Review: "Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy" by Costin Alamariu

“This thesis is an attempt to show that the aristocratic regime, and aristocratic morality, is the origin of the idea of nature; that, at the point at which a historical aristocracy starts to decline, its defenders, in abstracting and radicalizing the case for aristocracy in the face of its critics, come upon the teaching of nature and the standard of nature in politics. It is precisely this teaching of nature, so corrosive of all convention and all morality, that is politically explosive, and that explains the deep connection between philosophy—the criminal study of nature outside the city and outside the myths and pieties of the regime—and tyranny–the criminal and feral regime of rule outside and above all law and all convention.”

Most PhD theses go unpublished, and indeed unread, by anyone other than the author, their advisors, and their reviewers. When they are published, which most aren’t, then sales in the order of a dozen or so are the norm. Your correspondent is no stranger to academic publishing, and can confirm that a university press would consider a PhD thesis selling a few hundred copies to be a rip-roaring success.

With this in mind, the sudden popularity of Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy may very well be unique in world history. As far as can be confirmed, it is its author’s first work of any note, and is an almost exact reproduction of his 2015 doctoral thesis. And yet it has become an overnight bestseller, outstripping all other titles in both the classics and political philosophy within a few hours of its release.

If its initial reception is anything to go by, it seems very likely that Selective Breeding will be one of the most influential texts in political science and classical scholarship in the next several years. It therefore merits serious examination. Unfortunately, the only examination of any kind it has received thus far is not particularly serious, and is also paywalled. It therefore falls to humble language bloggers to do the heavy lifting.

What are we dealing with here

Selective Breeding focuses on one of the most uncomfortable tensions in classical Greek thinking: the relationship between the philosopher and the tyrant.

In brief, Alamariu notes that the Greeks themselves appear to have seen tyranny and philosophy, and tyrants and philosophers, as linked concepts.

Historically speaking, philosophers and tyrants both emerge in the Greek political world at around the same time (the end of the Archaic and beginning of the Classical periods). Almost from their first emergence, we see a prejudice in Greek thought towards philosophers as apologists for, or instigators of, tyranny.

For instance, tyrants and philosophers are presented as natural collaborators in various anecdotes by both Herodotus and Thucydides. And one of the principle charges made against Socrates was that he had been the mentor to some of the Thirty Tyrants who suppressed democracy in Athens following the Peloponnesian war.

The stated objective of the thesis is to discover whether or not this prejudice was justified.

Selective Breeding: the argument

In brief, Alamariu’s answer is “yes, it was justified”. He arrives at this conclusion by way of an ambitious reconstruction of the emergence of (he claims) both philosophy and tyranny. We can summarise this reconstruction and it’s central argument as follows:

1. Primitive societies are dominated by systems of custom, tradition, and group-based mediation collectively referred to as nomos (in the sense of the word as first used by Schmitt and developed by Strauss). These societies can be thought of as “primitive democracies” (or as Alamariu describes them in his preface, gerontocracies – societies ruled by elders in accordance with ancestral custom).

2. Under the rule of nomos, higher-order political life is effectively impossible. Individual considerations, innovations, and departures from the norms dictated by nomos are heavily circumscribed.

3. Perhaps the only way in which it is possible for a people to escape the low-tyranny of nomos is through the conquest of one society by another, or part of another.

4. In such an event, the conquering group becomes an aristocracy: a ruling class that is both socially and, crucially, biologically distinct from the society over which it rules.

5. An aristocracy, by virtue of its dominant position, is freed from the day-to-day tedium of “labour” – work undertaken for the sake merely of sustaining biological function – and left able to pursue its own interests.

6. Since most aristocratic classes – at least in Eurasia – are descended from highly-mobile groups of steppe pastoralists invested in livestock management, herd accumulation, and accustomed to seasonal cattle raiding and hunting, these interests tend towards:

   1. Breeding, as in the selection of animal specimens for particular physical and behavioural traits.

   2. Warfare, in particular of an acquisitive or piratical nature.

   3. Athletics, as a system of leisure activity in preparation for war.

   4. Exploration of the spaces beyond the scope of civilised life, especially as an act of “proving” for young men.

7. The unfettered pursuit of these interests leads to the discovery of the idea of nature (φύσις “physis” in Greek) as the principles of selective breeding are applied to human bloodlines.

8. The discovery of nature provides legitimation of the aristocratic worldview as the original justification of conquest is forgotten or obscured. The physis of the aristocrat, provided for by selective breeding, explains his superiority in war and athletics and thus justifies his rule.

9. Nature becomes both the preoccupation of the philosopher and the preserve of the tyrant. As the latter applies his superiority to overthrowing previously extant forms of government, the former provides the justification for doing so: the tyrant’s natural superiority to his contemporaries justifies their subjugation.

To arrive at these conclusions Alamariu tracks the development of Greek society from its earliest prehistory with reference to various archaeological, anthropological, and linguistic theories. He illustrates the evolution of the concept of “nature” with reference to the works of Homer and Pindar, including a comprehensive study of the meaning and nuance of φύσις in the latter. He then attempts to reconstruct the worldview of “pre-Socratic” philosophers via a novel interpretation of Plato’s Gorgias which constitutes the core of the thesis. He concludes with a chapter on the secondary interpretations of Plato’s work by Nietzsche and Strauss, attempting in his own words to create a “dialogue” between the two in order to resolve the question of the relationship between philosophy and tyranny.

The emergence of “aristocracy”

The first of these four sections, which tracks the development of the Greek aristocracy as a conquering Indo-European element atop what we might call a “Pelasgian” agrarian majority, is by far the most ambitious in its scope. No summary is likely to do it justice. Instead, we can content ourselves with saying that it leaves no stone unturned in exploring the emergence of “aristocracy” as a mode of rule and lifestyle, drawing on sources from all parts of the Indo-European family and even further afield (including a brief study of the Tutsi aristocracy of the Rwanda-Rundi peoples). Alamariu charts the development and habits of aristocracies across the world and across time, paying particular attention to their shared interests in horse and dog breeding and the cultivation of martial and athletic prowess, along with the very common motif of disdain for labour and mercantile activity.

That the main preoccupation of the Greek elite was piratical raiding – both of their Greek neighbours and of other settlements further afield – is exemplified by the Iliad, and was once taken as unquestionably true by most scholars. This is a pattern that is also evident in the traditions and terminology of virtually all Indo-European elites, regardless of whether or not modern academics want it to be. Alamariu takes great pains to show this, and his position has been vindicated in the past few years by the maturity of population genetics, evidence from which was likely not available to him at the time when he originally wrote the main body of Selective Breeding.

If any part of the work is likely to come under serious criticism, it is this. This is not necessarily because it is incorrect, but because it draws upon many works and concepts which modern scholarship and pop-intellectualism believe to be discredited. Indeed, Alamariu seems in places to feel obligated to justify his reliance on a variety of older secondary literature which, while perfectly valid, are no longer seen as fashionable by polite academic society. As of writing, the first “real” review of his work, published in Compact, has already attacked Selective Breeding on this basis. (Even going so far as to target for attack a discredited theory which does not, in fact, make a substantive appearance in the book).

This said, I don’t think we should judge any work by the inferior quality of its critics. And if we’re ranking anyone based on their popularity or fashionability, it’s clear who comes out ahead.

The discovery of φύσις and its expression in Pindar

For this reviewer, Chapter 2 is by far the most compelling section. Here, Alamariu charts the development of the concept of nature, with particular reference to Pindar. It’s here that his command of the primary literature makes itself apparent.

Alamariu explores each of the term’s uses in Pindar to create a working definition of the concept of physis as the Greeks understood it in the Archaic period, when the “aristocratic” worldview was already at or past its peak. Physis, generally translated as “nature”, is a concept which is not fully formed in Homer, although its central components are recognisable retroactively in the qualities that give Homeric heroes their martial and kingly superiority.

In his study of Pindar, Alamariu characterises φύσις as an inborn quality, linked closely to breeding, and on occasion used in this capacity in a manner synonymous with αἷμα (haima), “blood”. Unlike in its similar modern usages of “nature” which increasingly tend to the psychological, physis is a decidedly embodied concept, although one’s physis is linked closely to temperament in terms of overall physical capacity and “energy”.

He also notes that an abundance of physis is highlighted specifically as what separates the victorious from the vanquished; it is possible and indeed expected that the vast majority simply lack the physis necessary for greatness. In this, we see the logic of selective animal breeding reflected in the notion of breeding humans. The aristocratic “project”, by Pindar’s time, has come to be seen as the preservation and cultivation of traits associated with specific bloodlines. It is these bloodlines and traits which supply individual aristocrats and the class as whole with their ability to take and maintain their position.

It isn’t surprising that this aspect of Pindar has gone understudied by recent generations of classicists. Pindar has always been considered a “difficult” author, and his reputation as the “mouthpiece of the aristocracy” has seen him become less fashionable than ever over the last several decades.

It is difficult to fault Alamariu’s analysis of the Pindarian treatment of physis. It’s my opinion that this will come to be seen in time as the definitive treatment of the subject, and a crucial primer for our understanding of both the mentality of the Greek ruling class, and it’s understanding of its own fitness to rule.

This understanding – that it is the aristocrat’s abundance of physical vitality and excellence which underpins his natural domination over others – forms the basis for Alamariu’s interpretation of Plato’s Gorgias.

Rehabilitating philosophy: Gorgias and the “Platonic Project”

Gorgias (sometimes referred to as “On Rhetoric”) is another “difficult” text. Presented as a dialogue between Socrates and the eponymous sophist Gorgias and one of his pupils, it sees Socrates make several pronouncements which so confuse his interlocutors that they assume he must be joking.

Chief among these are the idea that orators (or rhetoricians) and tyrants are the most pitiable and powerless people in the Greek political community, because they commit wrongs and go unpunished. He also argues that it is a greater evil to do wrong and go unpunished than it is to do wrong and be punished, and that, on this basis, the greatest harm one can do a political enemy who has done wrong is to ensure he does not come before the judicial system.

When these claims are made, Gorgias’s student Callicles launches into an impassioned attack on Socrates’s position, in which he lays out the “argument from nature”. To Callicles, the idea that it is better to be wronged than to do wrong is self-evidently insane, for the shame of wrongdoing is imposed entirely by custom and law, and has no basis in reality (or nature). He argues that the strong have both large appetites and the will and capacity to satisfy them, that this is the right and just state of the world, and that only weak men praise temperance. A just world, for Callicles, is one in which the superior man – the Greek term used is ἐρρωμενέστερος (erromenesteros), the comparative perfect participle of the verb ῥώννυμι (rhōnnumi) “I strengthen”, which literally means “one who is made stronger”, but which can be more comfortably translated as “well turned-out” – is allowed to inhabit his own superiority and dominate his inferiors.

Callicles’s argument is entirely in keeping with the treatment of “nature” discussed above. Alamariu’s central argument is that Callicles, as the supposed pupil of the pre-Socratic sophist Gorgias, stands in the dialogue for the accepted position of pre-Socratic philosophy. He further argues that Socrates’s responses to Callicles are so ridiculous and obfuscatory – and so at odds with Socrates’s own position on similar issues in Plato’s other dialogues – that the reader should be forced to accept that Socrates (and Plato) acknowledge them as true, but are obliged to conceal their acknowledgement given Socrates’s close association with the would-be tyrant Alcibiades and the “Thirty who put down the Democracy”, which would eventually lead to his death.

If Alamariu is right in this, then Gorgias presents a fundamental and deliberate distortion of Socratic teaching on the part of Plato, necessary to ensure the survival of philosophy in the face of anti-tyrranic attitudes. He puts a great deal of effort into reconstructing the worldview of the pre-Socratic philosophers, and we can be confident his interpretation is the correct one. But is his the correct reading of Gorgias?

We’re offered several strands of evidence in support of the “Alamarian” reading.

In the first instance, Plato, and Socrates via Plato, are much more amenable to the Calliclean position in other texts. Much of the Republic is given over to Socrates’s musings on the selective breeding of superior specimens to rule over his ideal city. In some telling of his later life, Plato is said to have become entangled with the tyranny of Syracuse, seeking to displace Dionysius in favour of his nephew Dion, one of Plato’s students, indicating that he was not altogether opposed to tyranny. Plato’s own family, one of the most distinguished in Athens, was also apparently heavily associated with selective breeding projects; his own half brother is said to have abandoned philosophy in order to devote himself more fully to horse breeding.

In the second, we have the content and context of Gorgias itself, which makes strong comparisons between rhetoric and combat, underlines the point that a philosopher can no more be held responsible for his student’s irresponsible or immoral use of philosophy than can a wrestling tutor for his student’s irresponsible or immoral use of wrestling, and makes conspicuous and strenuous denials of any link between “true” philosophy and tyranny.

The charge of “teaching tyranny” is clearly an especial concern of Socrates and his apologists, as illustrated by both Plato and Xenophon. Beyond this, “Callicles” appears to be an invented persona – he is nowhere else attested, and has variously been suggested to be either an imagining of Plato of himself had he not been tutored by Socrates, or a thinly veiled stand-in for Alcibiades, another wayward student of Socrates with grand ambitions. (Even the name Καλλικλῆς, “glorious beauty”, seems rather on the nose considering his function in the dialogue.)

In fact, if this is all taken to be true (and it certainly appears to have been the case that the Athenians believed it to be true), then the Platonic project should be seen as an attempt to clandestinely transmit philosophy as the liberator of great men from the shackles of normative thinking (nomos in our terminology). It is the teaching of force and the “natural” order, which has been concealed behind a political mask in order to allow its continued existence.

It’s difficult to judge whether Alamariu’s argument (which extends far beyond what I’m able to cover in this piece) is sufficient to prove his case, though the evidence is certainly there, and certainly significant. It’s my hope that others more qualified to make an assessment will investigate his argument in more depth in the coming months.

The Nietzschean alternative to the Platonic Project

The book concludes with a chapter placing Alamariu’s “Nietzschean” reading of Gorgias in the context of Nietzsche’s own investigations of the origins of the idea of nature, and the deep connections between philosophy and tyranny.

Alamariu believes that Nietzsche saw the Platonic “project” as having been too successful. The adoption of the “political mask” had resulted in philosophy becoming moralistic, and this threatened to extinguish not only philosophy, but the preconditions of philosophy’s emergence (the understanding of nature) by turning it into another type of nomos.

This is taken to explain Nietzsche’s own turn towards the physiological as part of his own attempt to revive the study and idea of “nature” in his own time. “Nietzsche’s chief concern, insofar as his public of political teaching is concerned, is the preservation or resurrection of philosophy.”

Alamariu uses this chapter to position his reading as a hypothetical “Nietzschean” response to Strauss, the other principle thinker concerned with the emergence of the idea of nature. He also uses it to explore the esoteric nature of Nietzsche’s thought, in contrast to its more plain exoteric meaning, and the true significance of concepts like the “rebarbarisation of man”. I can’t do this chapter justice in the context of a short review, and can only counsel you to read it for yourself. Whether or not you agree, it will still be the most interesting philosophical text you read this year.

The Bronze Age Elephant in the Room

Much has been made of the supposed connection between the author of Selective Breeding and online humourist “Bronze Age Pervert”.

I don’t believe there is any information currently available which conclusively establishes a link. That said, some of the themes touched on in Selective Breeding do bear striking similarity to those touched on in Bronze Age Pervert’s writings, although couched in very different terms and to apparently different ends. I suspect that what we have here are two people of very different temperaments and attitudes who have hit on the same fundamental idea. Quoting Alamariu:

“Nietzsche breaks with the Platonic project and points back to the "dark roots" of philosophy because he shares li Plato's ultimate aims. They disagree only as to tactics… The failure of political Platonism forces the thinker who cares about philosophy to abandon the “political mask”… the mask of the philosopher as a good and pious citizen, and of philosophy as support for moral life. It was time to bring “Callicles” – the original political voice of philosophy, or the political thought of pre-Socratic philosophy, unedited and unvarnished – out in the open again. Indeed, it was maybe needful to intensify Callicles’s rhetoric as a way to counter our too-tame age.”

Alamariu expresses no interest in pursuing such a project himself either in Selective Breeding or elsewhere, confining his scope to an understanding of Nietzschean and Platonic thinking and motive in his book, and to thoughtful discussions of the cuisines of various European peoples elsewhere.

To contrast, Bronze Age Pervert has adopted a “political mask” of their own, and become the Callicles of the modern world, as Nietzsche attempted to do in the 19th century.

In Sum

Selective Breeding is one of the most interesting and thought provoking works of non-fiction I’ve read in several years. Even if it’s central arguments on the nature of Gorgias and esoteric Platonism do not stand the test of time, I believe it will become an important work in elucidating the alien nature of Greek thought for contemporary readers. It is impossible to come away from it with any illusion that the Greek philosopher or politician was the forerunner of the modern universalist secular humanist. Or that modern man is any less subject to nature – his own or that of his kin at large – than were the inhabitants of the ancient world.