Eugenicists and Progressives
A reader in this space expressed surprise that I would list “eugenics” along with contraception, abortion, euthanasia as a part of the same vague cloud of generally Progressive social movements that include liberal politics and secular humanism.
One must confess that who is a member of which group is a matter of judgment, or even speculation. The metes and bounds are not sharply defined. Nonetheless, I suggest that there are enough famous voices on the secular side of the issue, and sufficiently authoritative voices on the clerical side, to make the matter somewhat unambiguous.
Below are quotes from Malthus, Darwin, Margaret Sanger, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Konrad Lorentz, Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw.
Each quote is linked to the document from which it comes. I took the text and links, unchanged, from the website of the World Future Fund.
When asked to name the famous Progressives, skeptics, and atheists who founded the social movement that has since come to predominate the English speaking world, most learned readers will list at least one of these names as seminal. I have never heard, for example, a secular humanist to denounce Darwin as un-influential in shaping the Progressive mind. I cites these quotes not to support or undermine of the ideas therein, but merely to show whence the ideas spring.
I do not bother to quote authorities to the opposite effect, since I assume no one seriously thinks that eugenics is a Christian idea. But, for the sake of completeness, I here provide a link to G.K. Chesterton’s EUGENICS AND OTHER EVILS, as well as to the encyclical Casti connubii.
While the Apostle of Common Sense nor the Magisterium of the Catholic Church does not speak for all men calling themselves Christian, I offer these as an indicator of the general trend of Christian thought.
All these quotes issue from before the Hitlerian War in Europe, since, after that war, once the true horror of what the Progressives were suggesting was exposed to the light of day, as obvious as the ultrasound pictures of an unborn baby that the abortion mills are so eager not to show pregnant mothers, lest they see and know.
In profound shame, the Progressive movement with admirable uniformity and discipline performed an abrupt volte-face on the issue of eugenics, and pretended never to have supported it.
(Some were so bold as to denounce the National Socialists of Germany as being conservatives and Christians, or, in other words, fellows of Thomas Jefferson and John Locke, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, pro-Second Amendment partisans of limited government and traditional mores, rather than partisans of totalitarianism and of secular evolution from man to superman inspired by Nietzsche, Hegel, Darwin. It is a slander of breathtaking insolence, but has been the single most effective bit of propaganda in history. To this day, there are even otherwise sane-seeming conservatives who describe the radical revolutionary social engineers of Hitler’s crackpot intellectual socialist party as “Rightwing.” But this is an argument for another time.)
The Chestertonian and magisterial sources linked above in opposition to eugenics date from before the war, when world finally learned of Progressive atrocities. The teaching of the Catholic Church, of course, suffers no change when the fickle fashionable opinion of the world changes.
I do not propose that all Progressives are eugenicists or visa versa. The kinship is a historical, not logically necessary, fact.
The kinship between eugenics and other mechanisms of social engineering, as contraception, euthanasia, and aborticide springs both from a unity of the promoters thereof (for example, Sanger) and from the unity of the appeals used to promote them (for example, a taste for scientific efficiency and prudence of organizing human civilization so as to benefit current and future generations; and a distaste for traditional respect for human life as an awkward archaism, if not obscurantism).
The two philosophical components of social engineering schemes are (1) eudaemonism or hedonism, that is, the creed that human hygiene and happiness may excuse or sanctify the proposed breech of traditional mores or liberties (2) an indifference to the sanctity of human life. No one is a social engineer who does not tacitly or openly deem his fellow men as inferiors, merely cogs in the social mechanism, to be tinkered-with or discarded as a social good or private pleasure dictate.
It must be emphasized that not all Progressives nor eugenicists are totalitarians. Indeed, after World War Two, the majority of Progressives in the English speaking world embraced radical liberalism, or, at least, liberty in matters of sexual unchastity. (Progressivism still promotes policing thoughts and speech of the disarmed subjects for politically incorrect ungood thoughtcrime.) Not wishing to coerce the mother of an inferior baby to abort him, the sexually-liberal Progressive wants a program of private eugenics, where each mother for herself decides whether a baby, inferior due to some anticipated handicap or inconvenience, should be thrown into the chasm of Apothetae of the Spartans, or burned in the vale of Tophet.
In theory, the mother’s sole decision that her baby is inferior is a sufficient justification for infanticide. In practice (as with the woman-desecrating Progressive attitute toward pornography and sexual liberation) the outcome is to render women helpless before the disrespect and violence of their live-in boyfriends, and it is the boyfriend who often pressures the unwilling mother into the abortion, and into a lifetime of haunted regrets, and dream of small ghosts in empty cribs.
In China and India, to be born female means to be inferior, and for an astronomical number of girl babies, means a prenatal death sentence.
The liberal Progressives are gagged with shame when asked whether the private eugenics of the Far East is correct to condemn unborn females as inferior. After all, if the mother has the sole right to choose whether her daughter in the womb lives or dies, surely the choice that females form an inferior sex is, according to Progressive logic, a sovereign and unimpeachable choice, is it not?
This opinion relegating the majority of mankind to inferior status is the most noticeable and obvious sign of the Progressive mind, whether of the totalitarian or liberal school. It forms the sharpest contrast with the humility Christians would practice, if (unlike the present writer) they were good Christians.
Here are the quotes:
THOMAS R. MALTHUS
THE MALTHUSIAN PRINCIPLE
“The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second. By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal. This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall somewhere and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind. Through the animal and vegetable kingdoms, nature has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand. She has been comparatively sparing in the room and the nourishment necessary to rear them. The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years. Necessity, that imperious all pervading law of nature, restrains them within the prescribed bounds. The race of plants and the race of animals shrink under this great restrictive law. And the race of man cannot, by any efforts of reason, escape from it. Among plants and animals its effects are waste of seed, sickness, and premature death. Among mankind, misery and vice. … This natural inequality of the two powers of population and of production in the earth, and that great law of our nature which must constantly keep their effects equal, form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of society.”
Source: T. Robert Malthus, “An Essay on the Principle of Population” (1798), Chapter One
LARGE FAMILIES AND NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES FOR THE POOR
“Impelled to the increase of his species by an equally powerful instinct, reason interrupts his (i.e. man’s) career and asks him whether he may not bring beings into the world for whom he cannot provide the means of subsistence. In a state of equality, this would be the simple question. In the present state of society, other considerations occur. Will he not lower his rank in life? Will he not subject himself to greater difficulties than he at present feels? Will he not be obliged to labour harder? and if he has a large family, will his utmost exertions enable him to support them? May he not see his offspring in rags and misery, and clamoring for bread that he cannot give them? And may he not be reduced to the grating necessity of forfeiting his independence, and of being obliged to the sparing hand of charity for support?”
Source: T. Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Chapter Two
“No state has hitherto existed (at least that we have any account of) … that no check whatever has existed to early marriages, among the lower classes, from a fear of not providing well for their families, or among the higher classes, from a fear of lowering their condition in life.”
Source: T. Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Chapter Two
POPULATION LIMITATIONS: FAMINE AND EUTHANASIA
“The redundant population, necessarily occasioned by the prevalence of early marriages, must be repressed by occasional famines, and by the custom of exposing children, which, in times of distress, is probably more frequent than is ever acknowledged to Europeans.”
Source: T. Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Chapter Four
THE NEED FOR FAMILY PLANNING
“But as from the laws of our nature some check to population must exist, it is better that it should be checked from a foresight of the difficulties attending a family and the fear of dependent poverty than that it should be encouraged, only to be repressed afterwards by want and sickness.”
Source: T. Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Chapter Five
NATURAL RESOURCES ARE LIMITED
“Where there are few people, and a great quantity of fertile land, the power of the earth to afford a yearly increase of food may be compared to a great reservoir of water, supplied by a moderate stream. The faster population increases, the more help will be got to draw off the water, and consequently an increasing quantity will be taken every year. But the sooner, undoubtedly, will the reservoir be exhausted, and the streams only remain.”
Source: T. Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Chapter Six
CHARLES DARWIN
AGREEMENT WITH FRANCIS GALTON’S EUGENIC IDEAS
“My Dear Galton, I have only read about 50 pages of your book (to the Judges), but I must exhale myself, else something will go wrong in my inside. I do not think I ever in all my life read anything more interesting and original–and how well and clearly you put every point! George, who has finished the book, and who expressed himself in just the same terms, tells me that the earlier chapters are nothing in interest to the later ones! It will take me some time to get to these latter chapters, as it is read aloud to me by my wife, who is also much interested. You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense, for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work, and I still think this is an eminently important difference. I congratulate you on producing what I am convinced will prove a memorable work. I look forward with intense interest to each reading, but it sets me thinking so much that I find it very hard work; but that is wholly the fault of my brain and not of your beautifully clear style. Yours most sincerely, (Signed) “CH. DARWIN”
Source: December 23, 1859(?), Darwin-Galton Correspondence
“I have been greatly interested by your article (i.e., ‘Hereditary Improvement,’ Jan 1873). The idea of castes being spontaneously formed and leading to intermarriage … is quite new to me, and I should suppose to others. I am not, however, so hopeful as you. Your proposed Society ‘enquiring into the facts of human heredity’ would have awfully laborious work … As it is, there is much concealment of insanity and wickedness in families; and there would be more if there was a register. But the greatest difficulty, I think, would be in deciding who deserved to be on the register. How few are above mediocrity in health, strength, morals and intellect; and how difficult to judge on these latter heads. … Though I see so much difficulty, the object seems a grand one; and you have pointed out the sole feasible, yet I fear utopian, plan of procedure in improving the human race.”
Source: January 4, 1873, Darwin-Galton Correspondence
ON BREEDING IMPERFECTIONS IN MANKIND
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man itself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden him self whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage.”
“A most important obstacle in civilised countries to an increase in the number of men of a superior class has been strongly insisted on by Mr. Greg and Mr. Galton, namely, the fact that the very poor and reckless, who are often degraded by vice, almost invariably marry early, whilst the careful and frugal, who are generally otherwise virtuous, marry late in life, so that they may be able to support themselves and their children in comfort. Those who marry early produce within a given period not only a greater number of generations, but, as shewn by Dr. Duncan, they produce many more children. The children, moreover, that are borne by mothers during the prime of life are heavier and larger, and therefore probably more vigorous, than those born at other periods. Thus the reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members. … In the eternal ‘struggle for existence,’ it would be the inferior and less favoured race that prevailed—and prevailed by virtue not of its good qualities but of its faults.”
SUPERIOR TRAITS CAN BE BRED
“It deserves notice that, as soon as the progenitors of man became social (and this probably occurred at a very early period), the principle of imitation, and reason, and experience would have increased, and much modified the intellectual powers in a way, of which we see only traces in the lower animals. Apes are much given to imitation, as are the lowest savages; and the simple fact previously referred to, that after a time no animal can be caught in the same place by the same sort of trap, shows that animals learn by experience, and imitate the caution of others. Now, if some one man in a tribe, more sagacious than the others, invented a new snare or weapon, or other means of attack or defence, the plainest self-interest, without the assistance of much reasoning power, would prompt the other members to imitate him; and all would thus profit. The habitual practice of each new art must likewise in some slight degree strengthen the intellect. If the new invention were an important one, the tribe would increase in number, spread, and supplant other tribes. In a tribe thus rendered more numerous there would always be a rather greater chance of the birth of other superior and inventive members. If such men left children to inherit their mental superiority, the chance of the birth of still more ingenious members would be somewhat better, and in a very small tribe decidedly better.”
ELIMINATION OF THE POORLY ENDOWED ADVANCES SOCIETY
“Great lawgivers, the founders of beneficent religions, great philosophers and discoverers in science, aid the progress of mankind in a far higher degree by their works than by leaving a numerous progeny. In the case of corporeal structures, it is the selection of the slightly better-endowed and the elimination of the slightly less well-endowed individuals, and not the preservation of strongly-marked and rare anomalies, that leads to the advancement of a species. So it will be with the intellectual faculties, since the somewhat abler men in each grade of society succeed rather better than the less able, and consequently increase in number, if not otherwise prevented. When in any nation the standard of intellect and the number of intellectual men have increased, we may expect from the law of the deviation from an average, that prodigies of genius will, as shewn by Mr. Galton, appear somewhat more frequently than before.”
“If the various checks specified … do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will retrograde, as has too often occurred in the history of the world.”
NATURAL SELECTION IS NECESSARY FOR MAN’S ADVANCEMENT
“Natural selection follows from the struggle for existence; and this from a rapid rate of increase. It is impossible not to regret bitterly, but whether wisely is another question, the rate at which man tends to increase; for this leads in barbarous tribes to infanticide and many other evils, and in civilised nations to abject poverty, celibacy, and to the late marriages of the prudent. But as man suffers from the same physical evils as the lower animals, he has no right to expect an immunity from the evils consequent on the struggle for existence. Had he not been subjected during primeval times to natural selection, assuredly he would never have attained to his present rank.”
MARGARET SANGER
THE DANGER OF UNCONTROLLED BREEDING
“We should not minimize the great outstanding service of Eugenics for critical and diagnostic investigations. It demonstrates … that uncontrolled fertility is universally correlated with disease, poverty, overcrowding and the transmission of hereditable traits.”
Source: Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, (1922), p. 174.
“We are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all—that the wealth of individuals and of state is being diverted from the development and the progress of human expression and civilization.”
Source: Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, (1922), p. 187.
“Every single case of inherited defect, every malformed child, every congenitally tainted human being brought into this world is of infinite importance to that poor individual; but it is of scarcely less importance to the rest of us and to all of our children who must pay in one way or another for these biological and racial mistakes.”
Source: Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, (1922), p. 274.
PRAISE FOR EUGENICS
“… Degeneration has already begun. Eugenists demonstrate that two-thirds of our manhood of military age are physically too unfit to shoulder a rifle; that the feeble-minded, the syphilitic, the irresponsible and the defective breed unhindered; … that the vicious circle of mental and physical defect, delinquency and beggary is encouraged, by the unseeing and unthinking sentimentality of our age, to populate asylum, hospital and prison. All these things the Eugenist sees and points out with a courage entirely admirable”
Source: Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization (1922), p. 175.
THE NEED FOR STERILIZATION
“STERILIZATION of the insane and feebleminded and the encouragement of this operation upon those afflicted with inherited or transmissible diseases, with the understanding that sterilization does not deprive the individual of his or her sex expression, but merely renders him incapable of producing children.“
BIRTH CONTROL AS A EUGENIC MEASURE
“Birth Control is thus the entering wedge for the educator. In answering the needs of these thousands upon thousands of submerged mothers, it is possible to use their interest as the foundation for education in prophylaxis, hygiene and infant welfare. The potential mother can then be shown that maternity need not be slavery but may be the most effective avenue to self-development and self-realization. Upon this basis only may we improve the quality of the race.”
Source: Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization (1922), Chapter One.
CHARITY IS A SOCIAL EVIL
“Even if we accept organized charity at its own valuation, and grant that it does the best it can, it is exposed to a more profound criticism. It reveals a fundamental and irremediable defect. Its very success, its very efficiency, its very necessity to the social order, are themselves the most unanswerable indictment. Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease. Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the «failure» of philanthropy, but rather at its success.”
Source: Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization (1922), Chapter Five
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
SUPPORT FOR EUGENICS
“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. … Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Source: Decision of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Buck vs. Bell
SUPPORT FOR EUGENICS
“Just as in cancer the best treatment is to eradicate the parasitic growth as quickly as possible, the eugenic defense against the dysgenic social effects of afflicted subpopulations is of necessity limited to equally drastic measures …. When these inferior elements are not effectively eliminated from a [healthy] population, then — just as when the cells of a malignant tumor are allowed to proliferate throughout the human body — they destroy the host body as well as themselves.”
Source: A. Chase, The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1980), p. 349.
BIRTH CONTROL & RACE
It must be admitted, however, that there are certain dangers. Before long the population may actually diminish. This is already happening in the most intelligent sections of the most intelligent nations; government opposition to birth-control propaganda gives a biological advantage to stupidity, since it is chiefly stupid people who governments succeed in keeping in ignorance. Before long, birth-control may become nearly universal among the white races; it will then not deteriorate their quality, but only diminish their numbers, at a time when uncivilized races are still prolific and are preserved from a high death-rate by white science.
This situation will lead to a tendency — already shown by the French — to employ more prolific races as mercenaries. Governments will oppose the teaching of birth-control among Africans, for fear of losing recruits. The result will be an immense numerical inferiority of the white races, leading probably to their extermination in a mutiny of mercenaries.”
Source: Bertrand Russell, “ICARUS or the Future of Science” (1924)
ON EUGENICS
“Thee might observe incidentally that if the state paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were such as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child — this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways.”
Source: Letter of Bertrand Russell to Alys Pearsall Smith
“We may perhaps assume that, if people grow less superstitious, government will acquire the right to sterilize those who are not considered desirable as parents. This power will be used, at first, to diminish imbecility, a most desirable object. But probably, in time, opposition to the government will be taken to prove imbecility, so that rebels of all kinds will be sterilized. Epileptics, consumptives, dipsomaniacs and so on will gradually be included; in the end, there will be a tendency to include all who fail to pass the usual school examinations. The result will be to increase the average intelligence; in the long run, it may be greatly increased. But probably the effect upon really exceptional intelligence will be bad.
Eugenics has, of course, more ambitious possibilities in a more distant future. It may aim not only at eliminating undesired types, but at increasing desired types. Moral standards may alter so as to make it possible for one man to be the sire of a vast progeny by many different mothers. … If eugenics reached the point where it could increase desired types, it would not be the types desired by present-day Eugenists that would be increased, but rather the type desired by the average official. Prime Ministers, Bishops, and others whom the State considers desirable might become the fathers of half the next generation. Whether this would be an improvement it is not for me to say, as I have no hope of ever becoming either a Bishop or a Prime Minister.
If we knew enough about heredity to determine, within limits, what sort of population we would have, the matter would of course be in the hands of State officials, presumably elderly medical men. Whether they would really be preferable to Nature I do not feel sure. I suspect that they would breed a subservient population, convenient to rulers but incapable of initiative.”
Source: Bertrand Russell, “ICARUS or the Future of Science” (1924)
AGREEMENT WITH GALTON
“I believe that if a canvass of the entire civilized world were put to the vote in this matter, the proposition that it is desirable that the better sort of people should intermarry and have plentiful children, and that the inferior sort of people should abstain from multiplication, would be carried by an overwhelming majority. They might disagree with Plato’s methods, but they would certainly agree to his principle. And that this is not a popular error Mr. Francis Galton has shown. He has devoted a very large amount of energy and capacity to the vivid and convincing presentation of this idea, and to its courageous propagation. … Indeed, Mr. Galton has drawn up certain definite proposals. He has suggested that “noble families” should collect “fine specimens of humanity” around them, employing these fine specimens in menial occupations of a light and comfortable sort, that will leave a sufficient portion of their energies free for the multiplication of their superior type.”
Source: H.G. Wells, Mankind in the Making, Chapter II, (1903)
CALL FOR STERILIZATION
“I believe that now and always the conscious selection of the best for reproduction will be impossible; that to propose it is to display a fundamental misunderstanding of what individuality implies. The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilization of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.”
Source: H.G. Wells in American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 10 (1904), p. 11.
SPECULATION ABOUT A FUTURE EUGENIC STATE
“The dominant men of the new time … will find in themselves – it must be remembered I am speaking of a class that has naturally segregated, and not of men as a whole – a desire, a passion almost, to create and organize, to put in order, to get the maximum result from certain possibilities. They will be artists in reality, with a passion for simplicity and directness and an impatience of confusion and inefficiency. The determining frame of their ethics … will be the elaboration of that future world state to which all things are pointing. … It is manifest that a reconstructed ethical system … will give very different values from those given by the existing system … the ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity – beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge – and to check the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men. To do the latter is to do the former; the two things are inseparable.
In the new vision death is no inexplicable horror, no pointless terminal terror to the miseries of life, it is the end of all pain of life, the end of the bitterness of failure, the merciful obliteration of the weak and silly and pointless things. The new ethics will hold life to be a privilege and a responsibility … and the alternative in right conduct between living fully, beautifully, and efficiently will be to die. For a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have little pity and less benevolence.
The men of the New Republic will not be squeamish, either, in facing or inflicting death, because they will have a fuller sense of the possibilities of life than we possess. They will have an ideal that will make killing worth while.
The pre-eminent value of sexual questions in morality lies in the fact that the lives which will constitute the future are involved. If they are not involved, if we can dissociate this relationship from this issue, then sexual questions become of no more importance than the morality of one’s deportment at chess, or the general morality of outdoor games. … The men of the New Republic … will rout out and illuminate urban rookeries and all places where the base can drift to multiply; they will contrive a land legislation that will keep the black, or yellow, or mean-white squatter on the move; … so that childbearing shall cease to be a hopeful speculation for the unemployed poor; … This thing, this euthanasia of the weak and sensual, is possible. On the principles that will probably animate the predominant classes of the new time, it will be permissible, and I have little or no doubt that in the future it will be planned and achieved.“
Source: H.G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought, Final Chapter “The Faith of the New Republic”, (1902)
EXTERMINATION OF THE “SOCIALLY INCOMPATIBLE”
“The notion that persons should be safe from extermination as long as they do not commit willful murder, or levy war against the Crown, or kidnap, or throw vitriol, is not only to limit social responsibility unnecessarily, and to privilege the large range of intolerable misconduct that lies outside them, but to divert attention from the essential justification for extermination, which is always incorrigible social incompatibility and nothing else.”
Source: George Bernard Shaw, “On the Rocks” (1933), Preface.
USE OF GAS CHAMBERS
“We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill. We should have to get rid of all ideas about capital punishment …
A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.”
Source: George Bernard Shaw, Lecture to the Eugenics Education Society, Reported in The Daily Express, March 4, 1910.
KILLING THOSE “UNFIT TO LIVE”
“The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it … If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?”
Source: George Bernard Shaw, Prefaces (London: Constable and Co., 1934), p. 296.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
