Eugenics, a policy that seeks to “improve” humanity, dismisses the importance of bestowing a sense of worth and dignity to all individuals in the quest of breeding only “the finest”. Today, our expanding knowledge of genes and demographics has created eugenic possibilities far beyond those of the last century. Once rejected largely due to Nazi atrocities, eugenics is being embraced by both the Left and Right. Yet its beating heart lies not in politics, but in tech-driven approaches that reflect, as New York Marxist academic David Harvey called it, “a fetishism of technology” that transcends conventional politics.

In a way that past eugenicists could only dream, technology now opens the possibilities of engineering something far more radical than sterilizing the weak and giving bonuses to those with the right genetic inheritance. Instead, the looming prospect of an entire biological transformation emerges. For half a century, scientists have been dreaming of engineering humans to better specs before conception, as they look to edit genes to produce “superior” offspring.

New technology — from “gene editing” to in-vitro birthing and cloning — provides new ways to create “the better human.” One big difference from 20th-century eugenics is that today’s effort is a largely private matter, at least until now, shaped not by the state, but the technocratic elite. What’s emerging is a modern version of John Calvin’s Protestant “Elect,” based not on faithfulness but measurements of IQ and ability. This new dominant class, as Daniel Bell predicted some 50 years ago, can employ “new intellectual technology” as a means of “ordering the mass society.”

Promoted by technologists, these efforts tend to be intrinsically “dehumanizing,” as the late British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks warned. Eugenic technology, Sacks argued, operates “in detachment, driven by analysis, the breaking down wholes into constituent parts.” In this emerging world, we see the expansion of technology imposed on masses that have become less intelligent not despite but because of ever greater exposure to social media and increasingly, to artificial intelligence.

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Don’t worry, at least that’s what those who benefit the most from this shift suggest. Their answers boil down to this: let us lead you into the perfectly honed future. Masayoshi Son, the founder of Japan’s influential Softbank venture fund, recently suggested that artificial intelligence would lay the foundation for the creation of the “superhuman.” Not satisfied with making life better, Son now “really wanted to become an architect, to design the future of humanity,” as the Financial Times reported.

Politically, the current neo-eugenics movement spans the gamut. Ray Kurzweil, longtime head of engineering at the painfully progressive Google, is perhaps the best-known advocate of creating a “posthuman” future, with human behavior and attitudes shaped by the interface with machine technology. Sam Altman, generally a supporter of Democrats, wants AI bots to serve as “super assistant” for every dimension of life, supplanting the roles once played by parents, friends, teachers, ministers and neighbors. Mark Zuckerberg, a long-time donor to Democrats, thinks human contact can be supplanted by properly customized bots in his Metaverse.

Similar thoughts about automating humanity also come from Trump-leaning oligarchs like Elon Musk, who uses genetic screening before impregnating women who meet his criteria in order to create his “kid’s legion” of superior babies. Peter Thiel, an influential figure on the so-called Tech Right, warns darkly of “a deadly race between politics and technology,” with technology deemed superior to democracy. Thiel embraces the notion that cognitively gifted represent the future of society, and is a key investor in Orchid, a gene-editing IVF firm. He’s also, like Kurzweil, an enthusiastic backer of transhumanism.

The techno-elite’s vision constitutes a call for a scientifically ordered society detached from marriage, family, religion, and the broad sense of community. In its most extreme form, the eugenicists embrace “transhumanism” like Thiel — searching for extended mortality through technology. Today, we witness Silicon Valley’s obsession with efforts to extend life through the use of drugs, technology, and rigorous exercise, a kind of techno-Spartacism lacking that culture’s strong sense of communal obligation and honor. But this is just the beginning. “The rise to power of net-based monopolies coincides with a new sort of religion based on becoming immortal,” writes Jaron Lanier.

Potentially the most radical and far-reaching of the emerging creeds, transhumanism offers a distinctly secular approach to achieving the long-cherished religious goal of immortality. The new tech religion treats mortality not as something to be transcended through moral actions, but as a “bug” to be corrected by technology. The aim is to, in the words of tech engineer Anthony Levandowski, “develop and promote the realization of a godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.”

Ultimately, like their early 20th-century predecessors, the new eugenicists have little time for traditional religions, with their focus on the essential equality of people and acts of charity and concern for the less fortunate. They want to abandon the teachings that have underpinned much democratic and egalitarian thinking in the West. They’re trying to make a religion of their own.

In contrast, transhumanists reject Judeo-Christian egalitarianism. Yuval Noah Harari sees instead a future where “a small and privileged elite of upgraded humans” gain control of society and use genetic engineering to cement the superior status of their offspring. The new eugenicists are not going to “wait patiently for natural selection to work its magic,” he notes. Instead, bioengineers will rewrite its genetic code, rewire its brain circuits, alter its biochemical balance, and even grow entirely new limbs. He concludes: “They will thereby create new godlings, who might be different from us Sapiens as we are different from Homo Erectus.”

Some of the new eugenicists have a disturbing influence on the current Administration. Curtis Yarvin, a far-Right gadfly with ties to Vice President JD Vance, embraces the so-called Dark Enlightenment and favors ending democracy and imposing a tech-led monarchy. Like eugenicists of the last century, he has advocated for measures to keep down those deemed inferior. He seems also to have a soft spot for slavery, suggesting black people might have been better off without abolition.

Such thinking undermines the MAGA agenda, which draws its strength from the multiracial working and lower middle class. Some Right-wing nativists, like Steve Sailer, even think Republicans should ignore non-whites, even as they become an ever larger part of the electorate. These views get validation from Razib Khan, a science popularizer with links to Right-wing eugenicons like Sailer and Ron Unz. He wants race science to inform a reshaping of society, for example suggesting men “import” more East Asian women to marry the often not appealing — at least to Western women — nerdish types.

Yet it would be misleading to see the new eugenics drive as exclusively a phenomenon of the Right. In the last century, many on the progressive Left openly embraced eugenics, including leading lights like Margaret Sanger and Jane Addams. For them, the need was to curb the breeding of inferiors, largely Eastern and Southern Europeans, while encouraging childbirth among the superior, enlightened people, mostly Anglo-Saxons like themselves.

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This notion of “salvation by science” also appealed to some on the European Left. The famed Swedish sociologists Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, backed the sterilizations that were part of government policy till the mid-Seventies. This reflected the notion that socialism required a population that culls the genetically flawed. In 1941, Alva Myrdal wrote in Nation and Family that “In our day of highly accelerated social reforms the need for sterilization on social grounds gained momentum. Generous social reforms may facilitate home-making and more childbearing than before among the groups of less desirable as well as more desirable parents”.

A similar stance was advocated by The Webbs, the British inventors of Fabian socialism, who considered a policy of encouraging “the healthy” to have more offspring while blocking, as Sidney Webb put it, the “breeding of degenerate hordes of a demoralized ‘residuum’ unfit for social life.”

The conception of those “unfit” for social life resonates with some among the anti-MAGA crowd because it reflects the Democrats’ dependence on educated professionals. Elon Musk may be an object of hate for Leftists, but a defense of elite institutions is now mandatory on the Left, which demand protection from the populist masses as the repository of superior thinking. From all this, notes historian Michael Lind, comes the notion, popular on the Left, that the red states are “filled with inbred, knuckle-dragging, white nationalist Neanderthals plotting to overthrow democracy.”

Whether on the Right or Left, the core belief of all eugenicists lies in the assumption that we should shape and cull the human herd to fit a particular vision. This idea is gaining influence, particularly from the wealthiest and most powerful forces of our age. Threatened are our longstanding notions of morality, family, and self-governance critical to democracy and our flourishing as humans.

For some children growing up today, this feeling might be familiar. Some of the first so-called “designer babies” — whose embryos were screened for flaws or who were primed for ideal traits with carefully selected sperm or egg donors — are now teenagers, and many are depressed. In December, a West Coast psychologist spoke to Wired about these privileged young patients nevertheless haunted by their own DNA; often the children of Silicon Valley elites, they buckle under the expectations of their “distant parents”. The anonymous source spoke about children who discovered that their egg-donor biological mother had psychiatric problems: they were told, “Your donor is nuts, so you must be too.”

Their parents select — and shell out thousands — for preferred traits, cherry-picking donors for different qualities, perhaps “a sporty son and an artsy daughter”. There is something desperately naive about the latter: you cannot guarantee enthusiasm for Moleskine notebooks or ponchos, after all. But these preferences are not just risible, they are sinister; they show that even among blue-sky idealists who resent the constraints of their own genetic material, the social constraints represented in their preferences — boy strong, girl soft — go completely unquestioned. How might the offspring of that particular family experience their own childhood if their bodies and tastes digress from their expensive fates, if the son develops an unauthorized love of Twinkies and can’t run a lap without collapsing; if the daughter has an unplanned aptitude for rugby and sucks at sketching? It’s one thing to let down your parents, but quite another to let down your geneticist.

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Because many of the genetic-testing startups are based around Silicon Valley, designer babies have been swept up in the broader philosophy of tech-bro life optimization; Elon Musk, father of an indeterminate number of children, is said to have used genetic screening via the startup Orchid for at least one of his brood. In some ways, this is just an extension of the manifold ways Silicon Valleyites track and upgrade their bodies; these are people obsessed with “biohacking”, intermittent fasting, ice baths, LSD microdosing and Oura rings. We should not be surprised that they are equally obsessive about their offspring — but the extent to which it is possible is disturbing. In the US, it is legal to screen for qualities such as hair color, eye color and sex before an embryo is implanted in the womb; while there is ethical criticism from some quarters, there is no legal framework to prevent it. Among the controversial possibilities of ever-improving embryo screening is selecting for intelligence. The US biotech company Heliospect claims to be able to bump up predicted height and IQ for the “low” price of $50,000 per 100 embryos; the approach is promised to boost your fetus by more than six IQ points. In undercover footage, a Heliospect employee describes IQ as one of the “naughty traits that everybody wants”. Picking a child who won’t be fat, stupid, spotty or depressed is, according to this wink-wink wording, about as controversial as using a cheat code in The Sims. But that’s the thing about being “naughty”; it’s a one-off — scanning a Krispy Kreme as a 20-cent bread roll at the checkout is no big deal unless everybody does it. But what if they did? What would that society look like?

“Everyone can have all the children they want and they can have children that are basically disease-free, smart, healthy; it’s going to be great,” said Heliospect’s CEO Michael Christensen in 2023. And it’s not just good for your family, it’s good for society: Simone Collins, who with her husband Malcolm is among the best-known pronatalists today, told The New York Times: “Societies that have more intelligent people will have lower rates of crime, of rape, of violence, because intelligence correlates negatively with those societal blights.” While this is undoubtedly true, there are more than a few glaring problems with such an approach, not least that if you strictly optimized for peaceability, academic attainment and social compliance you would only ever have daughters. The eugenicists of the early 20th century — a cohort which improbably counted Helen Keller — sacrificed individual liberty among undesirables for the collective good; this sort of zealotry has rightly remained controversial since — until, that is, the ideas made contact with the demagogues of the West Coast.

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The project of scientific pronatalism itself has become a target for misanthropic internet weirdos; last week, a 25-year-old “promortalist” called Guy Edward Bartkus was believed to have blown up an IVF clinic in Palo Alto, California, and himself with it. He resented, according to a half-assed manifesto he left behind, not having consented to his own birth. In the event, all embryos stored at the clinic were salvaged. If pronatalism crystallizes hope, health and humanity then the disaffection of lurkers of incel forums, in which “promortalism” is common, makes sense. These are people who feel they have lost the lottery of life, and who are doomed by their apparent defects — height, weak jawline, social ineptitude — to celibacy and misery; though mainstream society has come to despise such men, their astuteness on this point is worth mentioning. What is inceldom if not the reverse of the sunny, pro-social, optimistic ideology which drives parents to screen their embryos? Each, after all, is underpinned by a fetishistic obsession with the fatalism of birth.

For neo-eugenics to really take hold, it will have to first contend with an unprecedented cultural shift towards “celebrating difference”. It is strange that the technological ability to perfect our babies — and its acceptability in America — has come at the exact point at which diversity, both mental and physical, has gained a mystical sense of importance. Just as young people began forming their identities around characteristics such as neurodiversity and mental ill-health, the next generation of parents began trying to breed them out. On the one hand, diagnostic criteria for conditions like ADHD and autism are being stretched to the point of uselessness, wrapping up rocketing numbers of “normal” teenagers in the warm bosom of understanding and exceptionalism. At the same time, for those who can afford it, these conditions are becoming almost optional. But the potential advent of widespread, hyper-accurate embryonic screening betrays how society really feels about difference. The bio-engineered teens of today are living proof that when people have plenty of money and choice, American would-be parents are “naughtily” selecting for the same old traits that have always been desired: healthy, sociable, attractive, intelligent, doing whatever they can to steer the nature-nurture tiller. For all the posturing and label-fetishism of the 2020s, a 1920s eugenicism lurks beneath. In an echo of that old line trotted out by racists, “I’m fine with [talentless/fat/acne-prone] kids — I just wouldn’t want one in my womb.”

Gone are the days of sterilizing the cognitively impaired. But medical intervention in social ills, which seem like ghosts of the unenlightened, pre-Nazi 20th century, are everywhere for those with eyes to see. As we speak, GLP-1 injections are being rolled out on the NHS with the promise of reviving our sickly workforce. Meanwhile only last week, the justice secretary Shabana Mahmood announced that the voluntary chemical program for convicted sex offenders would be extended to 20 English prisons; the government is said to be considering rolling it out nationwide and making it mandatory. Both fat jabs and chemical castration have noble aims on the surface — health and economic buoyancy for the former, freedom from compulsive sexual behavior for the latter. Nevertheless these policies have an aesthetic problem. One ungenerous interpretation would be that these represent a grand governmental project to cleanse undesirable traits — obesity, sexual deviancy — from the populace. The purification drive of eugenics never really went away; in order for these ideas to work, we have to trust those in power not to wield it recklessly.

The first wave of American designer babies, many of them now troubled teens, show why European countries have been more cautious about the traits for which ambitious parents are allowed to select; in Germany, France and the UK the technology is limited to screening for serious health concerns. On a societal level, elites breeding out non-ideal traits threaten to create genetic castes; as the science gets better and procedures become more common, this could one day open up a new frontier in health inequality. On a familial level, being a bespoke embryo taints the fundamental ingredient of a happy childhood: the belief that your parents’ love is unconditional, that of all the millions of genetic configurations that might have resulted from your conception, they are truly happy that they got you. There’s a good argument that this feeling of confidence in your own ability and worth, above any tinkering with embryonic odds, is the secret to a child’s success; nurture, after all, cannot be engineered. This truth is understood by Jude Law’s paralyzed swimmer in Gattaca; it is understood so completely that before the film is over he ends the life that had been so meticulously curated for him, a final act of rebellion against the strangest kind of unfreedom: that from your own DNA.

The Time Machine was published in 1895, and its image of the end times is shaped by the fears and discoveries of the late nineteenth century. The idea that evolution might slip into reverse, producing organisms fit only for the twilight. The idea that the earth was losing energy that it could not replace. “The time must come,” wrote Darwin’s great defender, T. H. Huxley, in 1888, “when evolution will mean adaptation to a universal winter, and all forms of life will die out, except such low and simple organisms as the diatom of the arctic and antarctic ice and the protococcus of the red snow.”

Today’s envisioned apocalypse is hotter. And sooner. Fire and flood and lots of it, the day after tomorrow. No need to set the dial to the distant future: we can see the glaciers melting. The intolerable world is one our grandchildren may know. How can we avoid this? Well, one way would be not to have any grandchildren.

Last month the Guardian published a mournful article about young men who have chosen to face the challenge of climate change by taking themselves down to the vasectomy clinic. Its principal interviewee, a 30-year-old council administrator from Essex, explained how he had come to the decision. “I thought: you know what? I don’t want to bring a life into this world, because it’s pretty shitty as it is and it’s only going to get worse.” The report made no grand claims about numbers, but he is not the first to identify the idea as a strengthening current.

In 2019, the journalist Wes Siler wrote about his decision to have the same operation for the same reason. “Is this a world we want to bring kids into?” he asked. In December 2021, Australian national radio carried an interview with a 24-year-old who had also chosen sterilisation as a way to reduce his impact on the environment. “I find it very frightening thinking about the way that the world is right now and what scientists are predicting the world will look like in 20 and 30 years,” said Aaron. “I didn’t think that was a great place to bring up a child.”

And last year, Dr Esgar Gaurin of Iowa, enthused by a service in Mexico City, put North America’s first mobile vasectomy van on the road. He chose Earth Day as his launch date, which he spent carrying out operations while parked outside the Holiday Inn Des Moines-Airport.

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The vasectomy is now such an ordinary and unsensational birth control method that you’re as likely to hear about it in a comic context as any other. “Snip-snap, snip-snap, snip-snap,” says Steve Carrell’s character in The Office. “You have no idea the physical toll that three vasectomies have on a person.”

But 100 years ago, vasectomy discourse was very different. The operation was sought out by men who wanted to increase their impact on the world, not reduce it.

William Butler Yeats can serve as a starry example. In 1934, he complained to a friend that his creative and sexual energies were flagging. His friend, half-jokingly, recommended that he get “Steinached” — that is, have one of his two vasa deferentia cut and sealed.

The procedure had been all the rage in Vienna the previous decade, after Eugen Steinach carried out his first operation on a middle-aged coachman who, 18 months later, claimed to feel like a much younger coachman. Sigmund Freud underwent it in the hope of keeping his mouth cancer at bay. Yeats read Rejuvenation (1924), the only English language book on the subject, and made an appointment to see its author, the Australian medic and sexologist Norman Haire.

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Easy to imagine the scene in Haire’s six-storey Harley Street home, a riot of Chinoiserie and antiques with a bed “big enough for three,” according to Diana Wyndham (author of Norman Haire and the Study of Sex). The 68-year-old Yeats, under the silver ceiling of the top-floor consulting room, confessing that he is all out of poetic ideas, and that his erotic life is similarly moribund. Haire, boasting of the “rather less than 200” artists and intellectuals he has aided with his steady scalpel hand. Yeats rising from the table to enthuse, as he did to the poet Dorothy Wellesley, about “the strange second puberty the operation has given me, the ferment that has come upon my imagination.”

What was happening here? Not much, biologically, except the Placebo Effect. But stories like this are evidence of a strong impulse in early twentieth century culture to consider national (for which read white male) enfeeblement to be a problem with a medical solution.

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s story The Creeping Man (1923), for instance, Sherlock Holmes investigates the case of an academic exhibiting weird, aggressive behaviour. His “ape-like fury” turns out to be almost literal — a doctor in Prague has been supplying him with a serum derived from the black-faced langur, “the biggest and most human of climbing monkeys”. This wasn’t Doyle going off with the fairies. That same year, the Russian-born surgeon Serge Voronoff came to London to tell 700 fellow doctors that his monkey-gland grafts would revolutionise “male vitality”. (I don’t know whether the whole audience rose, but they certainly burst into applause.)

The idea took hold. So many rich, exhausted Jazz Age men wanted the op that Voronoff opened a monkey farm on the Italian Riviera. In July 1927, John Beckett, a rebellious Labour MP who later joined the British Union of Fascists, asked: “Could not a Voronoff gland be grafted on the English Government?”

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It’s all pleasingly colourful and preposterous. At the level of social policy, however, we might be less inclined to snigger. Here, H. G. Wells comes back into the picture. Wells was a friend and supporter of Haire — Wyndham suspects he, too, may have been Steinached in Harley Street — and his work is shot through with his view of sterilisation as an instrument of eugenic reform.

His speculative essays Anticipations (1900) put it in the most extreme terms, suggesting that “the People of the Abyss” — those with transmissible diseases and disabilities — must be weeded from the population. “The nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, exports, or poisons its People of the Abyss,” he wrote, “will certainly be the ascendant or dominant nation before the year 2000.”

Wells’s position, if not uncontroversial, was entirely commonplace in early twentieth-century culture. When he was Home Secretary, Winston Churchill read a pamphlet by the vasectomy doctor H. C. Sharp called The Sterilisation of Degenerates (1910), and immediately began firing off questions to his officials. “What is the best surgical operation?” Churchill then wrote to H. H. Asquith, the Prime Minister:

“The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate.”

We don’t need to look too hard to find the echoes of these ideas in contemporary politics. They ring loudly in the Great Replacement theory — a white supremacist fantasy propagated by the far-Right French Presidential candidate Eric Zemmour and the glassy-eyed Fox News host Tucker Carlson — which suggests that white Europeans are being outbred by unacceptably fecund immigrant communities. Why are these men so fixated on the idea of flagging white virility? Why do they seem obsessed with the quality of Muslim sperm? Freud, alas, is not around to supply an answer.

But if he were, he might tell us that anxiety is a condition of modernity. And admit that, in his own case, a vasectomy turned out not to be a cure for what ailed him.

Every generation faces its existential terrors. Mine, which grew up in the 1980s, watched Protect and Survive films that advised us to put granny’s corpse in a bin bag, carefully labelled, if she died of radiation sickness. Having a vasectomy to save the planet isn’t quite as futile as having one to prevent a nuclear war, but it may come close.

The best we can say, I suspect, is that voluntary sterilisation is a fairly efficient mechanism to prevent a man from fathering another person who will be obliged to face whatever travails lie ahead of us. But an old story might worth taking into account here.

I heard it in a conversation between the US journalist Sigal Samuel and the climate scientist Kimberley Nicholas. It’s about Israelite men who abstained from sex because they didn’t want to create new slaves to Pharaoh. The women disagreed: their generation had failed, but perhaps the next would do better. So they seduced their husbands. Nine months later, Moses was born.

Darwin still divides the Left and Right, but the polarity has reversed. No one really cares about creationists any more. Instead, the row is over whether Darwin – and his theory, or its implications – is racist, or sexist. And the people passionately defending him are often right-wingers, while his critics are on the Left.

The latest incarnation is a by-the-numbers fighting-the-culture-war piece in the Telegraph about a guide to “Applying a decolonial framework to teaching and research in ecology and evolution” published by some plant scientists in the University of Sheffield. In the guide, science lecturers are told to contextualise Darwin by making it clear how his worldview was shaped by colonialism and racism.

I’ve read the guide, and it’s kind of tiresome. A small but irritating aspect is that it slanders the great pioneer of genetic biology JBS Haldane as a “racist and eugenicist”, on the basis of a piece of science fiction he once wrote.

It does indeed criticise Darwin too, one angle of which is that the HMS Beagle, upon which he sailed, was on a mission to map the coastline of South America in order to aid colonial control; that seems a strange thing to blame him for. But it also says that he thought white people were superior to black people, and men to women. It doesn’t mention his passionate hatred of slavery – “Great God how I should like to see that greatest curse on Earth Slavery abolished,” he wrote, saying it would be worth a million lives lost in war to end it – which feels relevant, but no doubt he was racist by modern standards. Cue a thousand-year war over whether we should judge him by standards of his own day or ours, and what those standards are, and so on.

I also rather wish that the Sheffield academics had mentioned whether or not they think Darwin’s theory of natural selection is true or not. There’s an awful lot of talk about power imbalances, Eurocentric viewpoints, and the legacy of colonialism, and how science “cannot be objective and apolitical” – but regardless of whether or not Darwin was racist, was he right? Maybe that’s taken for granted.

Universities, though, are universities; there are hundreds of them, and hundreds of academics in each one, and academics are mainly very left-wing. If you pick the most left-wing thing some academic has said that week, then you’ll never run out of things to print in your newspaper, if you need to keep stoking the culture war to rile up your readership. 

It’s not just the man himself, though. The interesting question is not whether he was personally racist, or to what extent his views were shaped by colonialism – the interesting question is whether his ideas were correct, or, more generally, which of the many, many ideas that have sprung forth from his initial, startling insight are correct, and which are not.

The sad, forgotten creationists aside, most of us gladly accept that dragonflies’ wings and wombats’ toenails or whatever have evolved; that those ancestors which had versions of those organs more suited to their environment tended to have more offspring.

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But when Darwin’s idea gets applied to behaviour, it becomes more controversial. The field of science that tries to do this is called sociobiology; it was controversial enough when it arose in the Seventies, pioneered by EO Wilson. It caused a furore – protesters poured water over Wilson’s head during a conference talk, chanting “Racist Wilson, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.” Wilson’s work was mainly about ants.

When Darwinian ideas are applied to the human brain, and human behaviour, it is called evolutionary psychology, and that is more controversial still. 

Which, on the face of it, is strange. Evolutionary psychology is, at its heart, the idea that the brain (and therefore the mind, and human behaviour and psychology in general) is the product of evolution, just like every other animal organ. As Richard Dawkins wrote in the 2005 foreword to The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, that is so obviously true as to be almost not worth saying: “The central claim [of evolutionary psychology] is not an extraordinary one,” he wrote. “It amounts to the exceedingly modest claim that minds are on the same footing as bodies where Darwinian natural selection is concerned. Given that feet, livers, ears, wings, shells, eyes, crests, ligaments, antennae, hearts and feathers are shaped by natural selection … why on earth should the same not be true of brains[?]”

If you accept that evolution really happened and that humans are a product of it, then that should surely be uncontroversial. It’s surely the case that if we had evolved from bats, or whales, rather than apes, we would be very different, psychologically speaking. But evolutionary psychology is an astonishingly controversial field. It’s “pseudoscience”, or “unfalsifiable”, according to some.

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The idea that the mind is evolved goes back to Darwin himself, but it was Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, a wife-and-husband team of academics, who really developed the field in The Adapted Mind, a book of essays they edited in 1992. 

Insofar as I can tell, evolutionary psychology is no more pseudoscientific or unfalsifiable than evolutionary biology in general. It’s harder to do, because brains and behaviour don’t usually leave fossils, but in principle it’s the same. You come up with some hypothesis, you make predictions using that hypothesis, and you test those predictions against reality.

For instance: one hypothesis within evolutionary psychology is the “psychological immune system”, the idea that we have an evolved tendency to behave in ways that reduce our exposure to dangerous pathogens. That’s pretty obviously the case in certain situations — for instance, faeces and rotting meat smell bad to us and we want to get away from them. But one more specific hypothesis was that people who have recently been ill, and therefore less able to fight off new diseases, would be hypersensitive to that tendency, and would want to (for instance) avoid people whose faces showed signs of disease.

One study found evidence that that was the case; a later, larger replication found that it wasn’t. Hypothesis (so far) falsified. This is bog-standard science.

It is true that there are a lot of comedy-sounding studies, into nipple erection and sexiness or a correlation between intelligence and semen quality, and some of them have failed to replicate. 

But if having some strange-sounding studies published, or studies that have failed to replicate, is enough to render an entire field pseudoscientific, then very few fields will survive. The field of medicine contains studies like this, in the medical journal Global Advances in Health and Medicine, which claims that to heal the body we need to study “the human energy field” and especially “organ-associated frequencies instrumental in the endocrine/chakra systems”. (It was eventually retracted, after two years.)

And this, in the same journal, encouraging “shamanic journeying” in paediatric palliative care, “in which the patient or the shaman moves into an altered state of awareness and encounters … ‘power animals.’” Or this paper, in the Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology, which looked at five (5) human brains, used no control group, did frankly weird things with the numbers, and used that to claim that aluminium in vaccines causes autism.

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Those papers — which took me five minutes to find — are bad, and silly, and potentially harmful. But we don’t throw out the entire scientific field of medicine because there are weird, bad papers published on its fringes. Evolutionary psychology has its cranks, and its amusing or weird-sounding papers, but so does every field. Demanding that it alone be pure is an isolated demand for rigour. It’s not fair to apply uniquely stringent rules to evolutionary psychology, and I think the only reason people do is because evolutionary psychology is associated with a particular kind of reactionary politics.

It is, of course, true that evolutionary psychology can have obvious political implications that other fields, chemistry or astrophysics, say, might not. And some of them are unpalatable. The James Damore “Google memo” based its suggestion that women are, on average, less interested in tech than men explicitly on an “evolutionary psychology perspective”, for instance.

But there is lots of perfectly good, and politically uncontroversial as well as scientifically uncontroversial, science that goes on, looking at psychology through an evolutionary lens. Daniel Kahneman’s great work of popular psychology, Thinking, Fast and Slow, explicitly describes human psychology as an evolved thing: “The questions are perhaps less urgent for a human in a city environment than for a gazelle on the savannah, but we have inherited the neural mechanisms that evolved to provide ongoing assessments of threat level, and they have not been turned off.” He links our ability to read faces to a crucial evolutionary need to assess the intentions of people around us. This is evolutionary psychology, unadorned.

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More importantly, though: whether something is politically convenient or not doesn’t affect whether it’s true. The Damore essay is a case in point. It certainly doesn’t seem to be unambiguously false: Cordelia Fine, author of Delusions of Gender and a populariser of feminism-inspired science, told the Guardian that Damore’s summation of the difference between men and women was far from perfect but “more accurate and nuanced than what you sometimes find in the popular literature” and “not seen as especially controversial”.

One problem is that if you say things like “Some of the differences between men and women are caused by evolution,” it sounds as though you’re saying “And therefore there is no point in working to reduce the gender pay gap”, or “and therefore women are supposed to have babies and not work”. It’s very hard to avoid people hearing those things. 

And it’s absolutely true that some people do use evolutionary psychology as a crutch for their beliefs; human beings are, indeed, not lobsters. (Mind you, they’re not clownfish either.)

Charles Darwin, the historical figure, is interesting to study, and it’s worth remembering that he was a man of his time. But Darwinism, the great insight of evolution by natural selection, is separate. It is true (or false) regardless of Darwin’s own views, and so are the many insights which have followed it. We can go back and forth over whether he was a racist, but the more interesting question is: was he right?

And even if Eichmann had pretended, what then? It would have made no difference. Once a Jew, always a Jew. Saul, by becoming Paul, had merely transmuted all that was most baneful about the Jewish conspiracy against the Nordic race into a more infectious, and therefore more lethal, form. Hitler, who traced the glories of ancient Greece and Rome to Völkerwanderung from the northern reaches of Europe, also attributed the downfall of classic civilisation to the virus introduced by Paul into the bloodstream of the Roman Empire. Its devastating effects had been evident ever since. Lethal variants had evolved. In January 1942, even as war was raging in the snows of Russia, Hitler placed Operation Barbarossa in the context of 2,000 years of history:

“The Jew who fraudulently introduced Christianity into the ancient world — in order to ruin it — re-opened the same breach in modern times, this time taking as his pretext the social question. It’s the same sleight-of-hand as before. Just as Saul was changed into St. Paul, Mardochai became Karl Marx.”

Two particularly toxic evils, both of them derived from Christian teachings, threatened the Nordic race with ruin. First, there was the insistence that the weak, the sick, the persecuted merited compassion. So infuriating did Hitler find the objections of church leaders to the Reich’s on-going sterilisation of mental and physical defectives that already, by 1937, he had begun to envisage the elimination of Christianity once and for all. Clearly, there was no prospect of the Germans fulfilling their racial destiny while they were cancerous still with compassion. Hitler’s own preference — one that he was quick to put into practice the moment Germany went to war — was for a mass programme of euthanasia. This, a policy that was sanctioned both by ancient example and by the most cutting-edge scientific thinking, could never satisfactorily be carried out by a people who persisted in seeing it as evil.

Yet it was their own folly, their own blindness, that constituted the authentic evil. The Christian morality they clung to had resulted in any number of grotesque excrescences: alcoholics breeding promiscuously while upstanding national comrades struggled to put food on the table for their families; mentally ill patients enjoying clean sheets while healthy children were obliged to sleep three or four to a bed; cripples having money and attention lavished on them that should properly be devoted to the fit. Idiocies such as these were precisely what National Socialism existed to terminate. For the Germans to continue in their opposition to policies so transparently vital for their own racial health was insanity. The churches had had their day. “Harping on and on that God died on the cross out of pity for the weak, the sick, and the sinners, they then demand that the genetically diseased be kept alive in the name of a doctrine of pity that goes against nature, and of a misconceived notion of humanity.” The strong — as science had conclusively demonstrated — had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.

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They also had a duty to trample down the second doctrine with which Christianity had poisoned the world. In 1942, an SS pamphlet quoted a line from Paul’s letter to the Galatians to illustrate just what it was that they had been summoned to fight against. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Here, the pamphlet warned, was a universalism that had dimmed the claims of blood, that had privileged the inferior races over the superior, and that over the course of the centuries had served to geld the Nordic race. A doctrine as pernicious in its effects as this could only have come from one source.

Of course Jews were not Greeks, and of course they could not be permitted to live alongside other, healthier races — of whom the healthiest was the Nordic. “Apes massacre all fringe elements as alien to their community. What is valid for monkeys must be all the more valid for humans.” Hitler knew that there was nothing particular about man. He was as subject to the struggle for life, and to the need to preserve the purity of his race, as any other species. To put this into practice was not evil. The truest evil was to do as Christians did: to oppose the ways of the world.

The Nazis, of course, did not succeed in their attempt to redefine for Europeans the parameters of morality. Their Reich did not last a thousand years. Their programmes of euthanasia and genocide are not commemorated today as models of enlightened statecraft, crafted in accordance with ancient wisdom and modern science. Quite the opposite. Today, across the Western world, the Nazis serve as the very archetypes of evil. The old supernatural cosmography that for centuries structured how people in Christendom understood the dimensions of hell may no longer possess the currency it once did; but the concept of hell itself still endures. It has become difficult, since the liberation of the death camps, to imagine it as anything other than a muddy cesspool, surrounded by barbed wire, crematoria silhouetted against a wintry sky. A belief in the satanic as Christians had long construed it, as a literal demonic force, may have faded in the West; but not the conviction that evil is to be identified with a single, sulphurously charismatic figure. Who needs the Devil when there is Adolf Hitler?

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Who indeed needs Jesus? It is no coincidence, perhaps, that the more Nazism has come to shadow the imaginings of people in the West, the less they have gone to church. Other regimes in European history have aspired, as Hitler did, to eradicate the hold of Christianity; but only Hitler aimed to eradicate, not just the institutional forms of the religion, but the doctrines of charity for the weak and sick, and the universalism, that lay at the heart of its traditional teachings.

This is why, 80 years on from the Second World War, the Führer retains his starring role in contemporary demonology. Communist dictators may have been no less murderous than fascist ones; but they — because communism was the expression of a concern for the oppressed masses — rarely seem as diabolical. Today, when we ask ourselves “what would Hitler have done?”, and do the opposite, we are as obedient to the weathering effects of Christian morality as our forebears were when they wondered “what would Jesus have done,” and sought to do the same.

Nietzsche, declaring in a famous parable that God was dead, declared as well that in the great cave that had once been Christendom His shadow still fell, an immense and frightful shadow. It is there in our readiness to use “fascist” as the ultimate insult; to sanctify those who suffer oppression; to regard racism as a sin beyond compare: a shadow that continues to define for us, even in this godless age, the meaning of evil.

The recent cancellation of Professor Gregory Clark at the University of Glasgow is a case in point. Yesterday, it was reported that Clark — a professor of economics at the University of California and visiting professor at the London School of Economics — was last week unable to give a lecture in Glasgow because of its title: “For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls: A Lineage of 400,000 Individuals 1750-2020 Shows Genetics Determines Most Social Outcomes”. The reference to John Donne’s poem, later appropriated by Ernest Hemingway, was not the problem. The allusion to the work of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein clearly was.

The Bell Curve, a 1994 book by Murray and Herrnstein, remains one of the most controversial pieces of analysis in the modern era. Though its critics tend not to have read the work, they insist that it not only argues for but positively rejoices in the idea that intelligence is largely determined by a person’s race. It is a misunderstanding that has rumbled on for over a quarter of a century, and every discussion of the book usually ends in acrimony. And so when Professor Clark hinted at the work in his lecture’s title, the university asked him to change it.

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In some ways, this was to be expected. The University of Glasgow had recently published a new report titled “Understanding Racism: Transforming University Cultures”, which sets out an action plan to make the university “an inclusive space for all”. As Clark himself put it: “My talk was regarded as a provocation in this situation. I had a half-hour Zoom meeting with the dean. He would reschedule the talk if I agreed to change the paper title to not have any reference to ‘bell curve’. I have refused.”

As soon as the disagreement was publicised, the online mob did what it always does and swiftly became an expert on a person previously unknown to them. Clark was slandered — just like Noah Carl and other academics before him — as a “eugenicist”, with one critic suggesting that the talk was due to be “a thinly disguised piece of book promotion by an economist who manipulates and misrepresents genetics to advance his pseudoscientific opinions”.

Indeed, the claim of Clark’s critics to know not only the content of his undelivered talk but also his intentions is all too characteristic of contemporary pile-ons. Today, it is not enough just to claim foresight, it is also necessary to pretend that you have complete insight into the motivations of those with whom you disagree.

No doubt this row will continue to roll on, with the university continuing to deny that it had “cancelled” Professor Clark’s lecture; its administrators claim that they will “continue to be in discussions” with him about finding “a suitable event” for his talk. Meanwhile, critics of cancel culture will add his name to the growing list of academics who have been uninvited from events due to their views.

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What happens after you're cancelled?

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Yet it is worth pausing for a moment to reflect that, following this most recent incident, a pattern in the cancel-culture conflict has started to emerge.

If today’s censors only attempted to cancel events about one particular subject or historical individual, it would be easy to discern their motivations. But because the prevailing ethos of the age is so all-pervasive, we appear to be less able than we should be to discuss it and dismantle it in turn. However, as Professor Clark’s treatment shows, that ethos has become increasingly clear. It goes something like this: human beings are born with equal abilities, and any sub-optimal outcomes in their lives are caused by societal factors beyond their control but which can be adapted with enough collective effort.

The fact that this mantra prevails goes a long way to explaining why transgenderism has become such a focal point in the culture wars in recent years. For if you are able to move between the sexes at will, then it’s only natural to conclude that nothing about the situation we are born into can or should limit us. You may have been born with male chromosomes and have male genitalia, but if you wish to become a woman any day then you can. And vice versa. Whether you are male or female isn’t determined — it’s something you can choose.

And this is where Professor Clark’s cancellation is extremely revealing. Given we know little about his speech beyond its title, you could be forgiven for thinking that the university’s fearful authorities were simply scared about the prospect of activist pressure and a toxic fall-out.

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But this approach fails to explain why a talk that references Murray and Herrnstein’s book would inspire such vitriol in the first place. The university was not simply concerned that the content of Clark’s lecture may have been racist. It is about something far more profound: the fear that he would touch on another aspect of the The Bell Curve’s thought that goes against the emerging ideology of the time. The reason why so much energy is dedicated to shutting down any discussion of the issues addressed by Murray and Herrnstein in their book is that, just like with transgenderism, it raises an undeniably fearful spectre — the possibility that our life-outcomes are to a great extent reliant on factors over which we have no control.

Of course, there are dangerous avenues in discussions over the relationship between race and IQ. Eugenics poses one of the worst moral nightmares imaginable. But there are only two things you can do to tackle it. The first is to shut down all debate; a prospect incompatible with modern democracy. The other is to allow responsible discussion of it, along with many other uncomfortable subjects. And if this cannot take place in a university, it is hard to know if it can take place at all.

Still, Professor Clark’s cancellation reveals there is also a deeper discussion that we need to have — one that questions what our attitude should be towards the situation we are born into. The ethos of our era holds that if we organise society well enough, everyone can be whatever they like. And ultimately, the fact that the counter-position — that we are all to some extent dictated by factors outside of our control — is so little heard is an ominous sign. For if it is false then we need not be troubled by it. But if it is true, surely it is better that we find out now, while some semblance of rational discussion is still possible.

It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. But that’s just the trouble. While it isn’t difficult and makes a satisfying splash, you soon run out of fish.

The woke have worked their way through thousands of contemporary figures — and have even returned to a few choice favourites. JK Rowling’s getting cancelled every other week now — which may suggest she’s not cancellable at all, of course. There’s always Tory politicians and their ilk, but those guys are born cancelled, so they don’t really count. The whole point of a cancellation is that you take someone from a position of honour (or blissful anonymity, in the case of a private citizen) and subject them to public disgrace. It’s the shift from one state to the other then generates the energy.

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In theory, there’s an abundant supply of dead white guys with the requisite dead white guy opinions, but who’s heard of half of them these days? I know they’re meant to be important philosophers, scientists or whatever, but if most people don’t know much about them, no one will pay much heed if they get cancelled. Why even bother ‘decolonising’ the curriculum, if the kids aren’t being taught about their past anyway. I mean, David Hume? David Whom, more like.

So cancel culture needs dead white males who are still famous. Pulling down their statues is like extracting a tooth with a living nerve — very noticeable. Winston Churchill is the go-to option, but he just won’t budge. Furthermore, his defenders are forewarned and thus forearmed. A smarter strategy, therefore, would be a raid on a prominent, but unanticipated, target. 

Which bring us to Charles Darwin. There’s no doubting his continued fame. If anything, he’s got more famous in recent years. 2009 was the 200th anniversary of his birth: there were festivals, exhibitions and a film. The Bank of England put him on the £10 note and Christ’s College, Cambridge put up a statue of him as a young man.

The anniversary came at a key cultural moment. It was the decade when ‘New Atheism’ was at its most fashionable. A generalised hostility towards religion was a way for secular liberals to process the trauma of 9/11 without singling out Islam. The so-called ‘Four Horsemen’ — Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett — propelled the movement forward with best-selling books. But as well as fire-breathing preachers, evangelical atheism required plaster saints — and who better than Charles Darwin, who did so much to challenge that old-time religion?

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Unlike the other bearded prophets of modernity, Marx and Freud, Darwin survived the 20th Century with his reputation intact. In fact, breakthroughs like modern genetics would enhance the explicatory power of his ideas. He’s also been lucky in his enemies. From Bishop Wilberforce in his own time to American televangelists in ours, Darwin is on one side, conservatism at its most embarrassingly backward on the other.

A country gentlemen, he wasn’t overtly political — and yet his ideas about evolution in the natural world were a perfect fit for liberal faith in human progress. In 19th Century terms, Darwin can thus be seen as a man of the Left — perhaps, the man of the Left. He has his fans on the Right too, but across a broad swathe of progressive opinion, Darwin is a truly foundational figure.

But can he be dislodged from the progressive pantheon, like David Hume was? Will the iconoclasts even try? It all depends on just how far the woke Left thinks it can push the liberal Left. After all, it wouldn’t just be luvvies pressed for public comment — but eminent scientists, directors of major museums and prominent public educators. Would Brian Cox bend the knee? Or Sir David Attenborough?

Darwin’s cancellation would certainly put a lot of very important people on the spot. But is there anything to cancel him for — apart from his deplorable dead white maleness?

Let’s start with his intellectual circle — because guilt by association is an acceptable instrument of the cancel culture. Firstly, there’s TH Huxley, a.k.a. “Darwin’s Bulldog,” who is a noted ‘scientific’ racist. Then there’s Francis Galton, who was Darwin’s cousin and the father of eugenics. In fact, the Darwin and Huxley clans include a who’s who of British eugenics — including two of Darwin’s sons. Also worth a mention is Herbert Spencer, yet another Victorian polymath who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” and is regarded as the founder of Social Darwinism.

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What about Charles himself? Did he subscribe to the problematic views that were so common among his associates? It looks that way, though one can argue as to what extent.

His Descent of Man contains disparaging references to the “savages” he encountered during his voyage on the Beagle. He was into skull measurements and the racist and sexist claptrap that goes with that particular pseudoscience. There’s some grim stuff in his correspondence too — for instance, the following passage in a letter to Charles Kingsley:

“It is very true what you say about the higher races of men, when high enough, replacing & clearing off the lower races. In 500 years how the Anglo-saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.”

Enough evidence to get him cancelled? Yes, going by the precedents. But what about the likely defences?

Firstly, there’s the obvious point that Darwin’s prejudices were not unusual for his time. And, true enough, they weren’t. But the same applies to David Hume and that didn’t save him from disgrace.

A second line of defence is to emphasise Darwin’s progressive opinions — he was, for instance, a staunch abolitionist. But wasn’t the whole British Empire also abolitionist for most of the Victorian era? Wasn’t the Royal Navy deployed to actively disrupt the slave trade? Yes and yes, but that doesn’t stop the Empire from being viewed today as an overwhelmingly bad thing. 

A third line of defence is suggested in an argument advanced by Jerry Coyne, the American biologist and blogger. Commenting on David Hume’s cancellation he proposes a rule for deciding whether or not a controversial monument should be removed:

“According to Coyne’s Dictum that prescribes cancellation only for those being honored for actions that are dishonorable (like Confederate generals), and not for those being honored for the good things they did, the Hume Tower’s name should stay.”

That makes a lot of sense, but the horse has already bolted. For instance, the stained-glass window commemorating Ronald Fisher at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge was installed to honour his foundational achievements in statistics, not his horrible views on race. That didn’t stop it from getting uninstalled. If this defenestration was the right call, then why shouldn’t the same principle apply to Darwin’s statue at Christ’s College? 

In any case, it could be argued that it is Darwin’s public works not just his personal opinions that are the problem. More than anyone, he elbowed aside a worldview in which man was created in God’s image, replacing it with descent from the beasts. He thus created a conceptual space for unequal gradations of humanity. He might not have intended for so much poison to flow from that starting point, but it did. Evolutionary theory, properly understood, does not justify eugenics or Social Darwinism, but the likes of Galton and Spencer nevertheless claimed Darwin as an inspiration. Guilt by association, you see.

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If it dares to, the woke Left not only has the means of cancelling Charles Darwin, but also the motive (furthering the woke terror) and the opportunity (the proven weakness of a craven cultural establishment).

There are fears that the process has already started. Earlier this month, it emerged that the Natural History Museum is reviewing its collections — including those associated with Darwin’s voyage — in response to the recent protests. The museum’s director is quoted as saying that “the Black Lives Matter movement has demonstrated that we need to do more and act faster, so as a first step we have commenced an institution wide review on naming and recognition.”

A first step. As recently as 2008, the museum moved its marble statue of Darwin back to its current position, presiding over the world-famous main hall. But is the great man sitting quite so securely today? I doubt he’ll be chucked into the Thames, but he could find himself banished to some corridor, with a charge-sheet inscribed on a nearby plaque. As for the statue of his younger self — sat on a park bench in Cambridge — will today’s students tolerate his presence at all? 

Of course, a campaign to cancel Darwin is not without risk. Woke over-reach could provoke a backlash. Who knows, the cultural elites might just take a stand. In fact, the Natural History Museum review is a chance to do that proactively — telling the whole truth about the past, but refusing to dis-honour it. 

And besides, as experts in taxidermy, they can tell the mob to get stuffed.

At the bottom of the window is a simple dedication:

R. A. Fisher
Fellow 1920-26 1943-62
President 1956-59

What Ronald Aylmer Fisher was fellow and president of was Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (in whose dining hall the window was installed). He was one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century. He more or less invented the modern discipline of statistics. As if that wasn’t enough, he also made a vital contribution to the ‘Modern Synthesis’ — which rescued Darwinism from the doldrums and turned biology into a fully-fledged science. Richard Dawkins named him the “greatest biologist since Darwin”: Fisher “provided researchers in biology and medicine with their most important research tools, as well as with the modern version of biology’s central theorem.”

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R. A. Fisher was, in other words, a foundational figure. Unfortunately, one of the things he founded was the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society. He was also a racist, telling a UNESCO enquiry that “available scientific knowledge provides a firm basis for believing that the groups of mankind differ in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development” (the opposite of what the enquiry concluded).

Last month, the college announced that Fisher’s window would be removed — following a campaign by Cambridge students.

Political correctness gone mad? Well, how would you like to eat below a memorial to a man who considered you racially inferior? As for concerns about erasing history, the window was only installed in 1989.

The real problem here is that Fisher was not some isolated crank. He was part of the much wider eugenics movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It can’t be edited out of our intellectual history, because for many decades, and to a shocking extent, it is our intellectual history. 

*

For obvious reasons, we view eugenic ideology through the lens of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Yet there’s another story that must be told — of how eugenics in Britain and America exerted an influence over the intellectual mainstream that outright fascism never did. Eugenic ideas were deeply embedded within almost every facet of modernity — shaping the thinking of movements, organisations and individuals that are still venerated today as icons of science and progress.

Taking Fisher as a starting point, one can, in the manner of a crazed conspiracy theorist, trace the links between many of the biggest names in science, literature, politics and social reform. Except that there’s no conspiracy — it’s all on record: a dense web of professional and personal relations that define the intellectual life of the era.

For instance, Fisher had an important mentor and supporter in Leonard Darwin — the son of Charles and the President of the Eugenics Education Society from 1911 to 1929. The EES was the focal point of the eugenics movement — almost every eugenicist that I mention in this article was a member of it.

Further reading

'Eugenics is possible' is not the same as 'eugenics is good'

By Tom Chivers

The father of eugenics was Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, who coined the word and laid down its pseudoscientific principles. He was instrumental in founding the EES in 1907 with the 21-year-old Sybil Gotto. The EES became the (British) Eugenics Society in 1924 and then, much later in 1989, the Galton Institute. 

It should be said that the Institute has long repudiated its eugenic past. For instance this is what it’s website says in reference to Galton’s 1869 book Hereditary Genius:

“Galton devotes an entire chapter to an overtly racist view of intelligence, which uses a completely fallacious group of criteria to argue that Africans were of less ‘worth’ than Europeans. These views are shocking now, but were pretty representative of many at that time.”

It was indeed another time, but even so Galton’s prejudices were grotesque. This is clear from a letter to The Times, in which he advocated a scheme of racial replacement in Africa:

“My proposal is to make the encouragement of the Chinese settlements at one or more suitable places on the East Coast of Africa a par of our national policy, in the belief that the Chinese immigrants would not only maintain their position, but that they would multiply and their descendants supplant the inferior Negro race. I should expect the large part of the African seaboard, now sparsely occupied by lazy, palavering savages living under the nominal sovereignty of the Zanzibar, or Portugal, might in a few years be tenanted by industrious, order loving Chinese…”

University College London, where Galton was based, is now in the process of renaming its Galton Lecture Theatre.

However, that’s not all they’re having to do. UCL also has (or rather had) a Pearson Lecture Theatre and a Pearson Hall named after Karl Pearson. He was a protege of Galton’s, a fierce rival of Fisher’s and, you guessed it, yet another raving eugenicist. His very real achievements in statistics and biology were horribly marred by his revolting opinions on “inferior races” and “degenerate and feeble stock”. That didn’t stop him from being offered an OBE and a knighthood — both of which he turned down because he was also a ‘principled’ socialist.

It may seem incredible to see such a combination of views, but before the Second World War it was unexceptional. Eugenic ideas were common among both Marxists and Fabians. The Left-wing eugenicists of the time included Sydney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley and J. B. S. Haldane. They didn’t just hold these beliefs in awkward juxtaposition, but saw eugenics as an essential part of socialist project. In Shaw’s infamous words, “the only fundamental and possible Socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of Man.”

It wasn’t just socialists though. In 1899, Winston Churchill declared that his aim in life was the “improvement of the British breed.” He saw “the “feeble-minded” as a threat and in a 1910 letter to the Prime Minister, Henry Asquith advocated compulsory sterilisation as an alternative to confinement — a “simple surgical operation so the inferior could be permitted freely in the world without causing much inconvenience to others.”

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By Niall Gooch

Churchill was a Liberal at the time he wrote that — albeit one who had come from, and would return to, the Tory ranks. However, many life-long Liberals — including those intellectual titans John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge — were also convinced eugenicists. Keynes was a co-founder of the Cambridge Eugenics Society with Fisher — and continued to support eugenic ideas even after the Second World War. 

Beveridge was no better. In 1906, he stated that “the unemployable” should be supported by state, but at the cost of losing their rights including “the franchise… civil freedom and fatherhood”. In the 1940s, at the height of his influence, he argued that child benefits should be paid at a higher rate to middle class than working class families to boost the birth rate of the former.

Again and again we see the co-mingling of eugenic and progressive ideologies. Early feminism was no exception. That’s especially true of the first advocates of birth control — women like Alice Vickery, Sybil Gotto, Marie Stopes and, in America, Margaret Sanger. They were all active in what was euphemistically known as the ‘social hygiene movement‘ — a mixture of charitable action, social reform, finger-wagging moralism, class snobbery and, in many cases, outright bigotry.

Some of the worst offenders are still revered as feminist pioneers and forerunners of the sexual revolution. Marie Stopes has a reproductive health non-profit named after her, and yet she was a eugenicist through-and-through. In her 1920 book Radiant Motherhood, she looked forward to legislation that would “ensure the sterility of the hopelessly rotten and racially diseased”. Meanwhile, Sanger — the founder of Planned Parenthood — set out her ideology in a 1923 op-ed for the New York Times:

“Birth control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtless practised. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilisation.”

And there it is, the whole of the eugenic mentality distilled down to just two words: “human weeds”.

*

Confronted by the poverty and squalor of the fast-growing industrial cities, there is ample evidence that the intelligentsia felt not compassion, but deep revulsion, for those less fortunate than they were. Take this 1915 diary entry from Virginia Woolf:

“we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. the first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look at twice, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; and then one realised that everyone in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.”

The more progressive intellectuals may have subscribed to various schemes for the improvement of society, but that did not preclude the most dehumanising attitudes to individuals that they saw as beyond help. Even the self-declared socialists, who supposedly had the best interests of the working class at heart, perceived much of it as an obstacle to progress. As H. G. Wells complained:

“We cannot go on giving you health, freedom, enlargement, limitless wealth, if all our gifts to you are to be swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny …and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon us.”

Further reading

The Scopes Monkey Trial was about racism, not god

By Dennis Sewell

Socialism and eugenicism went together because the latter was a tool for getting rid of the people that supposedly couldn’t benefit from, and might overwhelm, the former. Or to quote Karl Pearson’s chilling words:

“No degenerate and feeble stock will ever be converted into healthy and sound stock by the accumulated effects of education, good laws, and sanitary surroundings.”

This was also the Bureaucratic Age — a time in which technocracy had yet to understand its limits. Everything, not just the economy, was to be managed from the top-down by an expert class: “No consistent eugenicist can be a Laisser Faire individualist”, exhorted Sydney Webb, “he must interfere, interfere, interfere!”

Eugenics stood at the intersection of so many powerful intellectual currents — so why didn’t it triumph completely?

In part, it was because modernism, though untamed by later doubts, had to contend with what was still a Christian society. The Evangelical, Anglo-Catholic and Roman Catholic currents in the great Victorian torrent of social reform took a long time to lose their full force. And thus in the twentieth century, the eugenicists were opposed head-on by Christian campaigners like G. K. Chesterton and Halliday Sutherland.

And yet, as we know, the twentieth century also saw traditional Christian morality lose ground to progressive forces across a whole range of issues — from abortion to the divorce law to Sunday trading. So why did the explicitly eugenic agenda — once part of the progressive mainstream — not advance? What happened to it? 

The short answer is that the Second World War did. But that’s not the only reason it lost its respectability. Even if the Nazis had never come to power, the ‘progressive’ eugenicists would have been exposed as the cranks that they were. Their demographic paranoia would have been shown to be baseless. The growth of prosperity and the extension of the welfare state demonstrated that no section of society was beyond help. Over the decades we greatly improved the material condition of our nation without recourse to the eugenic methods that a generation of intellectuals once told us were indispensable.

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By Peter Franklin

Clearly, there’s no fad so dangerous as one that spreads through the academic and cultural elites — especially one that categorises the rest of the population by things like race and class, and then makes sweeping generalisation on that basis alone. 

In 2020, we could look for more windows to remove and lecture halls to rename. We could stop putting on the plays George Bernard Shaw and stop reading the books of H. G. Wells. We could erase any tribute to Marie Stopes or William Beveridge. We could even get economists to stop calling themselves Keynesians. 

But all of that would be missing the point. After all, it’s not the madness of the dead we need to watch out for. 

It was because of the threat to life, and not for any other reason, that the Judge solemnly authorised the procedure. “This case is not about eugenics,” he emphasised. And even so, even though the details of the case make it very clear that leaving DD to conceive again would do nothing good for her, and that no other course but sterilisation could work, it feels like a terrible conclusion to have reached. A letter from DD is quoted, and her words hang heavily over the proceedings. “My body is mine,” she says, “by human rights.”

My body is mine, by human rights. It seems like the most basic principle, and one which could only be breached in circumstances as extreme as those of DD. But of course, for much of history and in many places, it’s been breached with casual utilitarianism: the reason Mr Justice Cobb had to say his judgement wasn’t about eugenics is that there have been thousands of women like DD whose fertility was stolen from them only on the grounds of improving the gene pool. For as long as contraception has existed, people have been using it to stop the wrong people from breeding.

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Marie Stopes introduced the world to birth control in her book Married Love, then later she tried to stop her son from marrying a woman with glasses on the grounds that weak eyesight was “dysgenic” and should be excluded from the racial stock. Her passionate interest in eugenics put her into unsavoury connections: she gave Hitler a book of her poems.

But then, it also put her in step with a respectable and broad-based international movement of the rationalist and progressive: John Maynard Keynes, Beatrice and Sydney Webb, and George Bernard Shaw were among her fellow-travellers. (Given that Ronald Fisher has just had his memorial window removed from Cambridge for his views on eugenics, one wonders how long the Stopes clinics will bear her name.)

Under the influence of the ideas that Stopes espoused, thousands of women judged unworthy of breeding have been cajoled or coerced or downright deceived into sterilisation. They might have been judged “feeble-minded” – under a definition of feeble-mindedness that was expansive enough to cover heavy drinking and “promiscuity” (if you were unmarried and you got pregnant once, that could qualify you as promiscuous). It took the undeniable horror of Nazi Germany to make eugenics synonymous with atrocity; and even then, people have kept putting the idea into practice, while avoiding the word if they can.

Between 2006 and 2010, 150 women in the California prison system were sterilised — some with full consent, but others reported being pressured when they were under sedation for a different operation. One of the doctors involved defended the cost to the state: “Over a 10-year period, that isn’t a huge amount of money compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children — as they procreated more.”

Because black, Hispanic and Native American woman in the US have higher rates of incarceration than white women, targeting prisoners for sterilisation means (even if inadvertently) targeting racialised women for sterilisation. That, too, is a grim chapter of the eugenic inheritance, in the US and elsewhere.

In Peru, at the end of the last century, a programme under the misnomer Voluntary Surgical Contraception overwhelmingly captured poor and indigenous women, many of whom could not read the Spanish in which the consent forms were written as they signed away their fertility. And then there’s what’s happening now in the Chinese province of Xinjiang.

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The persecution of Xinjiang’s Uighurs has only recently made Western headlines, but it is hardly new, and reproductive coercion has long been part of it. What has changed over recent years is how explicitly the goal of exterminating the Uighurs is discussed, and how systematically it is pursued. While President Xi Jinping is a proponent of natalism (he oversaw the end of China’s one-child policy in 2015, for demographic rather than bodily autonomy reasons), not all population growth is wanted population growth.

The babies required are those of the dominant Han group. Chinese of other ethnicities must either assimilate, or be eliminated. State-mandated abortion, IUD insertion and sterilisation of Uighurs has caused the birth rate in Xinjiang (where Uighurs make up 45% of the population) to fall by 24% in the last year; for comparison, the nationwide decline in birth rate is only 4.2%. The attack on reproduction is the most extreme aspect of a programme designed to destroy the Uighur as a people, through prohibition of their language and culture, and “re-education” in brutal camps.

The Uighurs are a problem to the Chinese state because of the way the Chinese ideal of statehood is constituted. David Tobin, Hallsworth Research Fellow in the Political Economy of China at the University of Manchester, explains that since 2012, “policy became about engineering identity”. China’s leadership holds the position that “the disappearance of cultures and language is natural and should be celebrated” — it’s simply a matter of evolution.

While, theoretically, the country is not a Han ethnostate (under Mao, “Han chauvinism” was actually framed as a problem to be abolished), the Han are given a privileged role in the national myth, presented as the stable, civilising entity into which other, less developed groups must be absorbed. It’s for this reason that intermarriage between Han and Uighurs is encouraged, rather than abhorred, in the way that Western racism’s traditional horror of miscegenation might lead you to imagine. The stubborn otherness of the Uighurs is an affront to national unity that must be corrected, by any means necessary.

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If you study anthropology in Xinjiang, at the top of your reading list you’ll find an American name: 19th-century anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. Morgan researched and recorded the lives of Native Americans, especially the Iroquois. He was also an avid assimilatist, establishing a narrative of civilisation’s progress which has influenced the treatment of the Uighurs: the First Nations would have to give up their nations, and submit to being “civilized, Christianized, and humanized”.

Lewis helped to formulate early plans for the Indian Reservation system. These turned out to be sites not only of deprivation, but of control: Native American rituals were proscribed, and effectively remained so until the 1990s. And the logic of assimilation developed after Lewis’s death, perhaps inevitably, to include reproductive coercion. The Family Planning Services and Population Research Act, passed in 1970, subsidised sterilisations: as many as 25% of Native American women of childbearing age underwent the procedure over the next six years. Rote sterilisations were nicknamed “Mississippi appendectomies”.

The surgical banality of this violence shouldn’t obscure the fact that it is violence. For the individual, it’s a vicious sundering of her from her future, as well as a physical attack on her insides. That’s another reason to read the DD judgement: it is unflinching in its account of what must be done when an unwilling woman is sterilised. DD would be surprised at her home. She would be restrained. She would be anaesthetised, and she would wake up infertile and in pain.

Compulsory sterilisation is one of the gravest things that can be imposed on a person. When imposed on her because of her ethnicity, it is a genocide — the female body as ground zero in the pursuit of better breeding. It is being done, methodically and barely concealed, now, to the Uighurs.

Richard Dawkins does not have the same rule, I think it’s fair to say. “It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds,” he tweeted recently. “It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice.”

Lots of people got very cross about that, and I was naively surprised; surprised enough to break my own rule. I thought he was saying something fairly obvious, which is that if you bred humans for some trait then it would probably make that trait more common, and that he was explicit in saying he wasn’t talking about whether it was morally acceptable. But other people thought — they told me so — that he was literally in favour of eugenics. (Dawkins later clarified that no, he was not: “I deplore the idea of a eugenic policy [but just] as we breed cows to yield more milk, we could breed humans to run faster or jump higher. Heaven forbid that we do it.”)

The analyst John Nerst, who writes a fascinating blog called “Everything Studies”, is very interested in how and why we disagree. And one thing he says is that for a certain kind of nerdy, “rational” thinker, there is a magic ritual you can perform. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y.”

Having performed that ritual, you ward off the evil spirits. You isolate the thing you’re talking about from all the concepts attached to it. So you can say things like “if we accept that IQ is heritable, then”, and so on, following the implications of the hypothetical without endorsing them. Nerst uses the term “decoupling”, and says that some people are “high-decouplers”, who are comfortable separating and isolating ideas like that.

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Other people are low-decouplers, who see ideas as inextricable from their contexts. For them, the ritual lacks magic power. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y,” but when you say X, they will still hear Y. The context in which Nerst was discussing it was a big row that broke out a year or two ago between Ezra Klein and Sam Harris after Harris interviewed Charles Murray about race and IQ.

As a high-decoupler, Harris thought that it was OK to talk about what-ifs; if there are genetic components to racial differences, then we still need to treat everyone with equal dignity, etc: “I’m not saying there are, but if there are…” He thought he’d performed the ritual.

But for Klein, the editor of Vox, the ritual was not strong enough. Murray’s ideas are reminiscent of a grim history, in which pseudoscientific ideas about a hierarchy of humans were used to justify slavery or Jim Crow laws. For Klein (a low-decoupler, in Nerst’s taxonomy), you can’t simply take an idea out of its context like that. The context comes with it.

These two paradigms are very hard to square. Harris thought he was having a coolly rational debate in the philosophy-seminar style, so was baffled to find he was being accused of racism; Klein thought Harris was trying to sneak racist ideas in under an academic smokescreen, and couldn’t believe Harris claiming otherwise. Their models of the world were so different they just couldn’t understand each other. So obviously it descended into a massive online row with accusations of bad faith and racism.

That’s what I think was going on with the Dawkins tweet. Dawkins thought he’d performed the magic ritual – “It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice” =  “By X, I don’t mean Y.” He is a nerdy, high-decoupling person, a scientist, used to taking concepts apart.

But many people reading it are not high-decouplers; they hear “eugenics” and “work” and immediately all of the history, from Francis Galton to Josef Mengele, is brought into the discussion: you can’t separate the one from the other. 

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I think a lot of arguments in society come down to this high-decoupler/low-decoupler difference. And while I hope I’ve done a good job of putting the case for low-decoupling, I am very obviously a high-decoupler, so often I find myself thinking “but they performed the magic ritual! They said they didn’t mean Y!” and being really confused that everyone is very angry that they believe Y.

Dawkins, to my knowledge, never explained why he suddenly brought up eugenics out of a clear blue sky, but the word is in the news at the moment because Dominic Cummings hired the weirdo he wanted to hire, a man called Andrew Sabisky. Inevitably enough, the media has gone through his old social media posts and found various things he’s said, and he has since quit.

For the record: some of it is genuinely unsettling, for instance that “there are excellent reasons to think the very real racial differences in intelligence are significantly — even mostly — genetic in origin”. This is, I think, not true — I don’t know how you square it with the simple fact that poor black boys in the UK get better educational outcomes than poor white boys, for instance. And none of this should be seen as a defence of Sabisky’s hiring. (Watch me perform the decoupling ritual: will it work?)

But I thought a few of them were interesting from this high/low decoupling point of view. For instance, he described female genital mutilation (FGM) as a “moral panic”, because the actual numbers were low, so the risk to girls in the UK was pretty tiny. The full quote was “It is still unclear to what extent FGM represents a serious risk to young girls, raised in the UK, of certain minority group origins. Much of the hue and cry looks more like a moral panic.”

It seems fairly obvious to me that Sabisky is saying that FGM is rare in the UK – a view, incidentally, shared by at least one consultant obstetrician in the BMJ, who said “there is no evidence that large numbers of girls living in UK are having FGM”. He’s not belittling the impact itself.

Similarly, I’ve said before that claims about a wave of teen suicides are “absolute bollocks” and that the “epidemic of loneliness” is not real; that doesn’t mean I don’t think that suicide and loneliness are terrible things. You can decouple the frequency of the event from the seriousness of the event when it does happen. But for low-decoupling people, you can’t; by downplaying one, you are downplaying the whole package.

Similarly, Sabisky said that “women’s sport is more comparable to the Paralympics than it is to men’s”. But the context was that of Caster Semenya, a female runner who has an unusually high level of blood testosterone, and whether she should be allowed to compete in women’s sport. Sabisky is suggesting, as I understand it, that there is a need to draw boundaries around women’s sport in a way that you don’t around men’s, but you do around the Paralympics; if anyone could compete in women’s sports or the Paralympics, then lots of mediocre able-bodied men would win them and there would be no women’s sports or Paralympics left. The concept of “boundaries around the sport” has been separated from the idea of the sports themselves. But to a low-decoupler, it sounds, I think, as though he is saying they are inferior. 

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Even his “eugenics” argument, in an interview with Laura McInerny in SchoolsWeek in 2016, strikes me as quite a separating-the-feelings-from-the-facts, decoupling-style situation. In fact he even says so, explicitly: “You have to separate yourself from what you feel and from what are the facts of the matter.” He asks whether parents should be able to screen IVF embryos, whether for disability or schizophrenia, or for intelligence. The former is not a million miles away from our current situation, where pregnancies at high risk of chromosomal disorders can be terminated if the mother wishes; the latter will probably be happening in China in a few years. The fact is that it’s possible; that doesn’t say whether it’s right. 

Sabisky himself, according to that interview, seems to be against it: “He is personally uneasy about the ethics of many of the things he talks about and as a Christian — he married in church last year — he has moral views on the topics that may not be what people expect.” It seems to me that he is explicitly decoupling what he thinks is true, or what he thinks is effective, from what he thinks is right.

I don’t think, as some people do, that these remarks have been “taken out of context”, as such. I think that even with the context, lots of people would still assume that when he says “FGM isn’t a major risk” he means “we don’t need to care about FGM”. Similarly, Dawkins’s tweet wasn’t taken out of context: the context was all there, but the magic ritual didn’t work. It’s a translation problem: some people think they’re having a cold, rational discussion; other people are alive to the implications; there will be frequent occasions when the two groups will hear the same words and yet understand totally different things by them.

Again, to perform the decoupling-ritual one more time, none of this is to defend the hiring of Sabisky — who, full disclosure, I met in 2017 and interviewed for my book. It wouldn’t surprise me, to decouple again, if he was a useful person to have around government: he is a “superforecaster”, which means that of the 20,000 people making predictions about the future for the Good Judgment Project, he was one of the 150 who scored best for accuracy. (Read a bit more about that here, if you like.) I suspect having people who are really good at predicting the future is useful, but that is decoupling his abilities from his views, and maybe that’s not a good thing to do.

But I think the decoupling thing makes me understand a bit more why Dawkins’s tweet got people so angry. Sometimes the ritual fails, and the spirits break through the warding circle.

This sense that the 1920s represented something positive and culturally adventurous after the ardour of a decade of crisis and war is real enough. Among artists, writers, musicians and scientists there was a self-conscious willingness to embrace new ideas and to transcend the conservative world of pre-1914; among the wider public, if they could afford it, the 1920s did open up the prospect of motor transport, international travel by the (still dangerous) new air routes, owning a radio or a gramophone.

For the younger generation, those who were too young to serve in or work for the war effort, it was important to place a distance between them and the damaged generation of 1914. Talk of war was not encouraged. Veterans crippled physically or psychologically, or both, were shunned as a reminder of the grim ordeal now over.

The material life of the 1920s was also transformed by the advent of a real consumer revolution and the modern media. In 1922 the BBC was established and within a decade the density of radio ownership in Britain was the highest in Europe. The cinema was everywhere and American films introduced the British public to a new kind of consumerism. Where high fashion had been the preserve of the upper and upper-middle classes before 1914, cheaper imitations were widely available in the 1920s.

The ideal of leisure, completely familiar to our contemporary world, became a possibility for millions for the first time, whether driving in the new cheap motor-cars pioneered by William Morris, Herbert Austin or the American Henry Ford (only the last has survived), or holidaying in British seaside resorts, or taking part in popular sports such as golf or tennis. Lifestyle — again a familiar 21st century concept — made its debut in the 1920s among those with enough money to indulge their taste.

The positive was in evidence not only at home but also abroad. Enshrined in the post-war settlement in 1919 was a commitment to a League of Nations which was supposed to establish “collective security” as a global system to prevent further warfare. The League was never severely tested in the 1920s and British people flocked to join the League of Nations Union established in 1918 in order to educate the public in the virtues of co-operation and collective action. By 1927, there were more than 600,000 members.

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The post-war settlement also granted the British and French Empires control of former Turkish areas in the Middle East, and German colonies in Africa and the Pacific. These were supposed to be mandates held on behalf of the League, but they quickly came to be regarded as part of the Empire. For schoolchildren in the 1920s, the map of the world was filled with pink or red (both colours were used even for areas such as the Sudan or Iraq, which were not formally British possessions) to indicate the vast global extent of the Empire.

Empire Day became an important event in the public calendar reminding people that in the 1920s Britain was the global superpower. In 1924-5 a great Empire Exhibition was held at the Wembley stadium (finally demolished in 2003) which attracted 27 million visitors intent on enjoying the spectacle of British imperial grandeur.

Alongside the hopes for a new age, there nevertheless existed a darker side. Britain was a class society in which the bulk of the population lived on low wages and little welfare. After the wartime boom in production and employment, declining output and unemployment characterised much of industrial Britain. The slow revival of trade and falling prices put pressure on employers to cut wages and for nine days in May 1926 British society was confronted with the first General Strike of workers organised by the Trade Union Congress to demand better pay and conditions for coal miners.

There were widespread fears among the better off and in the government of a radical, even revolutionary movement inspired by the example of the communist October Revolution in Russia in 1917. The strike was broken, but the shadow of revolutionary threat, though never a real one, fuelled uncertainties about the future of Britain’s free enterprise, capitalist system.

In 1929, that system was subjected to its severest test with the onset of the world recession that lasted down to 1932. Although much has been made of the recent global economic crisis in 2007-9, it was modest by comparison with the collapse of trade, falling prices and wages, and mass unemployment ushered in at the end of the 1920s. Britain in 1929 was one of the richest states in the world, but the economy bore no relation to the wealth of today’s economy, and its general availability of welfare.

In the late 1920s, there was no welfare state; people were helped by charities, supported each other in family networks, or relied on meagre handouts for the old and unemployed. It is difficult to imagine today, despite regular complaints that the current welfare system is unjust and inadequate, the degree of sheer economic insecurity and poverty faced by millions of Britain’s labouring classes in that decade.

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Fear of the overthrow of capitalism was chiefly a middle-class concern. So, too, was anxiety about the “race”, which had much to do with differences between Britain’s social classes. In the 1920s there emerged a significant “eugenics” movement and the eugenists, both scientists and a broader, informed public worried that the rapid growth of an underclass of deprived and poorly educated Britons would lead to a decline in the genetic quality of the race. Statistics were misused to demonstrate that in 30 or 50 years’ time, the population would be swamped by humans of inferior physical and mental qualities; the middle-classes, those deemed to be genetically valuable, had too few children to compensate for the wider degeneration of the population.

Eugenists argued in favour of sterilisation of the “unfit”, either voluntary or compulsory. A bill presented to Parliament in the early 1930s to allow sterilisation was defeated, but ideas about the “fit” and “unfit” members of the community, now seen as a Nazi policy, had roots in British racial anxieties as well. Marie Stopes, pioneer of birth control in the early 1920s, and often presented as a model for the new progressive age, actually favoured control in order to prevent births that she regarded as a threat to the future of an imperial race.

Popular fears also arose from the prospect of any future war. Despite the confidence of middle-class liberals that the League would somehow guarantee a secure global future, there was also a more pessimistic view that war was built into the great power system or even human nature itself. The pacifist movement that emerged in Britain in the 1920s was small in number but vocal.

The No More War Movement, founded in 1922, campaigned against militarism and the glorification of war; a National Peace Council was set up a year later as an umbrella organisation for all the small and local peace organisations; the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, founded in 1915, had branches across the country. Among the many anxieties about future war, none was as important as fear of aerial bombing. First experienced when German aircraft attacked British towns in 1917-18, bombing was seen as a direct threat to ordinary civilians who were defenceless in the face of high explosive, gas or incendiary bombs.

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The effects of bombing were greatly exaggerated, but the common assumption that bombing might usher in an apocalyptic end to British society, or even Western civilisation as a whole, became embedded in popular views of future war. The absence of any serious international crisis in the 1920s did not damp down the pessimism. Indeed, the optimistic view of the present and the future as an age of progress and peace made the possibility of a descent again into world war all the more horrifying. The tension between the enjoyment of current stability and the prospect of a less stable future gave to the 1920s a bittersweet flavour.

Much the same might be said of the coming 2020s. Although in Britain and the rest of Europe people are healthier, better off and more secure than they have ever been, that very safety creates its opposite, fear of what might happen if the security is challenged.

For Britain, the next decade has become a source of real anxiety. For all the enthusiasm for leaving the European Union, Britain will be sailing into uncharted waters economically, socially and internationally. The sustained consumerism of the past decades makes it difficult to imagine a world in which everyone has to consume less, but it may well happen; British society is now deeply divided over many issues where it was not a decade ago; terrorism has been held in check, but it is always there as a possibility; environmental damage is a constant background noise but one that will become more insistent as the decade goes on. And war? No historian looking at the overconfidence of the 1920s that war was past history would dare to predict what might happen in ten years’ time.

The history of the next decade will not be the same as the 1920s, but it is likely to display a similar tension between hopeful expectation and hidden anxiety as a century ago.

The public’s perceptions of the trial have been shaped and coloured by films, plays and TV dramas — as well as by glancing references in newspaper articles, dropped names and conversational asides, all of which make up the currency of popular culture.

The episode’s urtext was Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee’s play, Inherit the Wind, which was turned into a 1960 movie directed by Stanley Kramer and starring Spencer Tracy. The trial generated at least three further feature films, including a remake of Inherit the Wind, and four or five made-for-television docudramas. The film Planet of the Apes, in which the intolerant orangutan religious authorities refuse to listen to the scientific evidence of their connection to mankind, as presented by the liberal chimpanzee scientist, was a clear allusion to the event.

If one were to frame a composite picture to capture the impression of the trial passed to the following generation, it would look something like this: an earnest, high-minded young schoolmaster, John Scopes, who reads widely and keeps abreast of intellectual progress, decides to teach his pupils about Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which is by now more than 60 years old and is accepted by biologists as scientific fact.

Scopes is motivated by a commitment to the welfare of the young minds in his charge. He is determined to give them an education founded on truth, rather than superstition. He obtains a set of textbooks and starts teaching evolution.

The pupils are gripped and want to learn more. However, Scopes’s initiative falls foul of a fusty, outdated law that forbids the teaching of evolution and requires him instead to teach the creation story set out in the Bible; this Scopes knows to be wrong because fossil evidence, combined with what he has read in Charles Darwin’s book, proves that the world is many millions of years older than a literal reading of the Book of Genesis allows.

But Scopes is also up against powerful interests, politicians and clergymen of reactionary disposition who feel very threatened, Darwin’s work being radically subversive of their source of authority and power. The issues at stake are academic freedom, freedom of speech, the separation of church and state, and supremely, the claims of scientific truth to a place at the top of the epistemological tree.

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The case comes to court, where a thrilling duel of wits ensues between two of the finest trial attorneys in the land. For the defence steps forward the urbane Clarence Darrow, representing science and progress. For the prosecution, William Jennings Bryan, the epitome of a fast-fading order, in outlook and attitude somewhat similar to one of the more hardline figures on today’s evangelical Christian Right.

To begin with, it seems the prosecutor has the edge. The jury are simple country folk, and he plays to their natural conservative prejudices. Darrow, by contrast is a big city boy, and his slick ways elicit the jury’s suspicion.

Soon, the tables are turned. Bryan had hoped to put Darwin on trial, but the wily Darrow has put the Bible on trial instead. Not only that — he has put the prosecutor on the stand. The old man makes an almighty fool of himself trying to explain how God made the world in six days.

As the young schoolmaster comes blinking into the sunlight having been thoroughly vindicated, his young pupils swarm around him. Now they can go on to become research chemists or geneticists. Heck, the geeky one with the specs might even win the Nobel Prize. For sure, anyone with a broadly liberal outlook stands with Scopes and is firmly of the Darrow persuasion.

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But almost everything we think we know about the Scopes trial turns out to be untrue. Scopes wasn’t really a science teacher: he was the high school’s football coach and only covered science when the regular teacher was away. He probably never actually taught his class about evolution at all. Scopes gave a number of conflicting accounts: that he did teach the lesson; that he set a chapter of a textbook as homework, but never taught evolution in the classroom; and, most credibly, that he had made the whole thing up. For the trial itself was a cynical contrivance.

The plot had been hatched around a table in Fred Robinson’s drugstore by a group of Dayton businessmen. One of them had spotted an advertisement in a city newspaper placed by a pressure group wanting to find a community willing to challenge the law forbidding the teaching of evolution.

Robinson, who styled himself “the hustlin’ druggist”, and his fellow small- town boosters, spotted a commercial opportunity. A spectacular trial in Dayton would pull in visitors from all across the United States, who would spend more dollars in local shops, hotels and restaurants every day the trial was in progress than local residents spent in a month.

John Scopes was invited to meet the business leaders on 5 May 1925. They made their pitch: he was a young man, 24- years old, with nothing to lose. He could become famous. They would see to it that whatever the outcome, no harm would come to him. He would be doing the whole community a favour. Scopes agreed, saying that he disapproved of the law anyway. Arrangements were made for the young teacher to confess to teaching a class about evolution in breach of Tennessee law.

The relevant statute, known as the Butler Act, was not a fusty old one. In fact the Governor had signed it into law only two months previously. The Tennessee House of Representatives had passed the bill by 71 votes to 5; the state Senate endorsed it 24 votes to 6. These margins reflected the Butler Act’s enormous popularity among the people of Tennessee — and there was good reason for that.

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By Suzannah Lipscomb

At this time almost everyone who considered themselves ‘progressive’, including everyone who considered themselves a ‘Darwinist’, strongly supported the-then rampant eugenics movement. In rural Tennessee, folks may not have had a sophisticated grasp of Darwin’s theory of evolution, nor of his cousin, Francis Galton’s related, but pseudo-scientific theory of eugenics; but they knew the progressives who preached Darwinism in the cities despised country people, called them “imbeciles” and “defectives” and would sterilise them if they got half a chance.

More than 60,000 Americans were forcibly sterilised under eugenics laws passed by 33 states. It wasn’t just low IQ that established someone as likely to have a dysgenic effect: a history of heavy drinking, or conceiving a child out of wedlock, were enough to mark someone down as a “moral imbecile”.

Neighbouring Virginia would witness vast sweep operations where road blocks were set up and teams of sheriffs’ deputies dragged whole families away to be put under the knife. But Tennessee held out, refusing ever to pass any compulsory sterilisation statute, and the people of the state distrusted the progressives. They understood that they didn’t just view southern hillbillies with contempt, they despised God and the Bible, too — and now they wanted to teach children that grandpa was descended from an ape. The Butler Act would put a stop to that nonsense.

The textbook John Scopes pretended to have used to teach his class about evolution was George Hunter’s A Civic Biology, a work that was consistent with the scientific orthodoxy of its day. That is to say, it was strongly influenced by scientific racialism and eugenics.

Hunter, like Charles Darwin before him, believed the several races of man had travelled different distances down the evolutionary road. Way out in the vanguard was the refined Caucasian; lagging at the rear was the significantly less evolved African type, with other races somewhere in-between.

Scopes accepted this doctrine of white supremacy. In preparing for the trial he had visited one of the scientists who, in 1906, had supported the exhibition of a Congolese Pygmy in a cage at New York’s Bronx Zoo, alongside an orangutan and a gorilla, as living proof of Darwinian evolution, presenting him as a transitional form between ape and human, the so-called ‘missing link’.

Suggested reading

The squalid myth of Dickensian London

By Robert Tombs

Hunter’s biology textbook was also scathing about what the author perceived as a feckless underclass that drank too much and lived off handouts. Compulsory sterilisation was his preferred solution.

As the town’s business leaders had hoped, the trial did pull in thousands of visitors. Dayton got its spectacle. The area around the courthouse soon began to resemble a carnival. A troupe of live monkeys cavorted on the courthouse lawn. More than two hundred journalists turned up, two of them all the way from England.

The man they had come to see perform, William Jennings Bryan, was certainly no prototypical Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. In fact, he was more of a Bernie Sanders. Bryan had been Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state and was three times the Democratic Party’s candidate for the presidency of the United States.

He was by some way the most politically Left-wing Democrat ever to receive the party’s nomination. The scourge of Wall Street bankers and big business, Bryan argued for a minimum wage and subsidies for poor farmers. He demanded the nationalisation of key industries such as the railroads, and the telegraph and telephone services. He was a radical populist and also a devout Presbyterian.

Since the defence admitted that Scopes had breached the statute, the only line left to pursue was to demonstrate that the creation story in Genesis was intrinsically risible. But when Clarence Darrow put William Jennings Bryan on the stand in Dayton, he did not inflict the comprehensive humiliation that posterity somehow remembers. He was evidently surprised by the answers he got when he pressed the witness on key points relating to the age of the world. Bryan may have been a fundamentalist, but his fundamentalism turned out to have its shades of grey.

The six days God had taken to create the world were not necessarily 24-hour days, Bryan explained. They might well have lasted millions of years, even hundreds of millions of years. Science and the Bible were not mutually exclusive. For the court, this answer meant that Darrow’s inquisition had no real evidential value and the judge swiftly brought it to a close.

Darrow and Scopes had failed to win the central argument on which the case turned. The jury took only nine minutes to reach their verdict: John Scopes was guilty as charged. The judge slapped the schoolmaster with a hefty fine. Which only goes to show that history is sometimes written — or re-written — by the losers.

Dennis Sewell is the author of The Political Gene; How Darwin’s Ideas Changed Politics

Not in our world, of course, but in that of Pavane – a novel by the science fiction author Keith Roberts.

Strictly speaking, Pavane isn’t sci-fi, but ‘alt history‘ – a fictional setting in which the course of world events takes a different turn. The best-known examples include Robert Harris’s Fatherland and Phillip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.

Unlike those two novels, which ask ‘what if the Nazis had won the Second World War?’, Pavane asks ‘what if the Catholics had won the Reformation?’ Roberts’ answer is that with an all-powerful church in charge of all of western Europe, the pace of technological and social change would have been much slower. (About a hundred years slower in the novel’s parallel version of the 20th century.)

One could read Pavane as a last gasp of old-fashioned English anti-Catholicism. But there’s a twist [spoilers]: In a coda to the novel it is revealed that the church authorities had fore-knowledge of how the 20th century would turn out if they didn’t act to slow down technological progress. Looking back across the possible timelines, Roberts has one of his characters utter these chilling words:

“Did she [the Church] hang and burn? A little, yes. But there was no Belsen. No Buchenwald. No Passchendaele.”

It’s pure speculation, of course. And, from a serious historical point of view, one can take issue with some or all of its counterfactual logic. Yet it asks a supremely important question: not the ‘what if?’ that is the premise of the novel, but whether civilisations should ever suppress science and technology.

Further reading

Is Europe on the brink of a new Thirty Years' War?

By Peter Franklin

As children of modernity, the very idea strikes us as scandalous – and also ridiculous: something that we shouldn’t and couldn’t do even if we wanted to (which, of course, we wouldn’t).

And yet, as I hope to show, we can and we must.

*

Can you guess who wrote this?

“I am convinced that the multiplication of the Feeble-Minded, which is proceeding now at an artificial rate, unchecked by any of the old restraints of nature, and actually fostered by civilised conditions, is a terrible danger to the race.”

Adolf Hitler? Oswald Mosley? No, I’m afraid it was Winston Churchill – in a 1910 letter to HH Asquith.

It’s surprising that the Left-wing Churchill-bashers of our own time haven’t made more of his support for eugenics. But, then, many of their own heroes and heroines from this period were also up to their necks in it. In fact, it’s hard to find many public intellectuals at the time who spoke up against eugenics. GK Chesterton was one of the few exceptions.

The conventional wisdom was that the use of sterilisation to eliminate congenital ‘weaknesses’ from the population was a reasonable, indeed progressive, thing to do. There were some experts who had doubts as to the practicality or effectiveness of such measures, but few with moral qualms. The theories were put into action in many countries including that exemplar of social democracy, Sweden – where something like 15,000 people were sterilised as a condition of release from institutions (with a further 5,000 or more sterilised in other coercive circumstances).

That was, of course, as nothing compared to the horrors of Nazi eugenics. The post-war world was shocked to its senses, and though not all eugenic practices came to an end, the respectability of eugenicism as an intellectual and political movement was destroyed. In the decades since, the taboo has endured even as our knowledge of human genetics has grown – and therefore the theoretical basis for eugenic policies.

Nor is it just theory. We have tools for the manipulation of DNA that the eugenicists of the early 20th century could not imagine. And yet we place strict controls on how we use them – especially in regard to human DNA.

Those controls don’t go as far as some people would like. We license various manipulations of early stage human embryos – including cloning. We use genetic screening to identify foetal abnormalities – which are then eliminated from the human population through abortion. In Nordic countries such as Denmark, the termination rate for Downs Syndrome babies is close to 100%. However, such procedures are presented as a matter of life saving medical research or reproductive rights, not eugenics. The Danish government has explicitly denied that it has a programme to eliminate people with Downs Syndrome from the population (though, in effect, that is what they are very close to ‘achieving’).

The range of traits, both physical and psychological, whose incidence we could interfere with is expanding. Writing for UnHerd this week, Tom Chivers explains just how close we are to making genetic edits to boost IQ. He also suggests that the Chinese government is taking a disturbingly close interest in the technology.

Further reading

Should we edit genes to boost IQ?

By Tom Chivers

Yet despite our growing capabilities, we have yet to use them to re-engineer humanity. We can’t be sure what’s going on in clandestine laboratories, of course – but not a single government anywhere in the world is admitting to a policy of modern day eugenics.

So, yes, we do suppress technology – and the eugenic application of genetics is not the only example. In fact, there is an ever-expanding array of national and international agreements to constrain the development and application of a number of different technologies.

*

A key motivation for the actions of the Catholic Church in Pavane was to stifle the development of nuclear technology until mankind was ready for such knowledge. One might argue that the real history of the nuclear age shows that we had no need of a techno-inquisition. After all, we’re still here, aren’t we? Yes, we are, but only through luck (or Providence). Nuclear weapons have been developed, tested, stockpiled and used in anger. We know that there were a number of Cold War incidents in which we came terrifyingly close to an accidental Armageddon.

Further reading

Don’t sweat the small stuff, or why the ‘New Optimists’ are only half right

By Peter Franklin

Nor are we done with this nightmare. Nuclear weapons can’t be uninvented, and, in fits and starts, they continue to proliferate. That things aren’t much, much worse is thanks to the internationally agreed restrictions that we place on nuclear technology – for instance those mandated by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Other treaties restricting military technologies include the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention and the Outer Space Treaty. But it’s not just weapons and potential weapons that we seek to control in this way.

Climate change treaties, most recently, the Paris Agreement, imply far-reaching restrictions on our use of fossil fuels and therefore the technologies that extract, refine and use those fuels. To meet their targets on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the nations of the Earth have effectively committed themselves to leaving most of world’s hydrocarbons in the ground.

That includes energy sources that we haven’t exploited yet, such as methane hydrates, which could be available in vast quantities if only we had an affordable means of doing so. However, developing the necessary technology would take investment – which climate change treaties effectively disincentivise by sign-posting a future in which it will be illegal to carry on burning fossil fuels at anything like the current level (at least not without carbon carbon capture and storage). This creates a huge political risk for investors who are therefore likely to take their money elsewhere.

This too is tech suppression – and, again, it’s for all the right reasons.

*

In mid 1970s, an Iranian-American author called Fereidoun M Esfandiary legally changed his name to FM-2030 (no, that’s not a typo). He regarded traditional naming conventions as a relic of the past – and he was all about the future.  When he died in 2000, he left instructions for his body to be cryogenically preserved in the hope that scientific progress would one day enable his resurrection.

Further reading

The most influential religion you’ve never heard of

By Peter Franklin

A more reliable legacy might be the ideas he left behind. One of these was the notion that the politics of Left and Right will be superseded by the politics of Up and Down. ‘Up’ stands the onwards-and-upwards of technological optimism. ‘Down’, I suppose, stands for the downbeat or down-to-earth attitudes of technology pessimists and sceptics. ‘Up-wingers’ are a motley crew including transhumanist libertarians, fully automated luxury communists and believers in the ‘Singularity‘; while ‘down-wingers’ range from religious conservatives to anti-automation trade unionists to deep green environmentalists.

FM-2030’s big idea is proving prophetic. For a start, the old Left-versus-Right political divide has never looked so obsolete. The new politics of Open-versus-Closed may be more about the globalisation enabled by technology than technology itself – but that could soon change. Advances in fields like robotics, artificial intelligence and genetics have such profound implications that it’s difficult not to see technopolitics moving front and centre.

Could we see a political realignment with a radical Up-wing party facing off against their reactionary Down-wing opponents? Well, I’m not sure that the Down-wingers would accept that terminology, which defines the debate according toUp-wing assumptions. So, here’s a different and better way of thinking about these issues: active versus passive. As a democratic society we can either passively accept the technological choices that others would like to make on our behalf – or we take an active part in the decision-making process.

Further reading

The Amish: America's most sophisticated users of technology

By Peter Franklin

Moreover, the real choice is not between progress and no progress, but between different paths of technological development. That’s because in suppressing one technological path we can open up opportunities along another. For instance, while climate change agreements weaken the case for investment in polluting technologies they have the opposite effect on clean technologies. As restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions have tightened, we’ve seen sustained progress across a range of low carbon technologies including renewables, smart grids, energy storage and electric vehicles.

Though we may recoil at the idea of suppressing technology, our horror presupposes that the avenues for technological progress are limited and that the resources we can devote to pursuing them are not. In fact, the opposite is true: there is no shortage of paths to the future, but we lack the means to take all of them. Even if there is no ethical objections to any of them, we would still have to choose.

Taking the time to consider our options – and thinking through the consequences – is anything but regressive.

As a reaction against the eugenic obscenities of the 20th century, we tend to resist the idea that our aptitudes, achievements and personalities are substantially influenced by genetic inheritance. And yet, the accumulation of hard scientific evidence would suggest that we are wrong to do so (albeit for the right reasons).

That evidence informs a new book – Blueprint: How DNA makes us who we are – by the geneticist Robert Plomin.

If you don’t have time to read the book, then read Andrew Anthony’s article about it – which is remarkable not just for the even-handed clarity with which it introduces Plomin’s arguments, but also for where it appears: the Guardian.

That the house journal of the liberal Left is giving Plomin a fair hearing is a sign that we might just have a sensible discussion about the science – and its implications. This is not before time:

“Plomin has been waiting 30 years to write Blueprint. It has taken him that long to conduct the research – much of it based on long-term twin studies – necessary to prove his case. But there was another reason for the delay, he admits: ‘cowardice’. For a long time, he says, it was ‘dangerous’ to study ‘the genetic origins of differences in people’s behaviour and to write about it in scientific journals’.”

Plomin is clear that genetic influences play a much bigger role in differences between individuals than is generally supposed, but there are important subtleties in his argument.

For instance, he’s certainly not claiming that there is ‘a gene’ for each of the complex behavioural traits he’s talking about:

“…single-gene conditions are rare and, as far as anyone knows, nonexistent in psychology.

“The big breakthrough in the past few years is polygenic testing, which is able to correlate multiple genes – often thousands – with behaviour differences. No one yet understands the complex relationships between different genes, but Plomin points out that this is not necessary for predictive purposes. Polygenic testing, he says, comes up with heritability estimates that correspond to a whole range of physical and psychological traits.”

As with most complex matters, the new genetics is much more about probabilities than certainties.

Suggested reading

Why much of genetic engineering remains a mystery

By Peter Franklin

Of course, scientific subtleties tend to get lost when interpreted politically. And, as Andrew Anthony points out, there’s a definite Left-Right split in these interpretations:

“Traditionally, those on the left have tended to see the environment as the critical factor because it ties in with notions of egalitarianism. Thus inequalities, viewed from this perspective, are explained not by inherent differences but by social conditions.

“Similarly, those on the right have leaned towards a more Darwinian conception, in which different social outcomes are accounted for by differences of suitability to the environment.”

But maybe the ideologues have got it wrong.

If differences in certain abilities are, in large part, genetically determined, then surely that ought to mean less blaming of individuals (and their family and social backgrounds) for negative life outcomes. After all, sane societies don’t blame people for their inherited medical conditions.

Also, if we become more inclined to recognise ‘hardwired’ differences in particular aptitudes, then perhaps we’ll be less inclined to force people to compete in systems built around a very limited range of pathways to success (the education system being an obvious example).

Could this line of reasoning be used to sort the population into genetically-determined castes – like the Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World?

Certainly, we should always be on our guard against the distortion of science – but, far from suggesting a crude stratification of society, the new genetics is all about the manifold interactions between thousands of genetic and non-genetic factors. Such complexity underlines our individuality. Therefore, if the science does suggest a particular policy direction, it is towards the personalisation of services provided to each individual – whether that’s in healthcare, education or any other form of support.

Ultimately, we don’t get to choose the scientific realities of the human condition. It is what it is. However, how we deal with those facts is our choice. 

We don’t choose our genes (not yet), but we do choose our values.

Suggested reading

Could genetically selective societies breed themselves into crippling uniformity?

By Peter Franklin

He concluded his 14 minute address with a reference to a Catholic priest who died in 1955:

“Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was arguably one of the great minds, great spirits of the 20th century —a Jesuit, Roman Catholic priest, a scientist, a scholar, a mystic. In some of his writings, he said… that the discovery and harnessing of fire was one of the great scientific and technological discoveries in all of human history…

“He then went on to say that… if humanity ever captures the energy of love, it would be the second time in history that we have discovered fire.”

It is fascinating to see Teilhard’s work continue to exert an influence – and not just within a Christian context. His most famous writings occupy a space somewhere between theology, philosophy and scientific speculation. Their ambition is to fuse Christian thought with evolutionary theory. The central argument is that the universe, including humanity, is evolving through different stages of increasing complexity and consciousness towards the ‘Omega Point‘ – a state of perfect unity that draws all of existence into itself.

Further reading

Free Minds: Robert Sarah, the dissenting cardinal, seeking to save his Church

By Allan Mallinson

This is not exactly mainstream science; it’s not mainstream Catholicism either. Indeed, the church authorities stopped Father Teilhard from publishing his work during his lifetime – and, when they were published posthumously, the Church officially placed them under a monitum (a warning).

The whiff of heresy that surrounds Teilhard doesn’t put off his biggest fans, especially not those in the ever-expanding ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ category. What they might find rather more disturbing, however, is the evidence presented in an article by John P Slattery for Religion Dispatches.

Slattery presents quote after quote that show that Teilhard was a racist who believed that some ethnic groups are more advanced than others. He believed that “as not all ethnic groups have the same value, they must be dominated” though not, he added, “despised” (well thanks, Pierre, that’s mighty big of you!).

Further reading

Could genetically selective societies breed themselves into crippling uniformity?

By Peter Franklin

Furthermore, he was a eugenicist who argued that what he called the “advancing wing of humanity” should use scientific methods to further its biological evolution. Here’s another direct quote:

“We must recognize…the vital importance of a collective quest of discovery and invention no longer inspired solely by a vague delight in knowledge and power, but by the duty and the clearly-defined hope of gaining control (and so making use) of the fundamental driving forces of evolution. And with this, the urgent need for a generalized eugenics (racial no less than individual) directed, beyond all concern with economic or nutritional problems, towards a biological maturing of the human type and of the biosphere.”

Slattery is careful to put Teilhard’s most objectionable ideas within their historical context:

“…before World War II, much of the Western World was, what most of us would now regard as openly racist. Anti-Semitism, anti-blackness, anti-immigration, anti-disability, and misogyny dominated the populations of the United States and Europe. Leaders in science and industry coupled such racism with Darwin’s conception of evolutionary progress to produce horrific decades of enforced eugenic practices.”

Prominent eugenicists of that era include Marie Stopes, George Bernard Shaw, Margaret Sanger, Sydney Webb, John Maynard Keynes, William Beveridge and Julian Huxley – all of whom are held in high regard by progressivies to this day (though not for their eugenicism). Let’s also not forget that nice, liberal, social democratic Sweden had a post-war programme of compulsory sterilisations that didn’t come to a halt until 1975.

Is this the attitude we should take to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – dismissing the bad stuff as ‘of its time’ and focusing on the good stuff?

Further reading

Don't monkey around with the borders of humanity

By Peter Franklin

No, because the ‘good stuff’ provides the basis for the bad stuff. Teilhard’s ideas have something in common with all visions of progress towards an Earthly utopia – the inherent perfectibility of humankind. That might sound like a good thing, but it allows for the idea that some people are fundamentally more advanced than others. It also implies that to make further progress, the inferior specimens have to be upgraded, bypassed or in some way dispensed with. This can be seen in Nietzsche’s concept of the Superman, the communist ideal of the New Soviet man and, of course, the Nazi belief in a master race. In a non-totalitarian form, it is there too in contemporary transhumanism and the Silicon Valley religion of the Singularity.

Further reading

The most influential religion you’ve never heard of

By Peter Franklin

It’s telling that what got Teilhard in trouble with the Catholic Church was his apparent denial of the doctrine of Original Sin. The idea that we’re all flawed (and born that way) is probably the least popular of the core Christian beliefs, but also the one for which the evidence is most glaringly obvious. It is also incompatible with Earthly utopias. If we’re all fundamentally sinful – and irredeemable except through divine grace – then there are no ‘advanced’ and ‘unadvanced’ classes of human being, and no self-propelled evolution towards perfection.

This is why Teilhard had no room for Original Sin in his philosophy. It is also why there should be no room for his philosophy in Christianity.

The counter-argument is that if the population becomes smarter, healthier and better looking, then what’s the problem? Very few people would choose to be thick, sick or ugly – so why wish these afflictions on others if they can be avoided?

Writing for Bloomberg, Tyler Cowan develops a deeper argument against genetic choice. Though of a broadly libertarian standpoint, he has profound doubts about the wisdom with which we’d use the coming technology:

“I don’t trust people to take so much control over the future of human nature.”

It’s not just things like propensity to disease that would be discarded or more trivial defects such as shortness of height or weakness of chin. Through genetic testing and abortion, we’re already eliminating people with Down’s Syndrome from entire populations as if they were without value – and that’s just the start of the ‘genetic cleansing’ heading our way.

Cowan’s focus is on personality types:

“If you could directly alter your kids’ genetic profile, what would you want? It’s hard to know how the social debate would turn out after years of back and forth, but I was dismayed to read one recent research paper by psychologists Rachel M. Latham and Sophie von Stumm. The descriptive title of that work, based on survey evidence, is ‘Mothers want extraversion over conscientiousness or intelligence for their children.’ Upon reflection, maybe that isn’t so surprising, because parents presumably want children who are fun to spend time with.”

Introverts might always be in the kitchen at parties, but, being thoughtful types, we do have our uses. Indeed, like Cowan, I think it’s possible you’ll miss us when we’re gone:

“Would a more extroverted human race be desirable, all things considered? I genuinely don’t know, but at the very least I am concerned. The current mix of human personalities and institutions is a delicate balance which, for all of its flaws, has allowed society to survive and progress. I’m not looking to make a big roll of the dice on this one.”

Given the choice, would every parent opt for an outgoing child? Perhaps not exclusively – but you can be sure that some of the more challenging personality traits would be all but eliminated. For instance, any trait labeled as ‘autistic’ would go out the window – so good luck recruiting the next generation of software engineers. As for tendencies that might be described as psychopathic or merely domineering, they’d be out too – and therefore the next generation of leaders.

Note that we’re not talking about a simple menu of genes that you can select or reject to produce your designer baby. Genetics is generally more complicated and inexact than that. Nevertheless, genetic engineering techniques will provide us with an ever increasing ability to shift the odds of a child turning out more one way than another. Given cultural preferences and prejudices this will bring about big shifts across whole societies – and not just biologically:

“Parents’ choices, and their eventual public unveiling, may have harmful effects on social norms. What if it becomes known that a high percentage of parents opted for children with paler skin or straighter hair or a greater chance of being heterosexual? That knowledge could boost stigmas and social divisions, even with stringent anti-discrimination legislation. The parental choices could end up being seen as, in essence, the final court of public opinion.”

Will we legislate to protect some aspects of human diversity, but not others? Moreover, would such legislation be enforceable? Perhaps not:

“The techniques will be available in many different countries, and over time the more lax standards will have greater influence, if only through ‘genetic engineering tourism’…

“In China, these techniques are already about one-third as cheap as in the U.S….”

Some see designer babies as a matter of competitive necessity – in that countries that engineer their way to, say, higher average IQ scores, will overwhelm those that don’t. However, that is to assume that genetically selective societies won’t breed themselves into crippling uniformity.

Of course, the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction does rather put one off the idea of a cheeky pre-emptive strike, which is the main reason why nuclear peace prevails. This is what game theorists call a Nash equilibrium – as Mark Buchanan explains in an article for Bloomberg:

“…named after the mathematician and economist John Nash… a Nash equilibrium is a set of strategies that, once discovered by a set of players, provides a stable fixed point at which no one has an incentive to depart from their current strategy.”

Not all Nash equilibria are as dramatic as Mutually Assured Destruction, but they are useful:

“…from local regulations to international law, negotiations can be seen as a gradual exploration of all possible moves to find a stable framework of rules acceptable to everyone, and giving no one an incentive to cheat – because doing so would leave them worse off.”

Unless one or both sides lose their minds, the terms of Brexit will be determined by a Nash equilibrium. Much is made of the ‘complexity’ of the Brexit negotiations, but most trade negotiations are bounded by knowable scenarios (which in this case might range from continuing membership of the Single Market to WTO rules only). Moreover, trade agreements tend to be legally binding, limiting room for manoeuvre on the part of the signatories.

But what about negotiations where the possibilities are unbounded and unknowable? This is true complexity (as opposed to mere detail). Buchanan cites a paper by Dimitri Kusnezov and Wendell B. Jones, who argue there are circumstances under which it is impossible to reach a Nash equilibrium:

“Kusnezov and Jones derive insight from recent mathematical studies of games with many players and many possible choices of action. One basic finding is a sharp division into two types, stable and unstable. Below a certain level of complexity, the Nash equilibrium is useful in describing the likely outcomes. Beyond that lies a chaotic zone where players never manage to find stable and reliable strategies, but cope only by perpetually shifting their behaviors in a highly irregular way. What happens is essentially random and unpredictable.

“The authors argue that emerging technologies – especially computing, software and biotechnology such as gene editing – are much more likely to fall into the unstable category. In these areas, disruptions are becoming bigger and more frequent as costs fall and sharing platforms enable open innovation. Hence, such technologies will evolve faster than regulatory frameworks – at least as traditionally conceived – can respond.”

The implication is that the future will be full of rapidly evolving and potentially dangerous technologies that we have no known means of regulating.

Perhaps we need to replace the Nash equilibrium with an ‘Amish equilibrium’ – that is a deliberate decision on the part of the (international) community not to use certain technologies. The Amish – an ethno-religious group mostly to be found in the United States – are famous for restricting their use of modern technology. They do so not because they believe these conveniences to be intrinsically wrong, but because of the potentially disruptive and unpredictable impact of, say, motorised transport on the community’s chosen way of life. By taking the option entirely off the table, there is no need to negotiate a regulatory regime (which may, in any case, be an impossibly complex task).

Whether formally or informally, the international community has already taken the Amish option on some technologies. For instance, the various nuclear test ban treaties have been effective since the 1960s (though not completely). An example of an informal Amish option is the global taboo against eugenics – which, though far from comprehensive, has discouraged once common and accepted practices like forced sterilisation.

The pushback against eugenics shows that technology is not destiny. If we are unable to moderate our use of a dangerous technology then we must, if we can, ban it all together.