UTOPIA OF USURERS - VI SCIENCE AND THE EUGENISTS

Utopia of Userers, et al

by Gilbert K. Chesterton

UTOPIA OF USURERS - VI SCIENCE AND THE EUGENISTS, UTOPIA OF USERERS, ET AL by Gilbert K. Chesterton
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The key fact in the new development of plutocracy is that it will use its
own blunder as an excuse for further crimes. Everywhere the very
completeness of the impoverishment will be made a reason for the
enslavement; though the men who impoverished were the same who enslaved.
It is as if a highwayman not only took away a gentleman's horse and all
his money, but then handed him over to the police for tramping without
visible means of subsistence. And the most monstrous feature in this
enormous meanness may be noted in the plutocratic appeal to science, or,
rather, to the pseudo-science that they call Eugenics.

The Eugenists get the ear of the humane but rather hazy cliques by saying
that the present "conditions" under which people work and breed are bad
for the race; but the modern mind will not generally stretch beyond one
step of reasoning, and the consequence which appears to follow on the
consideration of these "conditions" is by no means what would originally
have been expected. If somebody says: "A rickety cradle may mean a
rickety baby," the natural deduction, one would think, would be to give
the people a good cradle, or give them money enough to buy one. But that
means higher wages and greater equalisation of wealth; and the plutocratic
scientist, with a slightly troubled expression, turns his eyes and
pince-nez in another direction. Reduced to brutal terms of truth, his
difficulty is this and simply this: More food, leisure, and money for the
workman would mean a better workman, better even from the point of view of
anyone for whom he worked. But more food, leisure, and money would also
mean a more independent workman. A house with a decent fire and a full
pantry would be a better house to make a chair or mend a clock in, even
from the customer's point of view, than a hovel with a leaky roof and a
cold hearth. But a house with a decent fire and a full pantry would also
be a better house in which to refuse to make a chair or mend a clock--a
much better house to do nothing in--and doing nothing is sometimes one of
the highest of the duties of man. All but the hard-hearted must be torn
with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the
poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to
do it. As he stood gazing at the leaky roof and the rickety cradle in a
pensive manner, there one day came into his mind a new and curious
idea--one of the most strange, simple, and horrible ideas that have ever
risen from the deep pit of original sin.

The roof could not be mended, or, at least, it could not be mended much,
without upsetting the capitalist balance, or, rather, disproportion in
society; for a man with a roof is a man with a house, and to that extent
his house is his castle. The cradle could not be made to rock easier, or,
at least, not much easier, without strengthening the hands of the poor
household, for the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world--to that
extent. But it occurred to the capitalist that there was one sort of
furniture in the house that could be altered. The husband and wife could
be altered. Birth costs nothing, except in pain and valour and such
old-fashioned things; and the merchant need pay no more for mating a
strong miner to a healthy fishwife than he pays when the miner mates
himself with a less robust female whom he has the sentimentality to prefer.
Thus it might be possible, by keeping on certain broad lines of
heredity, to have some physical improvement without any moral, political,
or social improvement. It might be possible to keep a supply of strong
and healthy slaves without coddling them with decent conditions. As the
mill-owners use the wind and the water to drive their mills, they would
use this natural force as something even cheaper; and turn their wheels by
diverting from its channel the blood of a man in his youth. That is what
Eugenics means; and that is all that it means.

Of the moral state of those who think of such things it does not become us
to speak. The practical question is rather the intellectual one: of
whether their calculations are well founded, and whether the men of
science can or will guarantee them any such physical certainties.
Fortunately, it becomes clearer every day that they are, scientifically
speaking, building on the shifting sand. The theory of breeding slaves
breaks down through what a democrat calls the equality of men, but which
even an oligarchist will find himself forced to call the similarity of men.
That is, that though it is not true that all men are normal, it is
overwhelmingly certain that most men are normal. All the common Eugenic
arguments are drawn from extreme cases, which, even if human honour and
laughter allowed of their being eliminated, would not by their elimination
greatly affect the mass. For the rest, there remains the enormous
weakness in Eugenics, that if ordinary men's judgment or liberty is to be
discounted in relation to heredity, the judgment of the judges must be
discounted in relation to their heredity. The Eugenic professor may or
may not succeed in choosing a baby's parents; it is quite certain that he
cannot succeed in choosing his own parents. All his thoughts, including
his Eugenic thoughts, are, by the very principle of those thoughts,
flowing from a doubtful or tainted source. In short, we should need a
perfectly Wise Man to do the thing at all. And if he were a Wise Man he
would not do it.