Second Sight

It would be wrong to saddle Charles Darwin with responsibility for the eugenics movement, which was to blacken the 20th century leading up to its culmination at the Nuremberg Trials. Nevertheless, the concept of natural selection provided an intellectual underpinning which the godless commandeered to justify the movement. The idea that society would benefit by the eradication of the inferior and the imbecile had already been put into the air by Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), who held that the population must eventually outstrip resources. Even Darwin predicted that the civilised races would eventually eradicate the savage. This was soon to be fulfilled through the death of the last Tasmanian aboriginal in 1876.

Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”, although Darwin was to use it in his 1869 edition. The fittest did not mean the strongest but fittest for the prevailing conditions. And Spencer was anxious for action, calling for the theory to be turned into a political manifesto. Francis Galton, half-cousin to Darwin, and a brilliant scientist, was first to use the word “eugenic” following his detailed studies into the characteristics of inherited intelligence. He was to observe in his book, Heredity Genius (1869), the inferiority of the “lower races” compared with the European. Noting that the working classes had large families, he advocated a higher level of breeding among the intelligent.

While a casual and cruel attitude to-wards the “lower races” was endemic in British imperialism it was not until the turn of the 20th century that eugenics came to be considered a respectable and practical issue. Winston Churchill was strongly in favour, regarding the “multiplication of the feeble minded” as “a terrible danger to the human race”. He saw eugenics as a crusade for the future of civilisation. He was not alone: luminaries such as William Beveridge, H G Wells and G B Shaw were with him. Fortunately Parliament was not, and the call for the sterilisation of the “inferior” was rejected. Much of the rhetoric, presented as the rights of women and the remedy for illegal abortion, which resulted in the 1967 Abortion Act, found its origin in the eugenics movement.

The United States took up the banner with a will, and scientist Charles Davenport wrote his influential Heredity in Relation to Eugenics in 1911. He applied his expertise in animal biometrics to humans, studied racial characteristics in great detail, and, on the basis of statistics recorded by the Eugenic Records Office – which he had founded – became an ardent supporter of the movement. Its promotion was widespread and the Supreme Court’s favourable ruling in 1927 (Buck vs Bell) declared forcible sterilisation constitutional. Between 1907 and 1970 over 60,000 people in America had been victims. The last such sterilisation was reported from Oregon in 1981. Davenport contributed to German periodicals and institutions well into the Nazi era.

But the Germans hardly needed encouragement. Eugenics had been scientifically respectable since Fischer, Bauer and Lenz first published Foundations of Human Hereditary Teaching and Racial Hygiene in 1921. As Rector of Berlin University Eugen Fischer proclaimed in 1935 that “What Darwin was not able to do genetics has achieved. It has destroyed the theory of the equality of man.” By 1942 the German high command had decided on the Final Solution: that all Jews must be exterminated. Even to omit pockets of racial inferiority carried the danger of future revival. Of course many others who were ruled as inferior by Nazi standards went the same way.

Eugenics has become a dirty word, but the spirit lives on. The right to abort a disabled baby up to the time of birth is eugenics writ large. The procedure of permitting multiple embryos, so that only those without apparent defect will be permitted to survive, continues. It was not until 1976 that Sweden abolished laws promoting the sterilisation of women for openly eugenic reasons. I suspect that approval of eugenics remains deep within our society. It may not use the term, but eugenics by any other name will smell as foul.

Fundamentalist science leads logically from the survival of the fittest to the ultimate extermination of those who do not qualify. If man is no more than a highly evolved animal, with no special characteristics beyond an extended evolution of brain capacity, there is no reason, at least in principle, to hold back. Would not the world be a better place if we rid it of the mentally inferior, the severely disabled, the aged and incompetent and the underclass?

Julian Huxley, in his Galton Lecture of 1962, certainly agreed. Darwinian theory led him directly to advocating compulsory sterilisation for the underclass which, he claimed, had low IQ, little willpower and other genetic abnormalities – combined with an inveterate tendency to over-breed. 

Why do we continue to support and preserve Aids victims in sub-Saharan Africa when to leave them to die would eventually eradicate the disease? Every action which enables some population to survive is a fist in the face of Nature. We became homo sapiens only through the survival of the fittest; surely we should not use our ingenuity to defeat the very principle which brought us into existence.

Before we pat ourselves on the back for rejecting these views we must be honest enough to ask ourselves whether we retain any traces of eugenic thinking. And we must be prepared to remember that there was a time when we believed that the persecution of the unfit – those who rejected Catholic Christianity – was virtuous. There is blood on our hands too, and some of it is Jewish.

Do you think that eugenics inevitably arise from Darwinism? Is it fair to judge Darwinism by its abuse? Do we not all have a duty to improve human stock? There is good scientific evidence that, albeit at an unconscious level, we tend to pick partners, either through physical features or the recognition of different but complementary immune systems, in order to have healthy children. So eugenics are natural. Tell us what you think.

The following leading article from the issue of 29 May 2009 is reproduced by permission of The Catholic Herald. It is the voice of the newspaper and thus anonymous

The official executive summary of the Irish Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse is literally sickening. No one without a heart of tungsten can read this sorry account of generations of child abuse, sexual predation, near starvation and cruel and arbitrary physical punishment and feel no shame.

We are all tainted: every good Catholic, every good priest, every good bishop, every good pope is sullied by what was done or tolerated by the Catholic Church. We are the universal Church and the sin of one is the sin of all. We are ashamed of the Crusades, we are ashamed of the Inquisition – yet for both of these there was at least a kind of mistaken rationale within the context of the time. There is no rationale whatsoever for wanton, institutionalised and sustained cruelty to the young and poor. 

How was it possible for the main culprits – the Christian Brothers and the Sisters of Mercy – whose lives were sworn to the Gospel, to act over generations in a way that is about as far from the spirit of the Gospel as it is possible to get? How could the heads of these orders and the Church authorities not only overlook but positively collude with these scandalous activities by protecting them through a conspiracy of silence? Both the orders are headquartered in Rome, and it seems certain that the situation was known to the Vatican, and even to previous popes. It has happened before. The widespread sexual abuse of African nuns by Catholic priests, about which several reports were made to the Vatican throughout the 1990s, was only dragged into the open by the National Catholic Reporter in 2001.

We are not talking about an aberration by a handful of wicked people acting in defiance of the Church. Sadly, we are talking about a deep cleft in the ranks of the Church itself. 

The report exposes a culture which hides behind a clericalism which is prepared to protect vicious behaviour at the expense of defenceless innocents, many of whom carry their scars throughout life.

We have heard much recently about dishonourable financial activities by Members of Parliament. But even the most flagrant have been mere peccadilloes compared to the behaviour of those involved directly with this scandal, or indirectly by concealment. The call from Parliament has been for a root and branch reform of corruption. We are entitled to call for a root and branch reform of a corrupt clericalism which can stamp on the Gospel, protected by silence and the misplaced loyalty of Church members.

Quentin writes: This leader is pretty strong stuff, but, in my view, is fully justified by this shameful affair. You will find the full, official Executive Summary here. You may well want to contribute additional points, and of course you are at liberty to disagree with any part, or indeed all, of the CH’s view.

We are having an interesting exploration into the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib. So we might take this a stage further by looking at the Flood. This story is clearly one of great import, and has certainly captured imaginations throughout the ages. Indeed its narrative features were common in the Babylonian world, where at least ten different versions existed. And it appears in other cultures too. Of course there were local floods – which hardly match up, but perhaps the writer or writers used a folk memory of a particularly extensive catastrophe like the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. But there is no sign as yet in the archaeological record of a flood equating to the biblical description. 

The story, as it stands in Genesis, has some interesting features. We are told of an anthropomorphic God who appears to have changed his mind through his experience of sin in the world. God repents. Not, we would think, characteristic of the omniscient nature of God. Then, by our unenlightened standards, he simply proclaims genocide. Wicked though the world might have been, it must have contained at least innocent children, even if every one of the adults (except Noah) deserved a death sentence.

The physical features also raise questions. John Paulos, the distinguished American mathematician, taking account of the time period (40 days and nights) and the height of the mountains, calculates that the rain must have fallen at the rate of at least 15 feet an hour – enough to sink an aircraft carrier, let alone the ark. 

There is also the question of space. Noah was commanded to embark all the animals, the birds and crawling things. The fish seem to have got off lightly. We don’t know how many species existed at the time, and whether they were more and fewer than today. 15,000 new species were first discovered in 2008. So I think we can assume a large number, perhaps  running into the millions. And of course, double that number to provide male and female. Provisions for feeding them had to be carried too. Is this implausible?

I wonder, too, about the special sign of the rainbow. Since this is a spectrum of light caused by the interaction of the sun with moist atmosphere it presumably occurred as a phenomenon long before the Flood.

 Alternatively, we might suppose that, under the inspiration of the Spirit, the writers took a common folk account, whose literal truth or otherwise is not of consequence, and wove it into the history of salvation. Sin does bring death into the world, but God has promised that he will save the world. He will indeed provide an ark of salvation through his death (a taking-on of sin) – and we would see that ark as the Church. The animals are properly there because it is the whole of creation, not just man, which is transformed at the last day. In Romans 8, Paul speaks of all creation “groaning” for salvation. It is a marvellous passage to revisit. We do not know how this will be, but we do know that somehow the whole of nature is involved in redemption, and that, in our care for nature – akin to Noah’s care – we are contributing to this.

On May 7 1959 C P Snow delivered his Rede Lecture on “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”. His theme that there was an ever-widening gap between science and the humanities has influenced me ever since. He recounted how he had asked cultural luminaries, who were only too ready to leap on any intellectual mistake by a scientist, to define the second law of thermodynamics - and received no answer. I reflected, with shame, that the question would have foxed me too. So I started to read science - which is why you have a Science and Faith column in this newspaper today.

Snow, both a scientist and a novelist, deplored the contempt in which intellectuals held science to be no more than a kind of advanced artisanship while they revered an old culture, nowadays often attributed to “Dead White European Males” which was, in his view, already in decay and increasingly irrelevant. The future of civilisation, he claimed, depended on the explosion of science which alone could maintain it and spread its benefits of prosperity and the good life to the developing world.

Civitas, the Institute for the Study of Civil Society, has just published an excellent book on the controversy Snow triggered, and the 50-year aftermath. Edited by Robert Whelan, who writes a fine opening essay, it is called From Two Cultures to No Culture - which indicates its drift.

Although science was only recognised as a discipline with its own name in the 1830s, it goes back at least as far as Thales (seventh century BC). Many would date the beginnings of the modern scientific method to Francis Bacon at the turn of the 17th century. In essence it starts with a hypothesis about cause and effect in the material world from which predictions can be made. These predictions can then be tested with empirical evidence, which either confirm or refute the hypothesis.

Science is a progressive discipline. Despite errors and revisions it accretes knowledge, with practical certainty. It builds on what it has established at an accelerating rate. But philosophy does not. A modern philosophy may deal with different subjects from a different aspect, but its raw material was available to Plato. And, prescinding from Revelation, neither does religion. Who would claim to know more about the nature of God than, say, St Paul? Such questions are limited to the possibility of understanding more deeply what has been known from the beginning.

Both cultures are directed at truth, although their fields of inquiry are different. They can be, and often are, at loggerheads. But the disputes resolve themselves with better understanding. We all find it difficult to live meanwhile with ambiguity, yet the ability to do so is a sign of wisdom and maturity. Dismantling the barriers makes them complementary in many ways. Keats complained that Newton had “destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism”. But he was wrong. At a human level we can still rejoice at the wonder of a rainbow and, at another, rejoice in our understanding of how it comes about.

Science offers service to religion, by helping us to distinguish between the direct action of God in, for instance, the evolution of man, and the spiritual aspects - of which we are certain but which are not susceptible to scientific analysis. It eradicates the dangerous, and potentially scandalous, theory of the “God of the gaps” by making us face up to the utter otherness of God. We should be in awe of God’s creation ex nihilo, and in awe at what the scientists tell us of the architecture and the origins of man.

But when science is taken as a panacea it becomes dangerous. Snow believed that the dissemination and heavy funding of science and technology in underdeveloped countries would close the gap between rich and poor. But this has proved to be dramatically wrong. His failure, not confined to him, to understand through history and literature the factors of human nature which have so often choked rational advance, blinded him to the difficulties.

 It is man’s inclination to sin which has - through war, tribalism, aggrandisement and corruption - prevented the benefits of science from reaching those who need it most. It can teach all of us, scientists included, that bread alone is not enough, but every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Science, however powerful in itself, cannot succeed in improving the human lot without the conversion which leads man to the love of God - directly, or through love of neighbour.

Civitas, though not dealing with the specifically religious aspects, is not optimistic. It sees the trend in education as running against the value of the academic mastery of knowledge in both the sciences and the arts. The science curriculum is elided into a subject of general interest, and students can complete their education with minimal knowledge of history and without the opportunity to study a classic book or play at the depth at which its real treasures can be found. The emphasis is on education for change, but we cannot understand change unless we know how we got there first.

While this superficial educational approach affects the next generation, I continue to be concerned at the confidence of opinions expressed to me by so many of the older generations. Often they appear to be based on smatterings of truth which mislead because they are not based within a sound context. Did you know that a third of senior science teachers in America teach Creationism, and a quarter believe that it can be proved scientifically? 

Fortunately, this kind of thing is relatively rare on Secondsightblog, but I look forward to reading your comments. It may be that you think that the compass has shifted and that our society is focussed unhealthily on science at the expense of the humanities. Or you may think that our culture is stronger and more coherent than it was 50 years ago. Perhaps our capacity for instant communication, or the ability to find knowledge on the internet has relieved us from time-consuming study. Is this a mixed blessing?

“And the Lord God cast a deep slumber on the human, and he slept, and He took one of his ribs and closed over the flesh where it had been, and the Lord God took the rib he had taken from the human into a woman…” (Genesis 2, translated by Robert Alter directly from the Hebrew)

I am disinclined to write further about the literal interpretation of Genesis in the newspaper; it only seems to draw letters from readers who are either unfamiliar with the evidence or determined to reject it on ideological grounds. So I quote this passage here because it is interesting to speculate with you on the truth which inspired the narrative.

Since sexual evolution has existed for many millions of years, and is of course directly evident in our hominid forebears, it would seem strange indeed for God to have decided to create the female of home sapiens in such a remarkable way. Presumably Eve would have been a near-clone of Adam (a near-clone because she would have had a full set of x chromosomes rather than the denatured y chromosome left in Adam). I can see some real genetic problems here, and these would presumably have caused further difficulties in their immediate descendants.

We are familiar with the King James’ translation “help meet for him”, as the reason for creating Eve, but Alter chooses “sustainer.” The Hebrew is ‘ezer kenegdo. ‘ezer means “active intervention” and kenegdo may best be translated as “counterpart”. Aquinas thought that the conception of woman was a happy accident of God’s providence, but an accident nevertheless. What is the Hebrew for Vive la différence?

So the original does not seem to have any overtones of male superiority, and Genesis1 says quite simply “male and female” he created them. Perhaps this equality is all the more significant because Scripture was written, and so reflects, patriarchal times. Should we place any significance on the fact that the male is mentioned first? Does the way in which Jesus treated men and women have a bearing on our understanding?

It leaves me in a quandary. When I was married, over 50 years ago, my wife promised to obey me. Since this promise no longer has to be made she takes the view that her undertaking has been nullified. Of course I disagree. Not that the question has any practical relevance. We discovered who was boss years ago.

(A note. This piece was temporarily published before I spotted a typo at the top. I had written “one of his fibs”. I was tempted to leave it for someone to spot…)