Self-made Men

The persistent myth about eugenics runs thus. Invented by rather unpleasant right-wingers and members of the upper middle class in England, it instituted cruel and socially repressive policies, especially mandatory sterilization in the United States and Europe. It then generated the Nazi racial atrocities. As Elof Axel Carlson has it in The Unfit, “Eugenics….was the latest and most notorious of a long history of attempts to justify the isolation or destruction of an unwanted, allegedly unfit group of people.” It was a bad thing, and if current developments in genetic therapy are indeed a continuation of eugenics, then they too are a bad thing. Like all simplifications, the myth is easier to believe than the complex truth.

In In Our Own Image, David Galton (no relation of the founder of eugenics, Francis Galton) argues that current practices are indeed a form of eugenics, which, if wisely applied, will be a good thing. This is a risky position: most medical geneticists deny any connection at all with eugenics. Galton refutes, however, the obvious argument that this is a trivial academic discussion of the definition of the word “eugenics” (if it means reproductive coercion for the sake of our genes, the new medical technology is not eugenics; if it means changing our genetic make-up for the individual and communal benefit, then it is); “eugenics” already appears in draft EU legislation, which will seek to ban it.

Writing on eugenics has tended to polarize between a zealous laying of posthumous blame and the sincerely confused. Both the present authors are commendable for their clarity and their common sense. Both take a welcome, and rather unusual, liberal position on these questions. Carlson’s is a scholarly annotated work; Galton’s intended for a more general readership, with a naivety in the writing that may irritate intellectual readers, but which has the strength of stating the obvious; this is an area in which the obvious has been too often eschewed. Galton’s argument for the human application of current and future knowledge holds one’s attention, where the weighty judgments of ethical commissions would fail. It is indeed “obvious” that apparently humane scientists who connived at the Nazi eugenic programme may have been guilty of no more (or less) than trying to preserve their pensions, but it takes a confident and sensible writer to set it down. Similarly Carlson’s thoroughly readable, at times wryly entertaining, account of the history of the old eugenics shows that it was not invented by monsters, and that while some of its proponents were people one would not invite to lunch, many were progressive, decent radicals and doctors with a passion for constructive social reform. There are strange and unexpected precursors; sterilization started as what was thought to be the much-needed cure for habitual masturbation. Many of the measures, including mandatory sterilization of the “unfit”, were deemed in their day to be humane and progressive social policies. The fashionable commination of eugenics has obscured both the unpleasant physical realities about our genes and the wider truths about the two deep currents of human culture on which eugenics floated – beating up the neighbours, and ensuring the quality of our own posterity.

If our genes are a society, then some are terrorists. They have the power to kill, maim, or make life downright miserable for us and our children. Some strike at birth, others “sleep” for decades, and, like good terrorists, they are so well integrated into our body politic that, until the last few years, their exact whereabouts were a mystery; their individual extirpation (or more properly correction) is still well-nigh impossible. Too often, the only cure is the destruction of the body which harbours them, either literally or, more humanely, by preventing its reproduction or conception. Here lies the moral problem of medical genetics. Perhaps the person who is discouraged from reproducing, or the foetus that is to be aborted, or the embryo that will not be selected for implantation, must be a victim for the greater good of humanity. In that sense, maybe this person has fewer rights than the rest of us – an inferior person. It is but a short step to reverse that idea: that people who we think, for whatever reason, are inferior to us must be the harbourers of dangerous genes. Thus eugenics made an easy alliance with that age-old human vice of despising others.

What The Unfit is not, though, is a history of genocide, inter-tribal hatred, racial prejudice, religious bigotry and the creation of victimized pariah castes, the vagrant and the exploited; that would indeed be a big book. The opening chapters do document the existence of the tribal versions of these vices in the early Iron Age from the Book of Deuteronomy; the rest chronicles the intermingling of these historical phenomena with the eugenics movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Carlson maintains an exemplary detachment: he does not demonize or mock, and extracts only limited morals. A biologist by trade, unlike some other biologists who have written much on this subject, he stands as a historian rather than a man with a big agenda. He attributes the change, around the end of the nineteenth century, from social reform to the application of newly available genetic ideas, to a mounting frustration at the sheer lack of progress that had been made in fifty years of sincere assaults on social problems by environmental means. Although much intellectual racism owed nothing to eugenics, it is sadly true that systematized bigotry, racism and genocide, for a brief period only, were able to use a primitive and substantially flawed understanding of human genetics as a rationalization for what they would have done anyway. As such, genetics is a minor episode in this aspect of human history.

Unfortunately the converse of this is that bigotry was a major episode in the still brief history of the young science of genetics. That science, Galton says, now gives us the “new eugenics” from the concurrence of a rapidly increasing understanding of the human genome with extraordinary advances in reproductive technology. Instead of the old eugenics directed at an odd mélange of social and medical problems, we now have the new eugenics with the prospect of dealing effectively with defined and (for the sufferers and their families) horrendous diseases. The prospect has been greeted with everything from enthusiasm to an alarm which is partly conditioned by our knowledge of history: eugenics as the justification for the destruction of the unwanted.

A fault with the old eugenics, apart from its remedies being demonstrably ineffective even in its own terms, and being founded in a still very inadequate state of knowledge, was that it subsumed the prevailing political philosophy of the supremacy of the needs of society over the rights of the individual. Galton, as a practising medical scientist, wants the State to limit its regulation, and to use flexible legislation that can more easily keep up with the technical advances. But, of course, most societies seek to control the reproduction of their members; at its simplest this constitutes arranging or at lease influencing the marriage choices of one’s children. Carlson documents an early version: the curse, unto the tenth generation, placed by Deuteronomy on mamzerim, a special category of bastard born not to single women but extra-maritally to married women; the curse is clearly intended as a precaution against every husband’s worst nightmare. What comes implicitly out of Galton’s plea for relaxed legislation is that the old and new eugenics have in common not the practices of the scientists, but the view of the State that it should control the fertility of individuals for the greater good; then by physical or social sterilization of the fertile, not by the reverse methods of decreeing how the infertile (or those at risk of having a very sick child) may or may not circumvent their problem. To appreciate the full pathos of the old system, put together the separate accounts in these two books of the notorious sterilization of Carrie Buck and her daughter Vivian in Virginia in 1927. The old sterilization was cruel. But so too is the new form of legally enforced sterility through denial of access to the technology. Consider the case of Diane Blood, whom the courts sought to thwart in her wish to have the posthumous child of her husband. It is the State that inflicts the cruelty, then with the ready encouragement of many scientists, now in the face of some opposition. The regulations are the usual uneasy mix of ethics and safety blended with the “Yuck” factor. Opinion in the European Parliament is, for example, that cloning (much sought for the cure of last resort for certain kinds of childlessness) ‘violates respect for the dignity of human beings’, is “contrary to human integrity and morality” and “fails to preserve the human genome as a common heritage of humanity”.

The alliance of eugenics with Nazism discredited the old eugenics – already withering by then – for good. Racism did not die with eugenics. Racial massacre predates written history, only briefly used eugenics as a rationalization, and will continue as long as we let it, independently of science or medicine. But we become distracted both by the horrors inflicted by one dictator, and by the shock of the new. I can attempt a conflation of the conclusions of these two books as follows: the concurrence of our mounting knowledge of human genes, with all our novel forms of technologically assisted reproduction, gives us new and potentially humane solutions in genetic medicine. The effect of these techniques on genetic diversity and the composition of the common human gene pool will be slight, but the individual benefits considerable. The moral questions encountered are ones to which the revealed books and accumulated wisdom of sages give only sketchy answers and which, in such areas as the standing of embryos and foetuses within humanity, cannot be resolved to the universal satisfaction of even the secularized Judaeo-Christian West. Misguided and cruel policies were indeed adopted in the name of eugenics in democratic states, but our outstanding problems are new ones, such as how to avoid a novel version of creating “the unfit”’ a genetic underclass who are denied insurance in the free market. David Galton gives an unusually balanced view of this; there are no villains, and any solution will require vision and ingenuity.

Reprinted with permission of The Times Literary Supplement