G. K. Chesterton. Eugenics and Other Evils. 1922. Amazon Digital, 2012.
G K. Chesterton is one of those writers who is frequently quoted but seldom read—except perhaps for fans of Father Brown mysteries. Eugenics and Other Evils still has a lot to say, even if contemporary readers might not know some of the politicians and journalists he refers to.
Eugenics and Other Evils still deserves to be quoted. Chesterton here is pointed and logical. It also might make the reader a bit wistful. This 1922 book ends on a positive note that the Allies defeated the Germans, the source of Nietzschean philosophy and the pseudo-science of eugenics. We in the Western world have learned our lesson.
Except, of course, that we didn’t. We had to fight a Second World War against enemies that took eugenics to an extreme unimagined by the Kaiser and his Prussian professors.
Today’s reader can easily note how much of Chesterton’s argument today applies to abortion. Abortion, at least in the West, is a holdover from the eugenics movement. While most abortions in the United States stem from male chauvinism—the father convinces the mother to abort because he wants to avoid responsibility—we know that many abortions come because the infant’s genes indicate some kind of abnormality or the mother is persuaded she cannot afford to raise it. Those were both arguments the eugenists used.
In Chesterton’s day, the discussion included the idea of government-sanctioned marriages and other techniques for reducing the number of lower class people having children. He points out that poverty does not necessarily mean bad genes, or even a lower class. Many people in England can point to nobility somewhere in their family trees. Not that that means superior genes, but simply that poverty or wealth of parents is not a way to predict the financial status of the children.
One of the ostensible reasons given in the Roe vs. Wade ruling which overturned abortion laws in our country was that abortion would reduce the number of poor people. It has not. Chesterton would say:
I know it is praised with high professions of idealism and benevolence, with silver-tongued rhetoric about motherhood and happier posterity. But that is only because evil is always flattered, as the Furies were called “The Gracious Ones.” (3)
Chesterton makes us chuckle as well. For example the term eugenics itself (“good or blessed birth or race”) is not an accurate term for an opponent to use. He simply notes that chivalrous is not the French for “horsy.” (The root of the word comes from the French cheval, which means “horse.”)
He also notes something that Orwell would develop in more detail in his essay “Politics and the English Language”:
Most Eugenists are Euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of translating one into the other…
Eugenists are as passive in their statements as they are active in their experiments. Their sentences always enter tail first, and have no subject, like animals without heads. (22)
This sounds so much like Orwell; I wonder if Chesterton influenced him. It no different today when abortion promoters speak of their work.
He notes that there is a problem any time someone proposes a reform that calls for more government:
Autocrats…are those who give us generally that every modern reform will “work” all right because they will be there to see.
The problem is that most times a law “will do as a dog does” and “obey its own nature.”
Chesterton says that because eugenics disrupts the family and raises moral questions, those who propose it are at heart anarchists. He notes that historically anarchists are rare. They are not the same as rebels—even the devil expects his followers to recognize his authority. Eugenists and their pro-abortion allies recognize no authority except a vague subjectivity. I wonder what he would say about postmodernism! We are reminded of Judges 21:25.
Unfortunately, this sense of anarchy has taken root in the West even without the extremes of death camps, forced sterilization, and government-sanctioned marriages. Chesterton notes that this could lead to a problem in sexual relations. It has. As I write, many people maintain that sex is not something someone is born with but is based on subjective feelings and behavior. Among other things, it results in a lack of self-control, something we seem to read about every day in the news.
Anarchy…is the loss of self-control which can return to normal. It is not anarchy when men are permitted to begin uproar, extravagance, experiment, peril. It is anarchy when people cannot end these things. (11, emphasis in original)
“The modern world is insane, not so much because it admits the abnormal as because it cannot recover the normal.” (11) As I write this, a lawsuit in my state is trying to get boys who identify as girls to not compete against girls in high school sports. The local newspaper puts “biologically male” in quotation marks whenever it uses that term, as if to say alleged or so-called biological males. Anarchy, indeed.
Just as the newspaper editors ask “what is maleness?” so Chesterton says that the anarchist will ask “what is liberty?”
It leaves the question free to disregard any liberty, in other words to take any liberties. The very thing he says is an anticipatory excuse for anything he may choose to do. (65)
When Pontius Pilate shrugged off his sentence upon Jesus of Nazareth, he said something very similar: “What is truth?” No matter, he could do what he wanted.
Chesterton notes that “The thing that really is trying to tyrannise through government is Science.” He calls Science “the creed that is really levying tithes and capturing schools.” (34)
If it means the imposition of by the police of a widely disputed theory, incapable of final proof—then our priests are not prosecuting, but our doctors are. (34)
When we have Science trying to shape politics, we not only get eugenics, we get Socialism. Neither eugenics nor Socialism “destroy inequality.” They destroy security. “The ideal of liberty is lost, and the ideal of Socialism is changed, till it is a mere excuse for the oppression of the poor.” (72)
In spite of our historical record of fighting against the National Socialists in World War II and the subsequent obvious shortcomings and problems with other socialist societies, it seems like many in the West have not recognized that Socialism does not work in the long run. And the poor suffer the most under it.
There is much more. Chesterton reminds us that the poor and disabled are as human as anyone else. That argument still stands. May our liberty stand as well.