ES2208: Thinking about ‘Race’
Week 3
Science & Eugenics: Malthus & Galton
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Last updated 01.02.12.
‘Race’, racism and science
In today’s session we consider the roots of scientific racism. The idea that racism and science could form a comfortable alliance might seem odd from a twenty first century perspective. But, for nearly two centuries from the late eighteenth until the late twentieth century, a racism informed by science became hegemonic across the developed West. The remnants of scientific racism are all around us, and, much as we might wish to deny it, elements of the forms of racism still prevalent today can be traced to the science of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These centre on ideas about the measurability of physical characteristics and populations (head-size, genitalia, fecundity, etc.) and, it has been widely held, upon what we can ‘scientifically’ infer from such measurements about the psychology, intelligence, morality and character traits of ‘races’.
As you will remember from Plato’s Republic, since ancient times people have sought to build, on the basis of a ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ knowledge of human characteristics, societies which increase the positive and desirable attributers of one group or ‘race’, and eliminate those of undesirable elements or reduce them to the minimum level required for the effective functioning of society for the benefit of the good. It should come as no surprise then, that, around about the same time Kant was carefully and ‘scientifically’ dividing humanity into discrete and hierarchically organised ‘races’, others were examining the rational ‘rules’ of populations and their growth. The most notable of these was Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) who published the first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population in the same year as Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 1798. Taken together, the scientific works of Kant on ‘race’ and Malthus on population offer the basis for the development of a science of ‘racial’ improvement. Scientific racism is presaged in the clearest (and most sinister) way in the racist science of eugenics, a term coined by the English anthropologist, geographer, scientist and statistician Francis Galton (1822-1911) in 1883. Eugenics was really to come into its own in the early part of the twentieth century.
Thomas Malthus
Malthus’ central argument is that there is a lag between populations’ capacity to reproduce and grow and their ability to feed themselves. In response to the arguments of Rousseau, Malthus maintained that the prospects for human improvement were limited, with some sections of the population always condemned to poverty because the constant drive towards increasing numbers outstrips the expansion in the means of subsistence needed to support such growth.
“The way in which these effects are produced seems to be this. We will suppose the means of subsistence in any country just equal to the easy support of its inhabitants. The constant effort towards population, which is found to act even in the most vicious societies, increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased. The food therefore which before supported seven millions must now be divided among seven millions and a half or eight millions. The poor consequently must live much worse, and many of them be reduced to severe distress. The number of labourers also being above the proportion of the work in the market, the price of labour must tend toward a decrease, while the price of provisions would at the same time tend to rise. The labourer therefore must work harder to earn the same as he did before. During this season of distress, the discouragements to marriage, and the difficulty of rearing a family are so great that population is at a stand. In the mean time the cheapness of labour, the plenty of labourers, and the necessity of an increased industry amongst them, encourage cultivators to employ more labour upon their land, to turn up fresh soil, and to manure and improve more completely what is already in tillage, till ultimately the means of subsistence become in the same proportion to the population as at the period from which we set out. The situation of the labourer being then again tolerably comfortable, the restraints to population are in some degree loosened, and the same retrograde and progressive movements with respect to happiness are repeated.” (Malthus, 1993, p.18)
Nature/God, then, keeps a check on populations by means of starvation, poverty and the endemic diseases which seemed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to be unavoidable consequences of population growth among the lower classes. For Malthus, to attempt to ameliorate this situation in any way was to defy natural law. Chase (1980) claims that the Essay on the Principle of Population was not really “a book about demography, or population dynamics, or agriculture at all.” (Chase, 1980, p.77) It was rather a defence of certain social arrangements, in particular of “(1) the abysmally low pay scale and (2) the nearly total absence of such tax-supported social services as clean water services, health services, and education” (Ibid.) which prevailed during this period. Malthus therefore represents an influential voice for the emergent bourgeoisie, ably advocating for their interests and justifying the emerging social order in terms which would become nineteenth century orthodoxy.
“If the new population of wage earners suffered from endemic infectious and deficiency diseases while trying to make a life on the low wages of the new mean towns, this did not indicate that these hardworking people were the victims of poverty. Rather, Malthus wrote, such afflictions were the price of yielding to their own innate low natures…The famines, plagues, and wars that periodically decimated the ranks of the world’s poor and other sinners were, simply, the Judgement of nature and/or God on the types who ignore or flout the Natural laws of Population, Prudence, and Probity… It was, in short, not low wages and cyclical employment and unemployment but the hereditary low nature and irresponsibility of the poor that brought about their woes. The poor were poor because nature decreed their poverty; to attempt to alleviate in any way the poverty of the poor… was therefore to act counter to the laws of Nature, which in turn were also the laws of God.” (Chase, 1980, pp.77-8)
Malthus goes further, suggesting that the wealthy should help nature along a little to ensure that her laws are enacted. In this respect he moves a step closer to the anthropogenic improvement of the ‘race’ envisaged by Galton (below):
It is an evident truth that, whatever may be the rate of increase in the means of subsistence, the increase of population must be limited by it, at least after the food has once been divided into the smallest shares that will support life. All the children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to this level, must necessarily perish, unless room be made for them by the deaths of grown persons. It has appeared indeed clearly in the course of this work, that in all old states the marriages and births depend principally upon the deaths, and that there is no encouragement to early unions so powerful as a great mortality. To act consistently therefore, we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavouring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders. If by these and similar means the annual mortality were increased from 1 in 36 or 40, to 1 in 18 or 20, we might probably every one of us marry at the age of puberty, and yet few be absolutely starved. (Malthus, 1914, pp.179-80)
The ground was set for the scientific racism of the nineteenth century by the establishment in the Malthusian principles of population of a ‘Natural law’ of the unavoidable inferiority of the lower classes, ordaining the permanence of their poverty. Chase argues that “The poor, in the eyes of Malthus, were a race apart from the nonpoor” (Ibid., p.78). Although Malthus drew upon claims to the will of God to justify this position, his was “nevertheless, the first major theory of the human inferiority of the “lower and middling classes” to be presented in the language of science. From it many less theological and more mathematical systems of scientific racism would flow.” (Ibid.) For, what Malthus achieved was to offer a justification to the educated and wealthy for their continued disregard for, indeed violence against the poor as being a proper and ‘natural’ response to a set of divinely ordained social conditions. This thinking then offers the possibility of regarding other ‘types’ or ‘races’ as similarly undeserving of sympathy or support on account of their ineluctably low natures. Indeed, when combined with the ideas of eugenics discussed next, Malthus opens the way for scientific racism’s ultimate dénouement: “Nazi barbarism was motivated by an ethic that prided itself on being scientific… Multitudes must perish in this Malthusian struggle anyway, they reasoned, so why not improve humanity by speeding up the destruction of the disabled and the inferior races?” (Weikart, 2004, p.226)
Francis Galton
Francis Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin. Following an aborted medical training, and a period as explorer and geographer, Galton read and was greatly influenced by his cousin’s 1859 Origin of Species. In 1868 William Rathbone Greg responded to the Origin with an essay entitled ‘On the failure of “natural selection” in the case of man’, in Fraser's Magazine. He contended that the nature of civilisation had, in effect, suspended natural selection even by means of mental fitness in the case of man:
“our existing civilisation, which is the result of the operation of this law in past ages, may be actually retarded and endangered by its tendency to neutralise that law in one or two most material and significant particulars. The great, right, wise and beneficent principle which in all other animals, and in man himself up to a certain stage of his progress, tends to the improvement and perfection of the race, would appear to be forcible interfered with and nearly set aside; nay, to be set aside pretty much in direct proportion to the complication, completeness, and culmination of our civilisation… the indisputable effect of the state of social progress and culture we have reached, of our high civilisation, in a word, is to counteract and suspend the operation of that righteous and salutary law of ‘natural selection’ in virtue of which the best specimens of the race – the strongest, the finest, the worthiest – are those who survive…” (Greg, 1868, p.356)
“Among savages, the vigorous and sound alone survive; among us the diseased and enfeebled survive as well; – but is either the physique or the intelligence of cultivated man the gainer by the change?” (Ibid., p.359)
Darwin was appalled at the implications of what Greg concluded, but conceded that he was possibly correct. He incorporated Greg’s ‘suggestion’ in his later Descent of Man (1871). While Greg himself urged active political debate on the topic, Galton, also enthused by The Origin, began his own studies, starting to apply reasonably well established statistical methods to a new subject area, and came to the same conclusion as Darwin: Greg was possibly right.
In the Descent, Darwin approvingly cites both Greg, and Galton’s ‘great work’, Hereditary Genius (1870). Here is a flavour of Darwin’s remarks:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” (Darwin, 2004, p.159)
It is perhaps interesting that, although Darwin was a deeply controversial and divisive figure in the mid-nineteenth century, what he taps into here is a widely held view which had gained ground greatly since Malthus’ proposal of three quarters of a century earlier. And yet, such a ‘mainstream’ position of the period now probably reminds us of nothing more than Nazism. This impression is hardly vitiated by the passages which follow in Darwin’s account.
“A most important obstacle in civilised countries to an increase in the number of men of a superior class has been strongly insisted on by Mr Greg and Mr Galton, namely the fact that the very poor and reckless, who are often degraded by vice, almost invariably marry early, whilst the careful and frugal, who are generally otherwise virtuous, marry late in life, so that they may be able to support themselves and their children in comfort. Those who marry early produce within a given period not only a greater number of generations, but, as shewn by Dr Duncan, they produce many more children.” (Ibid., pp.163-4)
Darwin’s fear here is an echo of Malthus’, and is one which he shares with many an educated middle class Victorian, that the rapidly multiplying working class in the growing urban centres posed a real threat to the continued existence of their refined and ‘civilised’ way of life. Importantly for us, though, this sentiment is easily translated into concerns about degenerate ‘races’ too. Darwin has no trouble making the leap. He endorses Greg’s claim that
‘The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman, fed on potatoes, living in a pig-sty, doting on a superstition, multiplies like rabbits or ephemera: - the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts – and in a dozen generations five sixths of the population would be Celts, but five-sixths of the property, of the power, of the intellect, would belong to the one sixth of Saxons that remained. In the eternal “struggle for existence”, it would be the inferior and less favoured race that had prevailed – and prevailed by virtue not of its good qualities but of its faults.” (Ibid., p.64)
The threat was ‘real’ enough, and the consequences of its realisation clearly flew in the face of the upstanding Englishman’s sense of right. The possibility of a depletion of good ‘racial’ stock and the potential victory of the inferior ‘race’, then, required serious consideration and, in due course, action (see below). The example of the Irish is instructive. As we saw last week, it is this group who are most clearly identified as a lower ‘race’ among large sections of the British populace who have yet to apply versions of scientific racism to the indigenous peoples of Britain’s expanding colonies. But in this respect, anti-Irish racism opens the way for scientific forms of the old anti-Semitism, and, of course, of the crude racisms directed against the Colonial ‘subjects’ whose breeding habits must also have proved a great cause for concern.
So, during this period the application of the idea of evolution was being broadened into the social sphere and gained great popularity. The key figure here is the philosopher Herbert Spencer. A central feature of the mode of operation of his notion of evolution was refinement - characteristics were whittled away through the generations until what remained was a pure essence - a perfect type. The other important assumption which Spencer made, in terms of theory, was that selection was re-located away from the individual organism and placed at the level of the population and its social group. Thus educational and social policy-making became of paramount importance in deciding the 'fitness' of the nation. What made Spencer’s analysis of variation, differential survival, and speciation so significant (and potentially destructive) was the fact that one of the most striking slogans to be derived from later editions of The Origin of Species, “survival of the fittest” – a phrase coined by Spencer but adopted by Darwin, was associated in the literature of Social Darwinism with the supposed moral duty to ensure ‘survival of the most advanced’. From here, those so inclined could readily infer that this form of social competition necessarily entailed intellectual and moral domination and physical, and especially reproductive, curtailment of the power of the ‘lower’ working classes, and ‘inferior’ ‘races’.
The most important thing to take from this is that at least until the 1890s – the widely held assumption was that a) Galton was onto something – but he was really adding further support to what had already been pointed to by Greg – the possible cessation of natural selection in advanced human societies – and, b) the appropriate response was an enlightened social policy leading to a national programme of moral education, i.e., NOT the direct versions of social engineering which came later, with the Twentieth century.
In more detail:
- The social practices (hygiene) of families, social classes, etc. were now seen as not only giving rise to mental events and causes in general, but practices which might have ‘morally’ deleterious consequences for individuals, classes, and the ‘race’ as a whole. Such practices, e.g. wet-nursing, masturbation, homosexuality, and moral laxity in general, would, if allowed to become general within a population, lead to ‘moral degeneracy’ – the greatest peril facing the ‘European mind’ (cf. the semi-pornographic accounts which flourished at the end of the Nineteenth Century depicting encounters between high-minded, ‘civilised’ Europeans with members of the highly sexualised and immoral ‘lower’ ‘races’, often located within the Orient).
- These perspectives also opened the door to supposedly therapeutic public interventions – normative practices which amounted to class engineering, familial intervention, and even mind-healing – all of which had as their goal the re-establishment of a morally appropriate and civilised stance towards society and one's immediate social relations. If corrective imprisonment, confinement of the feeble minded, and punitive legislation did not work, then there was also the possibility of state sanctioned sterilisation, abortion, and enforced adoption to be considered - cf. the treatment of the Australian ‘aboriginals.’
However, more disturbing than all of the above was one final outcome of the theory of Social Darwinism: the eugenics movement. As noted above, the term eugenics is Galton’s. Your Galton reading dates from twenty years after its coining, and thirty five years after Galton had first expressed his views on ‘race’ in “The Comparative Worth of Human Races” in Hereditary Genius. The practical application Galton is proposing in 1904, the action required to tackle the problem identified by Malthus, Greg and Darwin, is a programme of ‘hygiene’. In Germany, eugenics was already known by the early twentieth century as ‘Rassenhygiene’ – ‘race hygiene’.
Galton’s presentation of his case in ‘Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims’ is, by the standards of the time, moderate in tone and message. ‘Racial’ improvement, he argues, is not a matter of morality, morals should “as far as possible [be left] out of the discussion” (Galton, 2000, p.79) because “goodness or badness of character is not absolute, but relative to the current form of civilization.” (Ibid.) Rather, what matters is the ideal ‘type’ specimen of the ‘race’ and whatever realises the truest expression of this Spencerian ‘type’: “the essentials of Eugenics may be easily defined. All creatures would agree that it is better to be healthy than sick, vigorous than weak, well-fitted than ill-fitted for their part in life. In short that it was better to be good rather than bad specimens of their kind. So with men.” (Ibid., p.80) Galton goes on to consider some of the criteria one might include in selecting the best breeding specimens of a ‘race’, “health, energy, ability, manliness and courteous disposition.” (Ibid., p.80) I wonder if you also consider these criteria to be unproblematic.
We are to imagine Galton’s eugenic utopia wherein the average quality of the nation has been raised to that of its best part: “The race as a whole would be less foolish, less frivolous, less excitable and politically more provident than now. Its demagogues who “played to the gallery” would play to a more sensible gallery than at present. We should be better fitted to fulfil our vast imperial opportunities. ” (Ibid.) What we see is a characterisation of the imperial ‘race’ against which could be contrasted the foolish, frivolous, excitable, childlike ‘natives’ of the ‘subject’ nations, people whose rightful place is to be wisely guided and governed by their white masters. Indeed, Britain’s economic and political reach, its imperial prowess appeared to offer legitimation for just such a vision of the inherent superiority of the best part of the ‘Saxon’ ‘race’. This is a wider point which we don’t have time to develop further in this module (but which you can explore at level 6 if you wish). Once tamed or “domesticated”, Galton thinks that the many of the “savage races” will, like the animals in a zoo, no longer wish to procreate and will “disappear”; others “like the negro, do not” and these will therefore require careful attention. In contrast, “our race” – the possessive is used quite unproblematically by Galton – will of course be found to become not less but more fertile under conditions of greater civility. As a first step towards his utopia, Galton proceeds to propose the identification of the best, noblest and most fecund families in Britain whose stock might be noted as worthy of further increase. Furthermore, eugenics should be developed as an educational movement to be “introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion” (ibid., p.83) which would, it is presumed, encourage more appropriate marriage and reproduction to the benefit of the ‘race’, “for Eugenics co-operates with the working of nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races. What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly and kindly.” (Ibid.)
Supported by various political and civic authorities for a time throughout Europe, North America, and many of the English-speaking colonies, eugenics was soon identified as the most immediately effective way of avoiding ‘racial’ degeneracy and fostering the development of ‘racial’ purity. Among the strongest supporters of the movement in the USA was Henry Ford, founder of the car manufacturers. So, it should be understood that the Nazi party was not alone in its readiness to sterilise the insane, to terminate or withhold life support from physically impaired ‘specimens’, and to actively advocate an aggressive policy of Europeanization of the ‘subject races’ with the minimum intention of removing all vestiges of indigenous culture (e.g. again Australia and its treatment of the ‘aboriginal’ tribes). Henry Ford’s The International Jew (1920) with its “biological”, “medical” and “hygienic” terminology was a great influence on Hitler and other leading Nazis.
To recap on earlier points, the eugenics argument deriving from this - used by the Nazis (and others in both Britain and America) was that a misguided society would allow indiscriminate over-breeding of, and inter-breeding with, morally and physically degenerate types. In so doing, the society would reduce the purity and strength of its best ‘racial’ stock over time, leading to its eventual collapse into barbarism. Therefore, in the absence of wars which might conveniently be used to reduce this damaging population surplus, other methods such as sterilisation, enforced abortion, and even extermination were justified in the interests of maintaining ‘racial’ purity. At the same time those deemed to represent the best of the ‘race’ should be encouraged to have large families.
In nearly all cases, the first expressions of interest in eugenic policies within any one nation state were typically formulated in terms of assumptions about there having been in the past, and existing until very recently, a relatively homogeneous population, e.g. eugenics was proposed as a solution to the consequences of letting ‘outsiders’ and ‘undesirables’ breed (such as the ‘feeble minded’, the hardened criminal, the recent immigrant or, in the case of there being colonies, the ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ ‘races’).
This takes us as far as we need to go this week and to a point where we will next time begin to explore the relationship which emerges between the idea of a ‘race’ and the ‘homeland’ or nation.
Darwin, C. (2004) The Descent of Man, London: Penguin
Galton, F. [1904] (2000) ‘Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims’ Races’ in Bernasconu, R. & Lott, T. (Eds.) The Idea of Race, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company
Greg, W. (1868) "On the failure of 'Natural Selection' in the case of Man", Fraser's Magazine, Sept. 1868, pp. 353-362
Malthus, T. [1803](1993) An Essay on the Principle of Population, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Chase, A. (1980) The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Cost of the New Scientific Racism, Urbana: University of Illinois Press Chapter 4 pp. 68-84
Weikart, R. (2004) From Darwin to Hitler Basingstoke: Palgrave