High Egalitarianism and Mid-Century Racial Utopia

Andro

The point of this study is to bring the characters and thoughts of early, post-war racial utopianism to light once again in order to contrast their lofty ambitions with the degraded, exposed realities of their projections. I am not a partisan for contemporary “human biodiversity” studies, and I do not intend to interrupt every outlandish, idealistic mid century claim with an example to the contrary. We are not here to debunk anything or provide lurid counterarguments. There are plenty of studies and anecdotal media one could consume in their own time to disabuse themselves of the ideas herewith. The transnational Atlanticist arrangement, however withered it may seem, serves as our vehicle forward, for it is the only order we can genuinely claim as our own. Its being fixed aright and guided well is our concrete political end.

Studying ourselves, how we have operated and thought in the past, identifying where our forefathers made mistakes—this is our goal. Our questions: How did the Atlanticist (i.e., American and British) consensus regarding eugenics and social hierarchy intellectually transform into mid century “high egalitarianism”? What were the compelling political and scientific problems which inspired this shift, and what ideas were developed to cement and propagate the transformation? What has recently given rise to a complication, or rejection, of these ideas, and what can we learn having endured this phenomenon?

Upon first encounter with UNESCO’s 1950 publication of “The Race Question”we are struck by the uncompromising moral resolve and assertion of biological rectitude. Though UNESCO assures the audience “studies are ongoing every single day”, they also assert the facts have been established. They are unquestionable. And why should UNESCO pull punches? From the introductory statement they reliably inform the reader that, like the wars which ravaged the globe immediately prior, the problem of race exists merely in “the minds of men”.

This problem, “the doctrine of the inequality of men and races”, is framed as the cause for the Second World War. The UN had tasked UNESCO with the specific task of locating and communicating the requisite “scientific facts” for dismantling the old racialist consensus. UNESCO assures us that the “competence and objectivity [of the multinational scientists consulted]... cannot be questioned”. While this endeavor was formerly a project of the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation (which Henri Bergson had chaired), evidently its method had failed. UNESCO recognized, as a result, that “knowledge of the truth does not always help change emotional attitudes that draw their real strength from the subconscious or from factors beside the real issue”. The evolution debate had swiftly moved from the pure, scientific realm to the political space, where passions and prejudice reign, thus inhibiting the IIIC’s warm idealistic aim. To this end the reader is told no amount of studies, if they “should prove that ‘races’ as such do, in fact, have different innate faculties or aptitudes”, would be able to challenge “UNESCO’s moral position on the race question”.

Quite the catch, indeed. In fact, it should sound like a familiar conundrum. Bronze Age Pervert discussed the matter concretely, with respect to contemporary ‘thought leaders’ such as Richard Hanania, Rob Henderson, and Garrett Jones, in his October 2024 essay on “Race in America and the Dork Right”:

“Leaving aside the fact that wokeness doesn’t as such consist in only the claim for racial redistribution to blacks; and leaving aside also the willingness of liberals and leftists to invoke the necessity of state action to correct the injustice of nature, which they absolutely would do if forced to accept the reality of innate racial differences in ability (some already do this, and John Rawls the prophet of the center left bureaucracies did already long ago)...”

UNESCO’s definition of race, delimited to mere physical and physiological distinctions—which, mind you, they assert have no bearing on the intellect—, was intended to operate as a “deradicalizing” component but, at its first potential challenge, the definition is disaggregated from the phenomenon of “racism”, a vicious expression which, in itself, is in “defiance of the scientific method”. Racism’s aggressive, dominating nature threatens the exaltation of all men and thereby undermines “cooperation”, a key component, UNESCO maintains, of the scientific method. The denial of man’s social bonding, across “ethnic groups” (UNESCO’s preferred replacement for the term ‘race’), is man’s disintegration. I am forced to admit much of this is boilerplate, but UNESCO’s invocation of Brazil ought to cause any good, hardy young “right winger” to salivate.

Brazil is upheld as an example of a society which has effectively resolved its racial antagonisms; UNESCO’s comment in full:

“This great republic [of Brazil] has a civilization which has been developed by the direct contributions of different races. And it suffers less than other nations from the effects of those prejudices which are at the root of so many vexatious and cruel measures in countries of similar ethnic composition. We are as yet ill-informed about the factors which brought about such a favourable and, in many ways, exemplary situation. But in the present state of the social sciences, general speculations no longer suffice. We must have specialists make searching inquiries in the field. We must learn from them exactly why and how social, psychological and economic factors have contributed in varying degrees to make possible the harmony which exists in Brazil. Then the results of their inquiries can be set forth in publications in order to stimulate those who are still struggling elsewhere to introduce more peaceable and happier inter-racial relations.”

One needs to have spent little time studying the global situation, today, to understand the perils of “Brazilification”. The key failing of these utopians, as adequately represented in the Brazil example, was merely to envision such multiracial societies as fertile grounds for economic and political development. Brazil’s history, as a country which implemented exacting racial reproductive laws to limit racial tension and yet preserved the typical Latin American racial stratification, should’ve been sufficient proof to these men that its multiracialism was a liability, not an asset. I produce here the team responsible for the drafting and revising of the UNESCO Statement on Race:

• Professor Ernest Beaglehole, New Zealand: ethnologist of Pacific indigenous peoples, important member and director at the International Labour Organization (ILO)

• Professor Juan Comas, Mexico: refugee from Franco’s Spain, anthropologist of the evolution of the human being and important advocate for the notion of “indigeneity”

• Professor Luiz de Aguiar Costa Pinto, Brazil: race relations “expert”

• Professor E. Franklin Frazier, United States: an African-American sociologist and critic of the notion that a black middle class/bourgeois would produce racial equality

• Professor Morris Ginsberg, United States: editor of The Sociological Review, president of the Aristotelian Society, opponent of “Dionysian” habits

• Dr. Humayun Kabir, India: Oxford-educated Bengali politician
  Claude Levi-Strauss (no need for further explanation)

Along with Ashley Montagu, Julian Huxley, and Gunnar Myrdal (to be detailed further) as well as Hadley Cantril, Edwin Conklin, Gunnar Dahlberg, Theodosius Dobzhansky, LC Dunn, Otto Klineberg, Wilbert Moore, Hermann Joseph Muller, Joseph Needham, and Curt Stern.

In observing this list of authors, perhaps we shouldn’t bother identifying them as Atlanticists, but, alas, someone had to empower them...

When UNESCO was established in late 1945 it selected Julian Huxley as its first director-general. Huxley, brother to Aldous, is emblematic of the figure we wish to study. He was a late president of the British Eugenics Society, head of the Zoological Society of London, and underwent an intellectual “evolution” from negative eugenics to race denialism. He co-authored, among others of “The Race Question” such as Hermann Joseph Muller, Joseph Needham, Gunnar Dahlberg, and Theodosius Dobzhansky, the “Eugenics Manifesto” of 1939. Negative eugenicists acknowledged that the English invention of safe birth paired with industrial necessity produced the unfortunate social situation wherein those “less-endowed genetically” (Huxley, Man in the Modern World, p. 66) were reproducing at a rate which far exceeded those of, presumably, preferred genetic stock. Huxley’s solution of widespread birth control has since been realized and his remedial plan of improved nutrition is a hot topic of discourse today with the head of the American Health and Human Services Department, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., currently advocating for it.

Although Huxley made no mention of the term “eugenics” in his autobiography and assuredly adjusted his position on human population management in the wake of World War II, his central position could be upheld. The British eugenic adherence to the malleability of man as a function of his “social environment” permitted domestic policy reform as a means to overcome the problem of “inferior stock” without aggressive intervention or such nasty proposals as “sterilization”. The position espoused by UNESCO regarding the equal distribution of genetically impoverished peoples across so-called ethnic groups likewise enabled Huxley’s brand of negative eugenics. Huxley’s reserved scope, that is, to not immerse himself in the world of explicitly racialist eugenics, perhaps saved his ideas from being relegated to the dustbin of history. Insofar as political empowerment is concerned with intellectual history, Huxley’s selection to guide Western Europe’s complex relationship with scientific eugenics following human biology’s disenfranchisement at the hand of the War was likely intentional.

Could we realistically have imagined biologists backed by the Pioneer Fund, nevermind German race scientists, to have been handed the keys to the most sensitive political topic in the wake of the war? Unlike Huxley, Ashley Montagu, a British-born Jew, held positions even before the War that would sound familiar to us today. His 1942 book, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, laid much of the intellectual groundwork, a proverbial off ramp, for Atlantic human biologists to pursue their study without the stain of Nazi association.

In the American context, where scientific racism of the German variety had been more popular than in Britain, we see the professorial dissemination of the new egalitarianism best in Carroll Quigley, mentor to Bill Clinton and frequent subject of Bircher, du Berrerist-style globalist conspiracy analyses. Quigley proposed in The Evolution of Civilizations that the human child, by contrast with other young animal species, is vastly immature in his instincts and capabilities. His potential personality, therefore, greatly dwarfs his actuality. Quigley uses the mere difference of human societies, informed by academic anthropology, to drive the point home:

“The fact that there are societies or tribes in which almost everyone is aggressive (like the Apaches) and that there are other closely related tribes in which almost everyone is submissive (like the Zuñi), and the fact that infants, taken from one such tribe and reared in the other, grow up to have in full measure the typical characteristics of their adopted tribe would seem to indicate both that all such people are potentially about the same at conception and that their personalities are largely a consequence of the way in which they are reared.” (51)

In contemporary debates concerning nurture and race, we often encounter rudimentary study analyses of a similar sort: “American babies of different races raised on military bases have similar tested IQs” or “English speaking children of different races will affiliate with adults of the same language but different race before adults of different language and same race”. Quigley’s example demonstrates the often facile thinking and “social scientific studies” the new egalitarianism took on.

While the ex-eugenicists were tasked by organizations like the UN to authoritatively communicate the new science, it was up to creative futurists, science fiction authors, to emotionally convey the matter. Arthur C. Clarke is likely best known for having co-written the screenplay to 2001: A Space Odyssey. He was referred to as the “Prophet of the Space Age” and his Wikipedia entry is worth your perusal if you haven’t had your fill learning of the great adventure once commonly afforded to men of our type.

The novel most relevant to our study is Clarke’s Childhood’s End. The book details an alien species, referred to as the “Overlords” who convene with the Secretary General of the UN to pursue psychic research and development with human children.

The Overlords keep these children removed from the unaffected adult population to develop their telekinetic, clairvoyant abilities in ultimate service to the “Overmind”, a universal intelligence, where it is likewise revealed by Clarke that the aliens, themselves, serve this intelligence as a bridge species, cultivating other races of life, such as the homo sapiens, to unify under this intelligence. As time passes, the recognizable human race is killed off and the psychic children are hooked up to the universal conscience to achieve the “Overlords” goal. Mishima called the book a “masterpiece”, its initial publication sold out, the New York Times praised it multiple times and associated Clarke with the likes of HG Wells and CS Lewis. Pink Floyd, Genesis, and David Bowie all made tribute songs to the novel with Led Zeppelin inspired so much as to design their cover art for the album Houses of Holy.

Close friend Torbert Fahey described the novel in the following way: “To the extent there was a positive case for antiracism and diversity in the mind of the White establishment, it was oriented towards something like [Childhood’s End]... Aquarian, pseudo-scientific belief in the coming unity of all peoples.” Clarke stands in as an authority on imagining or creating the future. His characterization of humanity’s maturity, its childhood concluding, is that of an attunement with a universal ethic and consciousness. In practice and situated in its time, Clarke’s Childhood’s End betrays multiracialism as a utopia—a projection of where things are to head. Clarke’s utopia holds sway in large part due to his talent for trafficking his unsaid moral belief of human uniformity alongside intergalactic space travel and parapsychology. Moments of rapid, epoch-defining technological and scientific development are often accompanied by the high hopes of pseudoscience and the latter possesses the rare ability to stir up moral exaltation, concretized by the fulfillment of newfound technological prowess. The Fifth Dimension, an American black soul and funk band, catches this best in their lyrics for the song “Let The Sunshine In”:

“When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius...
Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind's true liberation, Aquarius”

How hopeful! There’s a reason the 70s are spoken of as ‘the hangover caused by the '60s’, not to mention today’s situation. But what were top politicians of the time saying? An interview with Clement Attlee offers a brief introduction:

Interviewer: And I think you're against us going to the common market.
Why is that?

Attlee: “It’s a very limited alliance, purely European. It, really, I think, breaks the unity of the commonwealth. In my mind, the Commonwealth is immensely important. That is because it is multi-racial—Asiatic, and African; Australian, and American. I think it’s a retrograde step to go back to a purely European union. Mind you I’m all in support of relations. It’s quite another thing to submit entirely to what I consider would be, very largely, a dictatorship of civil servants.”

Attlee’s opinion portrays an English-led unity of ethnic groups that lacks the foresight of distributed rule but nevertheless possesses the verisimilitude of the high egalitarian.

Europe is viewed as a backwards frontier, the old home of Latin Christendom, whereas the formerly colonized regions of the world are recast as harbingers of racial utopia. The civil servant who saw his greatest and most wide-reaching manifestation in the British Foreign Office is likewise discarded as a relic. He is a potential threat to world democracy insofar as he, in combination with his fellow servants, births a “dictatorship”, or, in other words, a uniform authority on all matters of culture or ethics. The tensions between Attlee and Clarke’s Childhood’s End are multiple. Attlee foresees pluralism whereas Clarke assumes universalism, Attlee a decentralized democratic form where the post-colonial peoples become authors of global governance and Clarke a liberal conformity toward abstract cosmic union. One senses in Attlee a sense of cultural reconstitution and in Clarke more an erasure of past cultures. Ultimately, however, these tensions are functions of time and thus not fundamental. Both Attlee’s and Clarke’s vision is set back by the reactive, hateful impulse of the formerly disenfranchised.

Cord Meyer is a crucial connective point between the humanitarian scientific project of Julian Huxley and Ashley Montagu as well as the international project of Attlee. Meyer is also an exemplary distillation of the 20th century American internationalist. Head of the United World Federalists, appointed at only 27 years-old, a Bronze Star Medal for his service in the Pacific Theater of World War II, invited by Dulles to work at the CIA following his time at the UWF, and married to an “acquaintance” of JFK. How often we yearn for such lives of importance!

Meyer’s involvement in the United World Federalists—presently known as the “Citizens for Global Solutions”—is of particular interest to our study for it sought the establishment of world government through reform of both the United Nations and the American political system. Meyer offered a synthesis of elite liberal internationalism that sought binding legal frameworks for global governance which would transcend individual national sovereignties. The Movement operated under the assumptions of scientific objectivity and enlightened consensus to undergird a multiracial order. There existed a belief that such matters would be rapidly and commonly intuited by the post-colonial states, a vision consonant with UNESCO’s Statement on Race. In the Montreux Declaration of 1947, the Movement’s guiding document produced at the conclusion of their first conference, it was designed that delegates from 20+ countries—largely liberal politicians, scientists, and explicitly anti-fascist intellectuals—would strive towards the establishment of a world federal government endowed with “limited but adequate powers”. The Declaration presented the coming necessity for a universal civic loyalty to this government that would, in time, overcome national and ethnic affiliations.

The Atlantic Union, by contrast, complemented Meyer’s vision with an English inflection. Championed by Sir George Catlin, the Atlantic Union sought a federated Atlantic polity (the unity of Britain and America) grounded in shared cultural traditions, the parliamentary form of government, and the moral commitment to international governance and stability. The primary aim of the Union was to synthesize the rich English tradition of liberal constitutionalism with multiracial entities, much like Attlee’s vision of the commonwealth though with greater centralization. Meyer’s federalism and the Atlantic Union’s legal optimism provide a vivid picture of the political thinking of the mid century high egalitarian elite. Universalism was more than a mere metaphysical or futuristic ideal. Universalism contained within it an administrative imperative to replace romantic nationalism and its concomitant racialism with moral finality promulgated by international law and informed by scientific authority. Structural reform of the global order required a dissolution of particular identities, or global diversity, via juridical sublimation.

Even if the pursuit to overcome inherited, often emotional, loyalties through an enforceable legal system seems to us bankrupt, it was vital for liberal power to moralize the fallout of racial empire. This was the lone real-world instance of high-status, cerebral antiracism.

Suffice to say that this mode is dead. Its utopian visions have given way to a cold, gritty reality, and it would be difficult for me to imagine that these men, provided our upbringings and placed in our position, would peddle such ideas proudly. It’s valuable to remember when studying our near predecessors that their conceptions of the world, however lamentable, were not only the product of deception, weakness, or innately evil.

More often they were practical, operative solutions to maintaining and expanding power. Political pressures domestic and foreign required good faith Atlanticists, stripped of the option for mass internal war, to negotiate on poor terms. They produced, in turn, a progressive outlook to uphold the political technological apparatus which their forefathers had built. If one wishes to look further into this subject matter he might find it worthwhile to look into the writings and biographies of Henry Steele Commager, George M. Fredrickson, Roy Jenkins, TH Marshall, William Beveridge, and Hugh Gaitskell. One may even find it worth his time to revisit the Baldwin/Buckley debate at Oxford from 1965. Regardless, it will be our turn, soon, to step over them with firmness, and to redefine both contested terms and our aspirations for the future.