Traditionalist conservatives and classical liberals need Charles Darwin. They need him because a Darwinian science of human nature supports Burkean conservatives and Lockean liberals in their realist view of human imperfectibility, and in their commitment to ordered liberty as rooted in natural desires, cultural traditions, and prudential judgments. Arnhart's email address is larnhart1@niu.edu.
The Trumpian advocates of an "America First" foreign policy--like those at the Claremont Institute--have been arguing that it's not in the national interest of America to take the side of Ukraine against Russia. But there is a good argument for saying that it really is in America's national interest to support Ukraine.
In my previous post, I wrote about Angelo Codevilla's essay recently published by the Claremont Institute. Yesterday, the Claremont Institute published a new essay by Kyle Shideler. Both essays suggest that an America First foreign policy based on the Monroe Doctrine should teach us that the U.S. should not get involved in the war in Ukraine. But as I have studied these statements, they seem confusing and even incoherent; and some of what they say suggests that intervening on the side of Ukraine serves American interests.
There are at least three questions here. First, does Russian expansionist autocracy threaten the interests of the United States? Codevilla and Shideler generally say no. But some of what they write suggests that the answer might be yes.
Codevilla can say both yes and no in one paragraph: "Although today's Russia poses none of the ideological threats that the communist Soviet Union did (and though we have no directly clashing interests with it), Russia is clearly a major adversary in Europe and the Middle East. Its technical contributions to China's military, and its general geopolitical alignment with China, are most worrisome for the United States."
So which is it? Do "we have no directly clashing interests" with Russia? Or is Russia "a major adversary" and "most worrisome for the United States"?
On the one hand, Codevilla says that "Russia is no more willing to conquer Europe than it is able." On the other hand, he stresses Russia's offensive capabilities for fighting in Europe: "its operational doctrine since World War II calls for taking the initiative in a preemptive, massive, decisive manner. In these prospective conflicts, the Russians would use the S-400 air/missile defense system to isolate U.S./NATO forces by air, as well as strikes (or threat thereof) by the nuclear-capable Iskander missile to cut them off on the ground. Their ground forces, led by Armata tanks, the world's best, would then press to make them prisoners."
So, again, which is it? Is Russia an offensive threat to U.S./NATO forces or not?
But then, since both Codevilla and Shideler assume that an America First doctrine is based on the Monroe Doctrine, which says that America's interest is in defending its hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, while avoiding any entanglements in Europe, they imply, although they do not explicitly say so, that it's not in America's national interest to be a member of NATO and thus obligated to defend every NATO country against attack.
This raises my second question: Is the Monroe Doctrine a sufficient foundation for American foreign policy today? Both Codevilla and Shideler say yes. But they also say a lot that suggests no.
Shideler says that America has "an interest in preventing the rise of a power consolidating all Northwestern Europe, the Pacific Rim, or the Middle East, as such a power could hamper or deny our ability to engage in commerce, and likewise harm us." Through the early history of the American Republic, he observes, the British Empire secured these interests by serving as an offshore balancer on mainland Europe, so that no state could become so powerful as to achieve regional hegemony on the continent. But then with the weakening and collapse of the British Empire, the U.S. had to take the role of offshore balancer. Realists like John Mearsheimer would say this explains why it became a national interest for America to intervene in European wars to check the rising power of Imperial Germany (in World War I), Nazi Germany (in World War II), Imperial Japan (in World War II), and the Soviet Union (in the Cold War). Do Codevilla and Shideler agree with this? If they do, then they have rejected the Monroe Doctrine as insufficient for today.
Codevilla observes: "As always, Ukraine is where Russia's domestic and foreign policy intersect. With Ukraine (and the Baltic states), Russia is potentially a world power. Without it, much less." If that is true, and if it is true that it's in America's national interest to prevent Russia from becoming a world power, then the U.S. needs to intervene on the side of Ukraine, and thus set aside the Monroe Doctrine.
But then we need to be clear about what we mean by America's national interest. And that leads to my third question: Are America's interests morally right?
Shideler seems to affirm a moral relativism in foreign policy that would say no:
"to recognize that Russia has long opposed the expansion of Western power into its near abroad is not the same as defending its security claims. And recognizing the Russian demand in no way denies Ukraine's own interest in preventing itself from being dominated by its larger neighbor. To recognize the interests of one nation is not to deny the interests of another, nor does it make a moral claim as to which set of interests are 'right' or 'wrong.'"
Shideler also says, however, that American national interests include "preserving the way of life, beliefs, and distinctiveness" of America, and "that distinctiveness is based, in part, upon shared principles, articulated in our Declaration of Independence."
But then, of course, the Declaration of Independence does make a moral claim as to which set of interests are right or wrong: the natural rights of all men to equal liberty are naturally right, and tyranny is naturally wrong. Judging by those distinctively American, and yet also universal principles, the interest of Ukraine in liberal democracy is right, and the interest of Russia in illiberal autocracy is wrong. Consequently, an America First foreign policy really does support Ukraine against Russia.
But, apparently, Codevilla, Shideler, and the Clarement Institute disagree. They say that in international conflicts over national interests, we cannot make a moral claim that any of these interests is "right" or "wrong."
Vitaliy Kim is governor of the Mykolaiv region of Ukraine. The port city of Mykolaiv is shelled by the Russians every day. Bodies pile up at the morgue.
"Good morning. We're from Ukraine." This is typically the beginning of Kim's morning video message that is watched by most of the people of Mikolaiv.
A few days ago, his message was: "What can I say, the 17th day of war, all is well, the mood is excellent. We have freedom, and we're fighting for it. And all they have is slavery. . . . Together to victory."
If Harry Jaffa were alive today, he would be cheering them on by comparisons with Winston Churchill. Instead, the spokesmen for the Claremont Institute tell us that there is no "right" or "wrong" here.
This is the moral nihilism of Trumpian foreign policy.
Neville Chamberlain shakes hands with Adolf Hitler after signing an agreement on September 30, 1938, which provided "cessation to Germany of the Sudeten German territory" of the Czechoslovak Republic. Previously, in March, Hitler had annexed Austria. Hitler had argued that he was expanding Germany to include all German-speaking people in a "Greater Germany." He promised that his taking of the Sudentenland would be his last territorial claim in Europe. Many people across Europe and North America praised this Munich agreement as the only way to prevent a major war in Europe.
Even after the war in Europe began in September of 1939, after Hitler had invaded Poland, many Americans supported the "America First Committee" in arguing that the U.S. should stay out of the war because Hitler was no threat to American interests. The "American First Committee" disbanded on December 10, 1941, three days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and one day before the German declaration of war against the U.S.
Today, the American proponents of an "America First" foreign policy say that the U.S. and the European powers should reach an agreement with Vladimir Putin to allow the cessation to Russia of Ukraine, with Putin promising that this will be his last territorial claim in Europe. Donald Trump has suggested something like this. At a G7 summit in 2018, Trump told the leaders at the meeting that Putin had persuaded him that since all Ukrainians speak Russian, Ukraine is part of Russia. He also told them that they should lift the sanctions on Russia for the annexation of Ukrainian territory in Crimea. Now Trump says that Putin has shown himself to be a "genius" in invading Ukraine.
Surprisingly, many American conservatives are endorsing this position. One prominent example of this is the Claremont Institute. On March 3rd, the Claremont Institute posted on its website an essay by Angelo Codevilla, which is an excerpt from his forthcoming book America's Rise and Fall Among Nations: Lessons in Statecraft from John Quincy Adams. Codevilla finished this shortly before his death last year. The book originated in response to a request in 2019 from Trump's Department of Defense that he lay out what a truly "America First" foreign policy ought to be. He wrote the memo as presenting what John Quincy Adams might have recommended. The editors at the Claremont Institute praise Codevilla for his "characteristic incisiveness and perspicacity on the most serious matters of foreign relations."
Codevilla condemns American political leaders because "they pushed NATO to Russia's borders in the Baltic states and interfered massively in Ukraine." Then, "when, in 2014, Putin took Crimea, Obama imposed economic sanctions, meddled even more in Ukraine, and agreed to station token NATO and American troops in Poland and the Baltic states."
Codevilla insists that Russia is no threat to the U.S. because "we have no clashing interests with it." According to Codevilla, John Quincy Adams
"would be confident that Russia realizes it cannot control Ukraine except for its Russian part, or the Baltics, never mind the states of Eastern Europe. He would reassure Russia that the United States will not interfere with Russia joining the mainstream of European affairs and will not use normal relations with Ukraine or any of Russia's neighbors to inconvenience Russia. . . . He would trust in Russia's actual acceptance of its inability ever again to control this Ukraine. This would be Adams Ukraine policy."
According to Codevilla, Adams would also have removed all sanctions punishing Russia for taking Crimea and the Donbass.
"In sum," Codevilla concludes, "nothing would be geopolitically clearer to Adams than that natural policy for both America and Russia is not to go looking for opportunities to get in each other's way."
Remarkably, Codevilla and the Claremont Institute are taking the side of the socialist left! The International Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America has issued a statement condemning any sanctions against Russia for threatening Ukraine. They blame the U.S. and NATO for the crisis in Ukraine: "NATO is a mechanism for US-led Western imperialist domination, fueling expansionism, militarization, and devastating interventions."
The Claremont Institute was originally founded by students of Harry Jaffa, who were devoted to advancing Jaffa's conservative political philosophy. But I cannot believe that Jaffa would have said that it is not in America's interest to fight against the "evil empire" of Russia in defense of freedom. Consider this passage from Jaffa's "Decline and Fall of the American Idea" (The Rediscovery of America, edited by Erler and Masugi, p. 209):
"The moral rationality of the distinction between freedom and despotism articulated with transcendent lucidity in the Declaration of Independence was the ground of the righteous cause not only in the Revolution and the Civil War, but in all the great wars (hot and cold) of the twentieth century. When Ronald Reagan pronounced the Soviet Union an 'evil empire," he needed not many counselors to say so. . . . The Declaration of Independence stands squarely against tyranny, whether of the one, the few, or the many. Every single human being is entitled by the moral law, whether of reason or of revelation, to be considered an end in himself, to be governed, under the laws of God and of nature, by his own consent. Any exception to this can only be a harbinger of reappearing tyranny."
I cannot believe that Jaffa would have said that it is no longer in America's interest to fight for the freedom affirmed in the Declaration of Independence against the despotism of Putin's Russian Empire.
Codevilla invokes the Monroe Doctrine in arguing that as long as Russia does not interfere in the Western Hemisphere--he calls it "our backyard"--Americans ought to reciprocate by not interfering in Russia's backyard, which includes Ukraine. But doesn't this deny the Declaration of Independence in its affirmation of the right of every people to declare their independence from despotic imperial rulers? And didn't the American revolutionaries ask the French to intervene on the American side against the British? Don't the Ukrainians have the same natural right to seek the protection of NATO and the U.S. against conquest by Russia?
If the Claremont Institute is now rejecting the principles of the Declaration of Independence, then they are rejecting the fundamental principles of the American Founding, which were Jaffa's principles.
If I am wrong in my interpretation of the Claremont Institute or of Jaffa, please correct me.
In 2019, in an interview published in the Financial Times, Vladimir Putin said that the growth of nationalist populist movements in Europe and America proved that "the liberal idea" had "outlived its purpose," because the majority of people in the West were turning against immigration, open borders, and multiculturalism. He praised Donald Trump for turning America against liberalism, particularly in his attempt to stop the flow of migrants into the United States from Mexico. (I have written about the importance of an open borders immigration policy for Lockean liberalism.)
Putin's intellectual attack on "the liberal idea" has been combined with his military campaigns attacking countries that are moving to liberalism (like Ukraine) and defending illiberal regimes (like Bashar al-Assad's autocratic rule over Syria). The conflict between liberalism and its critics is both intellectual and military, as manifested in the war in Ukraine.
The intellectual debate over liberalism becomes ultimately an empirical question that must be answered by looking at the factual evidence of liberalism's success or failure. Does the freedom secured by liberalism promote human happiness?
The Human Freedom Index 2021 helps us to answer that question, because once we see how countries rank in that index, we can then see whether the countries ranking high in freedom also tend to rank high in promoting human happiness. As I have indicated in some previous posts (here, here, and here), the general pattern is clear: the liberal regimes tend to be high in both freedom and happiness, and the illiberal regimes tend to be low.
Since 1995, classical liberals at the Fraser Institute in Canada have published an annual Economic Freedom of the World that ranks the countries of the world according to their levels of economic freedom. Beginning in 2012, the Fraser Institute has cooperated with the Cato Institute to produce an annual Human Freedom Index that ranks countries according to a comprehensive index of human freedom that combines economic freedom and personal freedom.
As is characteristic of classical liberals, they define freedom in a negative way as the absence of coercive constraint, which follows John Locke's definition: "liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others," so long as one's liberty does not infringe on the equal liberty of others (Second Treatise, para. 57). Consequently, the measurement of such freedom in any country is also the measurement of a country's liberalism.
The Human Freedom Index 2021 uses 82 distinct indicators of personal and economic freedom in the following 12 categories:
PERSONAL FREEDOM
1. Rule of Law
2. Security and Safety
3. Movement
4. Religion
5. Association, Assembly, and Civil Society
6. Expression
7. Relationships
ECONOMIC FREEDOM
8. Size of Government
9. Legal System and Property Rights
10. Access to Sound Money
11. Freedom to Trade Internationally
12. Regulation of Credit, Labor, and Business
The most recent Human Freedom Index covers 165 countries for 2019, which is the most recent year for which sufficient data are available. The data are not collected by the authors but come from credible sources (for example, the World Justice Project, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the Economist Intelligence Unit, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and Freedom House).
For each of the 82 indicators, countries are scored on a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 represents the highest level of freedom. The scores for each of the 12 categories are averaged. These are then averaged for personal freedom and economic freedom. The final score for freedom in general is the average of these two, so that personal freedom and economic freedom are weighed equally.
For 2019, the top 10 freest countries, with two tied for 6th place, were:
1. Switzerland
2. New Zealand
3. Denmark
4. Estonia
5. Ireland
6. Finland
6. Canada
8. Australia
9. Sweden
10. Luxembourg
Other countries rank as follows: United Kingdom (14), United States (15), Germany (15), Taiwan (19), France (34), Ukraine (98), Russia (126), and China (150). At the very bottom are Venezuela (164) and Syria (165).
Although Ukraine ranks far below the freest countries, it does rank above Russia and China; and it ranks far above Venezuela and Syria. Ukraine ranks as low as it does mostly because of its low ranking in two categories: rule of law and legal system and property rights. The rankings there are low because of the pervasive corruption of its government and legal system: people have to pay bribes to ensure public services from police, the courts, and other public officials. If Ukraine is to become a fully developed liberal democracy, the Ukrainians will have to win the war with Russia and rebuild their country. But they will also have to reduce the corruption in their country. Only then will they move more towards those countries with the highest rankings for freedom.
The best model for emulation might be Estonia, which ranks as the 4th freest country in the world. Estonia and Ukraine have similar histories, and they both share their eastern borders with Russia.
Both Estonia and Ukraine were under the rule of the Soviet Union until they declared their independence in 1991. But since then, Estonia has been far more successful in becoming a liberal democracy oriented toward Western Europe and away from Russia. In 1992, Estonia established a fully market and free-trade economy. In 1994, Estonia adopted Milton Friedman's proposal for a flat tax: the tax on personal income is a uniform rate of 21%. In 2004, Estonia joined both the European Union and NATO. Estonia, Latvia, and Finland are the only NATO countries that border on Russia.
Estonia has adopted the liberal principle of religious liberty, so that all people are free to practice their religion or to be nonreligious. It has become one of the most secular countries in the world. About half of the people of Estonia profess no religious belief. The other half are mostly Christians--either Eastern Orthodox or Lutheran.
The government of Estonia is based on the liberal principles of limited government, discouraging centralized power, equality under the rule of law, and low levels of political corruption. The budget for the national government is always balanced, and there is almost no public debt. Estonia has one of the lowest rates of crime for any country in the world.
Estonia is a unitary parliamentary republic. The unicameral parliament is the legislative branch. The executive branch is led by the Prime Minister, who is approved by the parliament. The head of state is the President, mostly a ceremonial role, who is elected by the parliament. In January of 2021, the parliament selected Estonia's first female prime minister--Kaja Kallas.
Kaja Kallas
George Will has written about Kallas as a classical liberal who learned her liberalism from reading Friedrich Hayek after living as a teenager under the despotism of Soviet rule.
She has to worry that if Putin successfully conquers Ukraine, he might target Estonia next. But as a member of NATO, Estonia would be protected by the principle of collective defense in Article 5 of the NATO Treaty.
If Putin's invasion of Ukraine fails, Ukraine will be free to move towards the freedom achieved by Estonia.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken Meets with Estonian PM Kaja Kallas
Recently, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was interviewed by David Remnick at The New Yorker.
She said: ". . . the thing about the U.S. and NATO and the European Union is that we have ideas. We are about democracy and freedom and capitalism and security, as well as individual liberties. It's a fact that people are better off under democracies. . . . It's our ideas that attract others. Russia under Putin doesn't really have that power of attraction. He only has the power of coercion, and we are seeing that now in Ukraine in a brutal way."
Is that true? Are the modern Western ideas of liberalism--democracy, freedom, and capitalism-- powerfully attractive to human beings today? Is it true that people are better off when they live in liberal capitalist democracies? Or has the power of those liberal ideas faded in recent history? Must Putin rely only on the power of coercion? Or does Putin also have the power of some illiberal ideas in defeating modern liberalism? Do we see those illiberal ideas manifest in the thinking of Traditionalist philosophers like Alexander Dugin and Steve Bannon, who support Putin?
That the war in Ukraine is part of the global battle of ideas between liberal democracy from the West and illiberal autocracy from the East has been affirmed by Ukrainian philosophers like Volodymyr Yermolenko. Yermolenko is a political philosopher and political scientist in Ukraine who is the editor of Ukraine World, an English-language news outlet. He has recently written an essay for The Economist. Michelle Goldberg has written an article about him for The New York Times as explaining why Ukrainians believe they can win.
"Freedom is the key trait of Ukraine's identity as a political nation," Yermolenko says. He explains:
"Ukrainian political culture is based upon anti-tyrannical, democratic and republican values. Most Russians tend to approve of their tsar; Ukrainians identify with opposition to him. Within politics they see a social contract. This harks back to the early modern era, when the Ukrainian warrior class known as Cossacks made agreements with their leaders which ensured recognition of their rights and freedoms. This mode of thinking runs deep and it is impossible to eradicate. The Cossack, a free warrior on the open steppe, is one of the symbols of Ukrainian identity."
The word "Cossack" is derived from an Old East Slavic word kozak for "free man." In speaking about how political culture arises from a "social contract" between free men to secure their rights and freedoms, Yermolenko restates the ideas of Lockean liberalism.
Yermolenko continues:
"Ukraine is also a political nation. It is not centered exclusively on any single ethnic, linguistic, or religious identity. It is pluralistic. You can be a Ukrainian speaker, Russian speaker, or a speaker of Crimean Tatar and be ready to defend Ukraine. You can be Ukrainian Orthodox, Greek-Catholic, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or Jewish and stand shoulder to shoulder for this country. Ukrainians have a Russian-speaking president who has Jewish origins."
Thus, in contrast to the ethnic and religious nationalists, Yermolenko sees that Ukrainians have embraced liberal pluralism, and that they can still be united in their patriotic defense of their country because they are united in their commitment to the liberal values of a free society. If he is right, Ukrainian political culture is both cosmopolitan and patriotic. It is cosmopolitan in affirming the universal values of liberalism and patriotic in affirming the national identity of Ukraine as rooted in those values.
That Ukrainian sense of national identity has been formed largely in response to Putin's aggressive attacks on Ukraine--first his annexation of Crimea and the invasion of the Donbass region in 2014 and now his invasion of the rest of Ukraine. Marie Yovanovitch observes: "When I was in Ukraine in the early two-thousands, nobody knew the words to the national anthem. By the time I came back, in 2016, everybody knew the anthem. They put their hands on their hearts. The same is true now, as Russian troops are targeting kindergartens."
Yermolendo agrees:
"Our sense of Ukrainian identity has taken on a greater intensity in the past few years. Russian aggression since 2014 helped consolidate it among people who might earlier have felt close to Russian culture or Russia's information space. Mr. Putin's invasion will accelerate this process. When Russians shell residential buildings and destroy the central square in Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine, every shot diminishes the number of those who have sympathy with Russia. People who have felt they belonged in the Russian cultural space ten years ago, feel a strong Ukrainian identity now. They might speak Russian or go to the Russia-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church. But they are Ukrainians. Russia has lost the battle for their hearts and minds."
This transformation of Ukrainian identity is also the victory of European liberal modernity, and particularly the victory of the liberal humanism of the Enlightenment over the illiberal authoritarianism of the counter-Enlightenment (as promoted by people like Dugin and Bannon). Yermolendo observes:
"It is the extension of European values to the east. It is the story of the strength of the European idea--which today's Europe sometimes shies away from. It is the story of European humanism, rooted in Ancient Greek philosophy, through Roman republicanism, to Italian city-republics, the ideas of the Enlightenment and of anti-Nazi resistance. Through their resistance to Mr. Putin's empire, Ukrainians are showing that this humanist tradition has the strength, energy, and courage to defend itself."
In the summer of 1989, The National Interest published Francis Fukuyama's essay "The End of History?" This came just a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall and two years before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Fukuyama argued that humanity has reached "not just . . . the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
When Ukrainians defeat Putin, as they surely will, Fukuyama might want to write a new essay entitled "The End of History--Again?"
As he argued in his original essay, this is not the end of the history of political conflict and war, but it is the end of the intellectual history of the debate over the best social and political order. Because now most human beings recognize that liberal democracy is the best regime for securing human happiness, because it secures the human freedom that is the precondition for human happiness.
Another way of seeing this is to look at the empirical evidence for the correlation of freedom and happiness as presented in the Human Freedom Index, and to see how Ukraine is striving to move closer to those countries at the top of this index (countries like Switzerland and Estonia) and away from those countries at the bottom (countries like Russia and China). I will write about that in my next post.
Over the years, I have written various posts (here, here, here, here, and here) supporting Steven Pinker's argument that history shows a progressive trend towards declining violence and Liberal Enlightenment. But now Putin's invasion of the Ukraine forces us to consider whether this trend is now going to be reversed. Are we going back to an age of warring civilizations? Does this show that history is not progressive after all, and so Pinker was wrong? Pinker has just written an essay for the Boston Globe in which he tries to answer this question.
Here's the first paragraph of Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature:
"This book is about what may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history. Believe it or not--and I know that most people do not--violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species' existence. The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth; it has not brought violence down to zero; and it is not guaranteed to continue. But it is an unmistakable development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children."
Notice that he says this decline in violence "is not guaranteed to continue," a point that he stresses in various parts of his book (xxi-xxiii, 278, 361-77, 480, 671). In his Boston Globe article, he restates this in conceding that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has "brutally halted" one of the historical declines in violence--"the Long Peace"--the absence of interstate war in Europe since the end of World War Two. And here he defines "interstate war" as "an armed conflict between national governments that kills at least a thousand people in a war."
Pinker identifies five factors--ideas and institutions--that supported the Long Peace: interstate trade, membership in global organizations, the United Nation's outlawing of wars of aggression, democracy, and Enlightenment humanism. The first three applied to Russia but failed to prevent the war. The last two did not apply to Russia.
The punishment of Russia through economic sanctions and international condemnation appeals to those first three factors. The sanctioning has not gone far enough, however. We need to sanction Russia's oil and gas industry, which is the big source of Russian wealth. It is possible that this punishment could either change Putin's mind or lead to his losing the power to rule in Russia. If this were to happen, this would show the power of globalization to force nations to pull back from aggressive wars of conquest.
Democracies put checks and balances on the power of potential tyrants to lead their countries into foolish wars. But Russia is an "electoral autocracy" rather than a democracy, and so there is no check on Putin's "malignant narcissism"--or what Pinker calls his "grandiose craving for glory, lack of empathy, and a petulant sensitivity to affronts."
The fifth factor favoring the Long Peace--Enlightenment humanism--is "the conviction that the ultimate good is the life, liberty, and happiness of individuals, with governments instituted as social contracts to secure these rights." Putin's ideology rejects this liberal individualism. Pinker writes: "Putin cleaves instead to romantic nationalism, in which the ultimate goodto is the prestige of ethnic nations. Governments and strong leaders are their embodiments, and they struggle to stake out spheres of influence and rectify historic humiliations."
How could the war in Ukraine be ended in a way that would satisfy Putin's romantic nationalism? One possibility, as some commentators have suggested, would be for the United States and the great powers of Europe to agree to meet with Putin for a new Yalta Conference, which was the meeting in February of 1945 in Crimea of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin to plan for carving up their spheres of influence in Eastern Europe after the war. Biden and some of the European leaders could negotiate with Putin to divide up Ukraine--perhaps allowing western parts of Ukraine to be under European influence and eastern parts under Russian influence.
As Pinker indicates in Better Angels, Putin's romantic nationalism arose in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as one strand of "counter-Enlightenment thinking"--the revolt against Enlightenment liberalism and humanism that was explained in an essay by Isaiah Berlin (186-88, 240-44). It originated with Rousseau and was later developed in Germany by people like Johann Hamann and Johann Herder. These thinkers rejected the individualism, the rationalism, and the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment and affirmed collectivism, emotivism, and cultural diversity.
Part of this was Herder's romantic nationalism, which held that an ethnic group--such as the German Volk--had a unique cultural identity that could not be submerged in an abstract universality of humanity, and this ethnic identity was held together by bonds of blood and soil rather than by some individual consent to a social contract.
This romantic nationalism was often bound up with a romantic militarism--the idea that war was a healthy spiritual expression of heroic self-sacrifice and manly honor that was needed to cleanse society of the effeminacy and materialism of bourgeois hedonism. This romantic militarized nationalism now motivates Putin's wars of conquest and expansion as a glorious expression of the Russian Empire pushing back against the decadent materialism and individualism of liberal modernity. We can also see this in Alexander Dugin's Eurasianism and in much of the Alt-Right thinking, as in the case of people like Bronze Age Pervert, who argues that the best form of government (and the alternative to liberal modernity) is an ethnostate ruled by military dictators.
Does this mean that the Russian war in Ukraine signals a new historical epoch in which all the progressive trends favoring the Liberal Enlightenment--such as declining violence--are now going to be reversed? If so, that would refute Pinker's argument.
"Maybe--but maybe not," Pinker says. Maybe, as he says in Better Angels, history is unlikely to be completely reversed, but it is "jerky"--that is, there can be temporary backsliding (as happened in the first half of the 20th century), but not a permanent retrogression of history.
The renewal of the historical trends of liberal modernity will depend upon whether in the long run most human beings find liberal values--life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--to be truly desirable because they are conducive to their human flourishing. This will also depend on whether the human devotion to liberal freedom motivates us to resist the illiberal tyranny of people like Putin.
Bernard-Henri Levy Debates Aleksandr Dugin in Amsterdam, 2019
Aleksandr Dugin
"The Russian Renaissance can only begin in Kiev." "Only after restoring the Greater Russia that is the Eurasian Union, can we become a credible global player. Now these processes slowed down very much. The Ukrainian maidan was the response of the West to the advance of the Russian integration." (Maidan--the central square in Kyiv--is the name for the protest demonstrations against the pro-Russian illiberal government of Ukraine in 2013, which eventually led to the establishment of a pro-Western liberal government in 2014.)
That was the Russian political philosopher Aleksandr Dugin speaking in 2014. He was supporting Putin's annexation of Crimea, but he was criticizing Putin for not conquering all of the Ukraine as a step towards establishing a Eurasian Empire based on a fascist Traditionalism that could challenge the global power of American Liberal Modernity.
Recently, Dugin wrote an article saying that the aim of the current Russian invasion of the Ukraine was the "liberation" of the whole of Ukraine, which will bring "a completely different page in world history, . . . a multipolar world and a total change in the entire global world order." What he means by this is that while after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it appeared that the world order would be "unipolar"--with the United States as the one hegemonic superpower--now we can move to a "multipolar world," in which a Eurasian Russian Empire can challenge the power of the U.S. and stop the global spread of Liberal Modernity.
Dugin and other Right-Wing Traditionalists--like Steve Bannon--see the expansion of Russia as part of a global strategy to destroy the liberal democratic values of modernity promoted by the United States. Ultimately, these ideas of the fascist Traditionalists are rooted in the illiberal nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.
Previously, I have written posts (here, here, and here) on the intellectual tradition of illiberal traditionalism--from Nietzsche to Heidegger to Nazism, and finally to the American Alt-Right and European New Right today. For some time, I have wanted to write about how Dugin and Russian Eurasianism fit into that line of thought, which culminates in the global strategy of political leaders like Putin (and Trump) for pushing back against the international spread of American liberal democratic principles.
My thinking about Dugin's Eurasianism and fascist Traditionalism has been shaped by my reading of studies by Marlene Laruelle (2019a, 2019b), Charles Clover (2016), and Mark Sedgwick (2004), and by my reading of some of Dugin's writings--particularly, The Fourth Political Theory (2012). For understanding Dugin's entanglements in Steve Bannon's global far-right circle, I have learned a lot from Benjamin Teitelbaum's War for Eternity (2020). A recent article in the Washington Post offers a brief summary of Dugin's geopolitical Euroasianism and indicates how Putin has been following Dugin's plan exactly.
DUGIN'S LIFE AND THOUGHT
Dugin was born in Moscow in 1962. At the age of 18, he joined an anti-communist dissident group--the "Yuzhinsky group"--that engaged in various kinds of occult spirituality as a form of psychic rebellion against the soulless life of a communist totalitarian society. Dugin expressed his rebellion by embracing fascist and Nazi ideas. He discovered the writings of Julius Evola (1896-1974), an Italian fascist, who had adopted the ideas of the Traditionalist School initiated by the Frenchman Rene Guenon (1886-1951), an occultist mystic.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, he looked for ways to create an ideological fusion of fascism, communism, and Russian nationalism that would challenge the global hegemony of the United States and the values of liberal modernity that the U.S. promoted--individualism, materialism, secularism, democracy, and human rights. In the 1990s, he formed first the National Bolshevik Party and then the Eurasia Party as ways to promote his eclectic ideology that would support Russian global power projected against American liberalism. In doing this, he glorified Tsarist, Leninist, and Stalinist Russia.
Dugin is clearer about what he is against than what he is for. He is clearly against the liberal modernity promoted by the United States. But what he is for is often confusing and incoherent. Generally, his thinking combines four elements. First, and perhaps most fundamentally, he draws from the Traditionalism of Guenon and Evola. Second, he adopts fascist and Nazi ideas from the 1920s and 1930s. Third, he appropriates ideas from the European New Right of the past thirty years. And, finally, he tries to integrate all of this into a Russian Eurasianism.
Traditionalism is a revolt against the modern world as it began in the sixteenth century and then was deepened in the liberal Enlightenment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Prior to modernity, it is claimed, there was a divine order based on a universal religious tradition of spirituality that was diversely expressed in all of the organized traditional religions. The modern world has lost this spiritual tradition, because it has been corrupted by the soulless secularism, materialism, and individualism of modern liberalism. But once this corruption reaches bottom, the human longing for transcendent meaning will bring a cultural revolution that will renew the ancient Tradition.
The fascism and Nazism of the first half of the twentieth centuries were revolts against liberal modernity that attempted to restore the ancient traditions of a collective human existence rooted in the national identity of the Aryans and other blood-and-soil peoples.
The third element of Dugin's thinking comes from the European New Right--from those thinkers in Western Europe who reject the cosmopolitan liberalism represented by the United States. These thinkers want to turn Europeans away from an Americanized Europe and towards a European Europe, in which each European country breaks away from American hegemony and from the European Union and affirms the traditional cultural identity and moral values of each nation as expressing its white Christian heritage.
The final element is Dugin's vision of Russia as the leader of the Eurasian continent stretching from Dublin and Berlin to Vladivostok and Beijing. Russia lies at the center of the Eurasian continent. At the other pole of geopolitics is the Atlanticist Anglo-American world--Great Britain and its North American colonies--that has led the movement for liberal modernity. This would set us a global battle between a rootless Atlantic world of Modernity and a rooted Eurasian world of Tradition.
Notably, Dugin identifies the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 (the non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union) as "the peak of the strategic success of Eurasianists." Dugin laments the break-up of this alliance between Germany and Russia in 1941, when Hitler invaded Russia, as tragically failed opportunity for the illiberal Eurasianists to unite against the liberal Atlanticists.
Notice the historical logic of this. If Hitler had maintained his alliance with Stalin, illiberal Nazi Germany could have conquered most of Western Europe, while the illiberal Soviet Union took control of Eastern Eurasia. This could have checked the power of the Anglo-American Atlanticists (the U.S. and Great Britain) and prevented the hegemony of the U.S. after the war in creating the liberal international order.
In recent years, Dugin has found philosophic support for this bipolar vision of Liberal Modernity versus Illiberal Tradition in Martin Heidegger. Dugin has translated seven of Heidegger's works, and he has written two books about Heidegger. Dugin shows Heidegger's influence by using Heideggerian concepts like Dasein to explain geopolitics.
Against the background of Dugin's philosophic vision of geopolitics, one can understand why Putin invaded Ukraine. During the previous Ukrainian crisis of 2014, Dugin wrote:
"Our revolution will not stop in Western Ukraine. It must go further in Europe. . . . Europe faces a Revolution in both cases: if we, Russians, win, and if we stop somewhere under NATO pressure. If we win, we will begin the expansion of liberation [from American liberal] ideology into Europe. It is the goal of Eurasianism--Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok. A Great Eurasian Continental Europe. And we will build it. This means the European Revolution will be a Eurasian Revolution. This is our last horizon."
Apparently, Putin decided to invade Ukraine with the thought that now was the time to start the Eurasian Revolution against American Liberal Modernity. If so, he might have been following Dugin's advice.
I should say, however, that there is scholarly debate over whether Dugin has really had this kind of influence over Putin. Marlene Laruelle thinks that Dugin's influence with Putin has been greatly exaggerated, because Putin has never publicly spoken about Dugin. Clover and Teitelbaum, however, lay out the evidence that Dugin has been working with Putin behind the scenes. I do not have enough knowledge to decide this debate. But it does seem to me that if Putin has not been directly listening to Dugin's advice, Putin has been taking advice from people passing on Dugin's ideas.
Even if Dugin had no influence at all on Putin's decision, it's worth studying Dugin's thought as a philosophic explanation and defense of Putin's expansionist foreign policy.
DUGIN AND BANNON, PUTIN AND TRUMP
We must wonder why Putin decided to invade Ukraine now--at the beginning of Joe Biden's second year of his presidency--rather than sometime during Donald Trump's four years in office. Dugin's writing suggests an answer: as long as Trump was president, Putin did not need to go to war to build his illiberal Eurasian Empire, but the election of Biden changed that, because it threatened to renew America's leadership of the liberal world order.
On November 8, 2016, election day in the United States, Dugin wrote an essay on "Clinton Is War, Trump Is Freedom". He wrote: "Hillary Clinton is the path of globalism, the unipolar world, and the continuation of U.S. hegemony." She represented the old world order of American liberal dominance of the global system that is coming to an end. But since she would go to war to defend that liberal world order, the illiberal regimes like Russia would be drawn into her wars.
On the other hand, Dugin wrote: "Donald Trump is the America we almost lost"--the America described by populist nationalists like Patrick Buchanan that wanted to withdraw from liberal globalism. This America could be great again, but it would not be a global power enforcing the liberal international order. This would be a multipolar order in which illiberal autocracies like Russia and China could advance their illiberal values. So if Trump is elected, Dugin declared, "the world will be a different place tomorrow."
And, indeed, this came true. On November 10, 2016, two days after the election, Dugin wrote an essay on "Donald Trump's Victory." Dugin explained how this was a great victory for Putin: "Putin, standing in the vanguard of the struggle for multipolarity, led up to this. November 8th, 2016 was a most important victory for Russia and him personally. There is no alternative to the multipolar order, and now we can finally create the architecture of this new world order--not through war, but through peace. Trump has brought this with him."
Dugin wrote: "Trump's America is traditional and conservative, healthy, and worthy of respect. This America said a resounding 'no' to globalism and the expansion of liberal ideology."
Consequently, "we should abandon simplistic anti-Americanism, which was completely appropriate when the U.S. was ruled by the globalists." Now, "European liberals have lost their advisor," and thus liberal values must fade in Europe as long as America is no longer projecting liberal culture around the world.
Dugin observed: "Some retort that we overestimate Trump. Yesterday, they scoffed at us when we predicted his victory. Today, our time has come. This is a window of opportunity, and it is open. If we fail to use it now, then we will have only ourselves to blame."
Then, on November 14, 2016, six days after the election, Dugin wrote on "Donald Trump: The Swamp and the Fire." Here he explained that "anti-Americanism is over" for Russians who want to promote illiberal autocracy around the world, because not only will Trump turn America away from promoting liberalism abroad, he will also lead a revolution to overthrow liberalism in America. When Trump promises to "drain the Swamp," we should see that "the Swamp is an ideology--Liberalism." On the day before the election, the center of the liberal global order was in America. On the day after the election, that center was gone.
Now, with the election of Trump, we no longer have a global order with two opposing poles--America in the West promoting liberalism and Russia in the East promoting illiberalism. Now we see the West turning into the East. "Now they have turned into two eschatological promises: Putin's Greater Russia and America liberating itself under Trump. The 21st century has finally begun."
This alliance between Putin and Trump was manifest in the alliance between Dugin and Steve Bannon. In November of 2018, Dugin and Bannon met in Rome. This meeting was kept secret until Teitelbaum reported it in 2020 in his War for Eternity based on his extensive interviews of Bannon and Dugin. At the time, Bannon and Dugin had to keep this secret, because the Trump movement was being criticized for its ties to Putin and Russia, and so publishing the story of this meeting would have been an explosive scandal for the Trump administration.
Bannon had been identified as perhaps the mastermind behind Trump's election. He then joined the White House staff in 2017 as a close political strategist for Trump. After he was fired in August of 2017, Bannon began to build a global network of far-right thinkers and politicians to advance illiberal populism in Europe and elsewhere. Bannon had begun collaborating with people like the National Rally leader Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders of the Dutch Party for Freedom, and Viktor Orban in Hungary. He was also organizing schools in Europe to teach future nationalist leaders about political activism and ideology (including Traditionalism). His meeting with Dugin was part of that project.
Bannon is not the only Alt-Right thinker who has looked to Dugin. For example, I have written previously about "Bronze Age Pervert," who endorses "Eurasianism" as a form of the European Ethnostate under a military dictatorship favored by the Alt-Right.
Dugin and Bannon met for eight hours of conversation over one day in a hotel room in Rome. They talked about the philosophical ideology that might bring together Trump's America and Putin's Russia as allies in the fight against Liberal Modernity. A big part of their conversation was about how Martin Heidegger's philosophy might support this.
Teitelbaum reports Dugin's thoughts about Bannon:
"This American emerged from a wasteland, a society forged to modernism with no connection to its soil, no connection to history, and no sacred roots. To be American is to be without Tradition, which has made Bannon's rise all the more spectacular. For there, among the ruins of modernity and materialism--in the midnight kingdom, at the midnight hour--a sudden blast of light. The Russian sees Bannon's rise to power as the beginning of a successful revolt against the modern world, one foretold by ancient mystics and detailed in the writings of underground twentieth-century spiritualists. Bannon isn't a person; he's an eschatological sign."
". . . We are Traditionalists, Dugin thinks to himself, and it is our time" (Teitelbaum 2020, 3).
Like Dugin, Bannon had become a Traditionalist from his reading of Guenon and Evola. But despite this agreement on Traditionalist metaphysics and spirituality, Bannon and Dugin disagreed about some points of geopolitical strategy. Bannon thought that America and Russia needed to find common ground as part of the Judeo-Christian culture in fighting against China, Turkey, and Iran. But Dugin thought the spiritual fight against Liberal Modernity should be allied with China, Turkey, and Iran.
They also disagreed about Dugin's anti-Americanism. Dugin thought that America was the only state created in modernity, and that while both America and communism belong to modernity, Russia has premodern historical roots in Tradition. He thought that while he had been born into the rootless nothingness of communism, Bannon had been born into the rootless nothingness of America. Both of them had found their way out of nothingness into Tradition.
Bannon responded by arguing that the modern nothingness was not the real America:
"That's liberalism. Liberal modernity. It's not a people. That's a set of ideas--dangerous ones--put forward by people from around the world. When people say that America is an idea, that's what they're talking about, these so-called universal values that can't help but infect everything. But that is the thing--America isn't an idea. It is a country, it is a people, with roots, spirit, destiny. It's the working class and middle class, it's that group of people that have been perennial to us, from the fuckin' Pilgrims and the Puritans on. And what you are talking about, the liberalism and the globalism that live in America, real American people are victims of that. We're talking the backbone of American society, the people who give the country its spirit--they're not modernists. They're not the ones blowing trillions of dollars trying to impose democracy on places that don't want it. They're not the ones trying to create a world without borders. They're getting screwed in all of this, by an elite that doesn't care about them and that isn't them" (158).
Bannon insisted that the real Russia and the real America are united in their fight for spiritualism against materialism. Russia is fighting for the spiritualism of the Eastern Orthodox tradition against the materialism of communism. America is fighting for the spiritualism of the Western Judeo-Christian tradition against the materialism of liberalism. (Dugin is a member of the Russian Orthodox Church. Actually, he's an "Old Believer"--one of those who maintain the liturgical and ritual practices of the Russian Orthodox Church as they were before the reforms of Patriarch Nikon of Moscow between 1652 and 1666.)
In a way, Dugin seemed to agree with Bannon in 2016 when Dugin said (in "Donald Trump: The Swamp and the Fire") that Trump was leading the real America in a conservative revolution fighting against the Swamp of liberalism, and therefore Russian anti-Americanism was no longer necessary. Trump and Putin could be seen as "two eschatological promises." As long as Trump was fighting against liberalism in America, Putin could advance the cause of illiberal autocracy across Western Europe and the rest of the world.
But that was all changed by the election of Biden in 2020. Now, the Swamp of liberalism is back in control of America, and Putin has no alternative but to go to war against a unipolar global order with a hegemonic American liberalism. This was made clear in Biden's first year when he repeatedly declared that the world order was defined by a battle between the liberal democracy of America and its allies and the illiberal autocracy of Russia and China.
In these circumstances as created by Biden's election, Putin had to invade Ukraine and push up to and perhaps beyond the borders with the NATO countries. He had to do this to advance the cause of Dugin's illiberal Eurasianism rooted in Traditionalist spiritual values.
Right now, we cannot be sure of the outcome. But I see evidence just in the first few days of the war that Putin has already lost the war--because of the resoluteness of the Ukrainean people in defending their homeland, the strength of the U.S. and the NATO allies in resisting Putin's invasion, and the superiority of liberal democracy over illiberal autocracy.
Even if Putin occupies most of Ukraine, there will surely be a Ukrainian insurgency that he can never defeat.
Far from being smart, as Trump has said, Putin's invasion is dumb.
REFERENCES
Clover, Charles. 2016. Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia's New Nationalism. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.
Dugin, Alexander. 2012. The Fourth Political Theory. London: Arktos Media.
Laruelle, Marlene. 2019a. "Alexander Dugin and Eurasianism." In Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the Threat to Liberal Democracy, edited by Mark Sedgwick, 155-69. New York: Oxford University Press.
_____. 2019b. Russian Nationalism: Imaginaries, Doctrines, and Political Battlefields. Oxford: Routledge.
Sedgwick, Mark. 2004. Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Teitelbaum, Benjamin R. 2020. War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers. New York: Dey St., HarperCollins Publishers.
In January of 1989, I was in San Francisco for the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). I attended a "Symposium on Evolutionary Theory, Economics, and Political Science," which had been organized by Roger Masters. That caught my attention because I was spending a sabbatical year at Stanford University working on a project for applying evolutionary theory to political philosophy, and the writing of Masters had influenced my thinking. At that symposium, J. Philippe Rushton, a professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario, presented a paper on "Evolutionary Biology and Heritable Traits (With Reference to Oriental-White-Black Difference)."
He argued that the three major races--Orientals (Mongoloids or Asians), Whites (Caucasoids or Europeans), and Blacks (Negroids or Africans)--consistently differed in "Life History Strategy." Blacks have the fastest strategy: they live fast and die young. Orientals have the slowest strategy: they live slow and invest in the future. Whites are intermediate between these two poles. On average, Orientals are slower to mature, less fertile, less sexually active, less aggressive, and have larger brains and higher IQ scores. At the opposite pole, on average, Blacks are fast to mature, more fertile, sexually promiscuous, very aggressive, and have smaller brains and lower IQ scores. Whites fall in the middle, but closer to Orientals than to Blacks. This three-way pattern of racial differences arises from evolutionary and genetic causes rather than purely cultural causes. Blacks evolved to be adapted to the tropical climate of sub-Saharan Africa. Whites evolved to be adapted to the cooler climates of Europe. Orientals evolved for the coldest Arctic lands.
Even as he argued that these race differences are genetically based, Rushton insisted that this was not an argument for genetic determinism. There were two reasons for this. First, since there is enormous variability within each race, and since the distribution of traits shows a great overlap between the races, one cannot generalize from a group average to any particular individual. Second, he stressed that only about 50% of the variance is genetic, and about 50% is due to the environment; and even the genetic effects are necessarily mediated by neuroendocrine and psychosocial mechanisms, which allows the individual and society to exercise some control over this.
In the technical terms of the evolutionary science of life histories, Rushton explained, Orientals are more "K strategists," Blacks are more "r strategists," and Whites are intermediate between these two. He was employing a theory of "r and K selection" developed by Edward O. Wilson and others (MacArthur and Wilson 1967; Wilson 1975, 99-103).
In the equations used by population ecologists to describe the growth of populations of organisms, r represents the slope of the line showing exponential growth, while K represents the carrying capacity of a habitat for a certain kind of organism. Organisms identified as r strategists typically live in unstable, unpredictable environments, where the best reproductive strategy is to produce lots of offspring rapidly, while expending little parental investment in any one offspring. The idea is to flood the habitat with progeny so that, while many of them will die, at least a few will survive to reproduce. Organisms that are r selected tend to be small, short-lived, fertile at an early age, fast maturing, with a strong sex drive, little care for offspring, and less intelligent (smaller brains). Typical examples of r strategists are oysters, salmon, frogs, and insects.
K strategists, on the other hand, occupy more stable environments, in which the best reproductive strategy is to live close to the carrying capacity of their habitat by producing only a few offspring and investing a lot of parental care in each offspring. Organisms that are K selected tend to be large, long-lived, fertile at a later age, slow maturing, with a weak sex drive, with extensive parental caregiving, and more intelligent (larger brains). Examples of K selected organisms are elephants, the great apes, and humans. Indeed, humans are the most K selected species of all.
While many biologists have used r/K selection theory to explain differences between species, Ruston's novel idea was to use the theory to explain differences between races or subspecies within the human species. While humans are the most K selected species, Ruston argued, some human races were a little less K selected and more r selected than other races. Orientals are moreK selected than Whites, and Whites are moreK selected than Blacks.
As I listened to Ruston speak, I noticed that there were many newspaper reporters in the room, and I thought: This guy is going to stir up a big public controversy. And, indeed, as soon as the Q&A began, the reporters began asking hostile questions. I learned that Rushton had sent out press releases a week before describing his paper. He wanted publicity--bad publicity!--and he got it. Over the next few days, newspapers around the United States and Canada published stories about the firestorm he had created by presenting a scientific theory of racial differences that seemed blatantly racist. I thought to myself that this guy must be so narcissistic--so obsessed with being the center of attention--that he will pronounce the most offensive ideas about racial differences to create the notoriety that comes from being regarded as the most outrageous kind of racist.
What I remember most about Rushton's speech was his obsession with the size of black men's penises. One of the primary data points for his theory was his claim that black men's penises were bigger than white men's and much bigger than Asian men's. You can see why Rushton began to appear on American television talk shows by Geraldo Rivera and Phil Donahue to defend his ideas about racial differences.
Rushton's 1989 AAAS paper was eventually published in 1992, and it can be found online. Later, he elaborated his reasoning in a big book--Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (1997). He also published a special abridged edition of this book (2000), which can also be found online.
I was recently reminded of Rushton when I read some essays at the New York Review of Books (here) and Science for the People (here) showing that Edward O. Wilson had an extensive correspondence with Rushton--who died in 2012--that showed Wilson's support for Rushton's scientific theory of race differences. A few weeks ago, I wrote a post criticizing Monica McLemore for identifying Wilson as a racist without providing any evidence for this in Wilson's published writing. At that time, I had no knowledge of Wilson's correspondence with Rushton, which suggests that in his private correspondence Wilson was willing to express his sympathy for the scientific racism of people like Rushton. Wilson's correspondence is found in his papers at the Library of Congress. An index to the papers can be found online. I have not examined the papers. But I will assume that these two essays accurately quote from the correspondence with Rushton.
Some of the scientists who at first defended Wilson from McLemore's charge of racism--such as Jerry Coyne--have said that this evidence of Wilson's support for Rushton forces them to reconsider whether Wilson really was a scientific racist.
From what I see in the correspondence and in Wilson's published writing on race differences, I draw two conclusions. First, Wilson's correspondence showed bad judgment in supporting Rushton, because Rushton presented his theory of race differences in such a way that it could be easily interpreted as confirming scientific racism. This became very clear in later years when Rushton allied himself with Jared Taylor's online journal American Renaissance, which promotes Taylor's argument for promoting the "white identity" of America and restricting non-white immigration.
My second conclusion is that Wilson was not himself a racist, because he saw that the science of race differences was compatible with the Lockean liberal principle of natural human equality of rights, which denies racist xenophobia and white nationalism.
Wilson's correspondence with Rushton began in 1986. Wilson sponsored the publication of Rushton's paper "Gene-Culture Coevolution of Complex Social Behavior: Human Altruism and Mate Choice" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (PNAS). But there was nothing in this paper about race differences.
In 1987, Rushton asked Wilson to sponsor another paper for publication in PNAS. But this time, the paper was on race differences; and for that reason, Wilson had to decline to sponsor it. Wilson explained to Rushton: "You have my support in many ways, but for me to sponsor an article on racial differences in the PNAS would be counterproductive for both of us." He told a story about being attacked as a racist and then remarked: "I have a couple of colleagues here, Gould and Lewontin, who would use any excuse to raise the charge again. So I'm the wrong person to sponsor the article, although I'd be glad to referee it for another, less vulnerable member of the National Academy." Wilson's feeling of vulnerability in being exposed to the charge of racism must explain why Wilson's support for Rushton was restricted to private correspondence and never expressed in any public statement.
After Rushton's presentation at the AAAS convention on January 19, 1989, he found himself under attack. The Premier of Ontario called for his dismissal from his faculty post at the University of Western Ontario. The Ontario Provincial Police announced that he was under criminal investigation. At his university, there were student protests against him. Then, on July 1, he received a report from the Promotion and Tenure Committee of his department that rated his performance for 1988-1989 as "Unsatisfactory." The report said that members of the committee were "of the unanimous opinion that your work on the genetic basis of race differences is substantially flawed and that your published record indicates serious scholarly deficiencies." Rushton appealed this decision. He cited his numerous publications as evidence that his research record was good.
On April 4, 1990, Wilson wrote to the Appeals Committee at the University of Western Ontario to support Rushton's appeal. Wilson said that Rushton's data and interpretation were "sound, being adapted in a straightforward way from well documented principles of r-K selection in biology." He said that many biologists would agree with this, and he explained: "You may wonder why almost none have published their opinions. The answer is fear of being called racist, which is virtually a death sentence in American academia if taken seriously. I admit that I myself have tended to avoid the subject of Rushton's work, out of fear." Rushton won his appeal, and he wrote to Wilson to thank him for his support.
It seems that Wilson did not publicly state his support for Rushton's work out of "fear of being called racist." Those who wrote the essays for Science for the People and The New York Review of Books assume that he feared being correctly called a racist. But I think his published writing about race differences suggests that he feared being falsely called a racist.
Wilson's published writing about race is remarkably skimpy. His most extensive writing on race that I have noticed is in the fourteen pages of his 1953 article on the "subspecies concept" (Wilson and Brown 1953) and four pages in his 1978 On Human Nature (47-51).
In their NYRB essay, Borrello and Sepkoski say that in 1975, in the last chapter of Sociobiology, Wilson "suggested, among other things, an evolutionary and genetic basis for 'the behavioral qualities that underlie the variations between cultures,' as well as for 'marked racial differences in locomotion, posture, muscular tone, and emotional response that cannot be reasonably explained as the result of training or even conditioning within the womb.'" But the passage they quote does not appear in the 1975 Sociobiology. It appears in the 1980 abridged edition of Sociobiology (274). This passage originally appeared in On Human Nature (48-49), but without the phrase "marked racial differences."
For interpreting Wilson's understanding of race, the best place to begin is his early article on the subspecies concept, because for biologists, the term "race" is equivalent to the term "subspecies." Within each species, there is heritable phenotypic variation. Indeed, without such variation within each species, evolution by natural selection would be impossible, because there would be no variation for natural selection to work on. When this genetic phenotypic variation shows sufficient geographic structuring, so that the geographical origins of individuals can be determined from their genetic and phenotypic characteristics, then biologists can identify these geographic clusters as subspecies or races. These races can become "incipient species" that eventually might evolve into species.
We are all familiar with the Linnean Latinized binomial taxonomic label for a species that denotes the genus and the species. For example, the chimpanzee is Pan troglodytes--Pan for the genus, troglodytes for the species. The other great ape that belongs to this genus is the bonobo--Pan paniscus--which for a long time was assumed to be a subspecies of chimpanzees--the pygmy chimpanzee. That indicates the fundamental problem in all taxonomy: the boundaries are often so fuzzy that it's hard to distinguish between closely related species and between closely related subspecies, which leads to endless debates among taxonomists as to how to draw the boundaries.
Taxonomists employ a Latinized trinomial label for a subspecies. The four generally recognized subspecies of chimpanzees have four such labels (Stanford 2018, 184-90). The central chimpanzee--Pan troglodytes troglodytes--is found across a wide area of central African rain forest. The western chimpanzee--Pan troglodytes verus--is found in the Tai National Park and surrounding forests in western Africa. The eastern chimpanzee--Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii--is found in central and eastern Africa, and it's the most studied chimpanzee, including Jane Goodall's chimpanzees in Gombe. The Nigerian-Camaeroonian chimpanzee--Pan traglodytes ellioti--is found in forested areas across Nigeria and Cameroon, and it has been named only in recent years. Although it is not generally recognized, primatological taxonomist Colin Groves has argued that there is a fifth subspecies--the southeastern chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes marungensis)--that arises from the variation between the northern and southern populations of P. t. schweinfurthii.
Comparisons of genetic variation between humans and great apes have shown that the degree of genetic differentiation among chimpanzee subspecies is about the same as among human races (Fischer et al. 2006). So we have a choice. If we deny that human races are real, we must also deny that chimpanzee races are real. Or if we see that chimpanzee races are real, we must also see that human races are real.
In "The Subspecies Concept and Its Taxonomic Application," Wilson and Brown criticize the subspecies concept because of its "subjective and even arbitrary nature" (1953, 100). This must be so because it's a fuzzy concept with fuzzy boundaries. In an Addendum to Jerry Coyne's blog post (noted above), Greg Mayer argues that this shows that Wilson was not a racist, because in rejecting the concept of subspecies, he rejected the concept of race. "Roughly speaking, Wilson didn't believe there were races." And, indeed, this is what many biologists have said in attacking scientific racism--race is a cultural construction that has no biological reality.
But Wilson does not really deny the biological reality of races or subspecies. Insofar as the subspecies concept has fuzzy boundaries, it will always be to some extent "subjective and arbitrary," which is evident in the endless debates among taxonomists about how exactly to draw the boundaries. But then every concept has fuzzy boundaries, more or less, and therefore is to some extent "subjective and arbitrary." This is easy to see by going to any dictionary and looking at the many different definitions for the same word. Yes, the subspecies concept is difficult to define, but then every concept is difficult to define. If dividing between two racial categories allows us to make accurate predictions about each, then those racial categories are real, even when the difference between them is very small and fuzzy. This is just as true for dividing between species. The genetic differences on average between humans and chimpanzees is very small. But no one would say that the distinction between humans and chimpanzees is meaningless. Similarly, there are more genetic differences within breeds of dog that between the breeds; but no one would say that the differences between a Great Dane and a Chihuahua are meaningless.
When Wilson's 1953 subspecies article was reprinted in his 2006 book Nature Revealed: Selected Writings, 1949-2006, he added prefatory comments on the article, in which he wrote: "Looking back now, I believe Brown and I overreached in our recommendations on classification. There are populations that are both isolated, as on islands, and possess enough concordant traits to qualify as objective geographic units, and there are advantages to giving them formal trinomens. Some of these populations are proving to be distinct species different enough so that even if they were contiguous, no interbreeding would occur, but others deserve denotation as objectively definable subspecies" (354). So now he clearly recognizes "objectively definable subspecies," which must include human races.
He also observes, however, that human races are difficult to define; and so physical anthropologists in the 1950s "varied wildly in their definition of human races and hence their count of the number of races existing in the human species" (353). This is still true today.
Rushton identified only three human races--Orientals, Whites, and Blacks. But he admitted that since the races can and do interbreed, many if not most people are of mixed race. American Blacks, for example, on average have around 25% European genes (2000, 18, 50, 54, 59, 66-68, 93). He conceded, therefore, that "to a certain extent all the races blend into each other." But still most people can be identified with one race or another. And we can say that a Black is anyone most of whose ancestors were born in sub-Saharan Africa, a White is anyone most of whose ancestors were born in Europe, and an Oriental is anyone most of whose ancestors were born in East Asia (2000, 93).
Rushton cited the work of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues in The History and Geography of Human Genes (1994), who classified humans into races based on genetic polymorphisms (Rushton 2000, 85-89). A genetic polymorphism is a gene that can be composed of alleles in different forms. Cavalli-Sforza took polymorphic genes for blood groups, blood proteins, lymphocite antigens, and immunoglobins and calculated the different allele frequencies in populations around the world. He then used factor analysis to see the genetic similarity of these allele frequencies to calculate the genetic differences between each population and every other population. He could then calculate a genetic linkage tree that grouped the populations into racial clusters. Rushton does not tell his reader, however, that instead of finding Rushton's three races, Cavalli-Sforza found ten:
1. Bushmen and Pygmies
2. Sub-Saharan Africans
3. South Asians and North Africans
4. Europeans
5. Northeast Asians
6. Arctic Peoples
7. Native American Indians
8. Southeast Asians
9. Pacific Islanders
10. Australian Aborigines and the Aboriginal New Guineans
These ten races don't fall neatly into the three-leveled pattern of Rushton's theory.
Wilson did not, as far as I know, try to distinguish all the human races. In On Human Nature, he said: "most scientists have long recognized that it is a futile exercise to try to define discrete human races. Such entities do not in fact exist" (48). This passage has been quoted by those wanting to defend Wilson against the charge of racism by arguing that he denied that race had any biological reality.
But immediately after this passage, Wilson cited some research by psychologist Daniel Freedman that showed evidence for "geographical variation . . . in the genetic basis of social behavior" and "marked racial differences" in Asians, Caucasians, and Native American Indians (Wilson 1978, 48-50; 1980, 274). Studying American newborn infants, Freedman detected "significant average differences in locomotion, posture, muscular tone of various parts of the body, and emotional response that cannot reasonably be explained as the result of training or even conditioning within the womb." Chinese-American newborns tend to be more quiescent than Caucasian-American infants, and Navaho infants tend to be even more quiescent than the Chinese infants. Since this cannot be explained as resulting from cultural learning, this must show genetic differences between Asians, Caucasians, and Native Americans.
Wilson observes:
"Given that humankind is a biological species, it should come as no shock to find that populations are to some extent genetically diverse in the physical and mental properties underlying social behavior. A discovery of this nature does not vitiate the ideals of Western civilization. We are not compelled to believe in biological uniformity in order to affirm human freedom and dignity. The sociologist Marvin Bressler has expressed this idea with precision: 'An ideology that tacitly appeals to biological equality as a condition for human emancipation corrupts the idea of freedom. Moreover, it encourages decent men to tremble at the prospect of 'inconvenient' findings that may emerge in future scientific research. This unseemly anti-intellectualism is doubly degrading because it is probably unnecessary.'"
"I will go further and suggest that hope and pride and not despair are the ultimate legacy of genetic diversity, because we are a single species, not two or more, one great breeding system through which genes flow and mix in each generation. Because of that flux, mankind viewed over many generations shares a single human nature within which relatively minor hereditary influences recycle through ever changing patterns, between the sexes and across families and entire populations" (50).
Wilson quoted this last paragraph in a letter to Nature in 1981, in which he defended himself against the charge of promoting racism. "To keep the record straight," he wrote in the letter, "I am happy to point out that no justification for racism is to be found in the truly scientific study of the biological basis of social behaviour." But notice that saying that there is no scientific justification for racism is compatible with saying that there is scientific justification for the biological reality of race. A biological science of racial differences does not justify the racist xenophobia that denigrates or degrades those who belong to a race different from one's own.
Genetic differences in the average propensities and traits of the human races is compatible with the Lockean liberal principle of equal liberty. Lockean equality means not that all people are identical--in intelligence or in many other respects--but that all people are similar in resisting exploitation by others, so that no human being is good enough to govern any other human being without that person's consent. Equal liberty requires not equality of outcome, but equality of opportunity in the pursuit of happiness. In a society of equal liberty, those individuals who are naturally more intelligent or talented than others will reap the benefits of those superior traits, but those superior individuals will have no right to exploit those of lesser abilities. In such a society, everyone can find valued places for themselves.
Borrello, Mark, and David Sepkoski. 2022. "Ideology as Biology." The New York Review of Books, February 5.
Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi, P. Menozzi, and A. Piazza. 1994. The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Farina, Stacy, and Matthew Gibbons. 2022. "'The Last Refuge of Scoundrels': New Evidence of E. O. Wilson's Intimacy with Scientific Racism.'" Science for the People, February 1.
Fischer, Anne, Joshua Pollack, Olaf Thalmann, Birgit Nickel, and Svante Paabo. 2006. "Demographic History and Genetic Differentiation in Apes." Current Biology 16: 1133-1138.
MacArthur, R. H., and E. O. Wilson. 1967. The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Rushton, J. Philippe. 1992. "Evolutionary Biology and Heritable Traits (With Reference to Oriental-White-Black Differences): The 1989 AAAS Paper." Psychological Reports 71: 811-21.
_____. 1997. Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective. 2nd ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishing.
_____. 2000. Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective. 2nd Special Abridged Edition. Port Huron, MI: Charles Darwin Research Institute.
Stanford, Craig. 2018. The New Chimpanzee: A Twenty-First-Century Portrait of Our Closest Kin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wilson, Edward O., and W. L. Brown. 1953. "The Subspecies Concept and Its Taxonomic Application." Systematic Zoology 2: 97-111.
Wilson, Edward O. 1975. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
_____. 1978. On Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
_____. 1980. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Abridged edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
_____. 1987. "Genes and Racism." Nature 289 (February 19): 627.
_____. 2000. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. 25th anniversary edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
On February 12, 1809, Charles Darwin was born in England, and Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky. They had more in common than just the coincidence of their birth. Almost every February 12th, I have posted an essay on some of the common themes in their lives. I see at least ten points of similarity between Darwin and Lincoln.
1. Both saw the universe as governed by natural laws, which included the natural laws for the evolution of life.
2. Both were accused of denying the Biblical doctrine of Creation.
3. Both were accused of being atheists or infidels.
4. Both spoke of God as First Cause.
5. Both appealed to the Bible as a source of moral teaching, even as they also appealed to a natural moral sense independent of Biblical religion.
6. Both rooted that natural moral sense in the evolved moral sentiments.
7. Both abhorred slavery as an immoral violation of evolved human nature, and they saw the American Civil War as a crucial turning point for the abolition of slavery.
8. Both were moral realists.
9. Both saw human history as moving through a Big History of three evolutionary eras--the foraging era, the agrarian era, and the modern era.
