Chapter 164. A Vendetta Called Revolution: Heisman’s Sociobiology of Liberal Democracy, Secularisation and Political Order

Part II is the larger half of Suicide Note. It contains three treatises: “A Vendetta Called Revolution: How Ethnic Hostility between Anglo-Saxons and the Normans Who Conquered Them Evolved into Liberal Democracy” (pp.631-1157); “Converse Cognates: Why the Norman Conquest was the World-Historical Ass-Kicking that Deflected the English-speaking World from the German Path to Nazism” (pp.1158-1525); and “Creating God and the Evolution of Genetic Suicide” (pp.1526-1738) [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “Overview”; “Table of Contents”]. Here Heisman’s politics and his theory of religion meet. He applies kin selection to ethnic groups and nations, and on that basis reads rights, Puritanism, the American Revolution, the Civil War, capitalism, Marxist “class”, political correctness and secularisation as consequences of the Norman Conquest of 1066. This chapter gives his theses in order, with the historians he cites. It also separates the documented history recorded on the reference shelf from Heisman’s genetic reinterpretation of it.

1066: ‘The Death of English England’

The first section of the treatise is titled “1066: The Death of English England”. Its sub-headings are “Plan A: Revolt”, “Freedom Fighters Failed”, “Plan B: Revolution” and “Repressed Restorers Reawoken” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.633-639]. In the study guide’s summary, Heisman details how William replaced the entire English nobility within twenty years, as the Domesday Book documents. He quotes Jefferson and Paine on usurpation to establish the Conquest as a founding illegitimacy [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 52]. He recounts the legendary exodus of English nobles to Byzantium under Siward Bearn, who named settlements after London and York [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 53]. He reads the Domesday Book of 1086 as the record of the Anglo-Saxons’ reduction to a “subpolitical body” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 112]. He also cites Gerald of Wales: “The English are the most worthless of all peoples under heaven, for they have been subdued by the Normans and reduced by the law to perpetual slavery” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.678].

The reference shelf confirms the core facts. “A direct consequence of the invasion was the almost total elimination of the old English aristocracy”. “By that time only about 5 per cent of land in England south of the Tees was left in English hands”. “After 1075 all earldoms were held by Normans”, and after 1095 no English bishop remained. In the 1070s a fleet of 235 ships sailed for Byzantium, where “the English became the predominant element in the elite Varangian Guard” [Wikipedia: Norman Conquest, “Elite replacement”; “English emigration”]. The same article records that the free peasantry lost status, possibly because of the Conquest, and that slavery declined. About 28,000 slaves are listed in Domesday [Wikipedia: Norman Conquest, “Society”].

Predatory kin selection: Searle and Garnett

The sociobiological core of the argument is Heisman’s reading of Eleanor Searle’s Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power, 840-1066. He quotes her conclusion that the “closest approximation to the essence of that aristocracy is to think of it not as a clientele, but rather as a warrior kin-group”. He also quotes her description of William’s chiefs in 1066: “all could call him brother or cousin… They were a family in pursuit of maximum profit” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.732-735]. Heisman’s gloss is: “Norman ‘predatory kinship’ was an aggressive kin selection strategy”. On the one hand, he says, the Normans promoted “cooperation among themselves and predation on outsiders”. On the other, they were “eugenically channeling resources to the most talented” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.734]. He reads the murdrum fine, a collective penalty laid on a hundred when a Norman was killed, as “the legal-kinship double standard that captures in miniature the social problem established by this new order” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.735-736]. From George Garnett’s Conquered England (2007) he takes the claim that “Duke William’s claim to the kingdom of England was fabricated” and the notion of a “fiction of continuity” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.679]. He also takes Garnett’s point that William was the sole source of tenure in conquered England [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 81]. The reference shelf confirms that under William “all land was ‘held’ directly from the king in feudal tenure in return for military service” [Wikipedia: Norman Conquest, “Consequences”].

The Norman Yoke, rights and the revolutions of 1649, 1660 and 1688

Heisman builds on Christopher Hill’s “Norman Yoke”, the folk theory that traced oppressive government to William the Conqueror. He reads the regicide and the abolition of the House of Lords in 1649 as the completion of what the Anglo-Saxon revolts of 1066-71 had failed to achieve [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 56]. John Pym presented Parliament’s cause as the reassertion of Saxon liberties that had survived the Conquest [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 64]. The Restoration of 1660 put the Norman imperial project back on track [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 62]. The settlement of 1688 reconciled Norman force with the rights of the Commons [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 65]. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man is for Heisman an empirical inquiry into the hereditary basis of English government. It asks of the Saxons, “when did [they] stop being conquered?” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, sections 54, 66]. His general thesis is that, after Darwin, rights cannot rest on natural law. They are an evolved adaptation, invented specifically to illegitimize the Norman Conquest order [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 58]. One section reads Magna Carta the other way round. Coke’s extension of the Charter from the Norman lords to the Commons destroyed the Charter’s original intent, and Cromwell’s “Magna Farta” showed clearer understanding than the lawyers’ cunning [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 80].

The reference shelf traces the idea’s own history. Orderic Vitalis wrote that “the English groaned aloud for their lost liberty”. The term “Norman yoke” first appears in the apocryphal Mirror of Justices, printed in 1642 and “presented and accepted as historical fact”. Coke, Pym, Lucy Hutchinson and Henry Vane used the theme in a propertied sense. Lilburne, Warr and Winstanley used it radically: in 1649 Winstanley wrote that the people “have caste out Charles our Norman oppressor”. The idea returned in the Historical Essay on the English Constitution (1771), in Cartwright, in the Paine-Burke debate and in Jefferson. Carlyle, by contrast, judged the Conquest beneficial [Wikipedia: Norman yoke]. The article on the Conquest concludes that the theory “owes more to the period in which it was developed than to historical facts”. It sets Richard Southern’s view of 1066 as a radical turning point against that of Richardson and Sayles, who see less discontinuity [Wikipedia: Norman Conquest, “Historiography”].

America: elections, Puritans, Cavaliers and the Civil War

Heisman reads democratic elections as a peaceful internalization and domestication of civil war between Norman and Saxon, a repeated refighting of the Battle of Hastings through electoral means [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 59]. In his account the early presidency balanced Norman Virginia (Washington, Jefferson) against Saxon Massachusetts (Adams) [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 57]. He follows David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed on the two migrations: Puritans fled the “eleven years tyranny” (1629-40) to Massachusetts, while Cavaliers “arrived in Virginia during the 1650s seeking freedom from the Puritan yoke” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 73]. He calls George Fitzhugh, the defender of slavery, “the Thomas Jefferson of the Confederate Revolution”. He quotes Fitzhugh’s verdict that the Declaration’s principles were “wholly at war with slavery” and “equally at war with all government, all subordination, all order” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, sections 75-76]. Heisman holds that the Civil War “refought the foundational issues that originated with the Norman Conquest”. He calls the result “Lincoln the Conqueror”, leaving a “double-headed Normanglica”: a Saxon-Puritan America and a Norman-Cavalier British Empire [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, sections 74-76].

In this setting Heisman makes his remarks on race. They are reported here in his own words. The subsection “Barack Obama: Supernigger” (p.675) argues that the attention paid to Obama’s race shows that “race matters”. He links Southern slavery to the Norman past: “Normans enslaved the black race in America just as they had once enslaved the Anglo-Saxon race in England”. On this reading, “the racial meaning of the equality posited by Jefferson and consummated by Lincoln was the racial equality of Norman and Saxon. Normans could be equal to Saxons only if Saxons were equal to blacks” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.676-680]. He then turns the epithet on the Anglo-Saxons. They believe themselves “only conquerors and never the conquered”, so “one can only suppose that Anglo-Saxon believe they are Superniggers… an Über-race” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.681]. Elsewhere he calls blacks “victims of Anglo-Saxon selective stupidity” as well as beneficiaries of its political solution [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 77].

Locke, Hobbes and the ‘political cyborg’

Heisman cites John Dunn’s conclusion that Locke was “basically a Calvinist natural theologian” whose Two Treatises rest on a benevolent God. He infers that a secular liberalism that keeps Locke’s conclusions while rejecting his Biblical premises is irrational. Modern liberalism “secularized” Puritanism into the language of rights [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 86]. He traces Locke’s rejection of Filmer’s patriarchalism to Locke’s father, a Parliamentarian cavalry captain [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 68]. Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) appears in “Thomas Hobbes: Philosopher of the Twilight Zone” (p.1009) and “The Physics of the Modern Political Cyborg” (p.1387). There Heisman argues that it engineered “the individual” as a technological solution, making fear of death the premise of order against the kin-selective loyalties that had caused the civil war [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, sections 83, 133]. Heisman cites Searle against Hobbes: Norman risk-taking refutes the claim that fear of death is universal human nature [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 83].

Class, capitalism and Marx

The subsection “How Marx Borrowed Britain’s ‘Class’-focaled Lenses and Saw the End of History” (p.1094) contrasts Marx’s “class is the key to history” with Disraeli’s “race is the key to history” and his “two nations” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 90]. Heisman cites Macmillan’s “hereditary animosity” between “warring classes or tribes”. He concludes that Marx fatally misread British ‘class war’ as fundamentally economic, when it actually originates in the ethnic/biological distinction introduced at Hastings [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 107]. Capitalism and the Puritan work ethic were the Saxons’ weapons against Norman heredity [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, sections 91, 134]. Lenin’s vanguard corrected Marx, and that correction led logically to Stalinism [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 92]. For comparison, Eugene McCarraher’s history argues that capitalism is not a “solvent of enchantment” but a “surrogate form of transcendence”, the “religion of modernity”. McCarraher asks whether “the waters of pecuniary reason constituted a baptismal font” [McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon, #67252, “Heaven Which Exists and Is Everywhere around Us”]. Heisman’s “Cathedral of Commerce” (p.1082), the Great Seal design pairing Exodus with Hengist and Horsa and described as Christian outside, Jewish inside, reaches a similar result from a different starting point [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 89].

Secularisation as ‘the Unification of Church and State’

In “Secularization: The Unification of Church and State” (p.1046) Heisman inverts the usual formula. He quotes Stubbs: “the cohesion of the church was for ages the substitute for the cohesion which the divided nation was unable to otherwise realise”. Christianity acted “like a brace or cast that guides and directs the healing of a broken bone” across the ethnic split. On this view secular liberalism is “comparable to the removal of the brace or cast of religion” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.1046-1047]. He then qualifies the thesis. Biblical religion also became “a catalyst of civil war”. The Independent preacher Hugh Peter found “not any text of privilege of Parliament, which indeed came in with the conquest”, and because the pope had blessed the Conquest, “the Puritan Revolution was only a continuation of the revolt against ‘Rome'” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.1048-1049]. Just before this he describes America as “the literal afterlife of the Anglo-Saxon nation… a nation not of blood and body, but of a kind of spiritual creed” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.1044-1046].

Converse Cognates: the English Sonderweg

In “Converse Cognates” the Conquest becomes “the world-historical ass-kicking” that turned the English-speaking world away from the German path [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 94]. Heisman uses Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation to argue that the Germans kept an original Kultur that the Saxons lost [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, sections 98, 110]. Sombart’s contrast between English commerce and German heroism comes next [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 103]. Troeltsch supplies the claim that collective devotion is legitimate only where spiritual culture survives [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 118]. Schmitt’s thesis that liberalism negates the political is read as the liberal state’s origin in an internal war against the conquest-state [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 109]. Heisman also offers a counter-intuitive claim: centuries of submission to the Normans had prepared the Saxons for “mindless obedience” better than the Germans [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 96].

Living in the afterlife: individualism as genetic suicide

The “Creating God” treatise draws the biological conclusion. “Living in the Afterlife: The Sociobiological Logic of Individualism” and “The Child-Tyrant” (pp.1609-1626) argue that consistent individualism makes the child “simply another individual”. Why, then, would a rational person volunteer for servitude to a “child-tyrant”? The result is “genetically suicidal birthrates” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 131]. “‘Enlightened’ self-interest leads to racial self-destruction. From the view of kin selection, the individualistic logic of liberal democracies is rational insanity” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 132]. He uses Frank Salter’s theory of “genetic interests” to reckon Germany’s losses through emigration to America [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 128]. He calls liberal democracy economically engineered genetic suicide and says that both Auschwitz and liberal democracy were “designed to solve ‘the conqueror problem'” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 132]. Political correctness, finally, goes back to the English taboo on naming the Norman-Saxon conflict, which he calls “Anglo-Saxon selective stupidity”. E. A. Freeman’s claim that the Normans were “turned into Englishmen” drew Chesterton’s quip about a “Saxon Conquest” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, sections 145-146]. Scientific objectivity itself is described as an adapted weapon in Anglo-Saxon ethnic struggle [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 147].

Documented history and Heisman’s thesis

The extension of kin selection to nations is contested in the library’s scientific literature. Dawkins defines kin selection as gene selection among relatives, in which “the closer the relationship, the stronger the selection” [Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, #55197, ch.6]. Bo Gräslund lists the “no small demands” the theory makes, beginning with the need for “an animal [to] be able to recognise its own kin”. He argues that its imagined effects are “so similar to the actual effects of early close contact” that it “greatly obscured” the role of imprinting. He also holds that sociobiological jargon “is more a reflection of the modern Western dream of individual achievement than basic principles of evolution” [Gräslund, Early Humans and Their World, #37604]. Brian Baxter states the philosophical objection directly: “it is argued that naturalism commits the naturalistic fallacy”. He also grants that sociobiology applied to humans has “an unavoidable involvement in normative and prescriptive discourse” [Baxter, A Darwinian Worldview, #25957, ch.6].

Key points

• Part II (pp.631-1738) explains English and American liberal democracy as the outcome of Norman-Saxon ethnic kin conflict after 1066 [#38252].
• Elite replacement, Domesday and the Varangian exodus are documented on the reference shelf. Heisman’s addition is to read them through Searle’s “predatory kinship” as aggressive kin selection.
• In his account, rights were “invented” to delegitimise the Conquest order. The Norman Yoke ran from Pym and Winstanley through 1649, 1660 and 1688 to Paine and Jefferson.
• Elections are, on his reading, a domesticated civil war. The American Civil War re-fought 1066, with Fitzhugh as the “Jefferson of the Confederate Revolution”. His race remarks, including the “Supernigger” subsection, are reported verbatim in context.
• On Heisman’s reading, Marx misread ethnic conflict as class conflict, and capitalism was a Saxon weapon against Norman heredity. McCarraher, from another angle, calls capitalism the “religion of modernity”.
• Secularisation is “the Unification of Church and State”: religion was a “brace or cast” over ethnic division, and Puritanism turned the Bible against the Conquest.
• Rational individualism ends in “genetically suicidal birthrates”, liberal democracy is economically engineered genetic suicide, and political correctness is the taboo on naming 1066. Gräslund and Baxter set out the scientific and is-ought objections to the method.