4) Francis Galton and the new religion of Eugenics

On the 18th of January, 1874, a remarkable dinner party took place at the London home of Erasmus Darwin, older brother of naturalist Charles Darwin. The guests included Charles Darwin, the novelist George Eliot, a young classicist named Frederic Myers, and Darwin’s cousin, the statistician Francis Galton.

After dinner, they sat around the dinner table in darkness, eyes closed, hands touching on the table. At the head of the table sat a famous medium, Charles Williams. Darwin’s son George had organized an experimental séance with Williams, to see if there was any truth to his claim that he could contact the dead. George and his cousin, Hensleigh Wedgewood, positioned themselves under the dinner table for the séance, clinging to the medium’s legs. They wanted to make sure the medium didn’t try any ‘jugglery’, as Charles Darwin put it, by banging on the table and claiming it was the spirits.

For a long time, nothing happened. Charles Darwin started to find the séance ‘hot and tiring’, so he went to bed. Shortly afterwards, a connection to the spirit-world was finally established. The spirits’ arrival was announced by the movement of various items which the medium had placed around the room — a chair, a flute, a bell, a candlestick. It ‘astounded everyone and took their breath away’, Charles Darwin wrote in a letter to his friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker. He continued:

How the man could possibly do what was done, passes my understanding. I came down stairs &saw all the chairs &c &c on the Table which had been lifted over the heads of those sitting round it. — The Lord have mercy on us all, if we have to believe in such rubbish.

Darwin’s cousin, Hensleigh Wedgewood, was convinced. Even Francis Galton thought it was a ‘good séance’.

For Galton, this foray into the spirit world was a one-off — he ultimately dismissed Spiritualism as bunk. But his eugenic ideas were taken up and endorsed by many in the ‘occulture’ of late 19th and early 20th century society, as this research project explores.

If anyone has heard of Francis Galton today, it is as the notorious inventor of ‘eugenics’ — the attempt to steer the genetic evolution of humanity, for the good of the species. Eugenics is now a taboo word. But there was more to Galton than that.

He was born in Birmingham in 1822, and was a cousin of Darwin’s — both were grandsons of Erasmus Darwin, the 18th-century Birmingham naturalist who proposed an early theory of the evolution of species.

If Galton didn’t make the single mighty intellectual contribution that Darwin did, he nonetheless made several hugely significant ones, any one of which would be sufficient for the rest of us to retire satisfied.

He helped to invent the field of statistics, introducing the idea of the questionnaire and developing the concepts of dispersion, correlation and regression to the mean. Like the authors of Freakonomics, he liked to apply statistics to challenge conventional thinking — he published a paper in 1872, called Statistical Enquires into the Efficacy of Prayer, in which he examined the life-spans of European monarchs (who are constantly being prayed for) and found no statistical difference to the average.

He also invented the first scientific system for the collection and classification of finger prints, which were subsequently introduced as a standard technique for police work. In meteorology, he created the first-ever map of air pressure currents (on the left), and the first to ever appear in a newspaper as a weather report. He spent several years travelling in Africa, where he created one of the first accurate maps of any part of the continent.

He was constantly observing and trying to draw scientific conclusions. On a visit to the horse races at Derby, while everyone else was watching the race, Galton observed the crowd through his opera glass. He noted ‘the average tint of the complexion of the British upper classes’ and discovered that when the race started, the crowd became “suffused with a strong pink tint, just as though a sun-set glow had fallen upon it”. He shared his findings with the journal Nature.

He was something of a mad inventor. Prone to breakdowns and mental instability (like other leading eugenicists) he invented a top-hat that would prevent his brain from over-heating — when he squeezed a small pump, the top of his hat would raise, supposedly helping his brain cool.

He had a mania for classifying and grading humans. He invented a beauty map of Britain, scoring the men and women according to their physical attractiveness (Aberdeen scored lowest). And this obsession with classifying the fittest led to his chief interest — heredity, and how talents and flaws are passed on through the generations.

He noted that certain families — like the Darwins, the Galtons and the Wedgwoods (who all intermarried) — produced more than average people of exceptional talent. There appeared to be what Noel Annan would call an ‘intellectual aristocracy’ of certain families that produced the cognitive elite of a country.

In his 1865 article, Hereditary Talent and Character, he examined 300 English families, categorizing the men in them according to their achievements — from A for exceptional to G for good-for-nothing. He claimed to discover scientific evidence for what many already believed — if you come from a talented family, you’re more likely to be talented as well.

But could this be ‘nurture’ rather than ‘nature’? In 1875 he published the first ever study of twins and inherited traits, which seemed to show that similar physical, cognitive and moral traits emerge even when twins are raised separately. Such studies are now the foundation for hereditarian theories of human nature.

Humans have for millennia tried to make judicious marriages, partly to produce talented and healthy children who bring honour to their families. But could this unscientific selection process be put onto a firm scientific basis?

Galton wrote:

If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create! We might introduce prophets and high priests of civilization in to the world, as surely as we can propagate idiots by mating cretins. Men and women of the present day are, to those we might hope to bring into existence, what the pariah dogs of the streets of an Eastern town are to our own highly-bred varieties. (Galton 1865: 166)

In 1883, Galton coined the word ‘eugenics’ for his project to use science to guide the evolution of the human race. Statistics and classification would be key — he suggested that ‘those who are naturally gifted should be identified, and recorded on a national register. Families should be encouraged to record details of health, strength, intellectual capacity, character weaknesses etc., with as much narrative as possible.’

This hereditary database would help the fittest identify and breed with each other (this was termed ‘positive eugenics’ and inspired later organisations like Mensa, and even the creation of a a ‘genius sperm bank’). And it would also help the state to identify the unfit (ie ‘morons’, ‘imbeciles’, ‘idiots’, or those with other congenital weaknesses and discourage them from breeding.

In an unpublished science fiction novel, The Eugenic College of Kantsaywhere (1910) Galton imagined a society governed by eugenics, in which every child takes an exam, and only the fittest are allowed to reproduce, while those who score lowest are shipped off to the colonies.

At his most enthusiastic, Galton imagined eugenics becoming a ‘new religion’, a ‘creed’, the ‘religion of the future’. Other religious innovators, from Aldous Huxley to Osho, would also make eugenics a central part of their evolutionary spirituality.

Galton’s ideas had a huge influence on human culture, particularly the idea of sorting the cognitive elite through exams. The inventors of IQ tests and exams like the Eleven Plus were eugenicist psychologists inspired by Galton’s vision. We still live in a cognitive meritocracy where we are subject to endless tests to identify the smartest and give them power and resources. We all know the pressure of living under such a system: each test is a proof of your evolutionary fitness, or unfitness.

But it’s an exaggeration to say that Galton invented the ‘meritocracy’ or the idea that talent is hereditary. Hereditarian ideas were popular throughout the 18th and early 19th century, partly through the popularity of breeding animals. And the idea of identifying the fittest through exams goes back to the centuries-old Chinese civil service (which the British civil service finally imitated in the 1850s).

What Galton did do is introduce the idea that scientists could guide this hereditary process for humanity, much like breeders did for cattle or dogs. Eugenicists armed with tests and questionnaires were the priests of his new religion. And their power could be terrible. They could give you a grade, stamp you with a letter, and decide your entire destiny.

In the years after Galton’s death, eugenics was taken up by many — perhaps most — British intellectuals and politicians. Edwardian society became panicked that the unfit were outbreeding the fit, and the English national ‘stock’ was degenerating. Thinkers like George Bernard Shaw and politicians like William Churchill argued the mentally unfit should be confined, perhaps sterilized, or even (in Shaw’s off-hand suggestion) sent to the gas chamber.

This moral panic led to the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913, which allowed for the confinement of those deemed mentally unfit, sometimes for decades. It was only replaced by the Mental Health Act in 1959. Sterilization of those deemed unfit was never legalized in the UK, despite the efforts of campaigners like Sir Julian Huxley.

Meanwhile the gospel of eugenics spread around the world, and proved particularly popular in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, and in Nazi Germany. The Nazis’ murder of anyone deemed mentally, physically or racially defective made eugenics a taboo word, loaded with associations with white supremacy and fascism. And it’s true that Galton also categorized the races into a hierarchy — in an 1873 letter to the Times he argued Africa should be given to the ‘industrious, order-loving Chinese’.

But Galton was also, in his own mind, a humanitarian. Eugenics would do efficiently and humanely what nature did cruelly. You could let the unfit and unwanted be born and live miserable lives of illness and failure, or you could make sure they were never born in the first place. Which is kinder? Doctors today still recommend parents let severely disabled babies die out of mercy, and over 90% of foetuses with Down Syndrome are aborted. We are more eugenic today than we may like to admit.

It’s also the case that the history of eugenics is more complicated than the simple formula: ‘eugenics = fascist white supremacy’. As we’ll see, just as there are many varieties of Darwinism, so too there are many varieties of eugenics — feminist eugenics, African-American eugenics, trans-racial eugenics, socialist eugenics, techno-eugenics, and so on.

There is even ‘queer eugenics’ — yes, there were figures like Gerald Heard, a eugenicist mystic who argued that homosexuals were the avant garde superbeings of evolution. At a museum in LA this week, I saw a banner: ‘The future is female, black and trans’. The idea of the evolutionary supremacy of a type is still with us — it’s just white male supremacy that is severely out of fashion!

This brings us to the idea of ‘spiritual eugenics’.

Now, some contemporaries of Galton’s argued that an interest in mysticism or spirituality, or a tendency to altered states of consciousness, was evidence of your mental unfitness and perhaps classified you for the mad-house. That was the opinion of Henry Maudsley, the British psychiatrist and author of Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings (1887). It was also the view of Jean-Martin Charcot, founder of Europe’s first neurology clinic in the 1880s, who argued that religious ecstasy was a symptom of a brain pathology called ‘hysteria’.

Max Nordau, author of the influential 1893 book Degeneration, suggested a tendency to mysticism was evidence of congenital instability. He wrote: ‘Mystics are enemies to society of the direst kind. Society must unconditionally defend itself against them…[Civilized society] must mercilessly crush under his thumb the anti-social vermin.’

As a defence against this sort of thinking, leading mystical and spiritual thinkers adapted and remixed evolutionary and eugenicist ideas into ‘spiritual eugenics’. The person who was responsible for the injection of eugenic ideas into alternative spirituality was Friedrich Nietzsche, whose hymn to the superbeing, Thus Spake Zarathustra¸ was published in 1883, the same year Galton coined the word ‘eugenics’. We’ll examine Nietzsche’s ideas and influence in the next chapter.