Apparently this needs to be said: eugenics is bullshit. Evolution doesn’t have an end goal or purpose. “Better” doesn’t exist outside of human values, and the psychology of those values is often bullshit, too: fantasies of superiority and nostalgia for the aristocracies of old in all their sadism, etc.
Despite having been completely discredited by Nazism, eugenics enjoys broad support among people who should know better, namely educated people. But education can’t fix asshole.
I went to Aeon this morning, and the top article was about the historical curiosity that Soviet ideologues had a problem with wave/particle duality back in the day. How quaint and obviously wrong! Understanding the past’s belief systems is important historical work.
But consider this article from further down the page, by Stefan Bernhardt-Radu. It’s about roughly the same time period: the first head of UNESCO was a progressive eugenicist related to Aldous Huxley. The lesser-known, interesting fact is that there was progressive eugenics. Bernhardt-Radu lovingly reconstructs the intellectual context, all of the vintage biology from 100 years ago, that made Huxley seem reasonable. The effect is to rehabilitate those ideas. Bernhart-Radu is a fan of Huxley’s, having written his dissertation on the guy.
It’s like writing an essay on how reasonable Margaret Sanger’s eugenics was (she founded Planned Parenthood). Apparently Aeon’s editors were sympathetic.
The essay goes through the motions at the beginning: wasn’t the Holocaust just dreadful? But of course there’s a “but…”
Today, we tend to think of eugenics as a Nazi catastrophe of racial cleansing. But, for Huxley, racial cleansing and human evolution were distinct. In a co-authored book, We Europeans (1935), Huxley campaigned against the racism of fascists and other nationalists, especially the eugenics of Nazi Germany. Though he was a eugenicist, Huxley did not see himself as a racist. Discoveries in genetics and statistics proved to him that there were more individual differences within racial groups than racial differences between groups.
This has the energy of the Nazi who wrote of a massacre that, “I immediately lodged the sharpest protest against this, in which I emphasized that a liquidation of the Jews could not take place arbitrarily.”
It just warms my heart to know that Huxley had it in for the cripples and not the niggers, y’know?
Huxley’s ideas show that, in many ways, our modern understanding of eugenics is overly simplistic. According to the American historian Diane B Paul in Controlling Human Heredity (1995), eugenics ‘was a more diverse movement’ throughout its existence. At some points, radical eugenic policies like forced sterilisation were carried out; at other times, eugenicists in Western nations tried strategies that were more similar to those used by welfare states. Almost all Western countries engaged in multiple forms of ‘improvement’. In Europe, eugenicists often tried strategies that were closer to those used by welfare states than by Nazi Germany. These approaches involved genetic counselling instead of sterilisation and giving money to ‘genetically endowed’ couples so that they could have families. In Britain, eugenics meant many things to many people, and Huxley’s eugenical vision for UNESCO was more nuanced than we might first assume. If we hope to understand his ideas, we need to resist the impulse to immediately equate them with the horrors of Nazi Germany.
Ah yes, the diversity of the movement committed to voluntarily reducing genetic diversity.
Some eugenicists used carrots instead of sticks, so we have to understand their motivations as fundamentally noble, right? It has nothing to do with Huxley’s self-image as an “Oxford man”, alluded to a few paragraphs earlier.
The quantum physics article could just take for granted that we all know quantum physics is real and we all agree on the facts (if not the interpretation). Bernhardt-Radu does us a disservice by explaining archaic ideas without explaining the modern understanding. For example:
The problem was that, by limiting natural selection in human society, the blade that once cut down out-of-control populations would become dull, and human progress risked slowing or reversing. Other species lived and died according to the limits of their environments. Humans seemed to flourish without limit. Our success at surviving and reproducing, facilitated by the lack of natural selection in society, had become a threat to our future success as a species.
This is missing anything about the role of fossil fuels. We have a much better picture of the limits to growth than we had in the 1940s. It’s a real problem that oil is finite and the planet can’t support our population without it. The population will eventually be smaller. How will we get there?
Next, Bernhardt-Radu summarizes Bergson’s Creative Evolution, from 1907, which is of course not how evolution works.
For Bergson, complexity was the evolutionary process of simpler organisms coming together in an entirely new organic system, which had more flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances.
Huxley believed that what was true for simple organisms and the eye was also true for culture. In an essay called ‘The Idea of Progress’ (1917), he wrote that this process of coordination – the ‘increased harmony of parts’ – was a primary evolutionary trend. He believed that humanity could progress if human beings became culturally and biologically integrated into a harmonious society where each individual could live with their own special cultural background and biological endowment, as long as these did not damage the whole.
Harmony is a pretty good ideal, but the naturalistic fallacy is always a fallacy.
In his book Religion without Revelation (1927), Huxley argued that science could create greater harmony in society by giving humanity a common vision of the future, based on our shared evolutionary past. He called this endeavour to use science for human progress ‘scientific humanism’.This would become central to his project of eugenics at UNESCO.
And 100 years later, the great intellectual trend of our time is science denial and conspiracy theory. Investing such hopes in science was never a good idea, because it’s a category error. Science has certain ethical values. Lying is discouraged. Information should be shared freely. But the output of science isn’t a list of moral imperatives. Science doesn’t tell you whether to build a nuclear power plant or an atom bomb.
In the 1930s, as the Nazi party grew more powerful in Germany, and its claims about racial purity spread, Huxley criticised the idea of a so-called Aryan race. In We Europeans (1935), he described this idea as a biological veil for a political agenda. At home in Britain, things were no better: genetics was often used to reinforce the class system and political power. Despite these issues, Huxley did not give up on eugenics.
Typical liberal, really.
The morally odious idea that we should be good to everyone, but it only matters because a select few happen to benefit:
His version looked different to people in Germany or in Britain. Huxley came to believe that equalising the economic and social environment – by distributing wealth, for example – fostered people who were truly biologically endowed. Under ideal conditions, these physically superior people could finally reach their full potential. ‘Under our social system,’ he claimed in the 1936 Galton Lecture to the Eugenics Society, ‘the full stature or physique of the very large majority of the people is not allowed to express itself.’ Instead, ‘innate high ability is encouraged or utilised only with extreme inadequacy.’ Only by harmonising the environment with human nature would the truly eugenically endowed emerge and flourish. Huxley believed that eugenics would be the best way of encouraging heightened abilities not just among living individuals, but across humanity’s entire future. What was less clear was what exactly defined a so-called heightened ability. What determined success?
Huxley made the following public statement, comparing individuals to the cells in a body:
Man must find a new belief in himself, and the only basis for such a belief lies in his vision of world society as an organic whole, in which rights and duties of men are balanced deliberately, as they are among the cells of the body…By working together, we must lay a conscious basis for a new world order, the next step in our human evolution.
A major problem with this analogy is that we now understand apoptosis. Would the genetically unfit be so kind as to kill themselves? It’s the Way of Nature.
This kind of scientifically justified elitism is, in the end, pseudoscientific:
Huxley also set his sights on intelligence. Further human progress would be generated by fostering an increasing number of intelligent people. Based on the idea that two intelligent parents had an increased chance of having smarter children, Huxley believed that the average level of intelligence could increase if more people of higher intelligence could be born. Huxley recalled that most people in his day had an average IQ of 100, while ‘geniuses’ were at around 160. But if the average were raised to 120, for example, the frequency of those with 160 might also rise, and the possibility of those with 180, or even 200, would likely increase, too. This eugenical vision was rooted in Huxley’s view of evolution as a process of incremental harmony and progress. To create a new evolved world of superior intelligence, scientific world humanism involved discouraging those who were less ‘endowed’ from reproducing. The greater the average intelligence, the better the world-mind.
This completely ignores regression to the mean. It ignores the fact that life selects for more than IQ. The result of a breeding program with this goal would probably be…lots of kids with autism and associated health problems.
We finally get to Bernhardt-Radu’s point, which is that Huxley’s views are not only of historical interest but actually acceptable:
It would also be an error to think Huxley’s views are outdated. After all, UNESCO still strives to equalise the environment by addressing poverty and education. And, in many parts of the world, aspects of Huxley’s version of eugenics live on. Fetal diagnoses are still performed, and, upon seeing a fetus ‘unfit’, some might perform a legal abortion. In vitro fertilisation, a dream of Huxley’s, now allows some people to select the semen, eggs and embryos more likely to produce genetically superior children. We may baulk at any talk of eugenics, or think of Huxley as naive for his view of scientific world humanism. Yet many of us make decisions related to genetics or reproduction that Huxley would likely have agreed with.
As historians have realised, ‘eugenics’ now usually happens through individual choices, not the guidance of a central brain. For that reason, most of us do not think of our personal choices as cobblestones in the road of evolutionary progress and harmonisation – a road that was, at one time, planned and designed by UNESCO’s first director.
He actually credits eugenics for egalitarianism, which ought to win some kind of gaslighting award.
He’s aware that eugenics is rightfully stigmatized, so no one wants to own the label, but he doesn’t see the persistence of Nazi beliefs in society as a disturbing fact. It’s like the usual liberal racist who’s more disturbed at being thought of as racist than at the underlying racism.
We’re all Nazis now, without it being imposed from above. Progressive eugenics indeed!