NOW UNPAYWALLED: Are We Replaceable? Part One

Renaud Camus and the real force behind "replacism"

Edit 11 October 2024: This is part 1 of a three-part series. Part 2 is here and part 3 is here. I’ve lifted the paywall on part 1 and will host a subscriber discussion thread next week, Wednesday 16 October, for anyone interested in the themes it explores. I’ll do the same with parts 2 and 3 in following weeks.

On the list of influential writers no one will admit to having read, Renaud Camus is surely second only to Steve Sailer. Convicted in 2010 of inciting hatred against Muslims, after referring to Muslim migrants to France as “thugs” and “colonisers”, Camus is most notorious for coining the phrase “The Great Replacement”. The term has since taken on a life of its own: frequently cited by white identitarians and mentioned in the manifesto left by Brenton Harrison Tarrant, the New Zealand gunman who shot 50 Muslims in two mosques in Christchurch in 2019, today the phrase “Great Replacement” is more or less synonyous with “far right conspiracy theory”.

So, especially in a week where a British man was jailed for two years for “inciting racial hatred” by producing stickers, I’m playing with fire by offering a reading of Camus. But in what follows I want to distance Camus’ ideas both from racial violence, and also from a supposed conspiracy some associate with the phrase “Great Replacement”. Camus himself rejects the notion that any such conspiracy exists, preferring instead to address an ideology he calls “remplacementisme”, translated in a recent English-language anthology of his writings as “replacism”.

In what follows, the first of a three-part series, I’ll argue with Camus that replacism is not a conspiracy. And yet, polemic aside, it addresses something real: a structural blind spot across the Western world concerning the nature and meaning of human culture, predicated on the idea that peoples have no collective attributes, only individual ones.

This predates the two World wars, but has become a crusading force in their aftermath. It is arguably the central paradigm of contemporary Western culture, and finds expression in fields as diverse as architecture, tourism, and gastronomy. And my aim in venturing beyond the cordon sanitaire to risk a discussion of Camus’ provocative body of writing, is emphatically not to express (or incite) hostility toward other peoples. It’s to explore what insights this dissenter from present orthodoxies can offer, into an ideology now so normalised as to be all but invisible.

I want to disaggregate replacism from crude and paranoid conspiracy, with a view to showing how its demographic aspect is less a cause than effect of something much more pervasive. I’ll show how Camus’ analysis misses its real driving force (spoiler: this is not migrants from the Global South into the Global North). Then in the second part, I’ll explore replacism in this broader sense.

In the third, I’ll link replacism to our prevailing managerial ideology of the body: what elsewhere I’ve termed “Meat Lego Gnosticism”. For those of you who read this newsletter for its (reactionary) feminism, this will hopefully make clear how Camus’ macropolitical critique articulates with my usual enquiries into embodiment, anti-universalist feminism, and the structural blind spots that make mothering so invisible and under-valued.

What “The Great Replacement” Is Not

Before we get to replacism, my real interest in this essay, let’s talk a bit about Camus’ radioactive way into this discussion: the so-called “Great Replacement”. In particular, what this is, and is not. Camus sees this “Replacement” as both real, and emphatically not a sinister conspiracy or form of covert racialised animus. In his view, it’s an emergent phenomenon, driven by

obscure movements in the depths of the species, subject to the very laws of tragedy, starting with the first of them, which has it that the wishes of men and of civilizations whose disappearance is foreordained shall be granted.

(Camus, 2007: The Communism of the Twenty-First Century)

Camus characterised the phenomenon itself in The Replaceable Man (2012) as

the change of people, the substitution of one or several peoples for the people whose ancestral roots are there, whose history had for hundreds or thousands of years coincided with the territory in question.

How should we interpret this? Observing this ‘change of peoples’ has seen Camus condemned by association with views he himself disavows, some of which are bluntly xenophobic or deeply paranoid, such as fearful predictions (including by the recently-jailed sticker-maker) of “white genocide”. Camus himself rejects such associations, viewing the phenomenon he describes not as literal “genocide” but a metaphorical one. He describes this in terms borrowed from the French Martiniqan poet and post-colonial activist Aimé Césaire: “genocide by substitution”.

Césaire uses this polemical term to characterise a cultural process, often imposed by a conquering power. In it, the culture - that is, the language, faith, history, culture, collective memories and lifeworld - of a people is expunged by a conqueror, and replaced with the conqueror’s own. A classic example of this process might be the boarding schools in which Native Americans were compelled to forget their ancestral lifeways and adopt Anglophone American ones instead.

The Great Deculturation

Camus argues that something akin to this stripping-away and replacement of culture has been at work in Europe since at least the 1960s. In its course, the ancestral cultures of Europe have been largely dissolved: a process of disarmament which he calls “The Little Replacement”, or (as in his 2008 essay of the same title) “The Great Deculturation”.

This, he argues, is a byproduct of what he calls “hyperdemocracy”, or an overreach of egalitarian principles beyond their proper domain. In Camus’ view, the “legitimate domain” of democracy is political equality, and equality of opportunity. Hyperdemocracy is the spread of egalitarianism beyond this to areas where “it has no business”. When this happens, he argues, “nothing is allowed to be superior to anything else if that superiority might be suspected of having the least social character”. As he sees it, this radical egalitarianism obliterates culture. For to become cultivated is to become “unequal to oneself”; and hence, to achieve complete equality, culture must be emptied of meaning.

In turn, he argues, this produces a universal petit-bourgeoisie devoid of cultural inheritance, willing to accept in principle the notion that peoples are interchangeable, and thus defenceless against demographic change. Accordingly, wherever this process is established, including all of western Europe, the “substitution of one or several peoples for the people whose ancestral roots are there” is well advanced.

In London, for example, according to Department of Education data, as of 2019 less than 10% of schoolchildren in the London boroughs of Brent, Harrow, and Newham are white British. This will not surprise anyone who has visited those areas, and noting it does not necessarily imply a value judgement. But when compared to the demographics of those areas at the beginning of the twentieth century, it’s difficult to think of a word that more accurately describes this than “change of peoples”.

For Camus, this “substitution” isn’t natural, organic, or value-free: it’s driven by ideology. The core premise of this ideology is that people have no collective characteristics, only individual ones. To illustrate, let’s revisit those DfE statistics: these record that schoolchildren in Harrow are 49% ethnically Asian (NB: Americans would say “South Asian”). Can we infer anything about likely social norms in those schools, based on this information? Our prevailing modern orthodoxy claims that no, we cannot make any such inferences. Camus would argue that on the contrary, we absolutely can.

What is a people?

Can we say that sub-groups of people have any commonly observable shared characteristics? Earlier ages took for granted the idea that “peoples” exist, for all that their definition is fuzzy. Today, though, trying to define a “people” or even assert the reality of this concept is liable to get you cancelled, or at least bogged down in sterile debates about DNA. For Camus, though, a people is not a crude racialist phenomenon: in his notorious 2010 The Great Replacement he describes a people as “less a hypothetical community or biological kinship than a long-shared history”, an accretion of “culture and heritage” more than genetics, plus “desire, will, love”. It is, in Camus’ words, a “spirit and way of being on the Earth”.

This, he emphasises, is not exclusionary. And yet anyone with the most rudimentary capacity for pattern recognition can see the difference between one people and another. The people-ness of a people is a Gestalt, define neither in crude biological terms nor narrowly by behaviour. But you know it when you see it.

To illustrate: if, as an English person, you’ve been to the Costa del Sol, or somewhere similarly popular with English holidaymakers and retirees, you’ll know you can spot the English a mile off. It’s not just a matter of appearance, build, skin colour, or language. There are characteristic gestures, intonations, habits, and foodstuffs; preferred hours and manner of eating; clothing choices, relation to the landscape, et cetera.

Can you join a people? Camus thinks you can, though the bar is high. “Individuals who so wish”, Camus argues, “can always join a people out of love for its language, literature, its art de vivre or its landscapes.” But, he argues, you can’t do this at scale: “peoples who remain peoples cannot join other peoples. They can only conquer them, submerge them, replace them.”

What does this look like in practice? Returning to the Costa del Sol, we find that as the density of a people’s presence increases in an area, infrastructure and the built environment will begin to reflect that presence their preferences. In this way, for example, some areas of coastal Spain have been markedly anglicised.

Are they just as Spanish as the Spanish?

On the Costa del Sol, as elsewhere, there is nothing intentionally sinister about this. It’s an organic effect of two peoples coexisting in the same space. Historically, though, changes of people in a place have tended to prompt resistance from the people already in that place. For Camus, the essence of “replacism” is that it anaesthetises such pushback, by denying that any aggregate patterns can be ascribed to a “people” - or insisting that, if such things exist, they are at best unimportant or indefinable.

For replacism, then, “peoples” are not a thing. There are only human individuals, interchangeable regardless of origin, history, heritage, upbringing, ethnicity, language, and so on. And, Camus argues, if you cling stubbornly to the belief that peoples are a thing - eppur si muove - you will face the rhetorical bludgeon he describes as “the second career of Adolf Hitler”, in which any residual acknowledgement of any shared characteristics of any people will be smeared as tantamount to Nazism.

If this is true, though, cultures can have no content. If, as Camus puts it, “a veiled woman with a shaky command of our language, entirely ignorant of our culture” can say to “a native Frenchman with a passionate interest in Roman churches, the finer points of vocabulary and syntax, Montaigne, Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Burgundy Wine, and Proust and whose family has for several generations lived in the same little valley of the Vivrais […] “I am just as French as you are”, it follows that “being French is nothing”.

Replacism as a moral force

Why, then, is any of this happening? Camus is a prolific writer, and his thinking on this has evolved since the essays in Enemy of the Disaster were translated. (More on his more recent thinking in part 2.) Camus presents replacism as a moral force; but none of the essays in Enemy of the Disaster present a worldview in which this could be sincerely believed, theorising instead that replacism is a matter of bad faith, mendacity, cowardice, and self-interest. Equally, he seems unsure of who is driving it: in one place the change of peoples is characterised as emergent and tragic, in another as “invasion” or “colonisation”. In The Great Replacement, for example, he describes migration to France from former French colonise as a “counter-colonisation of France by Algeria”.

And yet colonisation requires rule by the coloniser: think of the Normans in 1066, who displaced the Anglo-Saxon ruling elite and imposed their own. No equivalent process has occurred in France. Quite the opposite: North African migrants to France are overrepresented at the bottom of the socio-economic scale. (This is broadly true wherever the ‘change of peoples’ has taken place in Europe.) So if there is some form of colonisation afoot, what is its nature? And cui bono?

Camus gets closest to suggesting a motive force when he characterises the order that emerges in the wake of deculturation. “[W]herever hyperdemocracy is to be found”, he argues, in The Great Deculturation, “men of culture are turned into corporate managers or replaced by them”. This replacement of organic culture by managerialism and the market in turn recalls what Carl Schmitt, in his 1929 essay The Age of Neutralisations and Depoliticisations, names the “spirit of technicity”. In every successive age of modernity, Schmitt argues, the drive has been to find a neutral domain within which human activity is no longer forced to distinguish between “friend” and “enemy”: that is, an age of ultimate relief from the political. But as each attempt at finding such a domain has failed, so the search has culminated in an age that admits of no governing principle but technology, which is now presented as the ultimate neutrality and our final salvation from the political.

Schmitt writes:

The evidence of the widespread belief in technology is based only on the proposition that the absolute and ultimate neutral ground has been found in technology, since apparently there is nothing more neutral.

And it’s here that we find the central clue to replacism’s moral claim. The forcible equalisation of everything, that is, draws its ideological power from a promise to abolish the friend/enemy distinction in favour of radical “inclusion”. In turn, this allows us to situate “hyperdemocracy” that drives replacism more precisely in terms of hard and soft real-world power. It is a spirit of technicity, motivated in moral terms by a desire to eliminate the political (with its implication of conflict, hierarchy, and exclusion) in favour of a pacific universalism. And this ideal today is represented most powerfully by the world’s only superpower: America.

The real occupier

In America Against America (1993), a study of the United States written after his visit to the country, the Chinese Communist Party official and political thinker Wang Huning observed that the American order is so individualist that the only power capable of governing it is technology. “To a great degree,” he argued, “American society is managed by a technological order. Man is more obedient to the technological than he is to the political.” In a propositional nation, one of whose governing assumptions has long been that people should be treated solely as individuals, Wang observes that “there is generally no power that can break through faith in individualism and the barriers [surrounding] the private sphere. [But] science and technology have this power.”

To recap, then: what Camus calls ‘replacism’ has flattened and obliterated European cultures, in the name of a “hyperdemocratic” egalitarianism whose moral force derives from the longing to obliterate friend/enemy distinctions. This means no rule is possible save by “the spirit of technicity”: the managerial rule of technology, that promises ultimate relief from the political. And, as Camus observes in The Great Deculturation, this clears all before it, making room only for the free operations of money:

Chateaubriand believed there were secret affinities between equality and tyranny. There are others between hyperdemocracy […] and the reign of money, submission to the powers of money, and avaricious docility before the laws of the market.

Taking these implications together, we can conclude that Camus is right to speak of a “genocide by substitution” powered by colonial rule. But attributing this African or Islamic migrants is a mistake. Mass migration from the Global South into Europe is an effect of replacism, not its cause. The real power driving genocide by substitution throughout Europe is the empire that has emerged out of the American republic.

This is, for me, an uncomfortable conclusion. I have a great many friends and professional connections in the United States. But we can perhaps be more specific: the driving force of replacism is not individual Americans or even the legacy American people: that is, the historic, cumulative American culture and folkways. America herself contains many thinkers critical of these forces, and many Americans would likely be appalled by the thought that their nation’s governing ideology is centrally implicated in the destruction of everything that makes the Old World enticing, distinctive, and awe-inspiring to the New. But replacism drives that aspect of American imperial hegemony that has become identified with the “spirit of technicity”, with post-political managerialism, and with the aspiration to radical, universal neutralisation and depoliticisation expressed by these forces. Replacism is also now contested in America itself, not least in disputes over how to manage the southern border.

Saying all this, even if I’m right to paint the postmodern American empire as the main contemporary driving force of replacism, this is (as I’ll explore further in part 2) not its first incarnation. Nor is America necessarily its last. And even in either geographic or ideological America, there are still places to stand outside replacism.

So with this in mind, in part 2 and part 3 of this series I’ll map some aspects of global cultural colonisation by the “spirit of technicity” and its neutralised, depoliticised regime of technological governance. I’ll sketch the other Great Replacement - a phenomenon visible in architecture and the built environment as much as peoples, and that in every case precedes the form of replacement documented by Camus. And I’ll draw some inferences from these dis- or re-placist no-places to explain further their supporting worldview: what we might call managerial theologies of the market, and of the body.

NOTE: I’ll be hosting a subscriber discussion next Wednesday, 16 October 2024 on Renaud Camus and the themes I’ve explored here.