How eugenics poisoned the welfare state
A century ago many leading leftists subscribed to the vile pseudo-science of eugenics, writes Dennis Sewell, and the influence of that thinking can still be seen today
So what went wrong with a welfare state that was supposed to make ‘ignorance, squalor and want’ things of the past, and guarantee greater social integration? Or have we simply misunderstood what that project was really about?
Most accounts of the origin of Britain’s welfare state begin with the Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, drafted by Sidney and Beatrice Webb during the first decade of the 20th century. Beneath their seemingly compassionate rhetoric, the founders of the Fabian Society were snobbish, elitist and harboured a savage contempt for the poorest of the poor. Both husband and wife were enthusiastic supporters of the eugenics movement, which held that most of the behavioural traits that led to poverty were inherited. In short, that the poor were genetically inferior to the educated middle class.
Eugenics had been the brainchild of Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, and was developed in response to Darwin’s theory of natural selection. It was taken up as a programme of political action by Darwin’s son Leonard. The eugenicists aimed to replace natural selection with a planned and deliberate selection. They were alarmed by the fact that the poorest in society bred faster than the middle class, forecasting that this trend would lead to a spiral of degeneration in the gene pool. Their aim was to encourage the rich to have more children and the poor to have fewer. They quickly got the science establishment on their side, creating a national panic about genetic deterioration that became as widespread and salient as fears of global warming are today. In this scenario, the poorest with their ‘defective’ genes were the bogeymen, a class that threatened to contaminate future generations.
For the Fabians, eugenics was not merely some eccentric hobby or sideline, but central to their social thinking. Beatrice Webb regarded eugenics as ‘the most important question’ of all, while her husband revealed the statist and dirigiste character of the movement with his declaration that ‘no eugenicist can be a laissez faire individualist… he must interfere, interfere, interfere!’ Even for George Bernard Shaw, ‘the only fundamental and possible Socialism’ was ‘the socialisation of the selective breeding of Man’.
In the years leading up to the first world war Leonard Darwin set about lobbying the government to act. He wanted to set up flying squads of scientists, armed with powers of arrest over the poor, to tour the country weeding out the ‘unfit’. Those who were found wanting by these tribunals were to be segregated in special colonies or sterilised. One politician who supported such draconian measures in parliament was the Labour MP Will Crooks, who described the targets of the eugenics campaign as ‘like human vermin’ who ‘crawl about doing absolutely nothing, except polluting and corrupting everything they touch’. Crooks was perhaps only outdone in his vehement contempt for what we now call the ‘underclass’ by Shaw, who believed that they had ‘no business to be alive’ and speculated at a meeting of the Eugenics Society about the need to use a ‘lethal chamber’ to solve the problem.
Another Fabian eugenicist, the writer H.G. Wells, vented his frustration and indignation in a direct address to the working class. ‘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,’ he complained, ‘...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.’ It was as if — as in the Brechtian joke — the Fabian left had lost confidence in the people and had determined to dissolve the people and appoint a new one.
In 1913, the eugenicists succeeded in getting the Mental Incapacity Act through parliament. As a result, some 40,000 men and women were incarcerated without trial, having been deemed to fall into various specious categories such as ‘feeble-minded’ or ‘morally defective’. This latter description was used to imprison petty criminals, unmarried mothers or those displaying homosexual inclinations — all, allegedly, clear signs that they possessed the sort of defective genes believed to be conducive to pauperism.
Edith Huthwaite, from Yorkshire, was categorised as a moral defective after being convicted by Ripon magistrates of theft. She was held for 18 years.
Theoretically, such measures were targeted at the mentally handicapped, but diagnosis of mental incapacity was applied somewhat loosely, and the act was frequently used as an instrument of oppression against the chronically poor. That suited the eugenicists just fine. They were by no means reticent in declaring their true agenda — the containment and segregation of what they termed the ‘social residuum’.
WILLIAM BEVERIDGE, later to emerge as the midwife of the post-1945 welfare settlement, was also very active in the eugenics movement at this time. Today, Beveridge is generally portrayed as a kindly, avuncular figure, one almost dripping with compassion and benevolence. But his roots were in a particularly hardline strand of eugenics. He argued in 1909 that ‘those men who through general defects are unable to fill such a whole place in industry, are to be recognised as “unemployable”. They must become the acknowledged dependents of the State... but with complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights — including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood.’ And that, except for the loss of fatherhood, has effectively been his legacy.
Eugenics was no quickly passing fad. The Eugenics Society reached its peak, in terms of membership, during the 1930s, and the cusp of the following decade saw the zenith of its prestige.
The economist John Maynard Keynes served on the society’s governing council and was its director from 1937 to 1944. Once again, this was no casual hobby. As late as 1946 Keynes was still describing eugenics as ‘the most important and significant branch of sociology’. Working alongside Keynes at this time as the editor of Eugenics Review was RICHARD TITMUSS, soon afterwards to become an influential professor at the London School of Economics working on social policy, and who would ultimately be dubbed ‘the high priest of the welfare state’.
It was during the late 1930s that much of the detailed planning for the welfare state was carried out. And a good deal of it was undertaken at meetings of the Eugenics Society. On the evening that the House of Commons met to debate the Beveridge Report, Beveridge himself went off to address an audience of eugenicists at the Mansion House. He knew he was in for a rough ride. His scheme of family allowances had originally been devised within the Eugenics Society with a graduated rate, which paid out more to middle-class parents and very little to the poor.
The whole point was to combat the eugenicists’ great bugbear — the differential birth rate between the classes. However, the government that day had announced a uniform rate. Beveridge was sympathetic to the complaints of his audience and hinted that a multi-rate system might well be introduced at a later date.
Given the association of so many of its founding fathers with the dismal pseudo- science of eugenics, perhaps we should not be surprised that our welfare system has ended up preferring safety nets to trampolines, or that it prefers simply to warehouse the poor rather than give people who have fallen on hard times a chance to take responsibility for their own lives.
Eugenics infected its adherents with a deeply pessimistic view of the poor, branding them as irredeemably genetically second-rate, and this view has cast a long shadow over social policy assumptions. Labour figures who mock the idea of ‘compassionate Conservatism’ or make light of David Cameron’s focus on our ‘broken society’ need to take a hard look at some of their own history and intellectual heritage. When it comes to who really can claim to care about the problems of the poor, the dividing lines are not so straight as Gordon Brown thinks they are.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/all/5571423/how-eugenics-poisoned-the-welfare-state.thtml
Pseudo Malthusianism and social Darwinism are perversions that continue to lurk in the warped and twisted minds of the left. Media propaganda, college professor revisionism promote the delusional ideas about supposed supposed genetic and hence social or racial inferiority of whole groups come from the ‘right’. Yet it’s the left who likes nothing better than to ‘categorise’ people on a group basis, especially when it can claim some sort of ‘scientific’ justification for doing so.
From Darwin to Hitler
An interview with author Richard Weikart
By Jayson Whitehead
05/16/05
As soon as World War II ended and details of the German Holocaust emerged, the world began to search for answers to explain the Nazis’ motivations for the systematic eradication of millions of Jews. Since then, Adolf Hitler has come to be recognized as the embodiment of evil and is frequently depicted as an amoral, bloodthirsty devil. Yet, as Richard Weikart explains in his recent book From Darwin to Hitler, Germany’s dictator in fact hewed to a strict, if pernicious, moral code, “an evolutionary ethic that made Darwinian fitness and health the only criteria for moral standards. The Darwinian struggle for existence, especially the struggle between different races, became the sole arbiter for morality.”
Where did Hitler appropriate his belief system from? As Weikart demonstrates, Hitler and his cohorts were the beneficiaries of a new world view that had cropped up in Europe and America shortly after the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Published in 1859, Darwin’s chief thesis that organisms gradually evolve through natural selection galvanized the European intellectual community by providing a rational explanation for the development of biological life sans God. As important as The Origin of Species was to science, its impact was equally felt in the field of ethics where it provided the groundwork for a new belief system that eschewed divine creation for Darwinian natural selection. The ripple effect was almost immediate. Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, the father of modern eugenics, argued for the practice of artificial selection—weeding out the “unfit” of the human race—only a few years after The Origin of Species’ advent in 1959.
Germany-Austria was especially fascinated with the ethical connotations of Darwin’s ideas, and its intelligentsia quickly integrated them. The result was that twenty years after its debut, The Origin of Species was the force behind a burgeoning eugenics movement. In an 1880 essay, German zoologist Robby Kossman laid down its ethos, proclaiming
that the Darwinian world view must look upon the present sentimental conception of the value of the life of a human individual as an overestimate completely hindering the progress of humanity. The human state also, like every animal community of individuals, must reach an even higher level of perfection, if the possibility exists in it, through the destruction of the less well-endowed individual, for the more excellently endowed to win space for the expansion of its progeny…. The state only has an interest in preserving the more excellent life at the expense of the less excellent.
By the turn of the century, declarations like Kossman’s were a common part of any German intellectual’s vernacular. Delivered dramatically, they often took on characteristics similar to those of the biologist Arnold Dodel. “The new world view actually rests on the theory of evolution,” he wrote in 1904. “On it we have to construct a new ethics.… All values will be revalued.” Ernst Haeckel was the most renowned German Darwinist (many of his books went through several reprintings) and perhaps its most passionate defender. Stressing that natural selection be applied to humans, he argued for its extension to all areas of life. He and fellow social Darwinists vehemently opposed any belief system that advocated the existence of a soul, instead holding that man had no free will; biology dictated everything, even morals.
As a result, notions of good and bad were shattered. Under the social Darwinist model, whatever facilitated the biological improvement of the human race was good, anything that hampered its development evil. As eugenics arguments gained traction, groups like the Society for Race Hygiene were formed to disseminate Darwin’s ideas and often ended up advocating artificial selection. Most eugenics arguments focused on how to keep the weaker elements of society—the disabled, the mentally retarded, repeat criminals and alcoholics—from reproducing (all were considered hereditary traits). Only by purifying the higher evolved, the social Darwinists argued, could the human race properly evolve. Of course, the white German was assumed to be the most evolved. As a result, most eugenicists had a harsh view of other races, believing them to be a less evolved form of human. Many argued that other ethnicities—aborigines, native Americans, blacks, East Asians—were in fact closer to the ape than to their level of human. Haeckel explained in The Natural History of Creation that “between the most highly developed animal soul and the least developed human soul there exists only a small quantitative difference, but no qualitative difference….” The social Darwinists had turned the traditional ideal of the sanctity of life upside down.
As bold and brash as the social Darwinists were in their rhetoric, they were less certain in how to execute their proposals. While some argued for compulsory sterilization of the “unfit” (a practice adopted in Sweden, America and other countries), others simply maintained that the weaker elements should be encouraged to refrain from reproducing. Darwinists were equally torn on topics such as war and abortion, some contending that they disproportionately reduced the able-bodied population while others believed them to be effective abettors of the evolutionary process. The one thing all social Darwinists agreed on was that whatever aided the fit and suppressed the unfit was moral and proper.
Into this environment stepped the Austrian-born Hitler, writing in Mein Kampf (1925): “A stronger race will supplant the weaker, since the drive for life in its final form will decimate every ridiculous fetter of the so-called humaneness of individuals, in order to make place for the humaneness of nature, which destroys the weak to make place for the strong.” Subjugating all of humanity to the evolutionary process, he took the next step of arguing that the destruction of the weak by the strong was humane. When he set up the “Aryan” German as the exemplar of the most highly evolved and the Jew as its weakest, or most immoral, the Nazis were born.
In From Darwin to Hitler, Richard Weikart, an associate professor of modern European history at California State University, documents the tremendous rise of Darwinian ethics in Germany. By demonstrating the depth of its reach in German society, he makes a compelling case that social Darwinism laid the basis for Hitler’s extreme moral code. Weikart also points to elements of Darwin that continue to affect today’s culture. oldSpeak recently interviewed the author by e-mail...contin...
https://www.rutherford.org/Oldspeak/Articles/Interviews/Weikart.html
Dehumanization (babies are clumps of cells) is the psychological process of demonizing the enemy (thee and me), making them seem less than human and hence not worthy of humane treatment. It leads to human rights violations, and genocide.