“So what is your next book about?”
“Eugenics.”
“Eugenics, what’s that?”
“Put simply the idea that if you breed good with good you
get better.”
“Why on earth would you want to write about that?”
“Good question!”
 | |
| Eugenics Congress Logo |
That is a brief account of a conversation that I had very
recently. The person I was talking to repeated a question that several others
have already asked me so I thought I might expand upon my reasoning a little.
It might be a topic that is going to keep on coming up.
I came across Eugenics as a subject at a young age, I don’t
remember exactly when or where but I do remember it being on my mind while I
was still at school. Those who follow my blog will know that I was born
disabled, that is, I have two congenital conditions. For a eugenicists this situation
would be abhorrent, proof that the human species was slipping into an abyss of
deformed, weak and deplorable life forms. The great white race of the western
world was being brought low by racial impurity and the intercession of
compassion that allowed the unfit to survive.
Curiously that is not how Sir Francis Galton, the man who
established Eugenics as a ‘science’ in the early 20th Century saw
it. He believed that humanity could be raised to higher level of perfection by
a system of controlled human breeding. The logic was very simple, take a man
and woman who are both physically fit and intelligent, let them make a baby and
the resultant offspring would, in all probability, be superior to the parents.
In support of this principle Galton could turn to Charles Darwin’s
new theory of evolution and how nature operated to ensure only the survival of
the fittest. Gardeners and stock breeders had also known for a long time that
there was an irrefutable logic to this principle of ‘good + good = better’,
they had been enacting it for millennia to produce better crops and better
cattle.
Although the logic of the eugenic principle seemed
self-evident the science behind the transmission of human traits from one
generation to the next was not. DNA would was confirmed 1956 by Watson and
Crick although its existence was first promulgated in 1869. This presented a
problem to the ardent eugenicist, they simply did not know how to proceed with their
vision of creating a superior human race.
One of the themes of my new book Eugenica is the corruption
of a simple idea into something more reprehensible. As Eugenics began to grow
as an academic subject, spreading from Britain to America, Germany, and
Scandinavia amongst other places, it did so against a social backdrop of a
growing awareness of the population of existing disabled people. During World
War One it was revealed that 2/5ths of the population that were eligible for
conscription were found to be unfit for military service. It was estimated that
there were some 16 million citizens of the United Kingdom who could be classes
as disabled.
A Royal Commission into condition of the feeble minded
reported in 1910 in an alarmist fashion suggesting a growing population such
people that was in danger of swamping the healthier people of Britain. The
commission’s report was taken seriously by politicians like Winston Churchill
and Parliament enacted the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 that put into British
Law the terms idiots and imbeciles.
Facing an impasse with the practical problem of implementing
a eugenics based breeding plan for the human race, a problem identified by the
playwright George Bernard Shaw and the author H. G. Wells as stemming from the
social convention of marriage, eugenicists looked instead at what was seen as
the menace of those feeble in mind and body.
Eugenics began to advocate for segregation and enforced
sterilisation of the disabled. In the state of Indiana in America, and also in
Sweden, they got their way. Very quickly the question of breeding a superior
human race became one of dealing with the several million inferiors that
already existed. This branch of Eugenics is termed ‘Dysgenics’. It is the
version that most people today are familiar with because it is the one enacted
by the Third Reich in Germany.
It is known but not always mentioned that the early Nazi
government actively pursued dysgenic policies against the disabled in Germany. Adolf
Hitler himself signed an order for a program called ‘Action T4’ that saw
enforced euthanasia used to kill over 100,000 disabled German citizens. Many of
the techniques used later at places like Auschwitz were originated and refined
in the Action T4 program.
I doubt very much that Sir Francis Galton would have
approved of dysgenics. He was not at heart an evil man, although some social
commentators have since presented him as such. In fact Galton was a polymath, a
genius, who made significant contributions in the fields of statistics,
sociology, psychology, anthropology, geography, meteorology; he even devised a
method of classifying finger-pints. Galton was a Victorian visionary who wanted
to improve the world and his early theories on Eugenics were very much in that
mould. The science of the time, however, fell very much short of that required
to either support or refute his theory of Eugenics.
There is something appealing in the notion of a man and
woman combining to produce a child who would be both physically and mentally
superior to their parents. The notion that such a child would be free of
illness of any kind is one that a parent can readily identify but we know now
that genetics does not work that way. The capacity for genetic mutation is at
the heart of evolution and adaptability. Every generation contains within it a
countless number of mutations of the inherited DNA code. The vast majority of
these mutations prove ineffective; they do not do anything. Some prove
detrimental, giving rise to physical deformity and mental impairment. A few
more prove very useful giving us singers, artists, geniuses. This is what early
eugenicists did not know and lacking this information they could not defend
their simple principle against the rise of the dysgenic interpretation.
Eugenics began with the best intentions but, as the saying
goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and so it was proved.
