Eugenics and other evils by G. K. Chesterton. - HTML preview

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CHAPTER I

WHAT IS EUGENICS?

The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after

you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies

have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists. It is no answer to

say, with a distant optimism, that the scheme is only in the air. A blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the

air.

There exists to–day a scheme of action, a school of thought, as collective and unmistakable as any of those by whose

grouping alone we can make any outline of history. It is as firm a fact as the Oxford Movement, or the Puritans of the

Long Parliament; or the Jansenists; or the Jesuits. It is a thing that can be pointed out; it is a thing that can be discussed;

and it is a thing that can still be destroyed. It is called for convenience "Eugenics"; and that it ought to be destroyed I

propose to prove in the pages that follow. I know that it means very different things to different people; but that is only

because evil always takes advantage of ambiguity. I know it is praised with high professions of idealism and

benevolence; with silver–tongued rhetoric about purer motherhood and a happier posterity. But that is only because evil

is always flattered, as the Furies were called "The Gracious Ones." I know that it numbers many disciples whose

intentions are entirely innocent and humane; and who would be sincerely astonished at my describing it as I do. But that

is only because evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous

alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin. Of these who are deceived I shall speak of course as we all do

of such instruments; judging them by the good they think they are doing, and not by the evil which they really do. But

Eugenics itself does exist for those who have sense enough to see that ideas exist; and Eugenics itself, in large

quantities or small, coming quickly or coming slowly, urged from good motives or bad, applied to a thousand people or

applied to three, Eugenics itself is a thing no more to be bargained about than poisoning.

It is not really difficult to sum up the essence of Eugenics: though some of the Eugenists seem to be rather vague about

it. The movement consists of two parts: a moral basis, which is common to all, and a scheme of social application which

varies a good deal. For the moral basis, it is obvious that man’s ethical responsibility varies with his knowledge of

consequences. If I were in charge of a baby (like Dr. Johnson in that tower of vision), and if the baby was ill through

having eaten the soap, I might possibly send for a doctor. I might be calling him away from much more serious cases,

from the bedsides of babies whose diet had been far more deadly; but I should be justified. I could not be expected to

know enough about his other patients to be obliged (or even entitled) to sacrifice to them the baby for whom I was

primarily and directly responsible. Now the Eugenic moral basis is this; that the baby for whom we are primarily and

directly responsible is the babe unborn. That is, that we know (or may come to know) enough of certain inevitable

tendencies in biology to consider the fruit of some contemplated union in that direct and clear light of conscience which

we can now only fix on the other partner in that union. The one duty can conceivably be as definite as or more definite

than the other. The baby that does not exist can be considered even before the wife who does. Now it is essential to

grasp that this is a comparatively new note in morality. Of course sane people always thought the aim of marriage was

the procreation of children to the glory of God or according to the plan of Nature; but whether they counted such children

as God’s reward for service or Nature’s premium on sanity, they always left the reward to God or the premium to Nature,

as a less definable thing. The only person (and this is the point) towards whom one could have precise duties was the

partner in the process. Directly considering the partner’s claims was the nearest one could get to indirectly considering

the claims of posterity. If the women of the harem sang praises of the hero as the Moslem mounted his horse, it was

because this was the due of a man; if the Christian knight helped his wife off her horse, it was because this was the due

of a woman. Definite and detailed dues of this kind they did not predicate of the babe unborn; regarding him in that

agnostic and opportunist light in which Mr. Browdie regarded the hypothetical child of Miss Squeers. Thinking these sex

relations healthy, they naturally hoped they would produce healthy children; but that was all. The Moslem woman

doubtless expected Allah to send beautiful sons to an obedient wife; but she would not have allowed any direct vision of

such sons to alter the obedience itself. She would not have said, "I will now be a disobedient wife; as the learned leech

informs me that great prophets are often the children of disobedient wives." The knight doubtless hoped that the saints

would help him to strong children, if he did all the duties of his station, one of which might be helping his wife off her

horse; but he would not have refrained from doing this because he had read in a book that a course of falling off horses

often resulted in the birth of a genius. Both Moslem and Christian would have thought such speculations not only impious

but utterly unpractical. I quite agree with them; but that is not the point here.

The point here is that a new school believes Eugenics against Ethics. And it is proved by one familiar fact: that the

heroisms of history are actually the crimes of Eugenics. The Eugenists' books and articles are full of suggestions that

non–eugenic unions should and may come to be regarded as we regard sins; that we should really feel that marrying an

invalid is a kind of cruelty to children. But history is full of the praises of people who have held sacred such ties to

invalids; of cases like those of Colonel Hutchinson and Sir William Temple, who remained faithful to betrothals when

beauty and health had been apparently blasted. And though the illnesses of Dorothy Osborne and Mrs. Hutchinson may

not fall under the Eugenic speculations (I do not know), it is obvious that they might have done so; and certainly it would

not have made any difference to men’s moral opinion of the act. I do not discuss here which morality I favour; but I insist

that they are opposite. The Eugenist really sets up as saints the very men whom hundreds of families have called

sneaks. To be consistent, they ought to put up statues to the men who deserted their loves because of bodily misfortune;

with inscriptions celebrating the good Eugenist who, on his fiancée falling off a bicycle, nobly refused to marry her; or to

the young hero who, on hearing of an uncle with erysipelas, magnanimously broke his word. What is perfectly plain is

this: that mankind have hitherto held the bond between man and woman so sacred, and the effect of it on the children so

incalculable, that they have always admired the maintenance of honour more than the maintenance of safety. Doubtless

they thought that even the children might be none the worse for not being the children of cowards and shirkers; but this

was not the first thought, the first commandment. Briefly, we may say that while many moral systems have set restraints

on sex almost as severe as any Eugenist could set, they have almost always had the character of securing the fidelity of

the two sexes to each other, and leaving the rest to God. To introduce an ethic which makes that fidelity or infidelity vary

with some calculation about heredity is that rarest of all things, a revolution that has not happened before.

It is only right to say here, though the matter should only be touched on, that many Eugenists would contradict this, in

so far as to claim that there was a consciously Eugenic reason for the horror of those unions which begin with the

celebrated denial to man of the privilege of marrying his grandmother. Dr. S.R. Steinmetz, with that creepy simplicity of

mind with which the Eugenists chill the blood, remarks that "we do not yet know quite certainly" what were "the motives

for the horror of" that horrible thing which is the agony of Oedipus. With entirely amiable intention, I ask Dr. S.R.

Steinmetz to speak for himself. I know the motives for regarding a mother or sister as separate from other women; nor

have I reached them by any curious researches. I found them where I found an analogous aversion to eating a baby for

breakfast. I found them in a rooted detestation in the human soul to liking a thing in one way, when you already like it in

another quite incompatible way. Now it is perfectly true that this aversion may have acted eugenically; and so had a

certain ultimate confirmation and basis in the laws of procreation. But there really cannot be any Eugenist quite so dull as

not to see that this is not a defence of Eugenics but a direct denial of Eugenics. If something which has been discovered

at last by the lamp of learning is something which has been acted on from the first by the light of nature, this (so far as it

goes) is plainly not an argument for pestering people, but an argument for letting them alone. If men did not marry their

grandmothers when it was, for all they knew, a most hygienic habit; if we know now that they instinctly avoided scientific

peril; that, so far as it goes, is a point in favour of letting people marry anyone they like. It is simply the statement that

sexual selection, or what Christians call falling in love, is a part of man which in the rough and in the long run can be

trusted. And that is the destruction of the whole of this science at a blow.

The second part of the definition, the persuasive or coercive methods to be employed, I shall deal with more fully in the

second part of this book. But some such summary as the following may here be useful. Far into the unfathomable past of

our race we find the assumption that the founding of a family is the personal adventure of a free man. Before slavery

sank slowly out of sight under the new climate of Christianity, it may or may not be true that slaves were in some sense

bred like cattle, valued as a promising stock for labour. If it was so it was so in a much looser and vaguer sense than the

breeding of the Eugenists; and such modern philosophers read into the old paganism a fantastic pride and cruelty which

are wholly modern. It may be, however, that pagan slaves had some shadow of the blessings of the Eugenist’s care. It is

quite certain that the pagan freemen would have killed the first man that suggested it. I mean suggested it seriously; for

Plato was only a Bernard Shaw who unfortunately made his jokes in Greek. Among free men, the law, more often the

creed, most commonly of all the custom, have laid all sorts of restrictions on sex for this reason or that. But law and creed

and custom have never concentrated heavily except upon fixing and keeping the family when once it had been made.

The act of founding the family, I repeat, was an individual adventure outside the frontiers of the State. Our first forgotten

ancestors left this tradition behind them; and our own latest fathers and mothers a few years ago would have thought us

lunatics to be discussing it. The shortest general definition of Eugenics on its practical side is that it does, in a more or

less degree, propose to control some families at least as if they were families of pagan slaves. I shall discuss later the

question of the people to whom this pressure may be applied; and the much more puzzling question of what people will

apply it. But it is to be applied at the very least by somebody to somebody, and that on certain calculations about

breeding which are affirmed to be demonstrable. So much for the subject itself. I say that this thing exists. I define it as

closely as matters involving moral evidence can be defined; I call it Eugenics. If after that anyone chooses to say that

Eugenics is not the Greek for this—I am content to answer that "chivalrous" is not the French for "horsy"; and that such

controversial games are more horsy than chivalrous.