The Religious Right in America versus "Vitalism"--an Interview

I was recently interviewed by one Emma Freire who published this piece on me, Steve Sailer, and Curtis Yarvin:

https://wng.org/articles/moral-minority-1746503962

I understand editors impose limitations on word count but for whatever reason this article ended up in my opinion as cheap PR. So here I will present my actual full answers to Emma Freire’s questions on the religious right and so-called Vitalism.

Anyway, here is the full interview:

Emma Freire: How has human biodiversity influenced your thinking?

BAP: By human biodiversity I assume you mean a code word for the taboo “racism.” Otherwise this contemporary coinage refers to so many things including the inherent and persistent differences between male and female, facts which I assume have influenced your thinking too. In regards to human groups anyone who can’t tell the difference between a Nuba, a Twa pygmy, a Baluba, let alone between these and a Frisian, or who insists that such differences are entirely a result of customs or laws, etc, is obviously insane. Humans are determined by both inborn nature and “nurture,” which includes customs, laws, education but also unintentional or unknown environmental circumstances. There is historically a dispute where some thinkers lean more in one direction for explanatory power; for example someone like Helvetius thinks that education and environment are far more important than inborn nature. Rousseau and Marx similarly believe in the great malleability of human nature. These thinkers’ attitudes toward religion and Christianity are well known. There is at the moment a contrived dispute on the right between partisans of “human biodiversity” on one side and religious conservatives on the other. The latter invoke the Biblical teaching of Imago Dei but I’m not sure their interpretation of this doctrine is historically or theologically sound. In other words, the universal openness of every human soul to salvation or damnation does not imply that human beings are equal in physical strength, size, shape, intelligence, character and so on or that a state should or shouldn’t consider such differences in policy, law or constitution. Buddhists also believe the Buddha arrived for the salvation not just of humans but of all living beings including “our brothers and sisters the birds” (St Francis of Assisi). But I’m not aware of Buddhist political movements who claim therefore that there is or should be equality in the phenomenal world. I suppose however that a Communist (or merely let’s say someone who feared being called “racist”) who wished to use Buddhism as a cover for their political beliefs could make such an argument, I don’t know. Anyway to answer your question my views aren’t influenced by the modern group of writers who use the label “human biodiversity.” My own views on the importance of nature and biology in human social and political life are influenced by Plato and Aristotle.

Emma Freire: I interviewed a commentator who said that Vitalism is “an explicit, formal deeply considered rejection of certain basic aspects of everything that is enjoined by confessing Christ.” What do you think about that statement?

BAP: Vitalism refers to an old philosophical idea that living organisms can’t be understood merely through what today we’d call chemistry or physics but that there is a vital or life force that animates them. Many such thinkers also believed the same force underlies nonliving things. It exists in the ancient world in ideas like Love and Strife from Empedocles and arguably in Heraclitus and others. The Stoic version of this idea is introduced to the Christian world by St Clement of Alexandria. Here is a good recent article that explains what this idea has meant:

https://mansworldmag.online/on-the-genealogy-of-nietzschean-vitalism/

Your interlocutor is probably referring to “Nietzschean” or 20th Century variety found especially in some followers of Nietzsche like Gabriele D’Annunzio and Ernst von Salomon, and which was suppressed after WW2. I’ve tried to revive this in my book Bronze Age Mindset. Some of these thinkers are anti religious and they’d be anticlerical—but so have been many believing Christians in history. Furthermore it’s possible to have a vitalistic understanding of the world with a completely opposite ethics, such as Schopenhauer did (who respected the ethics of Christianity) or Deleuze or Foucault, who are “Nietzschean” but were important for the modern left. In fine I don’t think your friend’s judgment is plausible…Christians throughout history have had a variety of attitudes and interpretations, some of which he would call “vitalist.” There’s also the possibility he doesn’t consider that I and others are simply indifferent to the actual content of Christianity (or other religions)…indifference isn’t the same thing as philosophical or other kind of opposition.

Emma Freire: You have said that you are not a Christian and you have had some harsh criticism for some strands of Christian conservatism. But maybe not all? Is there a strand of Christianity you wish would become more dominant in America?

BAP: I must clarify that my earliest friends on the right were French Catholic reactionaries (they are sedevacantists and believe the Pope is false and a traitor). I don’t accept the pretense to leadership of the American conservative intellectual movement in DC, or its associated politicians as the “face” of all religious people, including normal religious people in the United States. In my experience these are people who at best want political power and use religion instrumentally. At worst and in maybe the most frequent case they are people motivated primarily by things having to do with sexual morality or sexual psychodrama and think religion is primarily a way to express that orientation. I don’t consider in general and in the usual public cases religious identification in the modern world to be something different from something like the gay identity or trans identity. (I think the same about other modern group self identification such as national, ethnic, etc.) I am not aware of any strains of Christianity that exist at the moment that don’t have this same problem as every other modern belief, which is fundamentally broken and exists only as a kind of minstrel show. (A man like Celine in his book Death on Credit has the number of modern beliefs of all kinds.) It is these individuals who would like to insist on a very clear polarization into emotional “teams” like “Christ versus Nietzsche!” which they can use for their political purposes that have nothing to do with genuine belief; my friend Second City Bureaucrat has an excellent article on such types and their obsession with me:

Against the New Reaganism - Part 1 of 2

Against the New Reaganism - part 2 of 2

If an admirable strain of public Christianity will exist in the future it will likely be something entirely new and unexpected in relation to what exists now. I admire the Calvinism of the Dutch in the republic of South Africa in the earlier 20th Century. Something like that could be highly salutary for the historical American people as well but I’m not sure the seriousness and fervor is there to provide the ground for it. In my book by the way I admire many Christian heroes in history, with chapters on the conquistadores who spread the faith to the New World and on Conradin the last of the Hohenstaufen emperors whose martyrdom was so important for medieval Europeans. I also admire Christian leader Cesare Borgia who was a possible Papal candidate. Burckhardt mentions the highly particular and sincere interpretation of the Christian religion held by many geniuses of the Renaissance like Pico della Mirandola and others, I also admire this. Again, Christianity had so many interpretations in history and isn’t defined by easily numbered principles or as deductions from a text.

Emma Freire: What are your thoughts on the future of the religious right as part of the conservative movement in America?

BAP: Religious people in the modern world are obviously the only remaining popular core of any recognizably “right wing” movement. I am under no illusions about this. I and my friends number in the dozens maybe and I never had any pretensions of being a political leader or a popular force. That said I also deny that what you call the “religious right,” by which you mean not the people but their self appointed faces, movement leaders, intellectuals and politicians accurately represent these people, their beliefs or their interests. It’s a form of demagogic Pharisaism which was rejected by Evangelicals and others who were tired of charlatans like Ted Cruz and Santorum and Karl Rove etc cynically using religion to mobilize them and then give them nothing or little. They voted for a New York urbanite playboy who apparently is indifferent to religion, amoral personally, and not for people who avowed their faith. They were presumably tired of the minstrel show and wanted someone real and vital who would not lie to them. As it happens Trump the playboy TV star with supermodel wives is the man who delivered the much hoped for repeal of Roe v Wade. This pleased the mass of believing Christians in America but it also I think was a disaster for the movement social conservatives who have now lost the basis of much of their funding, activism and jobs. You can deduce from what I just said my opinions regarding the position of “religion in politics” in the modern world. I should clarify that I think a similar situation holds for Judaism in Israel and Islam in Muslim countries. But these have always been public and political “religions.” Christianity by contrast existed most purely in the life of Christ himself which is most beautifully memorialized in Nietzsche’s Antichrist.

Emma Freire: The terms Longhouse has entered popular lexicon and probably taken on many meanings you did not intend. What do you think Longhouse should mean in 2025?

BAP: The Longhouse word has taken off to an extent I never expected. But often it’s come to mean something synonymous with feminism or the influence of women in politics or social or family life. I simply direct readers to part 2 of my book “The Iron Prison” where I first use this term. More generally in my book it refers to societies and groups that are directed to the preservation of mere life as opposed to aspiring for something beyond mere life. As such it refers more specifically to gerontocracy or the rule by elders, which seems to be a universal in primitive societies. In such societies the woman also holds immense cultic and social power, even in nominally patriarchal tribes or nations. But more particularly it refers to a society that is directed to the satisfaction of these principles regardless of whoever holds leadership positions. Thus I have young Arab friends who think modern Islamic society, for all its brittle masculine bluster, is fundamentally a “longhouse” society; the same is true for historically “patriarchal” Jewish society and for most African situations. In the Christian world you had exceptions among some of the nobility and very conspicuously in orders such as the Templar order, the Teutonic order, the Knights of Malta etc but these are now all gone. In other parts of the world at various times you had various exceptions. The Mongol nöker concept is such an exception. But the Longhouse is the rule among mankind, it isn’t a modern exception. When I published the book in 2018 many doubted the vehemence of the monstrous image. But the following year came the Wuhan Flu crisis, where youth was sacrificed worldwide on the altar of fear of death and desire for base self preservation of the old and of mentally ill middle aged women, who at present hold decisive social and political power all around the world. So because of this many became convinced. I am writing an article further elaborating the image of the Longhouse in response to this and the unexpected popularity of the phrase.