From a fascinating review by Gregory Radick of Piers J. Hale’s POLITICAL DESCENT
Malthus, mutualism, and the politics of evolution in Victorian England in the TLS.
Sheds light on the ideological uses made of Darwin, and many connections across realms that were surprising to me at least.
Near the end he has a side comment about eugenics, from the “future is already here and encoding inequality” beat that is truly eye-opening.
Eugenics, another luxury bauble of late capitalism?
As a scientific-political programme, the deliberate breeding of better humans or, as it came to be known, “eugenics” – another period neologism, introduced by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton in 1883 – never recovered from its association with the Nazi death camps. Until then, however, it had enjoyed broad appeal across the political spectrum. In Britain, members of the Malthusian Left who gathered in the Fabian Society, including Shaw, Wells, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, were among the earliest supporters. Their preferred means for bringing about a eugenic future was education. The historical lesson many have drawn is that eugenics, however well intentioned, is inevitably coercive and ultimately murderous. But that is not the only possible lesson, and maybe not the best one. In 1996, after a year spent with the Human Genome Project at the behest of the US Library of Congress, the philosopher Philip Kitcher published a remarkable book, The Lives To Come, arguing that, whether we like it or not, the genetic technologies now available make eugenics inescapable, so the choice we face is about the kind of eugenics we have. In Kitcher’s view, the Nazis showed in extremis what not to do, while the Fabians offer more positive inspiration. Better, Kitcher suggests, to teach young people how to think through the social consequences of their reproductive choices, in a society committed to realizing human potential to the full, than to collude with the present regime of “laissez-faire eugenics”, in which those with enough money can buy whatever genetic improvements they can afford, and the rest can fend for themselves.
“Those with enough money can buy whatever [ …] improvements they can afford, and the rest can fend for themselves.” A well-put statement of a widespread state of affairs.
A Few Reasonable Words 