There has been some discussion online in recent years about a social-media user who presents pseudonymously as “Bronze Age Pervert.” Now widely acknowledged to be Yale University political-science Ph.D. Costin Alamariu, he has advanced a worldview, most fully realized in his 2018 “exhortation” Bronze Age Mindset, that aims at a kind of Nietzscheanism for the internet age. Our world, for Alamariu, is one in which a mass of beauty-hating subhumans (he calls them “bugmen”) are conspiring to smother masculine virtue and reduce all life to an endless undifferentiation.
I have made clear in my several forays into criticism of the so-called Bronze Age mindset, often willfully misunderstood by Alamariu’s unmanly defenders and pseudo-critics, that I do not dismiss out of hand certain of the complaints about modernity that he has lodged. That modernity disdains the authentic expression of manly virtue, for example, is impossible to dispute.
But to leverage warranted complaint into advancing a worldview that: attacks Christianity (guilty of “suppressing the natural spirit of man”), the American founding (“so much nonsense”), the family (“the end of a man”), and women (a malign force who “drain” men of their “vital essence”); proposes the rebreeding of “the original Aryan race, or as close an approximation as possible, through some kind of a Platonic Lebensborn program”; and imagines a future in which his followers, whom he describes as “superior specimens” in need of “space,” “wipe away” our “corrupt civilization,” and unleash their vengeance upon the “lower types of mankind,” or “humancockroach,” who have repressed them — this accomplishes nothing. The pithiest definition of the Bronze Age mindset that Alamariu offers is the desire “to be worshiped as a god!” — this, too, leads nowhere (nowhere good, at least).
Don’t interpret this enumeration, however, as a kind of schoolmarmish “how dare he!” denunciation. One can take Alamariu as seriously as he takes himself; his efforts in Bronze Age Mindset amount to a kind of intellectual onanism. It’s an ultimately lifeless dead end for someone so supposedly invested in what goes by “vitalism.” As I wrote last May, his worldview is, “at best, a superficiality of life well lived and, at worst, a cruel, sterile mockery.” Whatever problems he has identified with the modern world have already been identified by less compromised thinkers who have better ways to address them.
Doubtless some of the same banal interlocutors who have challenged my previous criticisms of Alamariu will fault this one as well for its alleged failure of engagement with the vitalists. They are free to continue their own engagements with his worldview as unconvincingly as they like. They are likewise free to continue cultivating their intellectual niches, however wantonly bespoke their ultimate form, and however unfruitful their ultimate result.
There is a form of engagement far more successful than theirs or mine that those peddling mediocre discourses will have a harder time dismissing, and with which Alamariu and his fans will reckon with difficulty. It belongs to Dustin Sebell, associate professor of political science at Michigan State University, and appears in First Things (an adaptation of an article set to appear in the Political Science Reviewer). Bronze Age Mindset, written in a deliberately inflammatory and ungrammatical style, can be difficult to take seriously. This is a dual advantage for its fans, who embrace its unconventional form as a defense against critics and accuse them of out-of-touch misunderstanding. But Alamariu has recently published another work, Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, that has aspirations to genuine intellectual sophistication. It largely consists of his Ph.D. dissertation.
The intent of Alamariu’s dissertation, in Sebell’s telling, is to defend the “practice of ‘breeding’ human beings on the grounds that some people and even peoples are naturally, in their ‘blood,’ superior to other, inferior people or peoples.” In so doing, Alamariu “elevates courage and, to a lesser extent, cunning so far above other virtues (moderation, justice, and piety) that he defends pleasure-seeking, lying, and ultimately even tyranny itself.”
Sebell finds, however, that his argument is lacking. It relies overly on “shock value,” “authority,” and citations of texts that “are contradicted by the very passages he cites.” Concerning Alamariu’s obsession with “breeding,” Sebell finds he lacks the courage of his convictions. “Breeding turns out to be only one of two elements required for ‘virtue,’ the other being . . . training or education.” As for his elevation of courage, Sebell finds that “Alamariu isolates and elevates the most spectacular part of virtue (courageous self-sacrifice) to the detriment of the whole, as is particularly evident in his preference for war over peace.” But, Sebell reminds us, “courage is courage only if it is put to worthy ends.”
Sebell’s assessment of Alamariu’s work amounts to a forceful and merited criticism, and is worth reading in full, as it covers other things unmentioned here. But Sebell is not without pity for the work’s author, “a burned child of his time” caught in a “predicament” forced by the modern world. And it is not without sympathy for that predicament: “the fight against the ‘last man’” produced by the modern world’s enervating moral and spiritual pathologies; its inability, having believed itself to have conquered or even abolished human nature, to reckon with that still-extant nature’s higher needs.
That fight, “when started by someone unable to finish it,” Sebell observes of Alamariu’s impotent combat, “ends in only-half-joking last-mannishness.” However, to Sebell, “starting the fight is not nothing.” Those of us who also worry about what modernity has done and is doing to us, and who search for solid ground on which to rest our questing souls, would be ill-served to look to a man who has lowered “the bar of virtue in order to cope with the pain caused by his inability to accept any of the religions, with their promise of justice in another life,” as Sebell puts it.
The vitalists and other discontents present their grievances to the world as a kind of willful dare; dismiss them, and in their minds, you have become a defender of the very status quo they (in some senses rightly) disdain. Yet the best Alamariu can offer, as Sebell points out, is “a self-defeating, last-ditch effort to restore the depth and height of premodern life to just about the only authority left standing for us today: modern natural science (biology).” His supposed rejection of modernity, then, would thus instead perversely have us join its war upon the higher things it sees as threats: the nation, community, faith, family. To defend these things from hostile pressure, to root an aimless world back in surer ground — these are the virtuous and, indeed, exhilarating obligations of men today, tasks to which true courage would be put to good use. As the unmanly Bronze Age mindset is unequal to them, men must look to higher sources of meaning.