*Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy*

That is the new book by Costin Alamariu, who also has self-identified as the very famous BAP.  It is a published version of his Yale doctoral dissertation on political theory.  It has been selling very well.

It still comes across as a doctoral thesis, but I feel any reviewer should excuse the unusual modes of presentation.  The doctoral thesis of BAP is going to come out, one way or the other, and better something than nothing.

I am more worried that the main claims are a mix of not true and also too bold.  Take the opening sentence — “The sexual market is the pinnacle of every other market.”

In contrast, I find it odd how little of contemporary society revolves around sex and breeding, relative to what a reading of Darwin might predict.  You might feel, a’la Hanson, that so many of our social proclivities evolved from initially sexual and mating impulses, but how autonomous they have become!  People spend so much time not having sex.  Fertility rates are plummeting, and that is at best a marginal political topic.  Rich CEOs very often utterly fail to create the harems that some might be expecting.  If there is a missing figure in this book it is Adam Smith and his TMS, who can explain so much of our social world with only minimal reference to sex.

Or take this sentence, again from early on: “Who wins in the sexual market as it is formed in a particular society, who gets to breed, is closely related, nearly identical to the question of how the next generation in that society is to be constituted.”

That seems obviously false.  There is simply a massive influence through socialization, and much of that is quite separate from the roles people may or may not have as “breeders.”  For the most talented, breeding in fact might be a highly inefficient way to influence the world’s broader future.  Intermediary institutions are systematically missing from the narrative of this book, so already the stage is set for everything to be darker than it needs to be, and for nature to have a stronger role than it ought to.

In any case it is hard to stay on the track of this argument, as the book is sprawling and repeatedly starts over again with new building blocks.  Perhaps the actual underlying belief here (see p.45) is that the Western intellectual class is boring and decrepit?  (Compared to what?  Has the author spent too much time at Yale?  It never has been easier to learn real stuff.)

We are led down paths of Nietzsche, Strauss, decaying political regimes, Pindar, and the ancient Greek world.  Frazer enters with the Golden Bough.  What I like best in the author is his willingness to throw himself into these worlds with convincing abandon.  What I like least is how little space is carved out for morality, or for the view that there is still plenty of progress in the world, and that there is a broadly common intersubjective judgment that some states of affairs are better than others.  I long for the Masons, and chatter about Hiram the Master Builder — there is a reason why ancient Greek philosophy no longer fits our world.  The simple truths of a suburban real estate developer, and the spouse and kids and dog back home, are swept under the rug.

The truly dark move would be to argue that nature must be violent, that man cannot remove himself from nature, and thus to flirt with the fascist view that violence amongst humans must be acceptable as well.  And, in this take, all of our moralities are phony adjuncts to the desire to breed.  But the exposition is somehow too winding and too replete with fresh turns for those issues to surface in a meaningful way.  Maybe some would argue they emerge from the Straussian muck?  I would have no objection to seeing them addressed directly, as surely the author at current margins is not afraid of additional cancellation.

Would more adherence to the hypothesis testing methods of the economist have done Alamariu some good?

I do agree with his view that Nietzsche was more sympathetic to Christianity than is usually realized.  The expositions and interpretations of Nietzsche probably are the best part of the book.

By the end we are given a new conclusion: “The chief intention of this study has been to offer an explanation for why the ancient city perceived philosophers as dangerous and as associated with tyrants — to argue that there was something to the ancient prejudice that philosophy was associated with tyranny.”  On that I can agree, but a simple libertarianism would have gotten us there more easily.  Alamariu can’t quite bring himself to make this conclusion either an empirical claim (too little actual hard evidence), or a logical claim (too many other variables in the model), and so it continues to hover uncomfortably in between, being put on the table with lots of drama but never receiving actual validation.

There is definitely material of interest in here, but it remains a book of its time.  Unfortunately, too much of our era has an emotionally negative predisposition toward too many things, including our current elites, and for reasons that are mimetic rather than justified, whether rationally or even by our impulses to breed.

BAP once wrote: “I will add only that Nietzsche says somewhere that it is the duty of a philosopher to promote precisely those virtues or tendencies of spirit that are most lacking in one’s own time…”  For all its pretense to the contrary, that is exactly what this book does not achieve.