An Open Catacomb: Four days with the Nietzschean Right

On the final night, I’m in a taxi with one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, arguably a doyen of his field. During the ride, I ask this brilliant man of science a delicate question...

Aug 19, 2023

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*Various details have been changed to protect people’s identities.

Written by Matthew Archer.

Part One: Geniuses Shouldn’t Pay For Parking

On April 16th, 1860, a thirty-seven-year-old lawyer named Frederick H. Billings stood around a peculiar rock with eleven other men. The odd geological composition was likely thrust to the surface centuries prior, thanks to the nearby Hayward Fault. The twelve trustees of the College of California were meeting to dedicate their new campus in a state that was barely ten years old. Only they faced a typical problem. One that — over a hundred and fifty years later — keeps Californian tech founders up at night: what name to choose?

Years later, as the new college town rose from the dirt, the trustees started naming streets. North-south streets were named after men of science. East-west, after men of letters. The designer Frederick Olmsted wanted to call the city Peralta, after a founding Spanish family who had travelled to then-Spanish shores in 1776, six months before the United Colonies became the United States. But the trustees wanted something more intellectual, something more grand. They were, after all, pioneers, men who had come to California looking for gold and adventure.

Billings was walking in the woods when he hit upon it. Legend has it, he was standing by Founders’ Rock when he remembered the final stanza of George Berkeley’s 1728 poem, Verses On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America:

Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The first four acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama with the day;
Time’s noblest offspring is the last.

Berkeley had been a world-famous philosopher and Anglican Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland. He too had an adventurous spirit, travelling to Rhode Island in 1726 in anticipation of building a missionary college in Bermuda. As historian of the city Charles Wollenberg writes, it was rather fitting:

What particularly attracted the trustees was a line in one of Berkeley's poems: "Westward the course of empire takes its way." The trustees, a confident group of prosperous, prominent men, were still very much affected by the Manifest Destiny ideology that had promoted the American conquest of California two decades earlier. To them it must have seemed altogether fitting and proper that the Pacific Basin would be the next "course of empire" for American expansion. Given this assumption, the idea of a brave new college community overlooking the Golden Gate and the new Pacific frontier was irresistible.

This is Berkeley’s origin story.

Today, the founders would be astonished by its success. The university — the centripetal force of the city — is a world-leading institution. Berkeley pulls in so many top scientists and economists that, since 2009, a faculty member or alum has won a Nobel Prize in all but four years. And Berkeley Laureates lay claim to something even greater than the million-dollar cheque, gold medal, international prestige, and handshake from the Swedish king: a lifetime parking spot on a crowded campus — a small gesture of reverence toward the type of mind that shapes each human generation. Aside from the scholarly atmosphere, there’s also the perfect weather — most days not too hot, not too chilly, just right. And so, to a pale Brit who has never visited America, this sounded like the perfect place to herd the world’s intelligence researchers for an annual conference.

That was the thought as I strolled through campus on a blue summer’s day, past the famous clocktower and up to the neoclassical library with its orange-tilled roof reminiscent of Prague. I’m in search of students to speak with. But something far more interesting quickly catches my ear: the slurred, demented screams of a madman.

He’s slouched on a plinth in the middle of campus. Nobody seems to pay much attention, he’s like a monument to apathy. This filthy young man with knotted, long blonde hair and opioid-eroded skin wears a once-white bra and cargo shorts. He seems to be rotting from the outside in. He yells at a group of distant students, closing his rant accusing them of being disgusting communists. Perhaps he isn’t mad, after all.

I pause to think about the best approach, the most likely way to tease out his story. Time wasted. I amp up the English accent to eleven and offer a polite, “Excuse me, I hope you don’t mind—”

But he interrupts, screaming louder than before: “DON’T TALK TO ME! DON’T LOOK AT ME! DO NOT LOOK AT ME!”

Somewhat startled, I offer a feeble “Okay, sorry I just wanted—”, but my mistake (I assume) was to have kept looking.

“I SAID DON’T LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT THE GROUND!”

I oblige.

“TALK TO ME FROM YOUR FEET!”

After a few more rounds of this, I give up, recognising the futility of trying to reason with a drug-addled mind. A young woman approaches as I walk away to ask if I’m okay. Her tone is odd — it’s as if she wants to say “sweetie” at the end of each sentence. “Are you new to Berkeley?”, she asks. Very, I say. “Ohh, don’t worry, it’s okay—” the extended Californian vowel distracts me, “we have a lot of this here.” I almost feel naive for expecting one of the world’s most important campuses to be safe.

On my first night, I’d heard and seen several black homeless folks on the street corner from the hotel window. In general, they were considerably worse off than the white homeless, who seemed to reside, like the madman, on or close to campus. A fresh streak of urine ran down one morbidly obese woman’s leg and gave the otherwise bougie square — full of expensive coffee, gelato, and salads — a sweet, foul smell. One man was singing quite well, though too loud for 10 pm. Another tapped away to an inaudible tune. Two elderly men sat in silence. That was Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley’s broken spine.

As you walk onto campus, you see a gold-leaf University of California sign on an elegant British racing green background. Perched next to it that first morning was Greg, a sane, sober homeless guy in his late sixties who secretly lived in the campus woods. He’d fought in Vietnam. I wondered what visiting middle-class parents thought and why security couldn’t just clear them off.

After the madman, I get talking to a clever comp sci Asian student walking her beautiful dog and ask her this very question. She tells me about how the city plays Whac-A-Mole with the homeless, clearing out an encampment every now and then, only for it to pop up elsewhere, that it’s been made legally difficult to remove people because the city doesn’t have enough shelters. Only infamous Oakland has a higher share of Alameda County’s homeless (where Berkeley is located). Between September 2021 and March 2022, Berkeley's Homeless Response Team removed over 75 tons of garbage, human waste and drug paraphernalia from homeless camps.

I ask comp sci girl about politics more broadly and why nobody fixes it, Bukele style — wouldn’t that be popular, I ask? Now I really am showing my innocence. She asks what brings me to Berkeley and I tell her about the intelligence conference, which she finds “super cool”. She’s clearly brilliant and talking to her makes me realise why I’ve flown five-and-a-half thousand miles to be here. Her speech, speedy and incisive, reminds me of a steam train — each thought seems to accelerate the arrival of the next, like coal thrown to its fiery engine. The study of intelligence can also be the study of beauty. We talk about Berkeley being over 40% Asian, about how that number will likely grow after the recent Supreme Court decision. She jokes that she inherited her creativity from her white dad and the high IQ from her Asian mum.

But such interesting talk of group differences will be almost entirely absent from the formal conference, which starts with a keynote from Frank Worrell, a distinguished giftedness researcher, and Steven Pinker who gives the same talk as last year about rationality, essentially a summary of his book. A few people are disappointed by this, understandably so. After all, here’s someone who could speak extemporaneously about myriad topics, or even just hold a Q&A (admittedly a somewhat self-aggrandising suggestion, but also more interesting — What’s your favourite Noam Chomsky anecdote? Care to speculate on the evolution of g and its relation to language?).

I jot down two points:

— Keith Stanovich (the doyen of rationality research) found that the correlation between a composite of rationality tasks (for example) and general intelligence is 0.7, providing a nice riposte to the idea that lots of high-IQ people are irrational.

— Myside bias (processing information in a manner biased toward your own prior beliefs, opinions, and attitudes) is the only bias that doesn’t seem to correlate with general intelligence.

But it seems Pinker, who will give a more scholarly and Straussian talk the following morning, is mostly lending his weight to a controversial field. A gesture for which many are, of course, grateful. His morning talk concerns public versus private knowledge. Someone asks for advice on presenting controversial work. Pinker tells the young man to always emphasise the facts-values distinction.

Part Two: The “Real” Conference

The formal conference is important, but it serves another purpose: Attracting interesting thinkers from both inside and outside the ivory tower. It’s fair to call some of these people dissidents, most of whom will not attend the formal conference. Instead, they hastily organise group chats and dinners. It’s a loose coalition united by an interest in the taboo: writers, YouTubers, Twitter anons, economists, world-leading scientists, and someone so famous that even naming his field would risk doxing him.

Many in this motley crew could fairly be labelled members of the ‘dissident’ or ‘Nietzschean’ right. This tribe sees Pinker’s brand of nice-guy Canadian liberalism, where we can all just hash out our differences over a beer, as outdated and naive. Someone reminds us that in 1968, Pinker was a fourteen-year-old secular Jewish boy living in liberal Montreal. The point is: if the strongest steel is forged by the hottest fires, you’ll have to adjust your expectations. Political ambition is made of sterner stuff. The Nietzscheans are more Team Rufo than Team Pinker. A dissenting voice reiterates the classical liberal critique, “You want to give the state the power to do the same to you? It’s a dangerous road to go down.” But to the Nietzscheans, neutrality is a mirage, a liberal’s useful fiction. You can't be neutral on a moving train.

Scattered amongst the Nietzscheans, however, are effective altruists, economically left-wing students, and relatively normal scientists and scholars sick of being stigmatised and denied research funding. A patchwork quilt knitted from defiance, potentially — though far from definitely — united on a handful of points. Perhaps the most important one is hereditarianism: understanding the power of heredity and evolution in shaping society and history. Coming together reminds everybody of the inadequacies of Zoom calls and DMs, of the online world generally, and of how social media amplifies the narcissism of — in the grand scheme of things — small differences.

And so, for four nights, I find myself at increasingly bizarre dinner parties. At one point, a friend leaves his table for water and tells me, “This is surreal. Four of my intellectual heroes are gathered on one table and none of them know each other.” I look around the room. If everybody could stop talking for just five minutes, it feels like they could take power by dawn. Pompous perhaps, but that’s certainly how it feels. All the energy, all the ideas, it’s here.

On the final night, I’m in a taxi with one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, arguably a doyen of his field. During the ride, I ask this brilliant man of science a delicate question: Have you ever encountered befuddled faces when people find out you’re religious? If so, do you have a go-to reply? I preface the question by telling him that a rite of passage for any somewhat clever kid of my generation seems to have been a militant atheist phase upon discovering that Richard Dawkins said that believing in God is silly. Many of us now look back in abject cringe at that time when we berated normies (perhaps even friends and family) for ostensibly believing in a ‘homophobic sky wizard’.

As with most intellectual phases, there’s no epiphany that breaks the spell. You just grow up. But for me, there definitely was a clean break: reading Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom. It’s partly a story about Carrère’s own conversion and eventual rejection of Catholicism, but it’s mostly a scintillating fictional account of Saint Paul and Saint Luke’s quests. A ‘clever meditation on belief’, as the publisher writes.

Carrère exposed the most embarrassing part of my own militant atheism. Not only had significantly smarter people believed in God, but they had grappled with questions I had not even considered. And yet I concluded in the ignorance of youth and with the conviction of a convert that they were obviously wrong. Of course, ‘clever people believe the stupidest things’ is its own genre of scholarship. My point is merely Mill’s:

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. […] Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them […] he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.

“Well, if it was good enough for John von Neumann…”, the man of science says after admitting that he had in fact encountered several bemused looks in his life.

“Do you see your science as separate from your faith?” I ask. A weighty pause. The car is silent, full of respect and anticipation. I am, after all, asking a more polite version of ‘So why do you, of all people, believe?’ Then the man of science begins to tell a story.

“I began noticing things.”

“What did you notice?” I prod.

“Well, for one, the higher comparative fertility of Christians. Lots of things like that…made me think. I haven’t really articulated this before.”

But then the taxi arrives, and we enter a beautiful Victorian house in the typical San Francisco style with all the wooden trimmings. Twelve of us gather in a cosy living room. For the first thirty minutes, the conversation turns to other matters (only four of us had been in the taxi). Then a fellow taxi traveller returns to the room with red wine and a thought regarding our previous conversation. I tell the room what I’d asked the man of science in the taxi and thus his story resumes.

For what must be twenty minutes, except for a couple of questions, everyone is silent. He’s probably the only religious man in the room and almost certainly the smartest. At one point, a latecomer (not one of us, but a friend of a friend of a friend) rudely interjects “What is this, a sermon?!”

“Sorry, and who are you?” One of us fires back.

But the newcomer isn’t wrong. It is a kind of sermon. He just doesn’t know the man of science. If he did, he’d be listening with equal intent.

The main theme is the Bible as the story of human evolution. He weaves Milton and Nietzsche into advanced scientific observations. Listening to him is like watching Federer play tennis. It’s not as if he’s a little bit ahead of you, as if you’d be able to catch up with a spot of hard work. It’s immediately obvious that the chasm cannot be closed. And it’s liberating. You can often understand the individual moves a great mind makes, but you cannot replicate the whole. Genius is more than the sum of its parts, a Gestalt entity. And to deconstruct is to disenchant. Far easier to sit back, relax, and absorb whatever comes your way.

The impromptu sermon ends with a comic, “I don’t know, did that answer your question, Matt?” He tells me that he hasn’t spoken about that stuff with anyone apart from his wife.

Whether it’s the red wine, the late hour, or the laughter, there’s a quiet peace in the room now. A room of friends and colleagues. It feels as though we’re a thousand feet below the ocean. Or like we’ve been snowed in. I think about the Christians in the catacombs worshipping underground, admittedly an odd scene for a bunch of Nietzscheans. But contrary to popular myth, the Christians never hid underground when persecuted. Everybody knew where the catacombs were. Instead, they worshipped alongside their pagan neighbours, holding not assemblies or Eucharists, but memorial meals for their dead family members. People kept alive by conversation — Galton, Fisher, Flynn, Lynn. And the time just goes.

Matthew Archer is the Editor-in-Chief of Aporia.

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