Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy
By Costin Alamariu
Self-published, 368 pages, $29.69
At some point in the prehistoric past, perhaps as recently as 5,000 years ago, sedentary agricultural societies flourished across large stretches of Eurasia. These societies were largely peaceful and egalitarian, far more so than later periods of recorded history. For the most part, they worshiped female fertility deities, revered women, and assigned them an array of important social roles. Women weren’t merely men’s equals—they were their superiors in many respects. All of this changed when marauding bands of nomadic barbarians overran and brutally subjugated these placid communities, which possessed scant means of self-defense. The conquerors pillaged, raped, subdued, and enslaved the peaceful valley-dwellers, establishing a society that was the opposite of what preceded it: warlike, expansionary, rigidly hierarchical, and male-dominated. The patriarchal social order that ultimately came to prevail across much of the world was the product of this revolution.
Versions of the story summarized above appeared in a wide array of feminist tracts written in the second half of the 20th century. The religion scholar Cynthia Eller dubbed this narrative the “myth of matriarchal prehistory” in her 2000 book of that title, which reviewed this large body of literature and the evidence for it—and found it tendentious, poorly supported, and politically unhelpful. Today, the myth no longer retains the currency it once did. Younger feminists are likely to see books advocating a return to mother-goddess worship as embarrassing kitsch. Matriarchal prehistory is more likely to furnish materials for pulp entertainment than political activism: Consider, for instance, Dan Brown’s 2003 bestselling thriller, The Da Vinci Code, which repurposed the narrative of a benign ancient goddess cult hounded to extinction by patriarchal oppressors.
Over the past week, however, a new self-published book reiterating the myth of matriarchal prehistory has shot up the Amazon sales rankings to become an unexpected bestseller. More surprising still, the author of this tome isn’t a feminist but, on the contrary, a fierce opponent of feminism and a stalwart of the online “manosphere.” His name is Costin Alamariu, and the book is Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, a revised version of the doctoral dissertation he completed at Yale in 2015.
As the author notes in the book’s preface, “a doctoral dissertation is usually read only by the student’s advisers”—so for one to become a bestseller is extraordinary. Alamariu was able to achieve this because of the cult following he has built tweeting and writing under his nom de plume, Bronze Age Pervert, BAP for short. His previous book, Bronze Age Mindset, appeared in 2018, written in the BAP persona’s caveman patois, riddled with humorous misspellings. The earlier book is a self-help “exhortation” focused on many of the same themes as Selective Breeding—Friedrich Nietzsche, ancient Greece, bodybuilding, the cultivation of warrior elites.
Ever since BAP appeared on the scene, liberal and conservative publications alike dedicated considerable efforts—when not trying to work out who the previously pseudonymous writer actually was—to making sense of his ideas and, often enough, lamenting his influence on young men, usually viewed as one variant of alt-right radicalization. One recent profile, by The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood, offered apparent proof of what was already widely known: that Alamariu is BAP. Wood, it turns out, had known and corresponded with Alamariu before the emergence of his online persona. This seems to have been what prompted Alamariu to publish Selective Breeding. “This thesis has been lied about for years, including recently in so-called mass-media articles,” he writes. “The reader can evaluate my words for himself.”
“None has taken much notice of his dissent from familiar masculinist assumptions.”
Most BAP coverage has framed him as an anti-feminist influencer, but none has taken much notice of his dissent from familiar masculinist assumptions. Most of the manosphere takes for granted that male dominance is inscribed in the natural order of things, and that feminism is an unnatural and belated deviation from this norm. Yet in both Bronze Age Mindset and Selective Breeding, Alamariu turns this assumption on its head. Drawing—as did the feminist scholars who elaborated the myth of matriarchal prehistory—on J.G. Frazer and other 19th-century anthropologists, he argues that an “egalitarian” and “collectivist” “gyno-gerontocratic democracy” is the “‘default’ mode of humanity.” Not only were 1970s feminists right about the prehistoric existence of egalitarian matriarchy, they succeeded in reviving it. We now live, BAP disciples often declare, in “the longhouse”: a recreation of ancient communal, female-dominated societies. As BAP says in Bronze Age Mindset, “the modern world is no different in this regard from any wretched tribal society,” in which people were “browbeaten and ruled by obese mammies who instilled in them socialism and feminism.” Contemporary feminism, then, isn’t a perverse denaturing of collective human existence, but a return to its primordial state.
Alamariu has described himself as a scholar and popularizer of Nietzsche, and his appropriation of feminist mythology may be viewed as an attempt at Nietzschean “transvaluation”: The terms remain the same as in the feminist version—male versus female, hierarchical versus egalitarian, violent versus pacific—but the values are reversed. But in doing so, Alamariu returns to older versions of the prehistoric matriarchy thesis. As Eller established in The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, the notion that matriarchy was the original form taken by human societies didn’t originate with feminists. Rather, it was Frazer and other 19th-century anthropologists who elaborated this narrative. Only, they saw the rise of the “male principle” as an evolutionary advance over what had come before. Most influentially of all, Johann Jakob Bachofen’s _Das Mutterrecht _(“Mother Right”), first published in 1861, depicted the gradual evolution of primitive hetaeristic matriarchy, where the mother and child represented the social bond, to an agricultural society in which Mother Earth was worshiped, through to patriarchy, as “a sequence of stages from chthonic motherhood to luminous Apollinian fatherhood.”
Nonetheless, Alamariu also differs crucially from these 19th-century predecessors. Whereas their work channeled the confidence of a Western civilization that took for granted its rise and global dominance, Alamariu contemplates all of this as something already mostly lost. In this regard, his clearest precursor is the Italian reactionary philosopher Julius Evola. In his 1949 introduction to the Italian translation of Bachofen, Evola declared: “With the advent of democracy, with the proclamation of the ‘immortal principles’ and the ‘rights of man and citizen’ and the subsequent development of these ‘conquests’ in Europe into Marxism and Communism, it is exactly the … leveling and anti-aristocratic law of the Mother, that the West has dug up, renouncing any ‘solar’ virile Aryan value.” For Alamariu, the historical emergence of male-dominated civilization isn’t an inevitable evolutionary development, but a singular, tenuous accomplishment of a few times and places—the recovery of which he presents as an untimely, subversive project.
Almariu’s adaptation of the prehistoric matriarchy myth sets the stage for the thesis of Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, hinted at in the title: In ancient Greece, philosophy emerged out of the knowledge of “breeding.” The argument goes as follows: Once the marauding nomads had abolished “gyno-gerontocratic democracy” and established aristocratic rule, they transferred their knowledge of how animals pass on traits to their offspring—gained from their prior pastoral existence on the steppes—to the regulation of human reproduction. They did this so as to ensure the desirable traits of the newly established ruling aristocracy—physical strength, strategic intelligence, martial valor—were not diluted by too much intermixing with the subordinate castes.
So far, despite the obviously speculative quality of all of this, we are on relatively solid ground: Aristocrats’ concern with protecting their pedigree—and simultaneous interest in animal breeding—are familiar enough from more recent historical periods. Alamariu’s more striking claim is that philosophy and science are the byproducts of these concerns. This is because philosophy emerged along with the invention of a concept of nature (phusis), understood in contrast to custom or norm (nomos). The political principle of gyno-gerontocracy is that nomos overrides phusis; that is, women and elders obtain their authority from social convention and force the rest into accepting a roughly equal status for all, regardless of innate abilities. In contrast: “The principle of nature acknowledges for the first time a reality that exists outside human law, tradition, and convention—outside and in opposition to nomos—and which is somehow associated with biological observations regarding breeding and blood.”
The initial evidence for this claim is an analysis of the literary documents of the heyday of Greek aristocratic rule: the works of Homer and Pindar. But philosophy proper only came into being, Alamariu claims, at a later stage, “through a radicalization of the standard of nature … in defense of aristocracy.” When aristocratic rule entered into crisis, challenged from internal fractures and external threats from the lower orders and foreign enemies, the philosopher emerged as a sophisticated apologist for the idea that “the aristocracy rules because it is physically, intellectually, and spiritually supreme.”
It is here that the final piece of Alamariu’s argument comes to the fore: the close relationship between philosophy and tyranny. In the ancient Greek context, it was common to accuse philosophy of complicity with tyranny. Socrates’s student Critias was the bloodthirsty leader of the Thirty Tyrants who ruled Athens after its defeat in the Peloponnesian War; this association was a factor in Socrates’s eventual trial and death sentence. For Alamariu, these accusations capture a truth: Tyrants and philosophers were both called to defend embattled aristocratic privilege, attempting to impose the “standard of nature.”
When Alamariu first submitted his thesis at Yale, he explains in the preface to the self-published version, he partly disguised his intentions. Throughout the text, he presents the argument outlined above as an explication of views advanced subtly by Greek thinkers—especially Plato—and more directly by Nietzsche. His account of an area of Nietzsche’s thought ignored or glossed over in most commentary—the German thinker’s deep and abiding concern with “breeding”—is persuasive. But, he makes clear in the new preface, the thesis doesn’t merely aim to offer a novel interpretation of philosophical texts, but to show that “the problem of breeding … is in many respects identical to philosophy”—that is, that philosophy is born out of the spirit of eugenics.
Just as Alamariu isn’t the first to claim that egalitarian matriarchy is humanity’s default mode, there are others before him who have claimed philosophy, “high culture,” and Western civilization as a whole are inextricable from male domination, racialized hierarchy, and imperialist violence. But as he also notes, these thinkers for the most part “reject or want to condemn Western history precisely because they partially intuited that it is based on [eugenics].” Their ranks include feminists, critical theorists, deconstructionists, postcolonial scholars, Afrocentrists, and other academic leftists.
“In both cases, this isn’t a neutral scholarly framing of the issues.”
He names Giorgio Agamben, who “makes the point that the understanding of nature I present in this book is the ‘secret’ behind all Western politics since Aristotle, and that it culminates in Auschwitz,” but he might have offered any number of other examples. Consider the notion of “phallogocentrism,” developed by Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, and others, which holds that Western thought privileges the phallus and the word; or, for that matter, Edward Said’s Orientalism, which argues that from ancient Greece onward, the West has been constructed in violent opposition to a feminized East; or Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s argument that Western philosophy is tainted from its origins by “instrumental reason,” which seeks to violently subdue nature. Alamariu accepts all this and goes several steps further, concluding that Western thought is essentially and inescapably the product of a violent, elite, Aryan male culture.
“Whether this is a good or a bad thing is another matter,” he avers. For him, it is good, while for his feminist and left-wing antagonists, it is bad—but they share the same basic story. If we grant its validity, is there a third position in which it is neither entirely good nor bad, but some of both? Not really. For Alamariu as much as for his opponents, we are either on the side of placid, egalitarian, socialist matriarchy—utopia or repulsive “bug life,” depending on whom you ask—or of the brutal Aryan “warband” from which all of high culture is descended. In both cases, this isn’t a neutral scholarly framing of the issues, but a mythmaking project and a call to arms.
When demands to smash the patriarchy—or in more recondite circles, deconstruct phallogocentrism—gained currency half a century ago, those who accepted these exhortations felt the thrill of intellectual and political subversion. They were “redpilled,” in current parlance, with stories the powers that be didn’t want you to hear: the buried history of originary matriarchy, the oppressive underside of the Western tradition. But within a few decades, feminism, deconstruction, and other revolutionary agendas were thoroughly institutionalized and professionalized. Periodic attempts to cargo-cult them back into some semblance of subversiveness only reinforce the opposite impression.
Under these conditions, though, the same stories that electrified feminists and other radicals barely more than a generation ago have become subversive again by way of a simple inversion of values. The struggle between primordial matriarchy and brutal steppe marauders remains an appealing mythical framework for processing the present, but for many young people, the despised status quo and the aspirational utopia have switched positions. In the Vietnam era, it was perhaps plausible to view the ruling class as a latter-day Aryan warband, but to most of us today, it looks more gyno-gerontocratic—perhaps especially to young men, who have experienced a drastic demotion in social status in recent decades.
“This puts Alamariu in the same position he attributes to the first philosophers.”
A further appeal of Alamariu’s theories for the disaffected youth is that they point to a seeming ideological contradiction at the core of contemporary Western societies. In recent decades, immense resources have been dedicated to the study of the human genome, in theory granting us a more extensive and sophisticated knowledge of “breeding” than the Greeks could have dreamed of. The result is that philosophy, which laid the groundwork for science with the discovery of nature, has now returned us to where—by Alamariu’s account—it all started: eugenics. And yet a taboo surrounds this concept, enforcing adherence to blank-slate orthodoxy even as research undermines it. All of this puts Alamariu in the same position he attributes to the first philosophers: appealing to the “standard of nature,” over and against the arbitrary strictures of nomos, the law of man (or, indeed, woman).
But what if the motivation behind the taboo against talk of “breeding” isn’t what Alamariu and other contemporary eugenics enthusiasts seem to imagine? If we were truly living in a communal longhouse akin to the matriarchies of yore, in which recognition of natural excellence was verboten to maintain uniformity, one would expect to see more evidence of “equal outcomes”; instead, we see ever-widening economic inequality. To be sure, objective measures of excellence are being discarded on ideological grounds, but that doesn’t seem to prevent some from finding ways to get on top and stay there. Those thriving amid these conditions today may not like to talk openly about “breeding,” but they are still practicing it. As Alamariu acknowledges, fetuses are screened for Down’s syndrome and other abnormalities that might militate against later Harvard admission. Today’s elites are also practicing assortative mating: marrying and reproducing with other elites in a manner that seems to assure the continued success of their lines. But it often seems that not appealing to the “standard of nature”—and appealing instead to “diversity,” for instance—is, paradoxically, as useful for today’s de facto aristocrats as appealing to natural superiority was in earlier times, because it enables them to obfuscate their social status.
Perhaps Alamariu knows all this on some level. According to Wood’s Atlantic profile, he grew up in Newton, Mass., an affluent, highly educated Boston suburb brimming with meritocratic strivers, many of them born abroad, like Alamariu. At least up until he finished at Yale, he was apparently following the standard path of his caste. By most accounts, though, he now spends much of his time in Latin America, a part of the world, we might surmise based on his writings, that he appreciates for its approximation of the ancient Mediterranean caste system he admires, with an elite descended from foreign conquerors ruling over a racially mixed subject class. It also has some recent history with “tyrants”—those peers of philosophers who take brutal measures to defend the natural aristocracy from the depredations of the demos—in the form of military dictators like Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner, for whom, as BAP, Alamariu has expressed admiration.
The apparent promise of Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy is that the eugenic regime of the ancient Greeks gave rise to tyranny, yes, but also to great cultural achievements that made the West what it is. But the latter-day tyrannies of Stroessner and his ilk can claim no such achievements. For the most part, they produced little or nothing of cultural note, having often pushed their most interesting artists, writers, and intellectuals into exile. Hierarchical societies with military leaders and heightened racial consciousness have no doubt produced cultural greatness at certain points in history—but also plenty of mediocrity. Latin-American elites in countries ruled recently by martial tyrants are well known for taking their cues from Miami—apparently preferring the cultural output of the democratic hegemon to the North over whatever their own more rigidly caste-stratified societies could muster.
Alamariu seems happy, at present, to take his tyranny without much promise of philosophy or culture arising alongside it. Likewise, the subculture that has formed around him has seemingly embraced his injunctions to prioritize physical self-cultivation—i.e., going to the gym—as a first step toward civilizational renewal, but further evidence of the promised renaissance remains mostly absent. As for BAP’s own literary output, it remains to be seen whether, like his hero Nietzsche, he will come to be recognized as a prophet only long after his time—as he seems to claim, and as some of his media detractors fear. Alternatively, perhaps in a few decades Bronze Age Mindset will look like kitschy ephemera, much as ’70s tracts about fertility goddesses and the “patriarchal revolution” do today.