Author: Rhiannon Evans
Editor: Ayotenu Dosumu
Artist: Marya Cao
A brief google search for ‘eugenics at UCL’ will yield a plethora of apologetic articles on the university’s official website addressing their “historical links with the eugenics movement.” ‘Historical links’ is putting it lightly; the history of eugenics is not one where UCL appears as a footnote, rather UCL was the home of eugenic research in Britain. Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, and founding father of the movement, left his financial estate to UCL in 1907. This enabled the establishment of a eugenics laboratory, including a permanent Chair of Eugenics, bequeathed to his protégé Karl Pearson. UCL’s grounds welcomed meetings of the Eugenics Education Society and its academic journal, The Annals of Eugenics, was published by the university.
But what is eugenics and why is UCL so ashamed of its association with the movement? Eugenics is a pseudoscience stemming from turn-of-the-century anxieties surrounding population control, immigration, and empire. Eugenicists sought to reckon with this seismic social upheaval by positing that humans have the ability to manufacture social progress, to manage the quality of their populations, using policies to control reproduction. Policies existed on a spectrum of marriage prohibitions to forced segregation and sterilisation of those deemed mentally or physically ‘undesirable’. All policies – however draconian their means – rested on a superficial understanding of human genetics that assumed abstract qualities like talent, morality, and intelligence, were heritable.
For the likes of Galton and Pearson, society was considered, ‘as plastic as clay, under the control of the breeder’s will.’ This sinister language may sound unsettling to the 21st century reader, conjuring images of dystopian science-fiction and Nazi-experimentation. Such was not the case less than 100 years ago. From its inception, eugenics was considered a cutting-edge science, embraced by those who professed to be modern, and primarily the preserve of Britain’s leftist elite. UCL’s Karl Pearson was a committed socialist, authoring The Moral Basis of Socialism and advocating for the logical and moral necessity of nationalisation of land and capital.
Pearson’s vision of a socialistic-eugenic Britain was not a paradoxical anomaly either. Many of Britain’s most beloved progressives (including John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, William Beveridge) accepted invitations to speak at the Eugenics Society and became official members of the body. Rather than being an unfortunate blemish on the history of the British left, eugenics was understood by many as an essential appendage to socialism. The ideological intersection lay in the belief that individual reproductive freedoms should be made subservient to the welfare of the social body. British leftist Eden Paul affirmed that ‘unless the socialist is a eugenicist as well, the socialist state will speedily perish from racial degradation.’ The revered liberal economist, John Maynard Keynes, was director of the Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944. He wrote of the necessity of birth control provision among working classes as their supposed ‘drunkenness’ and ‘ignorance’ threatened the possibility of them outbreeding Britain’s middling sorts.
Socialists saw conservatives as the enemies of progress. Commitments to planning, scientific research and technical efficiency were the order of the day for the British left which created fertile ground for eugenic and socialist ideas to flourish and coalesce. In part, this unsavoury association was a consequence of the left’s perception of science as a neutral instrument to bring about ‘progress’. These British socialists of the early 20th century failed to understand science as a fundamentally social phenomenon.
Science possesses an unquestioned authority and argumentative power, it’s supposed impartiality, objectivity, and pursuit of capital-T ‘Truths’ blinds us from the fact that it is so often a projection of our hopes and anxieties, a desperate quest for meaning in the face of the world’s messiness and chaos.
For eugenicists, selective breeding was understood as a compassionate means to control human evolution. Galton prophesied in 1904, ‘what nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly and kindly.’ An uncritical embrace of Social Darwinist thinking led eugenicists to the conclusion that their science was a humane alternative to letting natural selection run its course; clearly failing to situate their arguments for the prosperity of future generations into a larger framework of human rights and freedoms. By striving for a future of absolute equality (a classless nation made up of only the fittest human stock) they were necessarily claiming that their current society was inherently unequal, and that this inequality was biologically fixed and determined.
Today, eugenics is a dirty word, forever tainted by its realisation in the genocidal practices of the Nazi party. But prior to 1945 it was largely the preserve of elite leftist intellectuals who saw themselves as the pioneers of progress. Our current conceptualisation of politics, which has been fuelled by the expansion of mass media and internet echo-chambers, manifests in overly simplistic section divisions. Left vs Right. Progressive vs Conservative. While eugenics clearly eschews expected political boundaries, the same can be said for so many contemporary social and political issues. A timely example would be the remarkably high number of Americans who opted to vote for both Donald Trump and avowed democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the same ticket in the recent US presidential election. The two couldn’t be on further ends of the political spectrum but united voters because of their ‘anti-establishment’ convictions. The ‘political spectrum’ as a metaphor then doesn’t allow us to speak adequately about what politics actually looks like in practice. Perhaps a more refined understanding of politics as a messy web of competing interests and ideological affiliations would benefit us greatly in both our scientific research and political pursuits.
Kinesis Magazine 