Are the Straussian Fascists Showing that Will Altman Was Right About Leo Strauss?

I have written about Bronze Age Pervert's Bronze Age Mindset (here and here).  So I was interested in the recent essay by Blake Smith identifying Bronze Age Pervert as Costin Alamariu, who wrote a doctoral dissertation--The Problem of Tyranny and Philosophy in Plato and Nietzsche--under the supervision of Steven Smith, a Straussian political theorist at Yale University.  Blake Smith shows how Alamariu's dissertation explains the Straussian philosophic grounding for Bronze Age Mindset.

This connection of Alamariu's Nietzschean fascism to Strauss fits a remarkable pattern of Straussian influence with other contemporary exponents of Nietzschean fascism that I have considered on this blog.  Richard Spencer studied under Michael Gillespie at Duke University.  Michael Millerman studied under Clifford Orwin at the University of Toronto, although Orwin resigned from his dissertation committee after some newspaper stories publicized Millerman's fascist political philosophy.  Alamariu, Spencer, and Millerman were all shaped in their thinking by Leo Strauss's interpretation of Nietzsche's fascism as the best illiberal alternative to liberal democracy.

This seems to confirm what William Altman was arguing ten years ago--in a series of three books on Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Strauss--that Strauss was the secret theoretician of National Socialism.  Altman presented his "German trilogy" of books as following a tripartite structure suggested by Strauss in his "Three Waves of Modernity."  According to Strauss, the First Wave of modernity came with Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke; the Second Wave came with Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel; and the Third Wave came with Nietzsche and Heidegger.  If each wave comes through a sequence of three thinkers, who is the third thinker of the Third Wave?  Surely, Altman suggested, it must be Strauss himself.  And if the Third Wave leads to fascism, as Strauss indicated, then this would point to Strauss as the thinker who most fully worked out the theory of fascism or Nazism as the anti-liberal solution to the crisis of liberal democracy.

As I have indicated in my posts on Altman, I have found him to be an insightful commentator on Strauss.  But I do disagree with him on two points.  First, I think he overstates his Strauss-as-a-Jewish-Nazi thesis.  In fact, he implicitly concedes some of the weaknesses in this thesis.  He recognizes that Strauss regarded Hitler as a fool.  He also recognizes that there is no evidence that Strauss ever developed any positive program for moving towards a National Socialist society.

Still, I am persuaded that Altman has shown that Strauss is open to the criticism that he was not emphatic enough in defending liberal democracy against the ideas of Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Heidegger.  Strauss never really offered a thorough refutation of these ideas, and instead he showed some attraction to them--most clearly in his lectures on "German Nihilism" and the "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism."  Significantly, these lectures were not published until after Strauss's death.

My second point of disagreement is that unlike Altman and Strauss, I see Nietzsche in his middle period (Human, All Too Human, Dawn, and the first four books of The Gay Science) as providing an alternative--based on his Darwinian liberalism--to the positions he took in his early and late writings.  Nietzsche's Darwinian writings do not suffer from the contradictions that Altman rightly sees in his other writings.  Nor do the Darwinian writings provide any encouragement to the Nazis who appropriated ideas from the other writings.  Nietzsche's Darwinian aristocratic liberalism is intellectually, morally, and politically superior to his Dionysian aristocratic radicalism.  Strauss and the Straussians fail to see this as the Nietzschean way to defend liberalism against its illiberal critics.

Nietzsche Denies the Alt-Right Nietzscheanism of Bronze Age Pervert

                               Conan the Barbarian, A Favorite Meme for Bronze Age Pervert

Opening of "Conan the Barbarian" with the Nietzsche Quotation


"Hail Trump!  Hail Our People!  Hail Victory!"

That was the famous exclamation of Richard Spencer at a gathering of the Alt-Right in Washington, DC, shortly after Donald Trump's election victory in November of 2016.  Some of the people in the audience raised their hands in the Nazi salute.  A few days later, in an interview with the New York Times, Trump was asked about his Neo-Nazi Alt-Right supporters, and he was forced to say "I disavow the Alt-Right."

In August of 2017, Spencer and other Alt-Right leaders organized the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where they protested the decision to take down the statue of Robert E. Lee in Lee Park in Charlottesville.  Participants marched while chanting Neo-Nazi and white supremacist slogans and displaying Alt-Right symbols.  They were challenged by counter-protestors, and the clash between the two groups became violent.  A white supremacist at the rally--James Alex Fields--drove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors and killed a young woman--Heather Heyer--and injured 20 other people.  He was later convicted of first degree murder.

When Trump was asked to condemn the Alt-Right rally in Charlottesville, he said there were "fine people on both sides," which was ambiguous in a way that suggested he was refusing to condemn his Alt-Right supporters.  As a result, some of his leading supporters began to admit that they were wrong to vote for him.  For example, Julius Krein--the organizer of the pro-Trump blog the Journal of American Greatness and the editor of the quarterly journal American Affairs--wrote an article for the New York Times entitled "I Voted for Trump. And I Sorely Regret It."

As a consequence of this controversy, the Alt-Right continues to support Trump, but many of their leaders now say they need to be cautious in their public statements, so that they do not openly speak about their ultimate aim of promoting cultural and political fascism, because this will be unpopular, and it will weaken Trump's position.  They now have a new strategy.  In the short run, they will be part of Trump's populist movement, but without publicizing their fascist beliefs.  In the long run, however, they will work for Trump as paving the way for a fascist military ruler who will overturn liberal democracy and create a right-wing military dictatorship.

This new Alt-Right strategy is evident in the writing of Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), the pseudonym for a popular Twitter writer who has written the book Bronze Age Mindset, a self-published book that has become a bestseller at Amazon.  There are rumors that this book is being read by people in the Trump White House, and that BAP might himself be a White House staffer.  The book is certainly being studied by the intellectual defenders of Trump, such as Michael Anton, who wrote a long essay on the book in the Claremont Review of Books.  Claremont's blog--The American Mind--has published a series of essays on Bronze Age Mindset, including an essay by BAP himself responding to Anton's review.

Previously, I have written about the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche in Alt-Right thinking, and one can see that here, because Nietzsche is the one author mentioned most often in BAP's book.  But I see BAP as confirming my argument in my previous post on the Alt-Right Nietzscheans--that they draw their ideas from the early and late writings of Nietzsche promoting his Dionysian Aristocratic Radicalism, while ignoring Nietzsche's Darwinian Aristocratic Liberalism in his middle writings (particularly, Human, All Too Human).  Consequently, BAP does not see how his Nietzschean fascism is refuted by Nietzschean liberalism.

BAP's thinking has been shaped by Nietzsche's teaching about the will to power and the Superman (Ubermensch).  All living beings express the will to power by seeking to expand their mastery over the circumstances of their existence, and the Superman is the supreme expression of that will to power.

In Part One of his book--"The Flame of Life"--BAP calls this the "struggle for space," which is his answer to the question of the purpose of life.

"A healthy animal not under distress, not maimed, not trapped by man, seeks first when young: space.  Animal seeks space in physical sense, territory.  But this meaning isn't crudely physical, I give this as vivid image which is true for many animals that seek ownership of concrete territory.  But more generally you must take it to mean something else, space to develop inborn powers. . . . You must learn to see the secret language of nature and what it drives at: there is one path that drives for the production of a supreme specimen.  It is the path that governs higher life; survival and reproduction are only side effects of this path.  Life is at most basic, struggle for ownership of space" (24-25).

Most human beings--BAP calls them "bugmen"--live only for the preservation and expansion of mere life.  But a few real men--the men of power--seek the exaltation of life as expressed in youthful beautiful bodies and the strength and courage of adventurous achievements, particularly in war.  These real men were celebrated in Bronze Age societies as heroic warriors.

"Among the Greeks the man of power was called aner, who was different from the other word used, anthropos, which referred just to some shadow-being, indistinct, some kind of humanoid shape.  The real man was rare, and most males were not and are not real men!  The word in beginning was used only for demigods and superhumans like Achilles or Diomedes or Odysseus. . . . These peoples saw the vigor of youth as the true driving force behind life and behind all things, forever renewing itself reincarnating itself anew in each generation. . . . In same way when I poast physiques of beautiful and handsome youths I do so because in contemplating them I am filled with a deep calm and joy--I see in them the persistent rejuvenation of this same eternal force that is inside all things.  I see in this force the hidden design and intention of nature, its reaching beyond itself. . . . I have no doubt that the gods, if they exist, would look only like perfected and improved versions of beautiful physiques of young men, just like they showed themselves to the Greek oracles in dreams. . . . If you want to understand the true power of aion, of the eternal youthful energy that is the universe, you must study what remains from Heraclitus when he uses this word, and how he connects it to the idea of fire that is the essence of all things and all action.  And he is very right when he says, 'The best desire one thing above all, ever-flowing eternal fame among mortals; but the many glut themselves like cattle.'  This is what I believe in" (59-61).

(You can see here BAP's unusual style of writing--misspelled words, words dropped out, no rules of punctuation--an internet pidgin language or what Anton says appears to be "a simplified pastiche of Friedrich Nietzsche written by an ESL-middle-school-message-board troll.")

BAP sees the separation between aner and anthropos as manifesting a natural hierarchy of human types.  A few young men with beautiful bodies who are aggressively courageous in asserting their mastery over others in war and war-like competition for dominance are the highest expressions of human excellence.  By contrast, the great majority of human beings--the bugmen--strive only for survival and reproduction, and they find security in obedience to the few powerful men who rule over them.  Thus the fundamental fact of nature is inequality.

Modern science--and particularly, biology--helps us to see this natural inequality.  "Science is a great tool because it can uncover for us the biological conditions of all life and the relationships between types of life.  It can, as Nietzsche predicted, settle the question of the true hierarchy of values, or more precisely, the real ladder of life, the true hierarchy of biological types" (42).

There are at least three or four biological types.  In addition to the many bugmen and the few real men, there is a degraded elite of those BAP calls the "lords of lies" or "owners" who rule over the Iron Prison by constraining the space for everyone one.  These elite rulers are hidden.  We don't know their names.  Those whom the people identify as their rulers are only managers and ultimately enslaved to the system of the Iron Prison.

Throughout history, most of the time, BAP believes, the naturally lower human types have ruled in a way that has suppressed the aggressive spiritedness of those young males who are the highest human type.  But in the historical cycle of cultures, the degraded societies will eventually collapse, and the young male warriors will assert their superiority as the only truly free men.  We will see "the emergence of brotherhoods of savage men who have decided to purify the earth and rid it of the infestation of the human-cockroach" (51).

I must say, however, that after struggling to understand BAP's book, looking for ideas worthy of being taken seriously, I have concluded that there's nothing here but incoherent nonsense.  I'll point to seven points where I find his book confusing, with the hope that other readers of the book might help to clear up my confusion.


1. IS MILITARY RULE (OR THE ETHNOSTATE) THE ONLY RIGHT FORM OF GOVERNMENT?

In response to Anton's attempt to engage him in a debate over the best form of government, BAP says that's beside the point: "If my book doesn't speak about forms of government, it is because that's not its intention, nor my aim right now."

That's not true, because BAP clearly declares in his book that "the only right government is military government,"  and "the military form of government is natural to human species" (112-13, 177).  "In nature the vital part of mankind would rule and in the beginnings of many societies it does: military brotherhoods of men rule, and physical force as well as force of personality, charisma, draw the rest in an orbit around those who possess these in the highest degree.  This is all by a natural and secret pull, by instinct" (164).

He says that "democracy is the final cause of all the political problems I describe here," and "the Constitution, the ideology, the doctrine of rights, is all so much nonsense" (155).  Democracy will need to be abolished, which will happen when Trump is replaced by a military dictator--a new Napoleon (169-70, 189).

BAP says that one of his favorite military dictators is Alfredo Stroessner, who ruled over Paraguay from 1954 to 1989 (113).  Throughout his rule, Stroessner declared a state of siege so that he could suspend all civil liberties.  He was responsible for murdering thousands of people and imprisoning and torturing many others.  It is said that he enjoyed listening by telephone to the screams of the people being tortured in his prisons.  Wow!  Now there's a real aner!

In a few passages of his book, BAP suggests that the best form of government is not just any kind of military dictatorship but military rule over an "ethnostate."  He recommends that his readers should study the idea of the ethnostate as a guide for their "final aims," although they should be careful not to talk about this in public, because this would expose them to their enemies (171, 176).

The term ethnostate was first coined by Wilmot Robertson in his book The Ethnostate (1993), which claimed that statehood should be rooted in a homogenous racial and cultural identity.  Later Richard Spencer adopted the term for the Alt-Right.  In the winter of 2007, Spencer was a graduate student at Duke University taking a course on "Nietzsche's Politics" taught by Michael Gillespie in the Political Science Department. Spencer wrote a paper for that course on "Politics in the Grand Style: Nietzsche, the Judeo-Christian Legacy, and European Unification," which is available at Spencer's website.  He argued that "the deeper character of the Ethno-State . . . is Nietzschean at its core."  But one must see that Nietzsche was not an "ethno-nationalist."  Rather, he was a Europeanist who thought that contrary to the "insanity of nationality,"  "Europe wants to become one" (BGE, 256).  And so Nietzsche thought that "good Europeans" should look to a future unification of all of Europe into one culture, thus fulfilling what Napoleon had tried to do in his imperial conquest of Europe.  This is what Spencer has defended--in effect, an expansion of the European Union into one European Ethnostate based on the European Judeo-Christian culture.

So BAP seems to have something like this in mind when he mentions the idea of the ethnostate.  He also mentions a similar idea when he refers to "Eurasianism," which points to Alexander Dugin's Eurasia Party in Russia, which promotes the idea of expanding Russia into a massive Eurasian Empire based on the Russian Orthodox culture, an idea that has had some influence on Vladimir Putin.

So why does BAP hide his thinking about a military ethnostate as the best regime in his response to Anton?  Is it because he doesn't want to draw attention to the craziest ideas in his book?  In his book, he warns his readers that if they choose to go into political life by joining the Trump movement, they should denounce and disavow his book if they are asked about it, because "you must have an instinct for how much normies are able to take" (170).


2.  A SELF-HELP BOOK?

BAP tells his readers that they must "try to live according to a Bronze Age Mindset."  But then he says: "You must not misunderstand this.  This is not self-help book and I can't help you with how to live" (112).  He then continues giving advice about how to live: "I hope to show you that things don't need to be this way, and that you don't need to limit yourself to small things.  Above all you must reach for the great aim, physical and military independence.  Only the warrior is a free man."

So which is it?  Is this or is this not a self-help book?

He insists: "Self-help is completely useless, and not what this book is about" (129).  But then, again, like any self-help book, BAP fills his book with examples of men that his readers can imitate.  For instance, he tells the story of Pedro de Alvarado, a Spanish conquistador in the New World, and he writes: "This man was a born pirate: right before his death he was planning a great expedition for the conquest of China and the Spice Islands.  Alvarado was a nemesis to civilization, and this is right and good.  God sends such men to chastise mankind.  I want you to be like this: to listen to these instincts in you" (156).

His favorite examples for imitation are the new pirates of recent history--mercenary soldiers like Bob Denard and "Mad Mike" Hoare, who he presents as "the modern rebirth of Bronze Age vitalism" (159).  Hoare died just a few weeks ago (February 2), and the obituaries have recounted his adventurous life.  Soldier of Fortune magazine has some good articles on Hoare here. and here.  That magazine is all about the modern world of mercenaries.

BAP advises his readers that they should join some military organization or intelligence agency to gain the professional training that they will need for becoming successful mercenaries.  Is he serious about this?  If so, why hasn't he himself done this?  Or has he?


To be continued . . .

The Pathetic End of Richard Spencer's Nietzschean Alt-Right

 

This is Richard Spencer leaving the Federal Courthouse in Charlottesville, Virginia.  He is carrying his daughter's stuffed animal.  He brought it to court every day, he said, to be his "emotional support animal."  This is a good image for the pathetic death of Spencer's Nietzschean Alt-Right.

Yesterday, a jury awarded $26 million in compensatory and punitive damages to plaintiffs claiming damages from the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville in August of 2017.  $14 million of the damages were assessed against James Field, who is serving a life prison sentence for driving his car into a crowd and killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer.  Spencer was ordered to pay $1.2 million.

I have written previously about Spencer (here and here).  Spencer's ultimate aim has been to overthrow liberal democracy and establish a "white ethnostate" in North America and Europe.  For him this kind of thinking all began when he first read Nietzsche as a college student at the University of Virginia.  Then, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he began to study Leo Strauss, who he saw as sympathetic with Nietzschean fascist thinking.  (I have written a series of posts on the Strauss-Nietzsche connection.)  Later, he did some graduate work at Duke University where he took a course on "Nietzsche's Politics" from the Straussian political theorist Michael Gillespie; and his paper for that course--"Politics in the Grand Style: Nietzsche, the Judeo-Christian Legacy, and European Unification"--is perhaps the fullest statement of his Nietzschean Alt-Right thinking.  He argued that "the deeper character of the Ethno-State . . . is Nietzschean at its core."

Suddenly, at the trial in Charlottesville, Spencer announced that his Nietzschean Neo-Nazism was all wrong.  He said that this kind of thinking showed him at his "absolute worst," and that it was all a product of his "animal brain."  At one point, he testified: "That was me as a 7-year-old, and it's a 7-year-old that's probably still inside me.  I'm ashamed of it.  Those are not my sincere, thoughtful beliefs.  That is a childish, awful version of myself."

After the verdict, Spencer told reporters that the Alt-Right movement that he created is over.  "That's long dead and gone in my opinion.  And it's buried.  And I don't want to have anything to do with it."

He also said: "I'm going to develop ideas that I think are important to the future of the world.  I've evolved a lot.  I think that populist energy of a few years ago, I think it brought out the worst in a lot of people, and it brought out the worst in me.  I don't think saying I'm sorry would help anyone.  I think the main thing is to move forward with integrity and seriousness."

Is this the death of the Nietzschean Alt-Right?  Surely, some of the Nietzschean Alt-Right thinkers will say that rather than showing the death of the movement, what this really shows is the stupid mistake of people like Spencer who shout in public that the final goal of the Alt-Right is a military ethnostate, which provokes a public backlash.  The smart strategy is to keep quiet about this.  

As I have noted, "Bronze Age Pervert" has recommended to his readers that they should study the idea of the military ethnostate as a guide for their "final aims," but they should be careful not to talk about this in public, because this would only expose them to their enemies.  They should join the Trump movement as the best way to work for overthrowing liberal democracy and moving towards a Nietzschean military dictatorship.  But they should never say that this is their aim because "you must have an instinct for how much normies are able to take" (Bronze Age Mindset, 170-71, 176).

In other words, don't march in a torchlight parade chanting Neo-Nazi slogans and assume that you won't be punished by your enemies!

Can this Straussian "secret writing" strategy of Bronze Age Pervert work?

Well, a recent report on "The Global State of Democracy 2021" concludes that the United States has joined the growing list of countries that are "backsliding democracies"--democracies whose democratic institutions and norms are declining--while at the same time the illiberal authoritarian regimes are expanding.  Does this suggest that the historical conditions in the world today are growing ever more favorable to the ultimate triumph of the Nietzschean Alt-Right?

Bronze Age Pervert (2): Alcibiades as the Alt-Right Hero

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Does Russia's War with Ukraine Refute Pinker's Thesis of Declining Violence?

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.

COVID-19 in the Evolutionary History of Infectious Disease: Will It Kill Liberal Globalism?

Will the COVID-19 pandemic kill liberal globalism?  

According to Curtis Yarvin, writing for the Claremont Institute's blog American Mind, it should.  Shortly after the report of the first case of a coronavirus infection in the U.S. in late January--a Washington state man who had travelled to Wuhan, China--Yarwin wrote an essay entitled "RIP Globalism, Dead of Coronavirus," in which he claimed that the only sensible response to the danger of a pandemic reaching the U.S. was to stop all air travel across the Pacific and across the Atlantic.  He recommended "suspending 1492," so that the two great hemispheres of the planet would be disconnected, just as they were before Columbus's voyage to the New World.  No only that, but every country should be totally isolated for ever, with no one permitted to travel into or out of any country.  All international trade should be stopped.  Every nation would be economically and culturally self-contained.  

He did not expect this to happen, because he saw that the internationalist belief in the goodness of our interconnected, globalized world is too strong to allow for the wisdom of an isolationist vision.  But he foresaw that the internationalist failure to close all national borders to the spread of the coronavirus would bring the death of millions of people around the world, which could lead more people to recognize the virtues of an isolationist world.  This could be something like Japan's policy of sakoku under the Tokugawa shogunate, in which both trade and travel across Japan's borders were generally prohibited.

Yarvin--who wrote under the name "Mencius Moldbug" for his blog Unqualified Reservations--is one of the most influential of the younger alt-right theorists who argue that liberal democracy has failed, and that what we need is the authoritarian rule of a monarch or a corporate CEO, following a policy of isolationist nationalism that scorns internationalist globalism (Tait 2019).  Yarvin was the person who recommended to Michael Anton that he read Bronze Age Pervert, another young alt-right thinker; and so this seems to have been a turning point in the move of the Claremont Institute towards the alt-right.  (I have written a series of posts on Anton and Bronze Age Pervert here and here.)

Yarvin is obviously right about how air travel in a globalized world has promoted the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus around the world.  But I do not see how this proves that liberal globalism has failed, and that it needs to be replaced by a world of isolationist authoritarian regimes.  

We need to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic fits into the whole evolutionary history of infectious diseases from the Paleolithic to the present.  Ron Barrett and George Armelagos have written that history in their book An Unnatural History of Emerging Infections (2013).  In the first sentence of their book, they declare: "Microbes are the ultimate critics of modernity" (1, 115).  This introduces their Rousseauian epidemiological critique of modernity: the history of how human civilization moved away from the hunter-gatherer state of nature through the Agricultural Revolution and then the Industrial Revolution appears to be progressive improvement; but in fact, Barrett and Armelagos say, modern human beings suffer more from microbial infectious diseases than did their hunter-gatherer ancestors, which shows that the microbes--the bacteria, the viruses, and other microparasites--have evolved through mutation and reproduction to be the true masters of the earth.  This is an unnatural history because it moves away from the original natural condition of human beings as foragers in the Paleolithic.

That our modern globalized world is now suffering a catastrophic pandemic caused by a newly emerging coronavirus that has evolved to exploit the global interconnectedness of our world to infect us and kill us seems to show that.  This might seem to confirm Yarvin's argument that the COVID-19 pandemic exposes the vulnerability of globalist modernity. 

But I will argue that this evolutionary history of microbial diseases should teach us that while infectious disease has plagued humanity throughout all of history, and while newly emerging infectious diseases continue to threaten us today, a modern liberal globalized world can reduce, although never fully eliminate, that threat, so that life in our modern globalized world can be generally safer and healthier for more people than ever before in history.  This will be true, however, only as long as we preserve the freedom of a liberal social order that allows for the innovation necessary to meet the challenges that come from infectious diseases.

We can see that history as passing through four eras--the prehistoric foraging era, the agrarian era, the era of the industrial revolution, and the contemporary globalist era.  To fully explain this history, we need to understand both the microscopic and the macroscopic determinants of human infections.  

At the microscopic level, we try to understand how bacteria, viruses, and other microparasites have evolved to succeed (or fail) as human pathogens who must parasitize human beings for the survival and reproduction of the pathogen.  We should keep in mind, however, as I have indicated in a previous post, that virologist Marilyn Roossinck (2011, 2015, 2016) is probably right in suggesting that most bacteria and viruses are not harmful human parasites, because most of them have evolved to have either commensal (not harmful to the human host) or mutualistic (mutually beneficial) relationships.  For example, most of the bacteria and viruses in the human gut are necessary for human health.

It is only in the last century or two that modern science has given us some understanding of this microscopic world.  Some ancient natural philosophers--like Lucretius--have understood, however, that infectious disease can be caused by invisible pathogenic "seeds"--an intimation of the germ theory of disease.  I have written about this here and here.

At the macroscopic level, we can understand infectious diseases as social diseases, in the sense that they depend upon three social factors of human life--subsistence, settlement, and social organization.  The modes of human subsistence (such as foraging or farming), human settlement (such as nomadic bands or permanent urban living), and human social organization (such as egalitarian leveling or hierarchical classes) will influence our vulnerability to infectious diseases.

THE PREHISTORIC FORAGING ERA

For most of human evolutionary history, our ancestors lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers, in what the evolutionary psychologists call the "environment of evolutionary adaptation" (EEA).  Their mode of subsistence was predominantly gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals.  Their mode of settlement was for small bands of individuals to set up temporary campsites for no more than a few days or months at a time, so that they could move their camp many times a year to find the best locations for hunting and gathering. Their mode of social organization was to live in small groups where the adults were roughly equal, in that some individuals exercised informal leadership, but their power was checked by others who resisted any attempts at dominance.

The early modern political philosophers called this the "state of nature," and they disagreed about whether it was a state of peace and plenty or a state of war and poverty.  Thomas Hobbes declared that it was war and poverty, which made it a condition of desperate unhappiness.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau declared that it was peace and plenty, which made it the happiest condition for humanity.  Many social scientists today continue to take one side or the other in this debate.  So, for example, Marshall Sahlins said that Rousseau was right because our nomadic forager ancestors lived in the "original affluent society."  But others--like Steve Pinker--have said that Hobbes was right because our ancestors lived lives ruined by violence and scarcity.

Barrett and Armelagos say that the truth lies somewhere in between these two extremes.  But while they sometimes reject Sahlins' conception of the "original affluent society," they often endorse it and adopt a Rousseauian position (Barrett and Armelagos 2013, 1, 17, 22, 27-28, 111, 115).  They say nothing about John Locke's understanding of the state of nature, and so they do not consider my argument that Locke's account of the state of nature was mostly true, as confirmed by the anthropological evidence that we have today, and free from the mistakes of both Hobbes and Rousseau.  I have argued that here, here, here, and here.

The Rousseauianism of Barrett and Armelagos has a biblical dimension.  As the epigram for their chapter on the Agricultural Revolution (29), they quote from Genesis 3:17-19: "I have placed a curse on the ground.  All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it.  It will grow thorns and thistles for you, though you will eat of its grains.  All your life you will sweat to produce food, until your dying day."  Of course, this is God's curse on Adam and Eve after their sin and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.  The implication is that the prehistoric foraging life was the Garden of Eden for humanity--the Paradise that has been lost.

Barrett and Armelagos are certainly Rousseauian in their claim that foragers were generally healthier and less susceptible to infectious diseases than the later human beings living in agricultural and urban industrial societies.  They give three reasons for this.  First, hunting and gathering produced a wide diversity of foods, and this nutritious diet built up their immune systems that protected them from pathogens.  Second, because they lived in widely dispersed small groups that never settled in one spot for long, acute infections that require large and dense host populations were not sustainable.  Third, since foragers shared their food and other resources equally, there was no lower class of impoverished malnourished people who would be susceptible to infectious diseases.

I will not contest the last two points.  But I am skeptical about the first point.  They stress the importance of this point about nutrition among foragers: "Closely tied to human immunity, nutrition has always been our chief line of defense against infectious diseases.  Conversely, malnutrition is the chief determinant of immunosuppression worldwide" (20).

As one kind of evidence that foragers had a dietary diversity that supported their nutritional health, Barrett and Armelagos cite Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado's Ache Life History (1996) on the Ache foraging people of Paraguay.  During their forest living life, before they had contact with outsiders, the Ache hunted 56 animal species and gathered 44 plant species, which Barrett and Armelagos see as showing a remarkable diversity in their diet.  Barrett and Armelagos are silent, however, about Hill and Hurtado's observations about food shortages and infectious diseases among the Ache.  They observe that the Ache and other foraging groups often complain about their hunger.  They also suffer from poor health: illness and disease accounts for about a fourth of all deaths.  They suffer from a variety of viral infections.  They show the symptoms of diseases such as malaria, degue, amebic dysentery, and staphylococcal infections.  Hill and Hurtado conclude from this that Sahlins' "original affluent society" is a "farcical myth in modern anthropology" (320).

Barrett and Armelagos are enthusiastic proponents of the "Paleolithic Diet" argument of Stanley Boyd Eaton and Melvin Konner (Eaton and Konner 1985; Eaton et al. 1988).  The argument is that modern human beings are biologically adapted for the diet of their paleolithic ancestors, and that the mismatch between the modern diet and the paleolithic diet is responsible for the modern lifestyle diseases.  This has led a lot of people to try to revive their inner cave man by eating a "paleo diet" of plants and meats that might have been consumed by ancient foragers.

Barrett and Armelagos are silent, however, about the many devastating criticisms of this argument (Jabr 2013; Thompson et al. 2013; Turner and Thompson 2013; Zuk 2014).  First, modern humans have evolved over the past 7,000 years, so that their dietary adaptations are different from their foraging ancestors.  As one example of this, the cultural history of dairying societies created an environment in which  many people evolved a genetic mutation that allowed them to digest lactose--the sugar in milk--in adulthood.  In people without this mutation, the gene encoding lactase--the enzyme that breaks down lactose sugars in milk--shuts down after infancy when children are weaned from mother's milk.  Consuming milk as an adult is a Neolithic adaptation shaped by human niche construction.

A second criticism of the "paleo diet" is that today we don't have access to the foods that ancient foragers ate, because the plants and animals that we consume today are radically different from their ancient ancestral species--by artificial selection the domesticated plants and animals of today did not exist in the Paleolithic.  For example, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, and kale are all different cultivars of a single species--Brassica oleracea--that has been altered by human selection.

A third criticism is that anthropological studies of foraging societies over the past two centuries show a great diversity and flexibility in their diets that depends upon their socioecological circumstances.  So, for example, the diet of Inuit (Eskimo) foragers who live on fish and sea mammals will differ from the diet of foragers in the tropical rain forests of South America.

A fourth criticism is that there is some paleoarchaeological evidence that ancient foragers suffered from some of the diseases that are often assumed to be products of our distinctively modern diet and lifestyle.  For example, there is some evidence for atherosclerosis--arteries clogged with cholersterol and fats--in some ancient mummies buried by hunter-gatherers (Thompson et al. 2013; Wann et al. 2019).

Barrett and Armelagos do not mention, much less answer, these criticisms.

THE AGRICULTURAL ERA AND THE FIRST EPIDEMIOLOGICAL TRANSITION

About 7,000 years ago, some people in the Tigris-Euphrates valley began to settle into permanent settlements and to draw their food not just from foraging (hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants) but also from farming with domesticated plants and herding domesticated animals.  About 5,000 years ago, they began to form the first city-states (such as Uruk) that had formal governments with hierarchies of state authorities.  

This has generally been celebrated by historians and anthropologists as the Agricultural Revolution or the Neolithic Revolution--as the most progressive turn in human history because it allowed for urban civilization.  But Rousseauian anthropologists have lamented this as the biggest mistake in human history because human beings lost the freedom, equality, and healthy lifestyle of the foraging life, and it brought the tyrannical rule of kings, priests, and bureaucrats, constant warfare, oppressive taxation, slavery, and the emergence of acute infectious diseases.  I have written about James Scott's version of this argument.  I have also written about Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus as developing a similar Rousseauian argument.

Barrett and Armelagos reinforce that argument by claiming that the Agricultural Revolution brought a "domestication of pathogens" that caused an unprecedented increase in acute infectious diseases to the point that they became the primary cause of human death.  They identify this as the First Epidemiological Transition.

The domestication of pathogens means that human villages and cities based on farming created selective conditions for the evolution and spread of infectious diseases.  The human patterns of subsistence, settlement, and social organization created the circumstances favoring microorganisms that could leap from nonhuman animals to human hosts, and then sustain human-to-human transition in human communities that were large, dense, and susceptible to infection.  The evidence for this can be found in the skeletons of Neolithic people showing the signs of malnutrition and infectious disease--particularly, among low-status people.  Because they lived in permanent and crowded farming communities in which people were in close proximity to their domesticated animals, this created opportunities for microscopic parasites to jump from animals to human beings and then spread widely through the communities.

Prior to 1492, however, infectious disease pandemics could not become fully global, because there was little communication between the Americas (the New World) and the rest of the Earth.  But then Columbus' voyage brought a globalization of human disease ecology--for the first time in history, infectious diseases could move around the entire world.  When the Europeans introduced new infectious pathogens into the New World, tens of millions of indigenous American people died because they had no immunity to the new parasites.  It worked in the other direction as well--for example, syphilis from the New World spread quickly throughout Eurasia.

This globalization of infectious disease was the most harmful expression of the First Epidemiological Transition.  This is what made the global COVID-19 pandemic possible.  And that's why Yarvin recommends "suspending 1492."

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND THE SECOND EPIDEMIOLOGICAL TRANSITION

Up to the end of the 19th century, infectious diseases were the primary cause of death, and most of these deaths were in childhood.  Between 1800 and 1840, 64 per cent of children in London died before reaching age 25.  The common experience of parents burying their children forced people to ask deep questions about the meaning of love and death in a world where most children did not live to adulthood.  In a previous post, I have written about Charles Darwin's struggle to understand the death of his daughter Annie at the age of 10.  She died of tuberculosis, which was then called "consumption," and there was no cure for it; nor was there any understanding of how it was caused by bacteria.

But then by the early part of the 20th century, childhood mortality had dropped dramatically, and the average human life expectancy rose.  As a result, the world human population grew from about 800 million to 1.6 billion in 1910--and finally to almost 8 billion today.  During this time, chronic degenerative diseases (like heart disease and cancer) replaced infectious diseases as the primary causes of death.  

This is what Barrett and Armelagos identify as the Second Epidemiological Transition.  There is a debate over its causes.  But they think the primary causes were better nutrition and the "sanitary reform movement" that cleaned up the water supply and the food.

Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, a long line of antibiotics--such as penicillin and the sulfa drugs--began to save hundreds of millions of lives.  But then the overuse of antibiotics created a selective environment for the evolution of pathogens with antibiotic resistance, which is one of the causes of the Third Epidemiological Transition.

THE CONTEMPORARY GLOBALIST ERA AND THE THIRD EPIDEMIOLOGICAL TRANSITION

Within three years after the first use of penicillin as the "wonder drug" against bacterial infections, resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus appeared in British and North American hospitals.  This began an evolutionary arms race in which the pathogens seem to be winning, because they evolve antibiotic resistance faster than we can develop new antibiotics.

Another contributor to this new epidemiological transition is that the unhealthy diets and lifestyles of people in the modern world make them prone to obesity, diabetes, cancer, and heart disease, and when this is combined with an aging population, ever more people are vulnerable to infectious disease.

The circumstances of the contemporary globalist era also create opportunities for the evolutionary emergence of new infectious pathogens.  These new pathogens usually originate in nonhuman animals--they are "zoonotic."  Some people have to hunt wild animals for food and money, and so they are prone to come into contact with infected animals; and on rare occasions, the pathogen can jump to the human host. These newly infected people live in densely populated cities where the pathogen can spread by human-to-human transmission.  Some of the infected human beings be international travelers who can carry the pathogen all over the world within a few days.  Finally, there is a large population of elderly people with pre-existing chronic diseases who are more likely to contract and spread the disease and also more likely to die from it.

All of these circumstances apply to the COVID-19 pandemic.

To be continued . . .

REFERENCES

Barrett, Ron, and George Armelagos. 2013. An Unnatural History of Emerging Infections. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Eaton, S. B., and M. Konner. 1985. "Paleolithic Nutrition: A Consideration of Its Nature and Current Implications." New England Journal of Medicine 312:283-89.

Eaton, S. B., M. Shostak, and M. Konner. 1988. The Paleolithic Prescription: A Program of Diet and Exercise and a Design for Living. New York: Harper & Row.

Hill, Kim, and A. Magdalena Hurtado. 1996.  Ache Life History: The Ecology and Demography of a Foraging People. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Jabr, Ferris. 2013. "How to Really Eat Like a Hunter-Gatherer: Why the Paleo Diet is Half-Baked." Scientific American, June 3.

Roossinck, Marilyn. 2011. "The Good Viruses: Viral Mutualistic Symbioses." Nature Reviews Microbiology 9 (February): 99-108.

__________.  2015. "Move Over, Bacteria! Viruses Make Their Mark as Mutualistic Microbial Symbionts." Journal of Virology 89 (13): 6532-6535.

____________.  2016.  Virus: An Illustrated Guide to 101 Incredible Microbes.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Thompson, Randall, et al. 2013.  "Atherosclerosis across 4000 Years of Human History: The Horus Study of Four Ancient Populations." The Lancet 381 (issue 9873): 1211-1222.

Turner, Bethany L., and Amanda Thompson. 2013. "Beyond the Paleolithic Prescription: Incorporating Diversity and Flexibility in the Study of Human Diet Evolution." Nutrition Reviews 71 (8): 501-510.

Yarvin, Curtis. 2020. "RIP Globalism, Dead of Coronavirus." The American Mind. February 1.

Wann, L. Samuel, et al. 2019. "Atherosclerosis in 16th-Century Greenlandic Inuit Mummies." JAMA Netw Open 2(12):e1918270.

Zuk, Marlene. 2013. Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live. New York: Norton.