the most comprehensive vision of existence, and the books of Nietzsche, which include the most comprehensive criticism of that vision.

Both Plato and Nietzsche were fundamentally motivated by the same thing, the defense of the freedom of thought and of the possibility of philosophy, and therefore, at bottom, the preservation of nature, nature in the original, Pindaric sense, nature as blood and breeding.

Black Africans, in particular, are so divergent from the rest of humanity that they exceed the threshold commonly used in other species to draw sub-species boundaries.

There had been several attempts since the 1950’s—Leo Strauss is a great example—to resurrect the idea of nature in academic discourse.