What winning as a family looks like…
After the Second World War, a kind of insanity took over that is only now beginning to fade. The title of the Times article I started with is a question: Should we optimize human life? Of course we should. That’s what education, health care, culture, and technology are all about. You could argue that if we have the means to improve our species, we have a duty to improve it.
What has held us back for decades is the fear that if we start taking human genetics seriously again, we can no longer pretend there aren’t genetic differences between races. We’ve even gone through a period when we’re supposed to pretend that race has nothing to do with genes or biology — that it’s a “social construct.”
When’s the last time professors and journalists tried to make us believe anything so colossally stupid?
And even now, we’re supposed to worry that only rich white people can afford embryo selection, so our intolerable racial gaps will get even more intolerable. The Times article calls this prospect “dystopian.”
Even so, after decades of deliberate ignorance, I see signs of light.
ChristianityJudeo-Christianity and Eugenics:
Eugenics (from Greek εὖ (eû, “well”) + γένος (génos, “born”)) is the improvement of the human population via artificial selective pressure; through methods such as: selective breeding, sterilisation, genetic screening and segregation. While we speak of artificial means, eugenics is a naturally occurring process (albeit significantly slower) that has refined and improved the human population since our creation.
The philosophy of artificial eugenics was first developed by Francis Galton (Charles Darwin's cousin) and inspired by his cousin's theory of evolution. Eugenics works on the basic principle of increasing reproduction of ‘desirables’ and decreasing reproduction of ‘undesirables.’
While there are moral and biblically sound methods of eugenic artificial selective pressure, such as those prior listed, there are extremely immoral methods that contradict scripture, such as murder, through euthanasia, culling and abortion.
Murder, especially that of children (abortion), is wicked, depraved and under no circumstances is a biblically acceptable method of eugenics [Genesis 9:6, Job 24:14]; however preventative methods that stop the initial creation of undesirable offspring without any harm, is acceptable.
Eugenics was widely and openly practiced in the Western World in the early 20th century with major support from Christians who biblically justified it on the following principles:
—Honouring God’s Image— (Eugenics forbidden to alter our morphology and anatomy. [Genesis 1:27])
—Prevention of Suffering— (Responsibility to prevent suffering brought on by poor genetic health and disorders, which are all the product of mutations after our creation. [Acts 10:38; Luke 9:2])
—Stewardship of Creation— (Safeguarding God’s creation [Genesis 1] includes maintaining the ecological balance of the natural world, which includes population improvement, which is already employed for flora and fauna for increased usefulness and condition hardening.)
—Healthfulness— (Responsibility to maintain the health of our bodies, including genetic health.)
—God's Laws of Nature— (In nature the fitter better perpetuate their genes among their population which makes the population fitter.)
—Be Fruitful and Multiply— (The reckless breeding of the unfit is not fruitful, God created Adam as a thoroughbred which shined over the world like a light among the darkness as the pinnacle of His creation. [Genesis 1:28; 9:1,7])
Why should eugenics be employed for mankind?
Increased intelligence, ancestral purification, improved athletic ability, removal of genetic disorders, improved natural health, increased quality of life, increased life expectancy, decreased artificial health needs, decreased dietary and water requirements, improved immune system, increased resiliency to diseases, increased resiliency to climate and extreme temperatures, as well many other benefits.
To aid the bad in multiplying is, in effect, the same as maliciously providing for our descendants a multitude of enemies. Institutions which 'foster good-for-nothings' commit an unquestionable injury because they put a stop to that natural process of elimination by which society continually purifies itself.
While the law [of competition] may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of the few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race
Like a tug-of-war between two teams, highly competitive individuals strongly yearn for success and they make every effort to beat their rivals. Given this motivation, how do such competitors allocate resources? In particular, do competitive individuals care for opponents' interests, or do they only strive to maximize their own gains? Additionally, are competitive individuals more likely to endorse manipulation as a means to surpass others? These questions motivated this study. We aim to expand the understanding of competitiveness. Specifically, we examine how competitive individuals perform in hypothetical resource allocation games and the relationships between competitiveness and Machiavellianism.
As an individual difference, competitiveness was first studied in sports (Triplett, 1898) and its construct has been gradually expanded. Hyper-competitiveness (i.e. competing to win; CW) constitutes a neurotic need to win at any cost to maintain a sense of self-worth and power (Horney, 1937). Hyper-competitive individuals exhibit a strong desire to compete; and winning strengthens their self-esteem and feeling of superiority over others. They regard rivals as enemies and might use unfair strategies to win (Orosz et al., 2018). Studies have investigated how competitiveness relates to the Big Five personality traits. For instance, CW is positively related to neuroticism but negatively related to agreeableness (Fletcher & Nusbaum, 2008; Ross et al., 2003). Additionally, CW is positively associated with dominance (Ryckman et al., 1996) and aggressive driving behavior (Houston et al., 2003). Thus, CW is regarded as unhealthy competitiveness (Ryckman et al., 2009).
In contrast to the more extreme CW, a broader type of competitiveness – general competitiveness (i.e. competing to surpass; CS) was introduced later. CS indicates a desire to win in interpersonal situations but does not stress a neurotic need (Spence & Helmreich, 1978) like CW does. CS is a potentially adaptive characteristic in varied occupations. Some studies have investigated the relationships between CS and other personality traits. For example, it is found that CS is positively related to neuroticism (e.g., anxiety and anger facets) and extraversion (e.g., assertiveness and excitement-seeking facets) but negatively related to agreeableness (Fletcher & Nusbaum, 2008).
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Research consistently indicates that CW and Machiavellianism are positively related in Western culture (e.g., Houston, Queen, et al., 2015; Mudrack et al., 2012).
Liberty and the States System
England was the first modern liberal nation but it was not exceptional. This brings me to one more challenge I would like to make against the inter-state idea. The original idea, as it was articulated by Enlightenment thinkers, that Europe’s difference consisted in the fragmented character of its polity, included as well the observation that there was a division of power within the nation-states themselves. This view can be found in the writings of John Hall (1992), Daniel Chirot (1985, 1986), and Luciano Pellicani (1994). The very same states that dedicated so much energy to warfare, Hall writes, had “evolved slowly and doggedly in the midst of a pre-existing civil society” (1992: 187).
One other uniqueness of the West is the role that Parliaments played in its history: indeed so unique has this role been that German historians have considered the Standestaat, the representation of the three functional estates, Church, Noble and Burgher, to be a particular stage in world history (187).
The Standestaat was a type of political structure called the “state of estates”, which amounted to a partition of powers in which feudal lords, the church, and towns, recognized the monarch as the legitimate head of the state at the same time that each retained a specific set of rights and duties (Chirot 1986: 17–19). In China, India, and Islam, in general, there were no countervailing powers because there was no substantial distinction between the state and civil society; there was no aristocracy with special rights, no separation of religious and secular powers, no independent cities, and no parliaments where relations between the various estates of society were open for adjudication. It was in reference to the absence of a civil society that the category “oriental despotism” was used by Montesquieu, Marx, Weber, and Karl Wittfogel (Pellicani: 81–107). I shall return to this characteristic in the next chapter; suffice it to say now that, as centralized administrations evolved through the modern era, and the old feudal elites saw their privileges curtailed, consensual-liberal rights and limits were nevertheless elicited gradually from the emerging nation-states by aristocrats, town dwellers, lawyers, and commercial elites, albeit not peacefully but through a dynamic succession of conflicts that culminated in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the French Revolution of 1789.36
There is a certain naiveté in the presumption that Europe’s liberal institutions were not really liberal because they were associated with the pursuit of global power. It is true that in some liberal-arts courses, or older survey courses in “Western Civilization,” the history of the West was occasionally taught as if it were an intellectual history of “great books” and “great ideas.” David Gress, in his vigorous book, From Plato to NATO: the Idea of the West and Its Opponents (1998) has dubbed this idea the “Grand Narrative” (1998). According to him, this moralistic narrative “established a false dichotomy between some high principles, which existed outside history, and a flawed reality, characterized by inequality, prejudice and war”. By presenting Western history in terms of the realization of the ideals of liberty and democracy, this narrative “placed a burden of justification on the West…to explain how the reality differed from the ideal”. This dichotomy, Gress argues, offered ample opportunity for cynics to speak of the fraud, hypocrisy, and inconsistency between Western ideals and Western realities. Gress thinks that these critical views of the West can be met so long as we get away from an idealized image of Western uniqueness. He argues that liberal-democratic ideals were not new but “old practices.” These practices took hold of society only when “rulers competing for power” came to realize that the promotion of autonomous cities, mercantile interests, taxation with representation “made their societies stronger and more prosperous [and hence fitter] in the geopolitical conditions” of early modern Europe.3
I will follow a different line of reasoning in the next chapters. While liberty did not grow separately from mercantile interests and state power, the ideals of natural rights, security, and happiness were actually conceived as limits to the abuses of power. These ideals, moreover, were not ready-made human dispositions put into use when they were seen to serve the interests of warmaking states; they were cultivated and realized in time. Western freedom and reason can only be comprehended in time. I will also argue that Europeans were exceptionally warlike in a deeply-rooted, energizing and libertarian way rather than unexpectedly under the circumstances of a competitive interstate system.
we have a confrontation between two independent individuals, each of whom is driven to fight the other because each desires to wrest superior recognition from another self. The desire of the combatants is not for reciprocal appreciation. The concluding outcome is a relation of mutual recognition, but in the beginning we are dealing with two self-assertive individuals for whom the other is an object that needs to be subordinated.
The Master-Slave Dialectic and its Historical Reference
This brings me to the second context in which Hegel uses the word “desire”: in Section B, “Self-Consciousness” of the Phenomenology (1977), Chapter 4 entitled “The Truth of Self-Certainty,” which contains the famous account of “Lordship and Bondage”. Today, the most common interpretation of the lordship and bondage section (or the master-slave struggle) is that it is a parable about the nature of “selfhood” in which Hegel sets out to demonstrate that self-consciousness becomes determinate only though communication with another self consciousness. This section is thus seen as the point in Hegel’s text where the “social” dimension of human experience makes its appearance. Hegel sets out to show that the self who claims to be certain of his sensory experiences (including the Cartesian self who says “I think, therefore I am”, or the Kantian ego who speaks of the “possibility of the ‘I think’ accompanying all of my representation”) is impossible unless one also recognizes the existence of other selves. It is believed that Hegel uses the parable of the master’s rule over the slave to show that the self-sufficiency of the master is an illusion since the master cannot obtain true recognition from a slave lacking independent judgments (Solomon: 425–31). True recognition depends on a relation of mutual equality in which there are neither masters nor slaves (Rockmore 1997: 64–72). Thus, the isolated self (I=I) cannot claim to have knowledge of something unless this self acknowledges the existence of another self as an autonomous subject, “as something that has an independent existence of its own, which, therefore, it cannot utilize for its own purposes” (Hegel as cited in Stern: 74). Knowledge presupposes “two selves mutually recognizing each other as independent” and “collectively coming to take certain types of claims as counting for them as authoritative” (Pinkard 1996: 53–55).
The master-slave dialectic, it is true, is intended to illustrate that one “cannot achieve self certainty except as a member of a community of free persons who mutually recognize one another’s rights” (Wood 1990: 93). This dialectic ends with the image of a master who cannot get satisfaction from the recognition he gets from his servant. But this relates to the eventual outcome. We should not underestimate the dynamic which precedes the creation of master-slave relationship. The opening paragraphs of Chapter 4, “The Truth of Self-Certainty”, which include paragraphs 166 to 176, deal with “Desire in general,” and the dialectic of this desire. The subsequent paragraphs, 177 to 196, deal with the master-slave dialectic, and the first paragraphs of this dialectic describe two combatants engaging in a life-and-death struggle for the sake of “pure prestige.” Thus, in its very origins, before there is any master and slave, we have a confrontation between two independent individuals, each of whom is driven to fight the other because each desires to wrest superior recognition from another self. The desire of the combatants is not for reciprocal appreciation. The concluding outcome is a relation of mutual recognition, but in the beginning we are dealing with two self-assertive individuals for whom the other is an object that needs to be subordinated.
I would argue, furthermore, that this initial struggle can be read as Hegel’s version of the “state of nature” parable first presented by Hobbes and Locke. My reading here is indebted to Alexandre Kojeve’s much discussed, but not well understood, lectures on Hegel, which he gave in Paris during the years 1933–1939. I will be using these as they have been assembled by Raymond Queneau and edited by Allan Bloom under the title: Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit ([1947] 1999). Kojeve does not state explicitly that this fi ght is a description of the state of nature, but he does write as if it had an empirical or anthropological basis in the past before the formation of states. I will go beyond Kojeve, however, in suggesting that the life and death struggle that brings about the master-slave relation should be read as a description of the Western state of nature.
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