Eugenics and the left: a response to Freedland
The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland is a rare example of an intelligent member of the liberal commentariat. I usually find him thought provoking but ultimately wrong. His latest piece on the left and eugenics is characteristic on this score.
Freedland cites a series of early 20th century liberals and reformist socialists that professed enthusiasm for eugenics: George Bernard Shaw, William Beveridge, Marie Stopes, Harold Laski, JBS Haldane, John Maynard Keynes, Sidney and Beatrice Webb.
All of Freedland's examples will be familiar to anyone who's looked into this history, and I don't dispute the facts of the matter. However I do take issue with how Freedland frames these facts and the broader political conclusions he draws.
Freedland focuses on eugenics and the left, even though he acknowledges that eugenics was accepted across the entire mainstream political spectrum at the time, from left to right.
As André Pichot's magnificent study of eugenics and racism The Pure Society: from Darwin to Hitler (Verso 2009) makes clear, about the only significant mainstream opposition to eugenics at the time was mounted by the Catholic Church (and its motivations for this stance were scarcely progressive).
Pichot also demonstrates that eugenic discourse grew out of earlier reactionary ideologies developed by Malthus and Hobbes. Far from being based on science, these ideas fed into and guided nascent scientific research into evolution and genetics.
And while eugenics certainly had its fans on the left, it was most vigorously promoted by the right. Yet Churchill is the lone passing example of a right wing eugenics advocate mentioned by Freedland.
Why, then, does Freedland call eugenics "a skeleton that rattles especially loudly inside the closet of the left"? Perhaps the skeleton rattles more loudly because eugenics clashes with the left's wider ideals, while it chimes with those of the right?
But Freedland rejects this argument. He argues that socialists were attracted to eugenics because of a socialist emphasis on science, progress and state planning. "What was missing", he writes, "was any value placed on individual freedom."
This argument doesn't really wash. Support for eugenics was just as strong among liberal ideologues of "individual freedom". Nor was a belief in science, progress and planning confined to the socialist left.
If Freedland's hypothesis was correct, history would record many brave liberals in the centre ground fighting off eugenics from both left and right in the name of individual freedom. No such record exists, although Michael Rosen has recently made a case for Charles Dickens as an opponent of Malthus.
It makes much more sense to understand eugenics as an ideology of the European bourgeoisie, which spent the late 19th century consolidating its political triumph in Europe and expanding aggressively across the globe. Eugenics fitted with this period of imperialist expansion, one that would end in the horrific slaughters of two world wars and the Nazi Holocaust.
What was the radical left's position in all this? Freedland doesn't touch on this question and Pichot has little to say on the topic either. From what I can gather, the radical left has a much better though still chequered record when it comes to eugenics and its associated ideologies.
Marx and Engels were implacably opposed to Malthus. Marx famously dismissed Malthus's Essay on Population as "a libel on the human race". Engels called it a "vile, infamous theory".
It is also well known that both Marx and Engels were enthusiasts for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. They welcomed Darwin's materialist naturalisation of human prehistory and incorporated evolution into their understanding of humanity's emergence.
What is less known is that Marx and Engels were sharply critical of the Malthusian and Hobbesian themes that pepper Darwin's work (and those of virtually every other 19th century evolutionist). Pichot cites Marx writing to Engels in 1862:
I'm amused that Darwin, at whom I've been taking another look, should say that he also applies the 'Malthusian' theory to plants and animals, as though in Mr Malthus's case the whole thing didn't lie in its not being applied to plants and animals, but only – with its geometric progression – to humans as against plants and animals. It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, 'inventions' and Malthusian 'struggle for existence'. It is Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes and is reminiscent of Hegel’s Phenomenology, in which civil society figures as an 'intellectual animal kingdom', whereas, in Darwin, the animal kingdom figures as civil society.
Engels wrote to the Russian revolutionary Pyotr Lavrov in 1875:
The whole Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence is simply the transference from society to animate nature of Hobbes' theory of the war of every man against every man and the bourgeois economic theory of competition, along with the Malthusian theory of population. This feat having been accomplished ... the same theories are next transferred back again from organic nature to history and their validity as eternal laws of human society declared to have been proved. The childishness of this procedure is obvious.
What about the Bolshevik attitude to these questions? From what I can gather they were hostile to the racist, reactionary and paternalist politics associated with eugenics, but did not entirely dismiss its scientific credentials. Leon Trotsky concludes his 1934 address If America Should Go Communist with this curious statement:
While the romantic numskulls of Nazi Germany are dreaming of restoring the old race of Europe's Dark Forest to its original purity, or rather its original filth, you Americans, after taking a firm grip on your economic machinery and your culture, will apply genuine scientific methods to the problem of eugenics. Within a century, out of your melting pot of races there will come a new breed of men – the first worthy of the name of Man.
Trotsky's speculation that a "genuine scientific" eugenics might be possible in a socialist society seems at best naïve and at worst rather sinister to our eyes. But eugenic ideas were almost universally accepted among scientists at the time. It is not difficult to see how one could conclude that the reactionary elements of eugenics were a capitalist distortion of science, rather than concluding that the "science" itself was bunkum.
There is also another context here. Science in Russia was increasingly coming under Stalin's stranglehold in the early 1930s. This led to the disasterous rise of Lysenko's biology, which crudely and fiercely polemicised against eugenics. As this online encyclopaedia article notes:
Russia had a small but flourishing eugenics movement before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. With the advent of the Communist regime, some biologists hoped that the application of scientific principles to reproductive policies, as to agriculture, would receive official support. But many Soviet biologists, recognizing that complex human behaviors and social values cannot be ascribed to genes in any clear way, found the claims of Western eugenicists naïve and class-based. Moreover the "hard" hereditarian line promoted by most Western eugenicists was at odds with the Communist views of the malleability of human nature and thus appeared to provide no role for the environment in shaping human destiny. The Central Committee of the Communist Party outlawed work on eugenics in 1930, making the Soviet Union the only country where eugenics was officially denounced by governmental legislation.
These complications aside, it seems clear to me that there was a tradition of ideological opposition to Malthus and Hobbes on the revolutionary left, one that fed into a later left critique of eugenics, albeit a highly contradictory one. So while Freedland is right to warn against the reinvention of eugenic ideas in the guise of "underclass" theories, he is wrong to see nothing but gloom and doom in the left's history on this question.
Freedland is wrong in a deeper sense too, one that cuts to the heart of his reformist politics. He writes that progressives "face a particular challenge" to escape from the eugenicist shadow, and that "a movement is just like a person: it never entirely escapes its roots".
Yet revolutionary politics is based on the wager that political movements can enact a rupture with the past, and that what Marx called "the muck of ages" can be definitively cast off. In this respect it is more resolute and more hopeful than Freedland's vision, which ultimately chains us to a brutal past.
