The anthropological discovery that human beings can and must adopt relations to themselves and to those like them that are described by such verbs as taming, breeding, and tending, occurred in the Western evolution of ideas on two occasions in quite singular contexts, each time at a decisive turn in intellectual history. The first manifestation of this complex of ideas is associated with the name of Plato. In a novel manner, the founder of the Athenian Academy attempted to precisely conceive the traditional praxis of educator and statesman, with reference to a kind of anthropological difference that opened up a fissure within the essence of being human. Because human beings in advanced cultures cannot be by nature what they nevertheless are by nature, they must be educated, as individuals, and made to submit to rational governance, as citizens. Education and political stewardship are two fields of praxis in which the incapacity of human beings in advanced cultures to fulfill themselves without guidance from others (putting it in ancient terms: to obey their own nature) is manifested in a particularly noticeable way. In more closely defining pedagogical and state-cybernetic functions, Plato reaches back for images and analogies that are taken from the pastoral sphere. The dialogue Statesman is the primary source for Plato’s pastoral theory of politics in its fully developed form. Here we encounter a famous and still somewhat scandalous turn of phrase according to which the art of the political steward is an “art of shepherding” the featherless, hornless bipeds of unmixed breeding, along with the telling addition that – since tyrannies are never an option for Greeks in general and philosophers in particular – politics is concerned with a voluntary supervision of a herd of creatures living together of their own volition.1 A characteristic feature of Greek rationalism is the belief that human beings can only be dissuaded from unreasonable inclinations and induced to enter the house of reason through a specific ascesis – that is, a system of ongoing practices. It is unnecessary to point out how influential Plato’s pastoral anthropology was in this regard. Thanks to a series of translations and reformulations, it has left a deep impression on the Western imaginary, particularly the way in which it was blended with the figure of the good shepherd in the New Testament. For almost 2,000 years, Christian communal logic has been based on these Platonic images of herds and their shepherds.
The second discovery that it is necessary to train human beings to be human beings occurs under radically different circumstances in the nineteenth century, after Darwin naturalized the history of the species and placed the human being at the end of an evolutionary line that showed so-called Homo sapiens to be a cousin of the hominidae. Ever since, the traditional pedagogical question of how human beings are to be formed into human beings has been overshadowed by evolutionary biology. Instead of the tension between unreason and reason, we now have the antagonism of wilderness and civilization or, to put it in mythological terms, of Dionysian and Apollonian powers. Only in such a situation can the talk of domestication assume a serious tone. Now, the formation of human beings is no longer merely to be conceived metaphorically, as entry into the house of reason, but is supposed to literally be conceived as leaving behind the animal wilderness for civilized domesticity. This occasions Nietzsche’s unsettling intervention: he was one of the first to recognize that the process of generation, in the literal sense, always also implies instances of self-breeding and, on his view, usually as a kind of a progressive self-abnegation in thrall to the ideal of priestly and anti-aristocratic prejudice. Hence the provocative verse from the song On Virtue That Makes Small in the Third Part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
At bottom these simple ones want one simple thing: that no one harm them…. To them virtue is whatever makes modest and tame; this is how they made the wolf into a dog and mankind himself into mankind’s favorite pet.2
It is enough for us to note here that though Nietzsche’s observations continue to be well-understood, his concerns are no longer ours at present. While the author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra toiled away on the problem of how the suppressed sheen of the wilderness could be saved from castrative civilization’s total triumph, the question for us is rather how to succeed in putting a halt to the running wild of civilization at its height.
The twentieth century’s specific contribution to a new definition of the conditio humana begins with the realization that domestications cannot be sufficiently defined with the categories of evolutionary theory – neither for household pets in general nor for the king of household pets, the human being. Successive generations that follow a trend toward domestication are not governed by the normal evolutionary pressure of a purely natural environment. They benefit from a special climate that has been created half naturally and half culturally, in which it is not necessarily those who are optimally adapted for external nature who survive but rather the specimens that do well in internal conditions: these are the living beings who distinguish themselves by their exceptional agility, their increased capacity to learn, their engaging sociability, and, finally, by their bio-aesthetic advantages. Nest-building creatures, particularly birds, provide a natural-historical prelude to this, but even individual reptiles, such as the well-known Mexican salamander, retain their larval form for the duration of their lives, as do those particular mammals that are able to offer a high standard of nest-security and parental care to their young. In the case of such living organisms, biologists have observed a complex of characteristics that since the late nineteenth century were described by the term “neoteny,” that is, the retention of juvenile features (or were described with the concept “paedomorphism”). This includes the trend toward accelerated births, which leads to the emergence of quite immature young, a feature that is inconceivable without the luxury of a secure nest. These tendencies all come together in Homo sapiens, whose young are characterized by extreme immaturity at their time of birth. “Premature birth” [Frühgeburtlichkeit] among humans, to use the terminus technicus coined by Adolf Portmann in the middle of the twentieth century, not only implies that the human life cycle has an unusually prolonged juvenile phase, but also paradoxically entails that specimens that are “mature” in the biological sense die off, while premature, larval, or fetal forms acquire a monopoly on sexual reproduction. According to the Dutch paleoanthropologist Louis Bolk, whom we have to thank for having already formulated these dramatic insights in the 1920s, the evolutionary-theoretical truth of Homo sapiens is to be found in the provocative thesis that we represent a species of culturally and biologically successful fetal primates, who despite their juvenilization form a species capable of sexual reproduction.
A third discovery of human domestication is associated with these references to the neotenic condition of the human species, and gives a new meaning to the previous two. Disclosing the mystery of neoteny confirms the insight of cultural anthropologists that human beings, even in their early stages, must be conceived as cultural creatures. From this point on, the fundamental enculturation of human beings appears under a twofold light: First, culture signifies the resumption of a biological nest-privilege with the resources of civilization – in this context, domestication means neither entry into the house of reason nor into the house of civilization, but rather the gradual transformation of nest-security measures into architectonic protections and socio-technological privileges. It has since been very clearly recognized how culture as a whole functions like an immersive incubator that envelops its members. Second, through these reflections it becomes clear that Homo sapiens is dependent on cultural guidance for even its motivational disposition. After the breakdown of a purely biological programming of orientation, due to its extreme neoteny, the instinctive framework of Homo sapiens no longer guides it from within and it loses the firm linking of brain and environment, losses that require compensation. This compensation is provided by systems of symbolic guidance, which replace the instincts with authorities – a motif that was developed in the mid twentieth century by Arnold Gehlen. Symbolic ordering systems disburden all human young of the insoluble problem (at least on the individual level) of having to create the experiences and discoveries of their ancestors over again all by themselves.
The introduction of the concept of neoteny into the science of the human being clearly represents the most subversive innovation on record in the field of anthropological knowledge after Darwin. Its consequences should not be overlooked now, especially since most disciplines in the human sciences have yet to understand them at all yet or else have done so inadequately. The discovery of neoteny is also significant because it allows phenomena such as the passing down of traditions and education, which were supposedly already exhaustively researched, to appear in a different light. On the one hand, thanks to neotenology it is evident that pedagogy always comes too late, because the newborn human being, due to its premature birth, does not initially need education but rather demands the resumption of gestation by extra-uterine means (a motivation that Kant had already grasped in his anthropological writings, when he emphasized that deficient education can always be compensated for, while deficient discipline means that something is missing that can never be redeemed again). On the other hand, this theory reveals that human beings can never be educated enough, because their entry into the house of symbolic orderings forever remains a labile operation susceptible to disruption. Psychologists today are especially aware of this, and increasingly warn us of the dangers associated with the weakening of symbolic authority in postmodern (“fatherless”) society.
With what has been discussed to this point, I hope to have explained in broad outline why the members of the species Homo sapiens as such always already represent products of domestication: biologically through neotenization, and culturally through their integration into self-generated symbolic orders. Owing to the synergy of these two aspects, historically developed cultures first and foremost amount to (relatively) closed survival units, in which individual cultures are kept as though in artificial enclosures, or incubators. This was the issue that was occasionally described metaphorically as the “human park.”
In light of these reflections, it should be clear that self-domestication is a concept that encapsulates humankind’s past. The mystery of Homo sapiens – that it exists despite its biological impossibility – is only to be interpreted in terms of an anthropology of domestication. At the same time, we must acknowledge that prior methods for domesticating and taming the human being were obviously inadequate. When we see what an advanced pedagogy for our species involves, we immediately realize that the work of civilization is only half done. Even if human domestication appears to be a fait accompli in some respects (inasmuch as human beings only exist in the incubators of their respective cultures), it remains incomplete. The reason for this is easy to see. Cultures may respect domestic orders in their own internal solidary systems, yet domesticity in their relations with what is outside remains unfinished, because single cultures do not gather together under one roof very often, instead forming environments that are strange to each other, and not seldom hostile. The historical trace of the enduring lack of domesticity in external human relations is war, which has occasionally plagued the evolution of the species, but that first developed into a stable, somewhat professionalized institution approximately 7,000 years ago in Eurasia.
If we define more recent cultures as unified entities capable of war, we have a concept that allows us to see how the lack of domesticity has cast its shadow over internal cultural relations. Insofar as successful cultures prepare for war, their members never really feel secure in the shelter of their own homes. Anyone who wishes to overcome the poisoning of domestic life by preparing for war abroad must therefore reflect on the extension of domestication beyond older ethnic solidary unities. We find attempts at this, particularly in early Buddhism, in Stoicism, and in early Christianity. All three wisdom teachings (that are often misunderstood to be religions) are essentially movements for de-domestication: their founders demand that followers break with traditional domesticating systems. Buddhism refers to those who turn away from their old communities to enter the path of the Dharma, the house-abandoners expressis verbis. Jesus’ shocking demand that one must leave behind father and mother for the sake of the heavenly kingdom is well known. The ethical demand that the wise human being should prove himself to be a citizen of the universe (kosmopolitēs) and not merely a member of his own primary ethnic community goes back to Stoicism. Of course, these programs of radical de-domestication never aim at a return to the wilderness (although there are eremitic phenomena in all three movements), and even less at a regressive break with national symbolic orders. Uprooting from former dwelling places is part of a relocation effort to a higher domesticity, which for now can only be articulated in spiritual or cosmic symbols. In essence, Buddhist, Christian, and Stoic de-domestications are to be interpreted as acts of conscientious objection, indeed as respective metaphysics of desertion. They put an end to membership in cultural communities whose existence is based on war against foreign cultures. War is the limit situation of unified domesticated entities that simultaneously forms the fundamentally non-domesticated situation between unified foreign entities. Given these premises, only someone who rejects cooperation with their own collective in order to devote themselves to a domestication of humanity beyond polemical, individual cultures can conscientiously object to military service.
At this stage of moral evolution, we can ask how the naive pacifism of the great wisdom teachings and philosophies can be developed into a scientifically grounded pacifism. The answer to this question is provided by a second-order theory of domestication. Such a theory at the same time offers the foundations of a general theory of extended solidarity.
We now understand that individual cultures function as primary domesticating agents by safeguarding their members in a symbolic and material order. At the same time, it is evident why domesticating agents cannot themselves be domesticated: they are still oriented to the emergency of non-domesticity, to a life-and-death battle with foreign cultures – however muted this battle may have become in many places over the course of the modern era, reduced to merely economic competition. In view of these conditions, the phenomenon of culture – that in everyday consciousness is not entirely incorrectly equated with the concept of a “nation” [Volk] – can be redefined as a symbolically integrated population whose members cooperate with each other not only in domestic situations, but also in situations of life-and-death struggle. Cultures thus represent real operative survival units – in Heiner Mühlmann’s terminology, they are maximal stress cooperation units (MSC units).3 This definition has the advantage of clarifying why the most successful cultures are simultaneously the most domesticated and the most warlike, as a rule. The classic example of this in the cultural milieu of the West is offered by the Romans, whose civilization formed an enormous parallelogram of familialism and militarism. The secret of Roman culture’s success – as with every other distinctive military culture – consisted in the creation of a military technique whose principle could be characterized as the moral control of high-stress reactions in the face of present life-threating dangers. The fact that human beings are able to cooperate in relaxed [entlasteten] situations does not require much explanation. Conversely, the fact that men cooperate under maximal stress or pursue common goals even in battle and close proximity to death represents a phenomenon that is very much in need of explanation. Cultural theory shows us that the creation of extremely improbable patterns of conduct such as “maximal stress cooperation” requires a great deal of moral injunction (categorical prohibition of cowardice), cultural idealization (heroism), and technical preparation (weapons training, drill formations).
All of this suggests that maximal stress cooperation be viewed as key to the successful survival of cultures in the historical era, or the age of advanced cultures. At the same time, we should add that such acts of cooperation represent a paradoxical form of domestication. This is evident in the training of animals, which renders the most difficult biological processes – high-stress reactions – subservient to strategic goal-planning. Anyone who reflects on the continuation of humanity’s self-domestication and its integration into overlapping solidary communities must consequently turn to the question of whether traditional, culturally formative kinds of maximal stress cooperation can be overcome.
With this, a fourth sense of self-domestication emerges. After the talk of taming and domesticating human beings through neotenic juvenilization, and then additionally through political pedagogy, and finally through the internalization of symbolic orders, a rather technical version of the problem of domestication comes into view when we consider the military training of stress reactions. A pacifism elaborated in terms of anthropology cannot be content with the fact that rational individuals move out of their family’s or nation’s house into the house of God or the Dharma – or join the invisible nation of the wise. At moments of crisis, these morally fastidious movements lead to martyrdom, insofar as the latter provides justification for the belief that it is better to be killed than to remain in solidarity with a murderous cultural group. From the perspective of cultural theory, we would need to examine whether this exceptional form of non-cooperation with maximal-stress cooperators can be revised into a practicable general rule. This can be verified, although the difficulties associated with it remain great indeed. If cultures are to be understood as systems of domestication that are not themselves domesticated, the concern with higher-order domestications can only be assuaged by a revision of how cultures have been designed to this point, as polemical survival units. In this context, the concept of “solidarity” attains its specific transcultural resonance.
By its very nature, the work of the culture of taming the wild animal is carried out over three stages. The first stage is reached when a number of survival units, through mimetic assimilation, reach the point of being able to hold each other in check. In so doing, they do not aim at any internal domestication or demilitarization, yet are able to provide the deterrence needed for a containment that is prerequisite for progressive civilizations.4 At this stage of interethnic relations and relations between states, diplomacy arises – as an art of well-tempered hostility. This civilizing effort experienced its juridical fallout in modern Europe’s ius publicum. In this regime, it is obvious that regressive tendencies are not to be eliminated. The reason for this lies in the still unchanged equation of culture and survival unit.
Hence the second stage, that of the containment of polemogenic cultures, consists in reforming such cultures into interdependent systems. In doing this, cultures make their vital interests so dependent on association with their partners from other cultures that we may here speak of the emergence of a higher-order survival unit. This can be observed at present in the economically interdependent states of the West, whose likelihood of regressing to war with each other has become minimal. The effect of domestication here proceeds from the reformatting of a perceived survival unit. Such a survival unit transgresses its previous external borders so as to render the former enemy or rival into a cooperator, making them advantageous for its own survival. This process is readily apparent in the historically unique construction of the European community, which, in a fascinating process of self-containment, has transformed itself – against a backdrop of war that is not so far in the past – into an advanced political domestication unit. That even such self-containment units have to contend with the endogenous forces of disintegration is shown by the results of the referenda on the European constitution, in France and in the Netherlands, in May and June of 2005, respectively. Clear popular majorities made it known that they still consider their own nation, and not the European Union, to be their survival unit. The voting results in both countries are de facto profoundly illusory, since the respective survival interests of both can only still be satisfied in the European format, and this has been the case for some time already. (At the core of the will to illusion lies the fear of losing economic privileges, which we might prefer to believe have been earned by nations as such and not by the system of interactions between nations.)
The third stage of the culture of domestication of the wild animal would be achieved the moment the great, internally domesticated survival units, which one may call civilizations,5 using Samuel Huntington’s terminology (namely “the West,” “Islam,” India, China, Africa, Latin America), would have again developed among each other such a high degree of affirmed independence that they progress beyond the stage of non-domestication in their external relations. Present tendencies point in this direction. Nevertheless, they do not yet lead out of the stage of reciprocal containment. We should just as little ignore the fact that immense conflicts arise on the front lines, between large units – particularly between the Chinese and the Americans, and between the West and Islam. The contending cultural blocks are a long way from effectively gathering under the roof of a common civilization. In the external relations of large units, there can be no talk of the law of the excluded emergency, which was formulated by Bazon Brock and that governs internal civilizations. Indeed, containment as such is itself always put into question again, not least by the tragic double role of the monopolar world power, the United States of America. This country has dedicated itself to a global civilizing mission, on the one hand, and follows a crude regional pressure-group politics, on the other. It presents the spectacle of a civilization that simultaneously seems to be domesticator and wild animal. Thus the USA has quite rashly discredited the ideas whose creditability must be maintained at any price, if the progressive civilization of individual cultures is supposed to advance beyond the level of polemical containment.
In conclusion, I would like to point out a fifth sense of the concept of domestication. Aside from the still insufficiently tamed external relations of cultures, the sore point of their internal relations (biological reproduction) is also very much in need of regulation. Even in this regard, the culture of the wild animal proves to be an entity that requires domestication. This clearly entails lowering the birthrate in all cultures, to a degree compatible with their socioeconomically prevalent living standards. It rules out any kind of population increase for the poor, as well as fierce reproductive conflicts – as have been observed for a long time in Arab lands. The population there, from 1900 to 2000, grew from 150 million to 1.2 billion humans, which amounts to an eightfold increase. Immense violent discharges will be the almost unavoidable consequence of such an increase. Recent demographic research has made clear that there is a positive correlation between excessively high birth rates and war or occurrences of genocide. Through polemically motivated overproduction of human beings, whether latent or manifest, young men in particular between the ages of fifteen and thirty become a risk group that overstrains their own cultures’ potential for domestication. Information provided by institutes for strategic research reveals that in the Arab and African world over the next twenty years several hundred million young men will be ready for all manner of polemical activities. There is fear that not a few of them will make good recruiting material for religiously coded programs of self-destruction.
In view of these circumstances, we must split the question of whether humanity can domesticate itself into two halves. The first would be whether such self-taming should be expected in the near future. The answer to this question is clearly no. In all likelihood, the first half of the twenty-first century will remind us of the excesses of the twentieth century. The loss of life will probably be immeasurable, the damage to morality and culture incalculable. The second half of the question is related to longer-term perspectives. Despite everything, they are to be assessed with cautious optimism. If the attempt to bring the two biological explosiva of human cultures, polemophilic stress-programs and excessive reproductive tendencies, under control is successful in the long term, the process of global self-domestication (in other words: “the civilizing process”) may then receive a favorable prognosis.