On the Fallacy of Eugenics

Machine may grind the work of man's hands into a dust of indistinguishable atoms, it cannot alter the fact that Man is not a small thing. It cannot alter the fact that the Man is greater than the Machine, even at the moment when the Machine has killed him. Nor, again, is it merely because Mr. Wells has brought out this great truth, of the greatness of apparently trivial people, by a most delightful comedy of contrasts in the characters of those people. It is not even because he created the character of the aunt of the hero of TonoBungay; I have forgotten her name, but I still know her nature. I know her vety well; and she was one of the consolations of life; a real triumph of tenderness and power. It is not even because he disposed of a celebrated Continental Pacifist with a vigorous phrase I have never forgotten: " 'Au-dessus de la melee,' " as the man up the tree said while the wild bull was goring his sister. At the moment, at least, it is for none of these things that I feel impelled to pour out a pagan libation before that dignified pagan urn, if the time should ever come (may it be far distant) when he has provided himself with an urn. My gratitude is grounded on the grand and impressive fact that it was Mr. H. G. Wells, and not any of us poor slaves of superstition, who long ago pointed out the gaping and ghastly scientific fallacy in almost all that is now being revived, under the labels of Eugenics and Heredity.

The point is this; and it has never been answered. To judge by the way in which politicians and publicists discuss such matters, it has never even been understood. The fact is that it is totally impossible to argue from the fact of physical inheritance to -any sort of result other than the very simplest physical features. We all know that a positive physical element, which is also an entirely simple element, may be inherited; though even then it is unsafe to prophesy that it will be inherited. We all know what is meant by saying that the Robinsons run to tall men; or that red hair is for some reason recurrent and even frequent in the family of Pickleby. But nobody wants indefinite length as such, or humanity measured by the yard; and red hair may accompany any cast of features from that of Judas Iscariot to that of Bernard Shaw. All the things that are worth having, such as health and beauty and happiness and virtue, are all, without exception, things produced by a particular proportion between different things. It is said of a newborn baby with affection that he has his mother's eyes, with tolerance that he has his father's nose, with faint alarm that he has his great-uncle's jaw. But even if his mother were as beautiful as Helen of Troy,. her eyes would not make him as beautiful as Paris or Apollo. Beauty in a face depends on how the eyes and other features fit in with each other; and if all is devastated by Uncle Humphrey's jaw, the result will be disastrous even i£ Uncle Humphrey himself was a very handsome, though trying, old gentleman. For these harmonies which we human beings value, as beauty or virtue or the rest, do indeed form part (as some of us superstitiously believe) of the ultimate purpose of God, but they do not form part of what may be called the obvious and ostensible purpose of Nature. So far as that is concerned, they are only tunes or melodies that we happen to like; combinations of colour and form which we happen to admire. Yet the same is true even of what seems so simple and natural a thing as health. It is quite useless for eugenists to tell us that healthy parents always have healthy children; and especially that mentally healthy parents always have mentally healthy children. If we have lived long enough in the real world, we simply know that it is not true.

But the point is that the reason is really the same. Mental sanity, like bodily beauty, is not a separate positive concrete character that can be carried on like a pattern of big bones or a racial colouring of black curly hair. The question about any individual, born of any family, is not whether he inherits elements from that family; as no doubt he does. It is, as Shakespeare said, the question of whether "the elements were so mixed in him" as to produce a success or failure by our special standard of spiritual values. There is nobody with any wide circle of acquaintances, who does not know families in which the father and the mother are both normal, sane, and even splendid specimens, but in which for some reason something has gone wrong with the full psychological development of one or two of the children. But what has gone wrong is not the inheritance of a positive quality. It is not even the inheritance of a negative quality; such as is implied in the very vague phrase about feeble-mindedness; for it is often obvious that the father and mother and the family generally were not in the least feeble-minded. What has gone wrong in some manner, we can only suppose, is the tendency to achieve proportion. There has been too much of something; too little of something else, and the combination necessary for normal activity is thrown out of balance. The son of a sane man is often mad, because he has the right scruples in the wrong place. The son of a handsome man is often ugly, because he has the right features in the wrong face.

Now it is true that Mr. Wells, in the early work to which I refer, did not go into all this matter as I have done; nor do I make him for a moment responsible for my own irresponsible speculations. But he did, all that long time ago (I think it was in the book called Mankind in the Making), point out the essential fact which all the eugenists seem to have forgotten all over again. We breed cows for milk; and not for a moral balance of particular virtues in the cow. We breed pigs to turn them into pork, not to exhibit their portraits as pictures of perfect and harmonious beauty. In other words, we can breed cows and pigs precisely because we cannot really criticize cows and pigs. We cannot judge them from the point of view of the Cow Concept or the Pig Ideal. Therefore we cannot, and do not, criticize them in the way in which we criticize our fellow-creatures (always provided, of course, that they are our poorer fellow-creatures) when we call them feeble-minded; or when we betray our own feeblemindedness by calling them Unfit. For the very word Unfit reveals the weakness of the whole of this pseudoscientific position. We should say that a cow is fit to provide us with milk; or that a pig is unfit to provide us with pork. But nobody would call a cow fit without naturally adding what she was fit for. Nobody would call up the insanely isolated vision of the Unfit Pig in the abstract. But when we talk about human beings, we are bound to break off the sentence in the middle; we are bound to call them Unfit in the abstract, For we know how varied, how complex, and how controversial are the questions that arise about the functions for which they should be fitted. All this is very-obvious, and very old; I said it all myself twenty years ago; and Mr. Wells, as I have noted, said part of it much better than I could. But since there seems to be a queer revival of such things, a belated and benighted renascence of these fads I fancied were forgotten, it is as well to repeat our unanswered answer to the creed behind such barbarous tricks; for they are not confined to the curious commonwealth of Mr. Hitler.