Homer

The Yale historian Timothy Snyder, both in his 2010 Bloodlands and in a couple of recent interviews, has more or less finalized the argument given by Adolf Hitler in 1925 to his fellow Germans, reeling from an ambiguous defeat in the Great War and an unprecedented hyperinflation, the loss of the Ruhr and the worldwide Depression that crippled the Weimar Republic.

Hitler’s argument, according to Snyder, was a specious reconstruction of social Darwinism, originated in England by Spencer, Malthus and Galton, that the human condition has always been borne and justified by interracial and class conflict, and also by war and genocide. The strong both survive this conflict and remain good; the weak, construed as and termed “jewish,” have no claims to political legitimacy. The Peace of Versailles was thus construed as a “jewish” treachery of inconceivable provenance.

Interracial conflict does indeed frequent the pages of history and great literature, and social Darwinism does appear somewhat justified by it. The Old Testament, Homer’s Iliad, the waste of Carthage, Genghis Khan and Imperial Japan (I pick out but a few from history) attest to the legitimacy of the racially strong, and German society in the 1930s accepted Hitler’s argument and took up arms in the usual, devastating way. It also rendered a large ethnic population in Ukraine and Poland stateless, making an organized mass murder by the German SS, a political arm of Hitler’s Nazi party, possible.

Nevertheless, whether and how the longstanding tradition of Divine Right, of nationalism and xenophobia should come now, in the light of Adolf Hitler, to be viewed as a species of pure evil seems a bit fast. The Ilaid, after all, is one of the great literary epics of war, the father of all things, the Odyssey is the allegory of high kingship, and both are enduring portraits of something both good and great in human nature. The grandeur of Divine Right and exclusion had victims, but it also produced social and technological progress.

Quite problematically, the liberal West is now attempting, ineptly in our view, on the basis of a feminist, Wokeish identity of the downtrodden, to engineer the general uniformity of a new, post-xenophobe society without knowing how to do it. Today’s DEI ideology is badly premised and can’t possibly be taken to underwrite the government of the future, which will be a world government.

Strength through diversity is a biological maxim. Biological diversity, far from being guaranteed by open-sourced and liberal social debate, is built on desperate competition for resources, instinctive abhorrence of otherness and the subsequent discovery of utilitarian forms. Diversity is a product of brutally proven strength.

Similarly, equity of outcome is a wrong-footed ideology. If it is taken seriously it legitimizes voices which except as background tenor, shouldn’t pretend to rule. Political absurdities too numerous and too complex to deal with here become realities.

Inclusion is the final travesty of the DEI framework. By pretending to include, DEI Cancel Culture results in a totalitarian framework which, if not along the brutalist lines of Communist and Fascist attempts at politics, produces something merely neutral and neutered. The fatal flaw of this sort of thing, aside from its aesthetic horror, is its immobility. Politics should never be turned over to the neutralizers.

For Inflection AI’s Pi on this and the preceding three Posts, click here.