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.How would you say that in English? Porkification! Fat boys and fat men! The same in domesticated animals.Complete unselectivity of feeding habits!’‘But surely’, I said, ‘that’s the fault of the food manufacturers.It’s not genetic.’‘I don’t care if it’s cultural devolution, or genetic devolution, I know cultural devolution moves ten times faster than genetic devolution.But a culture behaves exactly like a species!’Now if you let Lorenz carry you any further with this argument, you might find yourself drawn to the conclusion that the finest specimens of humanity, ‘the strong, manly men’ he is always hoping for, have a duty to suppress the inferiors—and that that, briefly, is what the ‘aggressive drive’ is for.But those who were taken in by On Aggression might have had second thoughts had they known large chunks of it closely resemble a paper, written in 1942, with the Final Solution in full swing, when he was Professor of Psychology at the University of Konigsberg in East Prussia.‘The Innate Forms of Possible Experience’,45 which has been omitted from the two volumes of his collected papers published in English, evoked Gestalt perception and the principles of ethology to recommend a ‘self-conscious scientifically based race policy’ to eliminate the degenerates who preyed on the healthy body of society like the profiteering growth of a malignant cancer.The arbiters of this scheme were to be ‘our best individuals’ (Führer-Individuen) whose intolerant value judgements would decide who was – or was not – stricken with decay.Lorenz rejected Spengler’s pessimistic conclusion that nations declined through a logic inherent in time.Applied biology would forestall Spengler’s ‘inevitable fate’.Then, as now, the greylag goose is pressed into the argument.A pure-blooded gander has ‘a more sharply contoured head, straighter posture, redder feet, broader shoulders’, etc., whereas a barnyard goose develops a stunted appearance, not to mention a complete breakdown of morals.Similiarly, he says, we admire in men tight hips, wide shoulders and an eagle-like stare.46 And we recoil from the features of decay: ‘Loss of muscle, shortening of the extremities, growth of fat and a quantitative increase of eating and copulation drives.’ ‘Not one feature of domestication do we instinctively approve of.’Again, he illustrated the text with photographs; a fish from the stream, a wild greylag gander, a wolf and a bust portrait of Pericles – all long-featured – are juxtaposed against a pop-eyed goldfish, a domesticated goose, an Old English Bulldog (the date is 1942) and a marble head of Socrates – all of which had the squashed-up features of genetic decay.The lesson of this paper was that it was positively heroic to act with intolerance: attempts to discover why you rejected a person simply obscured your original judgement.And he exhorted the racial biologists to be quick: ‘There is indeed need to hurry!’—though there were more than two years left.I quote this passage if only for the style:Just as in the case of a surgeon who, in removing a growing cancer tumour, draws with his knife an arbitrary and ‘unfair’ sharp line between what is to be removed and what is to be preserved, and consciously prefers to remove healthy tissue than let diseased tissue remain, so must the a priori value judgement, when it comes to determine a frontier, decide on a point where plus is transformed into minus.There is a lot more to the paper, including a fantastic rigmarole that attempted to resolve the headache of every racial biologist.Why should the gene for beauty go sauntering off in a different direction from the gene for goodness? How was it that a perfect Teuton soul had nested in the body of the Führer?—to say nothing of the fact that by 1942 the racists had to accommodate the Japanese?Of course, one could dismiss all this as a temporary, if lethally ingenious, aberration, had Lorenz not continued to chum out many of the same ideas, the same metaphors, sometimes even the same passages – doctored here and there for postwar sensibilities – from 1950 to the present day.For example, when he discusses the ‘social fighting reaction’ in On Aggression, he regrets the misuse of this primaeval drive by demagogues and hopes that ‘our moral responsibility may gain control over it’
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