The Wit and Wisdom of Sir Francis Galton

"It has now become a serious nescessity to better the breed of the human race. The average citizen is too base for the everyday work of modern civilization." --Sir Francis Galton

One of my major lines of research has been the scientific control and manipulation of human beings, and the Eugenics movement is one of the most perfect examples I've found. The overlap between good intentions and nightmare consequences is highly instructive. This morning I came to realize that I have over 10 pages in one of my notebooks devoted to quotes from Sir Francis Galton, who actually coined the term "eugenics." Galton lived an exceptionally accomplished life and made advances in over a dozen scientific disciplines, but his real legacy to humankind is his writing, the interpretation of which I leave up to you.

Galton Explains Eugenics

I take Eugenics very seriously, feeling that its principles ought to become one of the dominant motives in a civilised nation, much as if they were one of its religious tenets. I have often expressed myself in this sense, and will conclude this book by briefly reiterating my views. Individuals appear to me as partial detachments from the infinite ocean of Being, and this world as a stage on which Evolution takes place, principally hitherto by means of Natural Selection, which achieves the good of the whole with scant regard to that of the individual.

Man is gifted with pity and other kindly feelings; he has also the power of preventing many kinds of suffering. I conceive it to fall well within his province to replace Natural Selection by other processes that are more merciful and not less effective.

This is precisely the aim of Eugenics. Its first object is to check the birth-rate of the Unfit, instead of allowing them to come into being, though doomed in large numbers to perish prematurely. The second object is the improvement of the race by furthering the productivity of the Fit by early marriages and healthful rearing of their children. Natural Selection rests upon excessive production and wholesale destruction; Eugenics on bringing no more individuals into the world than can be properly cared for, and those only of the best stock.

I am struck by a line from Hartford Van Dyke, the author of Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. In explaining his classic essay to Joan D'Arc, editor of Paranoia Magazine, he stated: "it is not a 'paranoid manifesto'; it is a politically biased technical instruction manual on how to justify, and how to selectively survive, human animal husbandry before the need for animal husbandry becomes unstably critical."

It is worth considering that Eugenics is not a relic of the past -- in fact, it never left, and will certainly be implemented again in the future. There is no shortage of reasons that could be invoked to justify the "need" for state-mandated Eugenic solutions -- or as Van Dyke bluntly puts it, "human animal husbandry."

A Question of Values

So what is a fit human being? Who exactly decides that, and based upon what guidelines? It's instructive to look to Galton for answers. Consider the quote that I opened up this article with:

"It has now become a serious nescessity to better the breed of the human race. The average citizen is too base for the everyday work of modern civilization."

A topic of much discussion is the binary debate often referred to as Nature vs. Nurture, the question of wether or not it is inherent genetic qualities or the environment and upbringing of a human that makes them who they are. This is, obviously, a simplistic and profoundly meaningless debate -- it's obviously both, and all of the assumptions this discussion is based upon have been uprooted by scientific findings in the past two decades. (As a good introduction for the unfamiliar, check out the BBC Horizon documentary The Ghost in Your Genes -- that link is to an online copy of the show in DIVX format, enjoy). However, the origin of the debate is none other than Sir Francis Galton -- from his 1874 book, "English Men of Sciences: Their Nature and Nurture."

Galton's focus on English men of science was because he considered the learned English upper class to be basically a master race. He never said it in those terms, since they didn't exist until decades later. (It should be mentioned that "master race" theory has its roots not in Adolf Hitler but Theosophist Helena Blavatsky.) From page 256 of Packard Vance's great 1974 book The People Shapers:

Galton was vague about what constituted "baseness." But to him "civilized man" was epitomized by the English upper classes. They were the repository of "virtually all that is biologically precious in the English nation and possibly in mankind."

No Simple Racist

Racism, at least as I've known it, is inherently a belief in the superiority of one's own race. Sir Francis Galton was something much more interesting, and possibly much more dangerous: he was a scientist. After all, claiming that Asians are humanity's Master Race -- something I've brought up in the past -- implies a heirarchy of value. Galton, like many sceintists before or since, was much more interested in precisely assessing the qualitative differences between races. For many reasons, our current cultural climate is hostile to the notion that different races are in fact different. Galton makes a subtler point:

The instincts and faculties of different men and races differ in a variety of ways almost as profoundly as those of animals in different cages of the Zoological Gardens; and however diverse and antagonistic they are, each may be good of its kind. It is obviously so in brutes; the monkey may have a horror at the sight of a snake, and a repugnance to its ways, but a snake is just as perfect an animal as a monkey. The living world does not consist of a repetition of similar elements, but of an endless variety of them, that have grown, body and soul, through selective influences into close adaptation to their contemporaries, and to the physical circumstances of the localities they inhabit.

So at least on an intellectual level, we find Galton striving to be objective. As we will soon see, this was not a consistent goal and he didn't do a very good job at it.

Tour the Earth with Sir Francis Galton

The American Indian:

The American Indians are eminently non-gregarious. They nourish a sullen reserve, and show little sympathy with each other, even when in great distress. The Spaniards had to enforce the common duties of humanities by positive laws. They are strangely taciturn. When not engaged in action they will sit whole days in one posture without opening their lips, and wrapped up in their narrow thoughts.

Galton was a very thorough man -- he had something to say about every race on Earth. In his 1869 book Hereditary Genius, he offered up a memorable chapter entitled "The Comparative Worth of Different Races." There we find no shortage of disturbing material, especially regarding "The Negro," as Galton puts it. It is here that we see his alleged "objectivity" collide with his total ignorance and conditioned racism:

It is seldom that we hear of a white traveller meeting with a black chief whom he feels to be the better man. I have often discussed this subject with competent persons, and can only recall a few cases of the inferiority of the white man,?certainly not more than might be ascribed to an average actual difference of three grades, of which one may be due to the relative demerits of native education, and the remaining two to a difference in natural gifts. the number among the negroes of those whom we should call half-witted men, is very large. Every book alluding to negro servants in America is full of instances. I was myself much impressed by this fact during my travels in Africa. The mistakes the negroes made in their own matters, were so childish, stupid, and simpleton-like, as frequently to make me ashamed of my own species.

He also goes on to note that "The Australian type is at least one grade below the African negro," but I won't whump you over the head with anymore of this material -- anyone reading this has gotten the point by now.

Galton's Solution for Africa

As you are beginning to realize, Galton is truly a bottomless well of shocking, ignorant, and just plain monstrous quotations. For this precise reason, he's also a fountain of truly funny unintentional surrealism, and the best example of that is his letter to The Times of London, dated June 6th, 1873:

My proposal is to make the encouragement of the Chinese settlements at one or more suitable places on the East Coast of Africa a par of our national policy, in the belief that the Chinese immigrants would not only maintain their position, but that they would multiply and their descendants supplant the inferior Negro race. I should expect the large part of the African seaboard, now sparsely occupied by lazy, palavering savages living under the nominal sovereignty of the Zanzibar, or Portugal, might in a few years be tenanted by industrious, order loving Chinese, living either as a semi-detached dependency of China, or else in perfect freedom under their own law.