Great turmoil in the English-speaking world over the latest controversy that is shaking the consciences and professorships of closer woke observance, as much on the Atlantic side of the old continent as on the American side. The object, or rather, the subject of contention is Dr. Nathan Cofnas, an American, a philosopher of science, specializing in biology, with several publications to his credit in science and philosophy.
A researcher outside the box
Cofnas, a research associate at the University of Cambridge, came under fire for a long article under his own signature, posted on his website, titled "A guide for a Hereditarian Revolution. How to win and create a better world", the ultimate purpose of which, openly stated, is to illustrate to conservatives a new platform of attack against wokeism. This platform, a veritable new Weltanschauung, is not proposed as an ideal manifesto of a new conservatism, but rather as a methodological praxis, which the author calls hereditarianism, devoted to the defeat of that particular mixture of political liberal-radicalism, economic liberalism and philosophical postmodernism that we can most briefly summarize as "wokeism."
What Cofnas suggests
The conception of hereditarianism expressed by Cofnas, while conceptually simple would deserve, in order to be fully illustrated, an in-depth study probably longer than the essay itself that defines it; we can, however, take up its salient features, which can help to give an overview both of the praxis proposed by the American academic and of the reasons for the media blizzard that has erupted around him. Briefly, we could divide the Cofnasian methodology of combating wokeism into two parts: a pars destruens and a pars construens. The pars destruens, contrary to what one might expect, is not aimed at Wokeism per se, but rather at the conservative front itself to which Cofnas makes no secret of belonging. Conservative critics, and the public opinion that supports them, the researcher asserts, are in a constant passive-defensive position toward Wokeism for an extremely simple reason: they accept its premises.
The dogma of equality
The essential premise of Wokeism, derived by direct ancestry from the Enlightenment, is the equality of human beings. Equality, mind you, which is of human beings and not among human beings; an essential difference: it is, according to the Woke worldview, a substantive, ontological equality, and not just a legal equality before the law (be it Caesar's or God's one), which has already been the heritage of Western culture for centuries. The substantive equality of human beings thus presupposes, also echoing Marx, that any existing inequality is not only illusory but also unjust and, more importantly, the child of an equally illusory and unjust patchwork of social constructs and economic arrangements (according to Marxism) and language games (according to postmodern philosophical doctrine). Logically, if conservatives accept this premise, they place themselves playfully, and of their own free will, within the value horizon of wokeism, which represents precisely the messianic will to redress these differences and compensate their alleged victims. The positions of white supremacists and anti-Semites are also radically rejected, for Cofnas they start from the same premises as Wokeism: equality. White supremacists and anti-Semites hate non-Whites and Jews as they can be accused, with heated resentment, of rejecting equality and harboring vague ambitions of domination over whites, accusing the various "minorities," in essence, of the same things that Wokeism ascribes precisely to whites (racism, classism, sectarianism, etc. ), in a perhaps not accidental reprise of the words of German Social Democrat August Bebel, who had given anti-Semitism the pithy definition of "socialism of imbeciles."
A scientific approach
Cofnas boldly illustrates how the differences between the various races, a term he claims, is a real taboo of contemporary society, comparing it to the religious ones debunked, after long scientific research, by scientists such as Charles Darwin. Far from being a supremacist, Cofnas defines himself as a race realist, a definition he says is more collimated with the truth that can be scientifically ascertained through field studies.
The pars construens of Cofnasian hereditarianism consists, for the writer, in a sort of collage between a revival of some topoi dear to German philosophers of Romantic extraction of the 19th century and a perspective markedly influenced, in the political field, by the so-called elitist school that arose in Italy at the end of the same century (Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels). Conservatives had already identified cultural or civilizational differences as the origin of some inequalities within the multiethnic societies of the West (cf. Huntington), but for Cofnas this perspective is "soft," thus insufficient and partial. Cultural differences have, according to the American researcher, "material" origins, that is, in the language of contemporary science, genetic ("Culture influences academic outcomes, but it is not a completely independent force that can be detached from genes."). As we said, this is a reprise of a theme dear to the Romantics, Herder above all, but also to the Russian historian and geographer Lev Nikolaevič Gumilëv, who, according to a particular form of geographic-climatic determinism, would see the natural context influencing genes first and, because of this influence, culture (including aesthetics), which, as a result, would originate, with all the corollary of differences on the levels of academic performance, sports and so on. Since we are talking about genes and not maximum-systems metaphysics this position, for Cofnas, may well deserve as much the adjective of realistic as that of scientific.
A work for elites
As mentioned, however, the second direction of Cofnas' attack on Wokism passes through a rediscovery, this one not philosophical but exquisitely political, for the central role of the concept of elites. Thus, in Cofnas' case, the idea of a conservative cultural revolution from below is rejected, but so is the prospect of an intellectual elite acting as a "pathfinder" for conservatives on the model of that theorized by Gramsci for the Communist Party. Unlike Gramsci, Cofnas does not intend to create new elites, but to conquer existing ones and bring them into the conservative camp. The author of the essay is honest to the point of brutality in recognizing how at the moment the cultural but also "intellectual" (IQ is mentioned several times) elites are resolutely on the side of wokeism, but this can change by showing them how and why the prospect goes to undermine the very foundations of their being elites (in a manner similar to how the intellectual enlightenment of many rulers in the latter part of the ancien regime detonated the revolutionary phenomena that would dethrone them). In Cofnas' exquisitely elitist vision, then, it is power, and power alone, that pulls the strings of the political and philosophical discourse of nations. An almost Confucian vision in which the intellectual and philosopher is at the limit entitled to the important but dim role of sage and adviser.
A controversy among conservatives
This is a vision and methodological practice that, while coming from an American academic, is much more consonant with the sensibilities of European conservatism than with that of the stars and stripes. Flaming in Cofnas' essay, not surprisingly, is a cordial but lively rebuttal by two well-known American conservative pundits, Christopher Rufo and Richard Hanania. In Rufo's perspective, there is no need to fight Wokism directly, but to besiege the institutions (and cultural casemates) through which it thrives and in which it unfolds; in Hanania's, on the other hand, it is to be confronted with only the arsenal of reforms and legislative tools made available by the democratic state. These are two visions, those of Rufus and Hanania, which in Cofnas's eyes appear as conspicuously naive, dangerously underestimating the messianic-religious afflatus that animates the woke movement, which is far from being a mere political phenomenon but is configured as an all-round Weltanschauung, with ambitions for total reform and regeneration of the human being as a whole.
And of course comes the censorship....
Regardless of the veracity or otherwise of the theses proposed by Nathan Cofnas, which, for those who had fully internalized the premises of Wokeism, turn out to be not only blasphemous but even inconceivable, the media pillory was unfailingly triggered. Immediate retaliation was exercised by the very funders of the academic's stay in Cambridge, the Leverhulme Trust of London, to which were then added the censorious sirens of other academics and, not least, those of the media and students. In Italy, a country far removed, at least for now, from this kind of controversy, the echo of the gazzarra reached only the editorial staff of Dagospia, but it is difficult, from the peninsula, to give an idea of the uproar generated by Cofnas' studies and theses in now solidly multiracial and multiethnic realities such as the United Kingdom or the United States. There has been no shortage, however, of voices in support of Cofnas, albeit critically declined. This is the case, for example, of Oxford University pro-vice chancellor Bhaskar Vira, who, while opposing Cofnas' theses, resolutely defends his freedom of expression, while others are clamoring for the scholar's firing on the spot. It is worth, in the face of this stress test for democracy (Dagospia's definition), a further reflection, which we postpone to another venue, on what is the role of the university in the West today: laboratory and academy of all kinds of studies, even the least aligned, or megaphone of power?
Research fellow at the Machiavelli Center. A philosophy scholar, he has been working for years on the topic of the revaluation of nihilism and the great German Romantic philosophy.
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