SOCIAL DARWINISM & EUGENICS

Eugenics

Herbert Spencer coined the phrase the survival of the fittest in his book The Principles of Biology (1864). Darwin took it and used it in print subsequently.

The Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 was informed by the eugenics movement. It divided the mentally unfit into idiots, imbeciles, the feeble-minded and moral defectives and sought to separate them from one another in colonies.

Nazism furnished the Eugenics ideology with its apogee.

In 1959 the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 was repealed.

Francis Galton

Francis Galton was the first scientist to write about birth order. He was his parents ninth and youngest child.

Those who embraced eugenics often differed with their fellow believers. The writer H.G. Wells was critical of Galton's views.

In 2020 it was reported that University College was going to rename its Galton Building because of the scientist's association with eugenics.

See Also: STATISTICS Francis Galton

Social Darwinism

Social Darwinism predated Darwin. Idea of a parallel between Natural history and social history. You should not interfere with the working out of human nature. Believed that politicians should not interfere. Spencer believed that there was a hidden force that ultimately improved matters.

(Reaction to father's friend Rousseau), Malthus believed in the iron operation of nature. Spencer was once speaking to a group of people about a tragedy, Huxley said he knew what it was about - a deduction killed by a nasty fact. Huxley told Darwin to read Spencer; Darwin was not impressed, he found it too vague. Huxley persuaded Darwin to replace the phrase natural selection with Spencer's the survival of the fittest.

Social Darwinians were critical of the upper classes.

Scrooge quoted Spencer's phrase It is better that they should die.

Galton was an explorer of Africa and meteorologist. Galton regarded himself as being a person of high quality; he believed that such people were having fewer children than people who were not of quality (he had no children himself); therefore, people of quality were becoming an ever-smaller proportion of the world's population; therefore, humanity was in decline. In the 1860s he started advocating eugenics. Coined a word for it. Saw it as positive , who should breed, and negative , who should not.

In 1869 Galton's book Hereditary Genius was published. He and the statisticians who followed him were the founders of human genetics.

The Eugenics Society's only real impact in Britain was to have a lot of people categorised as mentally defective.

Prior to the start of the First World across Europe there grew up a belief that there were competing races (that were expressed themselves through states) and that part of their competition process was warfare. In parallel, it was claimed that most nations had natural enemies and so it was natural that there should be warfare between them. These views helped to prepare Europe for war.

It was appreciated that people were living longer. However, the problem for recruiting fit men to serve as soldiers in the Boer Wars made many people question whether people were as fit as they had been prior to Industrialisation.

In 1912 the first international eugenics conference was held. It was held in the Royal Albert Hall. Its patrons included: Alexander Graham Bell, Winston Churchill, and Charles Eliot the President of Harvard University.

The reason Marie Stopes became interested in genetics was because it might reduce the rate at which non-quality people, such as the poor and the disabled, would have children.

Initially, eugenics was a progressive idea. It sought to improve people's lives. It was given a major boost by the way in which numerous men who volunteered for the Army during the Boer War failed their medical examinations.

Galton spend his final years working on a novel that was entitled Can t Say Where. In it, people were required to sit exams. If they passed, they were allowed to have children, if they failed, they were sent to labour camps. There was a measure of ambivalence but not dystopianism. It was not published during his lifetime.

William Beveridge was a believer in eugenics. It informed the thinking behind the Beveridge Report and thus the British welfare state.

Cyril Burt devised the Eleven-Plus examination so that bright children in modest circumstances could be identified. It was introduced in 1944.

The statistician Charles Spearman devised the concept of general intelligence, which he termed G.

Germany

Prior to the outbreak of the First World War, Social Darwinianism had come to influence the thinking of many European statesmen and military commanders. There was a view that the competition between nations would result in winners and losers. Struggle was seen as natural; nation states that failed to seek to be victorious deserved to be defeated. These views were echoed outside the ruling echelons. [Margaret Mitchell The War That Ended Peace (2014)]

In northern Germany the Hegelian view that warfare was the natural state of mankind had considerable. Social Darwinianism and its impact upon inter-state conflict was readily accepted. In southern Germany and Austrian Social Darwinianism helped to nurture a convergent acceptance of aggressive militarism.

Race

Initially, Darwin did not regard there as being any profound difference between people from different social-cultural groupings. However, as the 19^thC progressed, various ideas about race began to circulate. He took to referring to higher races and lower races .

Marie Stopes

Marie Stopes believed that only selective breeding could save humanity. She once sent Hitler a volume of her poetry. Stopes's first marriage was annulled for non-consummation. Her second became highly dysfunctional as a result of her controlling conduct. At the age of 44 Stopes gave birth to a son Harry Stopes-Roe (1924-2014). She discouraged him from reading because it might encourage him to hold opinions that were different to her own. She required him to wear dresses until he was eleven-years-old.

The Marie Stopes Foundation went bankrupt in 1976. The lease of the organisation's building was bought by Tom Black (1937-2014), his wife Jean, and their friend Phil Harvey. They set up Marie Stopes International to furnish contraception and abortion services on a social profit basis. Black served as its chief executive. It developed into a being global enterprise.

In 2008 the Royal Mail proposed issuing a stamp that featured Marie Stopes. This caused controversy because of her endorsement of eugenics and Hitler. Her birth control was intended to lessen the number of poor people. She had left the bulk of her estate the Eugenics Society.

Location: Marie Stopes House, 108 Whitfield Street, W1T 5BE (orange, blue)

H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895). That struggle was needed for progress.

Wells s Ann Veronica. she goes to Imperial and reads biology. Clear, but not stated, she is reading The Descent of Man and is influenced by its ideas. The novel paralleled the life of Marie Stopes, who was a eugenicist.

Dr Moreau's Island

Thomas Huxley was of the view that people should not seek to derive an ethic from evolution. This was because humanity would thereby cease to be civilised. The stance was repeated by Wells, his former pupil

In Wells's novel The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), the physiologist Dr Moreau feels able to justify his actions of combing humans and animals to create the beast people because such a creator was the seemingly logical consequence of evolutionary theory, which held that nature was cruel and inefficient. The author was arguing against such behaviour. In doing so, he was echoing Huxley's stance that people should not seek to derive an ethic from evolution. This was because humanity would thereby cease to be civilised. Wells appears to have had a preference for organisms being to make their own way rather than being directed. This would have resonated with the way in which he was rising through the class system through the application of his own intellect.

However, the logic of Wells's own Utopianism led him to embrace negative eugenics.

See Also: ANIMAL WELFARE Vivisection

David Backhouse 2024