Richard and Jonathan discuss the Eugenics movement of the 19th and 20th centuries, with particular focus on its American pioneers, Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. Eugenics has become taboo today - in the wake of Boasian anthropology and political correctness - but it was hegemonic in the first half of the 20th century, informing the thought of politicians and writers across the political spectrum. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
Welcome to Vanguard, a podcast of radical traditionalism.
The Vanguard Here's your host, Richard Spencer.
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Vanguard.
And welcome back as well, Jonathan Bowden.
Yes, hello.
Nice to be here.
Very good.
Jonathan, today we're going to talk about eugenics, Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, and the whole constellation of ideas and thinkers surrounding that subject.
And before we jump into the conversation, I think it's worth mentioning this.
We certainly live in an age of partisan vitriol and left-right battles, but Some of the things that really interest me are not those places where the mainstream left and right disagree with one another, but where they are in total agreement, where they walk lockstep.
And one of those things is the denunciation of eugenics as the most evil movement, or at least one of them, of the past.
200 years.
And it's certainly also quite often associated with that other most evil movement of fascism or national socialism.
And that it's both, I think all of them are in agreement that it is both a pseudoscience, but then it's also in some ways all too effective and something we need to resist.
So it didn't work, but then it was all too effective at the same time.
Usually it's...
In some of these irrational critiques they have of it.
And, you know, this is a fascinating opinion because this is something that has changed dramatically.
Over the past century.
It's hard to find another opinion where you have a 180 degree shift in such a fairly short amount of time.
It's almost as if the Western world converted to Islam and began denouncing Christianity and secularism overnight.
Perhaps not that dramatic, but you see my point.
Certainly, something like the National Socialist Regime in Germany did have eugenics programs.
They were not actually as pronounced as some might believe.
They actually modeled a lot of those programs on the eugenics programs found in Sweden and in the state of California.
California is probably the ultimate model.
You had eugenics being endorsed by university presidents.
That is, it was very much part of the elite.
They thought this was a good thing.
It was also part of the progressive elite.
Eugenics was not a reactionary opinion.
It was something that was opposed by the, say, old-time religion folks, or whom you might call reactionaries.
It was something that might even be on the left in certain contexts.
Certainly with someone like Lothrop Stoddard, whom we're going to speak about a little bit later, it was...
A position held by someone who openly thought of himself as a progressive and as a modernist.
And it also had some popular appeal.
Actually, in a talk I gave not too long ago at the HL Mencken Club, I showed some pictures.
They were actually taken by a very good book, a biography of Lothrop Stoddard, which is written by a...
A left liberal who doesn't like Stotter very much but recognizes his importance.
But these pictures were of eugenics buildings at the State Fair.
And I believe a famous one is from the Kansas State Fair.
And they would have competition for the fittest family.
And what they wanted to see was a good genotype.
That is a healthy family with all boys and girls looking strong and smart and good-looking parents and things like this.
So eugenics...
I think we should talk more about all these things in detail,
but maybe you could pick up on that Basic history of eugenics that I've just outlined.
That something that was hegemonic has become unspeakable just over the course of 100 years.
Something that was endorsed by presidents and now is associated with crazed lunatics.
Maybe just talk a little bit about that and talk maybe a little bit about why that happened.
Do you think it was just the legacy of the Second World War or was there something more?
So why don't you just pick up on that, let's say our consciousness of eugenics in the 20th century.
Yes, I think what we have here is the acceptance of and then the rejection of one and the other.
The notion that biology impinges upon social matters to a very considerable degree from about sort of 1860, 1870 through to the 1940s.
You had a very pronounced view in all sorts of countries, particularly countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, and elsewhere, countries that you don't often associate with these sorts of ideas.
But eugenics ideas were very pronounced in the politics in these societies and amongst academic and clinical elites.
It was essentially, in some ways, a progressive biologism.
It was the belief that you could actually act upon man and upon the circumstances of lived anthropology, as contemporaneously understood, and you could improve the human lot, just as you could act on the social and economic sphere from a centre-left perspective to improve mankind's lot.
You could actually, and from an interventionist conservative perspective as well, you could also improve man's lot biologically.
How this was to be done was the subject for, you know, sort of maximal debate.
But the idea that if you bred the strongest children and the tallest children and the fairest children and the most intellectually precocious children who also had pronounced athletic abilities, that you would actually begin to create more wholesome human beings, better families and better communities and better societies.
That sort of viewpoint would have been regarded as axiomatic in the mid-1930s.
And it would have been shared by left-wing liberals, some socialists, many sort of active and latte-faire libertarians and old liberals, many new liberals, many conservatives of all sorts.
The only people who would really oppose it.
Well, people who were very much linked to certain forms of biblical Christianity because, of course, these ideas are inevitably linked to notions of biological health and reproduction, what would later be cast by feminism, later in the century, second wave feminism, as reproductive rights, but then was looked at as reproduction for health and for eugenic health at that.
And this meant that contraception and abortion...
Abortion as a form of contraception, particularly in relation to life, which was considered in some respects unworthy or inferior in one category or another, would definitely come into play.
And Christian moral concerns about that aspect of eugenics was very pronounced.
However, probably a large number of evangelicals shared semi-eugenic ideas because racial and national ideas were so much more conservative.
during this epoch and was so much more hegemonic that it meant that the amount of opposition that eugenics got was relatively small in comparison to the almost universal odium in which it's held at the present time.
Let me jump in on that, actually.
One of the groups that...
Lowe's eugenics at the moment is the evangelical Christians, but it's worth mentioning that there were eugenic laws in the state of North Carolina, for instance, up until the 1970s.
And the state sterilized a tremendous amount of people, most of them black, which it considered unfit for bearing children.
So there was a kind of old-time religious repulsion from eugenics as modernists, and that kind of makes sense.
But just to back up your point, it was something that was accepted by the large majority of Protestants in the South.
Yes, the sterilization of the unfit, which was carried out quite across the Western world until a particular generation of natural scientists died out.
In terms of the social application of biological ideas in the 1970s, really what you have is you have a generation that accepts these ideas in the 30s and 40s when they're young and carries them out in orphanages and halfway houses and children's homes and clinics for the elderly and the infirm and mental hospitals.
And weigh stations for the mentally subnormal and so on and so forth and carries these functions out right across the 50s, 60s and into the 70s.
And that generation then dies out and the scientists who follow them don't have the same ideas because they've been exposed to a different and a contrary mindset from 1945-46 onwards.
So you have a reversal of what went on.
And at times an unstated reversal whereby the policies just change and sterilization of people with grossly deformed and inadequate IQs, for example, to prevent them from breeding people who might be described as idiots in future sort of percussive generations.
That came to an end in most Western countries around the same time in the mid-1970s.
And I think it came to an end because generationally the scientists who'd imbibed eugenic ideas had essentially passed through the system and were retiring and being replaced by a cohort that didn't share the same notions.
I also think it's important to realise that essentially what's happened is that two concepts have been conflated into one another in order to summarily dispatch both.
And this is the idea of eugenics as against dysgenics.
And dysgenics, which is, if you like, the negative side of eugenics, whereby you act so as to prevent harm, but you also act to, in some senses, prevent life through abortion or through selective contraceptive use or through sterilization.
The proactive and yet sort of SNP-oriented.
And negative side of eugenics is its really controversial feature.
The wholesome side, the building people up, the tonics for the brave sort of side, is one which only the most niggardly and sort of nihilistic and sordid left-winger would be opposed to, because they find nauseous the idea of happy, athletic, intellectually precocious families.
Beaming for the camera in an Osmund-like way.
You know, it fills them with nausea and disgust.
But the number of people who are filled with nausea and disgust for such sort of pungent, healthy normality are relatively few and far between.
And many of them are neurotic and sort of outsider-in in their orientation.
So that sort of eugenics has been deconstructed so that the term eugenics is no longer used.
And it's just a symbol of healthiness.
Although there are radical Christians of a certain specialization dislike even that.
I remember a Christian woman of my acquaintance a long time ago, a theorist in Christianity, Catholic variants of same, expected to me at great length about how she was appalled by pictures of athletes in hospital wards for the sick.
She said it's monstrously eugenic having these pictures of these healthy goddess and god type individuals, reminding everyone who's palsied and lame and sick and broken down what they're not.
And it's essentially a form of conceptually beating them over the head with a trunction as they're trying to get a little bit better in their own terms.
And these were just pictures of health.
So it shows you how far the sort of negative reaction to even the idea of healthiness as a presumed good has worked in this society.
Illness is dealt with as a sort of something to be alleviated, but the corollary that you actually obtain health when you're not ill is something which has been rather left out of the equation.
Doctors who too radically value health fall under a certain cloud.
And under a certain moral suspicion these days, that their viewpoint tends in a sort of semi-eugenic direction.
So certainly there's been an incredible reversal.
But when most people say eugenics, the thing that they're really talking about is the negative side of eugenics, the sort of parsimonious, sort of quote-unquote getting rid of the inferior dimension to it, is what people really get riled against.
The more positive agenda would probably have a sullen acquiescence on behalf of most people who are not sold on the idea that healthiness is not necessarily just next to godliness but two steps away from fascism.
Many of the elite are pursuing eugenics.
I mean, they call it genetic therapy or genetic counseling is another word.
And there are, you know, I don't want to dwell on these things, but they are in some ways pursuing negative eugenics in the sense that they are certainly much more willing to abort a child with Down syndrome or so on.
And that, of course, can be discovered in the womb.
And so, in some ways, one could also suggest that eugenics is still living on.
It's just you simply can't use that name, because when you use that, a swastika flag begins waving in someone's mind.
I mean, it just seems like that is what it is.
But the actual practice seems to go on.
I mean, it's worth pointing out, I guess...
I want to talk a little bit, I want to return actually to your mentioning of the academic side of this.
But before pointing out, I think I mentioned this at the beginning of the program, but Nazi Germany did have certain eugenics programs.
They were not as unusual as...
Many people would have you believe, and they weren't actually as pronounced as someone would have you believe.
In some ways, they were rather humdrum eugenics programs when compared to what was going on internationally.
And Hitler's attacks on, say, the Jewish people and what's come to be known as the Holocaust, that was obviously not a eugenic program.
I mean, Hitler obviously was...
He had very strong negative feelings against the Jews, and he thought that they were a very dangerous enemy.
But he did not think that they were stupid morons or something.
It was just, you know, again, when you conflate eugenics and the...
And the Holocaust or all of the use of concentration camps and so on and so forth in the Second World War, you're really mixing apples and oranges.
They're just not the same thing.
But again, that is the perception, and that is the central reason why...
Eugenics is a kind of non-starter in our contemporary world, or it kind of has a subrosa existence or something like that.
Let me just ask you a real quick question, because you were talking about the academic side of this issue and the fact that so many of these researchers...
Who were quite predisposed to Galton, Darwinism, eugenics, that that switched.
Is that part of the so-called Boasian revolution in anthropology?
What I mean by that is, of course, that Franz Boas, he was a sworn enemy of Madison Grand.
In many ways, this is actually one of the things that...
Some of us have forgotten, is that when Franz was talking, when Boaz, excuse me, was talking about things like, you know, immigrants' head, there's no correlation or connection between head shape or head size and brain size and intelligence.
He would even say things that are obviously false in which he actually...
Literally fabricated his data, claiming that an immigrant's head would change shape when it came to America.
You know, it's almost this assimilation.
The melting pot would change the physics kind of thing.
It's a totally nonsensical notion.
But all of those papers that he wrote were all directed against Grant and eugenics.
That was the target.
And sometimes that's forgotten because Boaz's revolution in anthropology and genetics has been so profound and broad that you forget that he was actually reacting against another force, and that was Grant and eugenics, who again were hegemonic.
But Jonathan, do you think, is that what you were getting to when you were talking about before about the academic shift amongst researchers?
They did not think in terms of Galton and, say, let's call it classical Darwinism.
And that really, it's kind of those people where they lost the battle.
And this is the reason why eugenics kind of vanished.
Yes.
I do think it happened in a certain context, though.
I think people who supported eugenics found that unless they found a different vocabulary for it, their support couldn't be sustained in polite society.
Therefore, they either found arcane in differentiated terminology, or they gave up on it completely.
And when you have an idea that time has come, a vanguard will push for a contrary system.
And if there's nothing to push back against them, they will take the high ground and they will take over the theoretical discourse of a society.
And you need a very small number of people to be singing from the same hymn sheet in order to affect that.
So you just need the anthropology societies and the anthropological journals and the anthropology academic departments of the United States.
To tack one way, or lopsidedly to tack one way decisively, for there to be a complete rerouting, and for one set of theories to be replaced by another one.
But it only happened because the soil was so fertile, because the other discourse had drained away to nothingness, and even those who were in favour of it found themselves unable to articulate it, given the moral climate post-1945.
Boaz and his friends seized the hour, basically, and introduced forms of social discourse, because that's what it was, which explained everything in terms of the social ramifications of man.
And this very much, of course, fed in indirectly to the new left of the 1960s and 70s, which is quite a break from the old left in many ways, which would accept quite a lot of prior and inheritable characteristics, even biological ones.
Marx and so on never thought that man could be changed biologically at his primary nature.
The only change that could be brought about was socioeconomic, which could be decisive, but was rudimentary in relation to man's fundamental being.
And Lenin as well never thought that man was capable of change at the biological level.
Some people would always be born stupid, others would be born brilliant.
Some could approximate to one or the other by dint of some application or its absence.
People will be born sick or rattled with disease.
People will be born healthy.
People will be born with mental diseases and disabilities.
And with the exception of socialized medical concern, there's not too much that can be done about that.
Whereas the New Left believes that everyone is a tabula rasa and that everyone can make it up as they go along.
And that although there are certain things which, of course, impinge...
Such as extreme illness and that sort of thing, from the biological realm, that's restricted very much just to the narrow issue of personal health.
Other than that, every issue is explicable in terms of social engineering and purely social engineering, but not sociobiological engineering that was rendered out of account.
So progressivism snips off that element of it that was biological in the past.
And that's why eugenics we've gotten rid of.
Yes.
And I want to return to this theme that I was talking about before in terms of Grant and this former hegemonic discourse.
And I think it's worth pointing out a little bit about Madison Grant, the man.
Because I think if you really look at his story, you see, in a nutshell...
As it were, the story of the dispossession of the WASP elite over the course of the 20th century.
And Grant was actually, he was a lawyer by training, but he never really practiced.
I guess he was very similar to Lothrop Stoddard, and to that degree he also had a law degree and also had a PhD, Stoddard did.
But he was immediately fascinated by naturalism, and he was actually involved with people like Theodore Roosevelt and the Big Game Hunter, the Boone and Crockett Club.
He was really pioneering the whole concept of wildlife management and conservation.
He was part of the co-founder of the Bronx Zoo in 1899, I guess, in his native New York.
They would actually bring bison into...
New York City, things like this.
He was involved with the American Bison Society.
You know, there were some statistics that before the society got going and the bison were being conserved, that there were, I can't remember the exact statistic, but it was something like less than 20 bison were remaining.
Essentially, the bison is obviously a majestic creature, but when it entered the world of rifles and, you know, horseback, horse riding men with guns, it was a...
a big slab of meat as a target and it was being slaughtered.
We might very well not have the bison, the American buffalo, without someone like Madison Grant.
He was part of the co-founders of Glacier National Park, which I am quite lucky to live about a 45-minute drive away from, but it might be second only to Yellowstone National Park, but maybe even some might rank it higher, but it's a truly...
Gorgeous part of the world that includes all sorts of things from mountain peaks to rivers and lakes.
It's truly a miraculous place.
He was part of the Save the Redwoods League.
Redwoods, of course, these massive trees, mostly in California.
Again, we shouldn't forget what still exists today for us to appreciate.
Um...
And what probably wouldn't exist without the work of Madison Grant and his colleagues.
This is someone who was directly involved with the 1927 Immigration Restriction Act.
He was part of the American Defense Society, the American Restriction League.
So he was very he was certainly not a politician or a political operative, but he was the intellectual force behind these major initiatives, which, you know, more or less cut off immigration to the United States and I think did more than that.
So this is a man.
He was part of the elite.
He was actually a kind of Brahmin.
He was actually from New York City, not Boston.
But when you look at these people now, you realize that there was this...
The entire elite WASP class that was part of even a deeper tradition, which might have included the Adamses and all of these people, but just a totally different version of the American right than what we have today.
And in many ways, if you think about it, what we have today, the kind of buckly-eyed influence right as a replacement or a perversion of what we had.
So anyway, if you think about the history of the life of Madison Grant, you really see this other world, a kind of alternative reality for what American conservatism could be.
But do you have any thoughts on that, Jonathan, in terms of this, you know, maybe America before the Second World War had a chance to have a different path in the world.
That if people like Madison Grant had been the intellectual leaders and they had been able to influence political leaders, and they were influencing political leaders.
You know, Calvin Coolidge was writing articles on how America shouldn't become a waste dump for the, you know, degenerate or something.
He was using extremely strong language to probably shock some white nationalists or something.
There was this other path that America could have taken if people like Madison Grant had prevailed instead of the types of people we have today.
Yes, very much so.
I think the different paths that America could have followed are all proportionate to the issue of isolationism if America could have remained isolated from not the rest of the world because that's an impossibility.
But isolated from policy involvement with the rest of the world and military intervention in the way that occurred in the First World War, after which there was an isolationist phase, of course, when President Wilson's diktat was overthrown, and there was a return to an isolationist posture.
And then the build-up to the Second War, which changed everything, which led to the ascent to globalism, as Stephen E. Ambrose calls it.
In his famous book about the emergence of an American empire, as it were, and the Korean War, and then the war with the communist blocs, and the modern world that we have today.
I think the influence that such figures would have had was entirely proportionate to the degree to which America remained a republic and not an empire, to use Buchanan's phrase.
The more imperial America became, the more it became enamoured of other models and the less it became enamoured of a nativist American model.
It's almost inevitable that nativism would go together with the desire to keep America isolate and keep America out of other conflicts and to keep America from drifting towards global policeman type roles that it's been keen to adopt.
Since the mid-1940s, since the attack on Pearl Harbor, essentially.
So I think the general point about men like Grant is that they were from an era where America should have decided its own destiny in its own terms, where the notion of American uniqueness and sort of preferentialism and providentialism Which irritates the hell out of the rest of the world, of course.
This notion of exceptionalism has been turned around to indicate an imperial or post-imperial vision.
But in Hugh Grant's day, it was a plea for American uniqueness in American terms, which meant that America was to be a society that did not involve itself with the old world, particularly.
There was a new world sufficient unto itself.
I think once America opened up to the forces that wanted it to go global and play a global role, the influence of this old, patterned, cross-grained wasp elite was bound to falter and die in the way that it has.
Yes.
Well, speaking of the ascent to globalism, I think it's worth talking about the issue of Haiti, which was quite an important topic for Lothrop Stoddard, who was one of Grant's protégés, certainly modeled his theories on Grant's and so on and so forth.
He actually wrote his doctoral dissertation on the revolution in San Domingo, and that is the race war, for lack of a better term, that occurred in that island afterwards.
I think it's worth...
Pointing out a couple of things to go back to American globalism.
But in 1915, U.S. Marines were actually sent to Haiti by Woodrow Wilson, and he said that he was going to bring democracy.
And they actually remained there for some 20, 25 years.
They built all sorts of things.
And that didn't really work.
And then actually in the latter half of Dwight Eisenhower's administration, Marines were sent back to Haiti to keep it from going communist, and the island didn't do too much.
And then in 1994, Bill Clinton actually sought to restore democracy this time, you know, I guess around 75 to 100 years later after it was brought to the island.
And so it seems like Haiti, it's...
It's almost been a platform for all of these ideas to play out.
That is American globalism, the continual failure of American globalism, and also something that Stoddard talked about, which was those revolutionary ideas that would inflame.
So maybe, Jonathan, you could just talk a little bit about Stoddard's rather fascinating book on Haiti and a lot of the ideas that he brings up, and also just the contemporary relevance of Haiti, how it's still in the news.
We're still fascinated by ideas of democratizing it or, quote, developing it, end quote, and how this fetish almost won't ever go away.
Yes, it's a sort of throwing to start relief by the recent Haitian earthquake and the enormous expenditure of dollars and time and muscle and energy in trying to rebuild Haiti after the earthquake.
I remember Alex Katarjic, I think, wrote a piece on alternative rights or certainly similar websites to the extent that Haiti should not be rebuilt.
Yeah.
Which, of course, is an argument for dysgenics in many respects.
The revolution in San Domingo by Stoddard dealt with the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution's impact on Haiti and the tripartite war that developed between the British Crown and the Spanish and the French authorities there, and the emergence of a racially conscious black army under Trois-Saint-Laudeture and its aftermath in Haiti.
Where Leveretier was outmaneuvered by Napoleon, who history records, of course, was a racialist, which rather shocks people today.
When Tresant was invited to France, he was promptly arrested and put in a tower.
And Napoleon turned to his marshals and said, "You see how I deal with them?" And Napoleon's views on many of these matters are now quite notorious and have led to a de-escalation of the Napoleonic cult that was part and parcel of French intellectual life for the better part of the last 200 years.
So this racial warfare, which is not too extreme to call it, which subsumed Haiti, And which led, after many bloody massacres and internecine strife, to the massacre of the residual white, largely French population and the emergence of a black republican dictatorship in Haiti for most of the 19th century.
Haiti is essentially an African society in the Western world and closely resembles the society America set up in extreme West Africa called Liberia.
The Liberian flag is, of course, the American flag, which is one star.
And Liberia, which America has also intervened in for the best part of a century and a half in order to try and make things right, was to be the resettlement zone for the black slaves.
The Lincoln's policy in relation to black emancipation had two strands, one of which, of course, was never realized, and that was the second one, whereby after the Civil War...
He wished, at least in theory, to deport the African population of the United States back to Liberia, which is why this colony was established on the extreme West African coast.
And that, of course, never was carried forward.
But in relation to Haiti, Stoddard sees it is a clear example of white folly in relation to dealing with, essentially, another race.
That has different standards of behaviour, different standards, different characteristics of identity, and will run a society in a completely different manner to that which Europeans would, or even semi-Europeans would.
The elite in Haiti, since the massacring of the whites in the early 20th and 19th century, has always been the latter, of course, has always been of mixed race, including the notorious Haitian dictatorship.
Of the mid-20th century, Papadoc de Valier's regime, and the militia, the Tom Tom Macoute, through whom he exercised supreme authority.
The Americans supported him, despite all of the penchant for bloodthirstiness, putting cabinet members to death during cabinet meetings, personal support for voodooism, dispensing money in the streets.
surrounded by men with weapons, traditional African ways of behaving.
The United States of America supported all of this for the fear of getting something worse in Haiti.
Indeed, America is always intervening to either prevent authoritarianism in Haiti, hence the But also reluctant to endorse certain people who are thrown up by democracy or pseudo-democratic reform in Haiti.
The controversy around President Aristide when Clinton was in power is a testament to this.
And the IQ level in Haiti is pathetically low.
The standard of living is extraordinarily low.
An enormous proportion of the population still live in shanty towns, still live in wooden huts, still live in cardboard boxes, a significant proportion of people eke out a purely subsistence form of life.
One of the reasons the earthquake had such devastating effects...
The size of the air is because all of the houses were jelly-built and didn't have the internal architectural armour that's necessary to prevent them from falling about people's ears.
Similar earthquakes occur in Japan all the time, and hardly anyone is injured at all.
And this is because the quality of the building is so much better.
But Haiti is essentially a basket-case society.
And Stoddard systematized the recognition of this.
Usually it's dealt with anecdotally.
There's a book by St. John at the end of the 20th century called Haiti, the Black Republic.
But his analysis of Haiti is anecdotal, really, and sort of spectatorish.
Stoddard is scientific and eugenic and sociobiological and anthropological, biophysical and racially historical.
So it's an attempt to systematize what might otherwise appear to be whimsy and a collection of anecdotes about an Africanized society in the Caribbean.
and the perils and misadventures of it.
So Stoddart's view is a systematisation of what otherwise could be sort of ethnic and political cliches.
But it's a pretty devastating analysis of Haiti, which can't really be refuted given its current power of stoddart.
Yes, you know, one thing that...
I found quite interesting about his book, which I actually read recently because Alex put out a new edition.
And that is the combination between, let's say, leftist ideology on one hand and then...
And, you know, one thing you got from the book is that this pot was simmering for a long time.
There was always going to be this racial clash.
It was never going to ultimately work.
It was always going to end in tears and blood.
But what really set off the revolution, the catalyst, was this new way of talking that was brought to the island immediately after the French Revolution.
That you could soon start talking about the rights of man and so on and so forth.
and that this was like pouring gasoline on the fire and it almost immediately set off a revolution and a race war on the island.
Yes, and yet the irony is that most of those French revolutionary ideas were never to be applied in that way, because most of the extreme revolutionaries in France, such as the Club de Cotelier and the Club de Jacobin, the two major revolutionary clubs, only ever thought that those ideas would be applicable to Europeans.
To Frenchmen in particular, and to white men in general, they never thought that those ideas would be applicable to other groups.
And although there were always those that wished to go further, there was no tendency in France, apart from on the fringes of the fringes, and this was amongst the revolutionary class, don't forget, to emancipate the slaves, nor was there any move to particularly.
And Napoleon certainly put the kibosh on that because he had no intention of doing so.
Just as there was no intention to extend these ideas of liberation to women, this was regarded as absurd even by the Jacobins themselves.
And the most radical people on the Jacobin side, people like Robespierre and St. Just, deprecated the idea that these ideas were always for export and always to be reinterpreted in different contexts.
There were people who saw the correlation and believed in the universalism of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
There was the group, was it the Amis des Noirs, the Friends of the Blacks, that I remember that were kind of putting, taking leftism to its ultimate conclusion.
In some ways, what we're talking about is the history of the left in general, which has moved from advocating for working people or the proletariat towards advocating for the wretched of the earth and the third world.
I mean, in some ways, that is the movement of the left in a nutshell over the past hundred years or so.
In closing, Jonathan, let me bring up another I think we should be working to reclaim it right now.
And that is environmentalism, so-called.
I actually don't even like the word environmentalism.
I think saying we're naturalist or that we...
Want to conserve nature is a much better term.
Nature evokes all sorts of things, has all sorts of connotations, which I think are much more positive than environment, which seems kind of sterile and things like this.
Obviously, Madison Grant was a scientist, but he also wanted to preserve, say, the bison because they were a majestic animal.
He thought they were beautiful.
He obviously wanted to preserve glaciers.
I think one way that what we could bring to environmentalism, which I think is the most healthy and positive aspect of environmentalism,
and which actually attracts people as opposed to the other environmentalist movements of like global government and, you know, things like this, which are not very attractive.
But what attracts people is that idea of nature, the beauty of nature and experiencing nature.
What do you think about that, of our ability, our unique ability?
to reclaim conservationism or naturalism and how, much like Grant, that that should be a major cause for us, which is to Keep the world green and beautiful and to fight things like the terrible overpopulation that you see in some kind of horrifying city like Mexico City or Sao Paulo or something.
You know, we want quality over quantity.
We want to live in a beautiful earth.
So what are some of your thoughts on that idea?
Yes, I think that's mirrored in green ideas itself, because you have this idea, green ideas are not really part of the left-right spectrum, but they're cut across it in various respects.
Green ideas are also circular, because there's a sort of light green outer circle, and a dark or deep green, as it's called, inner circle.
And the deep green ideas are very interesting, even misanthropic to a point, with doctrines like Gaia.
Right.
And so on, that sees humankind as a sort of exocrescence upon the earth, and the earth only as value.
This is part of the tendency all ideas have to maximize their own extremism and adopt at the margin a fundamentalism of their own coinage.
Nevertheless, certain more moderate deep green ideas are deeply susceptible to a right-wing coinage, and the conservation of all forms of natural beauty, Extreme forms of localism,
forms of animal husbandry that are linked to preservation of animal species and biodiversity, but are not linked to doctrines of rights and animal rights or animal liberation, but draw on a similar metaphysic that ends in a different place because it begins in one.
You see this very much with the split, say, in Britain between the sort of...
Anarchist group like the Animal Liberation Fund and a conservationist group like the Royal Society for the Protection of Quality to Animals.
The two sort of overlap in terms of some of their coteries, but ideologically they're very much at variance because the one is conservative and small c and ameliorative and piece by piece and localist.
Whereas the other wishes to extend the universal doctrine of human rights to animal species and has developed the concept of animal racism, of course, namely speciesism, all of which is an outgrowth of the politics of human rights.
But if one assumes the politics of human rights in a grandstanding and universalist way and sees human identity and glory...
in very much an individual or a localized manner, then deep green and ecological ideas have a lot to say to all forms of conservatism that wish to preserve and restore, as against that which is transitory and which is to upend and is purely and only concerned with human life, to the detriment of the ecology without which mankind couldn't subsist.
Absolutely.
You know, I mentioned this before.
A very useful biography of Madison Grant, and it's by a man named Spiro.
And although he seems to be a left liberal of some kind, he clearly wants to get it right.
And that's certainly admirable.
He offers a very useful and rich autobiography of Grant, which has really influenced my...
And one of his major themes is that if you tell someone that Grant is an early environmentalist, they'll usually bring a smile to their face.
And if you tell someone that he was also an early eugenicist, that will usually inspire shock and horror.
But as Spiro points out, there was no contradiction in Grant's mind between saving the Redwoods and saving the white race.
That those were part of the same movement.
So, as I mentioned before, I think we are uniquely suited to generating a kind of renaissance of green or naturalism or environmentalist politics.
So, Jonathan, let's just put a bookmark in the conversation right there, and I would love to return to these ideas in the near future, and I look forward to speaking to you soon.
