The History and Practice of Eugenics, PT. 2

The History and Practice of Eugenics. 


G.K. Chesterton and the Pseudo-Science of Eugenics

While researching this subject(Eugenics), I learned that G.K. Chesterton wrote in opposition of the eugenicists pseudo-science. He had the following to say:

"It is necessary to point out the essential fact which the eugenicists 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 for pork. . . . Therefore we cannot, and do not, criticize them in the way in which we criticize our fellow creatures when we call them feeble-minded; or when we betray our own feeble-mindedness by calling them Unfit. For the very word Unfit reveals the weakness of the whole of this pseudo-scientific 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."("The Fallacy of Eugenics," published in Avowals and Denials (London, 1934)

He was basically saying that just because someone is unfit for one thing, does not mean that they are not fit for something else. Obviously, he felt that human life had value. He also wrote, Eugenics and other Evils in 1922, it was a compilation of the arguments he had given against eugenics in public talks, lectures and essays, in opposition of the Feeble-minded Bill. In this book he didn't cut people who had good intentions much slack: "There exists today a scheme of action, a school of thought . . . a thing that can still be destroyed, and that ought to be destroyed. . . . I know that it numbers many disciples whose intentions are entirely innocent and humane . . . but that is only because evil always wins through the strength its stupid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin."

"(A) solemn official said the other day that he could not understand the clamour against the Feeble-Minded Bill as it only extended the "principles" of the old Lunacy Laws. To which one can only answer "Quite so." It only extends the principles of the Lunacy Laws to persons without a trace of lunacy. . . . Indeed, the first definition of "feeble-minded" in the Bill was much looser than the phrase "feeble-minded" itself. It is a piece of yawning idiocy about "persons who though capable of earning their living under favourable circumstances" are nevertheless "incapable of managing their affairs with proper prudence"; which is exactly what all the world and his wife are saying about their neighbours all over the planet."

As I said before, humans always judge themselves to be superior to everyone else, especially their neighbors. I don't think it is so much because we dislike our neighbors as it is because we like to feel superior. And we don't like to take responsibility for ourselves let alone others, which is why people target the poor, because if we can blame them for being poor, we have no responsibility to them. Particularly, when we convince ourselves that their financial state is not the only way that we are superior to them.

Chesterton pointed out that in England, the government was actually creating poor and destitute people beginning with the Game Laws and the Exclusion Acts and with the enclosure of once common lands. I believe the Exclusion Act referred to was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, who prohibited Chinese people from immigrating to America. Britain had similar racist laws. We are usually taught that the game laws were the basis for modern hunting and conservation regulations. They evolved from the Norman forest laws, which changed the forests from being places for the royals to hunt, by granting the Norman nobles the right to hunt as rewards for service to the crown. Sometimes, the right to hunt on a certain area was given to land that someone else owned or controlled. Sometimes the areas hunted on were called, parks, chases, or free warrens. In 1390, the law was changed so that no person could hunt unless they owned land worth 40 shillings a year, or were a clergyman who earned at least 10 pounds a year. This effectively, restricted hunting to the governing upper classes. Most of us are familiar with the issue of hunting in the Robin Hood stories. In general, the only one who can hunt on a piece of land is the man who owns it, unless he gives someone else permission. King John figures prominently in those stories, and one of the grievances his barons had with him was over the forests. Apparently, he was taking land away from his barons and declaring it to be a royal forest, which only he could hunt on.

In 1723 the Black Act was passed to make poaching a felony, which could carry the death penalty, and was seen to be directed at those who were poor and desperate enough to hunt in forests.

In 1831, the requirement to be able to hunt was holding land worth 100 a year in freehold or 150 in leaseholds, but the requirement of owning an estate was abolished that year. The laws are really rather convoluted. Their basis goes back to Old English Common Law. Under that system, the land owner did not own the wild animals on his property until he killed them. As long as the animal was alive, you didn't own it. But you couldn't go onto someone else's land and kill an animal. The newer laws were more specific. If John went onto Jim's land and killed a rabbit, the rabbit belonged to Jim, because the land was his, but if John chased the rabbit off of Jim's land and onto George's land before he killed it, it neither belonged to George, because it had not been jumped on his land, nor to Jim, whose land it had been jumped on because it wasn't on his land any longer, when killed. However, both Jim and George could prosecute John for trespassing. There are some other weird aspects of the laws. If John kills an animal on John's property and sells it, he isn't guilty of theft, but of game trespass. But if he just happens to be walking through the woods after some other poachers killed an animal and picks the dead animal up and walks off with it, he is guilty of theft. The landowner himself was responsible for apprehending poachers until 1861, when police were allowed to search persons leaving someone's land that they suspected of poaching. With the abolishment of the land ownership requirement for hunting, came the requirement to have a license to hunt. This most likely still excluded poor people who would not have been able to obtain a license.

The enclosure of lands was complicated, sometimes the land was enclosed by their owner, because they no longer had tenants on it, and it was more profitable to graze sheep on it than to farm it. But in many instances, it was just a way to grab land, and resulted in people who had led an agrarian life, being forced to move into cities and work in factories, just at the time when factory workers were needed due to the increase in industrialization, which partly came about due to demand for English wool. This meant there was actually an incentive for running farmers off of their land, so somebody would be available to work in the factories. These poor factory workers then became the victims of the prejudice of the upper classes who owned those factories. As they had families and their population increased, the upper class had a surplus in the commodity they had become, and saw eugenics as a way to decrease the surplus. Chesterton held that the nobility had created the destitute and then held them liable for being destitute.

He complained about the policy of : "making the very poor work for the capitalist, for any wages or none. . . . The game laws have taken from him his human control of Nature. The mendicancy laws have taken from him his human demand on Man. There is one human thing left which it is much harder to take from him. . . . He can create in his own image. . . . as the Christ Child could be hidden from Herod – so the child unborn is still hidden from the omniscient oppressor. He who lives not yet, he and he alone is left; and they seek his life to take it away."

Mendicant is a word that is seldom used any more. It means a bum or beggar. The mendicancy laws basically made vagrancy and begging or panhandling illegal. They would be similar to US anti loitering laws.