I have mentioned before here one of my favourite books, An outline for Boys and Girls, which is a left-wing encyclopaedia from the early Thirties, edited by Naomi Mitchison. Since she knew all the smart lefty young people, it is a very high-class production, still informative and thought-provoking. The chapter on economics is by Hugh Gaitskell, who would almost certainly have been Labour Prime Minister in place of Harold Wilson had he not died early. There is a chapter on ethics by Olaf Stapledon, and one on architecture by Clough Williams Ellis. Arthur Waley’s mistress, Beryl de Zoete, supplled the chapter on dance, and the one on poetry was from a young schoolteacher, “Wystan Auden”.
Almost as informative as what the encyclopaedia says is what it takes fro granted, Here is the conclusion of the chapter on biology, written by John R. Baker, who is not in Who’s Who, but was clearly an Oxford don of some distinction.
EUGENICS
All the hundreds of thousands of kinds of animals have evolved from very simple forms of life, and presumably from inorganic matter originally, without the existence of any mind to plan them. Mind itself is one of the products of evolution, and now at last one kind of living thing only has got the ability to control and plan the course of evolution. That one kind of living thing is the human kind. For centuries men have selected certain types of domestic animals for breeding, and have thus created all the variety of horses and cattle and sheep and pigs and dogs that exist to-day. They have improved all these animals for the purposes for which they require them, but they have not improved themselves. There is no reason at all to suppose that the inborn mental capacity of man has increased since prehistoric times.
When men were just evolving from ape-like ancestors, they evolved because the best individuals survived and had young ones, whilst the worst died oft and had none. That does not happen in civilisation. With us the weakly are looked after by the strong. If the weakliness is an inherited character, it is unfortunate that the people who have it should have children, because they will pass it on, generation after generation. On the average, the most successful people have the fewest children in most civilised countries to-day, and the least successful the most. It is possible nowadays for ordinary people to arrange whether they will have many or few children, or none at all. It would certainly be better if the most successful people had most children, because success in life is partly due to inherited qualities. Many people with excellent inherited qualities never get an opportunity to show them, from lack of a sufficiently good education. If we wanted to improve our race, we should give everyone an equal chance in life as far as possible. We should then encourage the most successful to have a lot of children. Many people are what is called feeble-minded. Their brain never develops beyond that of a child of six. Often this is a character which is inherited in the same way as blue eyes. If two such feeble-minded people marry, all their children will be feeble-minded. If a feeble-minded person marries a normal person, the children will be normal, but some of their descendants will be feeble-minded. It would be a good plan to prevent people who have inherited feeble-mindedness from having children, because feeble-minded people are not happy themselves, and they are not useful to other people, and they cost other people a lot of money. Unfortunately, they are increasing rapidly in numbers in Great Britain. Before long they will form quite a large proportion of our population, unless we decide not to allow them to have children. Members of Parliament, who decide these things, think it best to let them go on multiplying. When they were young, Members of Parliament did not have An Outline for Boys and Girls.
This isn’t surprising given the views of people like Margaret Sanger.
Do you find yourself wondering how many assumptions we take for granted today our descendants will find weird, objectionable, or dangerously wrong?
Baker wrote a book called Race. published by Oxford University Press in 1974, which was endorsed on the cover by Sir Peter Medawar and later by the British National Party. Its vision of racial hierarchy was unusual only in being anachronistic: had it been written between the wars it would have been unexceptional. As you point out, his views on eugenics were likewise quite typical of their time. Later in the 1930s there might have been more editorial caution about the policy recommendations. But the genetic argument was broadly accepted in principle.
More on this line, much later, in my beloved “Man and his Future”, a CIBA meeting in 1962, where a lot of similar thinking is displayed by inter alia Crick, F. — and resisted by the delectible Alex Comfort
I must try to get hold of that, Oliver.
I do think it is important, morally, to distinguishe between what one might call “positive” and “negative” eugenics. The difference between discouraging people from breeding and discouraging them from living is morally significant. I also suspect that eugenics was a necessary part of the matrix of the welfare state mentality: it was another expression of the idea that society was more important than any individual.
I agree, and the scale is subtler than binary, from killing, to sterilising, to discouraging and, on theother side encouraging procreation among the chosen (including by AID)
o