In Our Time - Social Darwinism

Episode Date: February 20, 2014

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Social Darwinism. After the publication of Charles Darwin's masterpiece On the Origin of Species in 1859, some thinkers argued that Darwin's ideas about evolution could also be applied to human society. One thinker particularly associated with this movement was Darwin's near-contemporary Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest'. He argued that competition among humans was beneficial, because it ensured that only the healthiest and most intelligent individuals would succeed. Social Darwinism remained influential for several generations, although its association with eugenics and later adoption as an ideological position by Fascist regimes ensured its eventual downfall from intellectual respectability.With:Adam Kuper Centennial Professor of Anthropology at the LSE, University of LondonGregory Radick Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of LeedsCharlotte Sleigh Reader in the History of Science at the University of Kent.Producer: Thomas Morris.

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Hello, when Charles Darwin published his masterpiece on the origin of species by means of natural selection in 1859, he laid the foundations for a new era in scientific inquiry. His theory that organisms had involved into their current forms over millions of years revolutionized biology and is arguably one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of science. But the significance of Darwin's thoughts reached beyond the realm of biology. Philosophers, economists and political scientists applied the concepts of evolution and natural selection to their own fields. And in the second half of the 19th century,

this gave rise to a school of thought known today as social Darwinism, which attempted to understand society by seeing it as a struggle between competing individuals. Later, it also led to the signs of eugenics, which sought to control and improve the genetic makeup of the human population.

Social Darwinism remained influential until the 1930s, but since the mid-20th century, the term has largely been a pejority of one. Today, still tainted by its association with Nazis who used eugenics as ideological justification for the atrocities of the Holocaust. With me to discuss social Darwinism are Adam Cooper, centennial professor of anthropology at the LSE, University of London, Gregory Radick, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds, and Charlotte Slay, reader in the history of science at the University of Kent.

Adam Cooper, the term social Darwinism wasn't widely used until a little after Darwin's death. Could you explain what it describes? Well, it describes a theory which in fact predates Darwinism. It's the idea that there is a parallel, maybe even an identity, between the evolutionary processes in natural history and in social history. So the same laws apply in both. Of course, it depends to certain extent to which particular theory of evolution you take up, where you think evolution is more or less the same thing as proper.

progress or not. But the essential idea then is that you shouldn't interfere with the natural course of history. You can't change human nature. That's the basic slogan of what came to be called social Darwinism. Can you develop a bit more? So listeners, there are no doubt, about how it takes off from Darwinism and how it sort of takes it on as well. Well, it takes off more from Herbert Spencer, who influenced Darwin. We can talk about. We can talk about that. Well, let's talk about him now because it's part of this, you know, conversation, yeah. Well, Spencer, in many ways,

was the most influential philosopher in mid-19th century, England, became terribly influential all over the world, and Spencer believed very firmly that human societies were just like natural organisms, and they developed in exactly the same way.

His thoughts are coming out in the 1840s, 1850s, before the origin of the species. Yes, right. And he develops the idea of the struggle for survival. And Spencer's idea was that there was an inevitable progress from one stage of society to another always onwards and upwards and upwards, and that politicians in the state shouldn't interfere with these natural processes. There were two great stages.

There was the barbarian stage, which was a matter of war and bravery and men fighting. And then there was the more advanced industrial stage where the qualities that were important were being industrious and clever and so on. That was the stage that we were at. But he coined the word evolution and also the phrase later taken up, much later, by Darwin, the survival of the fittest. And he had it, there was a drive in him

that what was happening in society, the natural selection, the struggle and so on, really did apply to us. Absolutely, absolutely. And he felt that there was this hidden force operating, which was going to improve things, even though it involved all sorts of unpleasantnesses like war and famine and so on and so forth. But we shouldn't interfere with all that, because that was nature's way of forcing progress by survival of the fittest. And so if we didn't interfere,

things would get better and would improve. And here we have the first hint here, It's something which, the first hint here of something that we'll develop during the program, that if you're disabled, incapacitated, leave you alone because if you should fade away, and that's going to help everyone else. Well, Spencer's famous phrase, it is better that they should die, which, as you'll remember, is quoted by Scrooge. Right. Greg Ruddy, how far did Darwin himself take this idea on, Spencer's idea on,

How far did he see a similarity between the way the human species behaves and the rest of what he was discovering, the evolution from the great apes and so on? Well, there are a number of places in Darwin's writings, public and private, where he sounds classically social Darwinian in just the ways that Adam's been describing. For instance. Well, I think a particularly revealing example is in a letter that he writes in the autumn of 1859, in the run-up to the publication on the origin of species, to his great friend and mentor, the geologist Sir Charles Lyle.

Lyle had read the book in proofs over the summer, and they were corresponding about it, and Darwin was desperate to convert, or as Lyle sometimes joked, pervert Lyle, to the truth of the theory of natural selection. One of the points that Lyle hesitated over was whether natural selection just by itself, without a kind of divine superintendence,

was sufficiently powerful to advance intelligence in the history of life from the primitive state in which we find it in something like a fish, to the glorious state it's in a Lyle or a Darwin. And so that was his question to Darwin. Is natural selection powerful enough? And Darwin answered, yes, it is. And if you want to persuade yourself of this,

all you need to do is look around, because natural selection is operating in exactly this way right now among people. Among people, we have a variation in intelligence. At least some of that variation seems to be inherited. And there is a struggle for existence in which to be more intelligent is an advantage. And he says to Lyle, if you doubt that, all you need to do is to look at what's happening now, as Darwin says, with the races of men, the less intellectual being exterminated by the more intellectual. And that's his language. I think that's especially revealing, first of all,

because it shows how easily Darwin slipped across what we sometimes think of as a kind of sturdy boundary between the biological and the social. But secondly, how in so we can pause that, because that's a big thing to say, isn't it, in terms of this conversation? Because there was a lot a backpedal he went on and a lot of of his apologists said no he wasn't really like that he said that but he didn't really mean that he mentioned it but that is there for people who want to take it up

and develop it as it were from the tree of Darwinism they want their stem of social Darwinism and further as we'll come to eugenic and they've got somewhere to go some place to go to get their evidence it's there Darwin didn't need Spencer to

come to these views as has sometimes been said had Darwin been confronted with the phrase social Darwinism, the bit that would have surprised him was the social. Obviously, to someone like him, Darwinism would have social implications. And furthermore, in working those out for himself, and I think the Lyle letter shows this, he found it absolutely straightforward to represent the inequalities in his own day, inequalities in the races, but also between individuals, between social classes, between the sexes, as natural and indeed as uniquely intelligible in the light of his theory. Did you see them as unchangeable?

No, he didn't see them as unchangeable. He accepted as inevitable the extinction of the lower races as he sought. By which he meant? By the higher races, by the Europeans, in any contest between the European. the hot words at the moment, though. They sure are. You've got to spell out what he meant. Did he mean the Patagonians by the bridge? Well, when he wrote to Lyle...

Because we're talking about a time of colonialisation in a big way, so this is a hot potato, isn't it? When he wrote to Lyle in 1859, he very probably had in mind Tasmania and what was happening there. But he and Wallace... So he thought this was inevitable? Yes. Yeah. Charlotte Slay, the historical context of all this is important. I've just mentioned a little of it.

can we get it all? We've got industrialisation, which Adam mentioned, we're mentioned in a different context, and we've got the colonies growing, colonialisation, Britain trying to come to grips with an empire and what to do with it and how to... These two big things, and urban poverty is coming in. Now, these all fed in to Darwinism and to social Darwinism. Can you tell us how that happened? Yeah, by the late 19th century,

the Victorians were beginning to worry that their greatest ideal, progress was perhaps running out of steam, a sense that they were maybe overtopping the hill in a number of senses. You alluded to industrialisation and that had obviously caused a big change in the population patterns and where people were living, urbanisation. And there was a recognition that there was a great deal of poverty that came in the wake of this urbanisation. So there were a number of prominent reformers, journalists, researchers who were looking into urban poverty in the late 19th century and some of them, to their surprise, discovering quite how bad it was. And this fed into a general, kind of nervous excitement about what this poverty and this

dirty milieu might create. So by the late 19th century, you see huge excitement is not too strong a word over Jack the Ripper and Jack the Ripper as a sort of a manifestation of this spirit of urban, the urban poor, the Sherlock Holmes stories of course from the same period. So there was an anxiety that these people were outbreeding the nice, the middle class, the good people. And it's a strange thoughts if you pursue it because if you pursue it, you begin to see some of the contradictions at the heart of social Darwinism. because essentially...

Can I before you go in for a second? Can you just bring in the colonies as well? Yes, of course. The empire. The empire were going, and as Greg mentioned, Tasmania, and actually there was genocide going on at this time. That's right, yes. Which was part of the conscious or unconscious of the people

who are doing the thinking back in Britain. That's right, yes, colonial issues, issues of empire, very much part of the background to this discussion and anxiety about the inhumanity. of those operations from some commentators, of course. And then on the other side, anxiety when they didn't go so well. So the first war, for example, went very badly for the British. And indeed, that fed back into the issue of urban poverty,

because when men went forward for recruitment to that, they were found to be in such poor physical condition that they couldn't be admitted to the army. So again, that triggered the question about what was happening domestically. So I did interrupt you. I'm officer. I just wanted to bring the whole thing in. Yeah.

This is feeding into the way people are talking about a beginning to develop what became social Darwin. That's right, yes. Would you say they were coarsening Darwin's original template? I think that there were a whole diversity of ways of understanding what Darwin might mean for society. So I alluded earlier on to this apparent contradiction.

So what these people were saying about the urban poor and their rates of reproduction. They were saying that they, those are going to outbreed the fit. Well, hold on a minute. If biologically those people are succeeding, then they are the fit. And in a sense, this is a sort of a crisis

of the Victorian identity. It goes back to what Greg said about the intellectual races will exterminate the non-intellectual. Here, there's a fear that it's happening the other way around. So which is biologically fitter? Because we're looking after the weak and disabled so well they're going to out punch them. No, well no, not even

that we're looking after them. They just keep breeding. These urban fore they keep breeding. Well, biologically, that would, you would think, logically make them the more fit. So which is it that's biologically fit? Brains or brawn? So that's a question that's thrown up for the Victorians. And so this began to lead to fairly,

what we would look back on, as we do look back on now, as ruthless opinions about how you controlled society. So in a sense, it's a moving away from Darwin who said you didn't control anything. It just got on with being itself to taking those ideas and turning into ideas of control. Yes, I think that grew very slowly. Another infamous quotation is by Havelock Ellis,

the pioneering researcher into sexuality, who said that it's an act of charity to give some money to a beggar on the street, but it's an even greater act of charity to prevent him being born in the first place. And I think, as well as being very unpleasant, it's an interesting statement because it's unclear whether it's meant

as a gesture of individual humanity or whether it's a social control. Nations, European nations, gradually, very gradually, going into the 20th century, developed means of the kind of data gathering that is the necessary precursor to a genuinely social control

at a social level. Before we move on, taking up your word charity, Charlotte, one of the things that Darwin said which does distinguish him from all of that is that he said he believed in charity, he practised charity, he believed in her, because he'd brought out the noblest impulses

in mankind and womankind, so he was in that sense for it. Yes, he was, but he also very much encouraged the villagers in Down where he lived to form a mutual saving society as well. So there was an element of self-help about it too. Can we then talk

as Adam, we've got Spencer in the 50s who was very influential in this country and particularly in the United States. Particularly in China. And particularly in China. I didn't know that. Can we leave China for a second? The United States where it socketed right

into big business and seemed to be the perfect vindication and theory and intellectualization of doing big business the way big business being done in the States and there are. And then we have Darwin coming up with the Ferora that he eventually caused, aren't it, were we really from the Great Apes and so on? Where

did these ideas go from then? It comes out in 1859, we've got Spencer behind it, the 1860s and 70s, what's the big argument about when Wallace and Huxley downed in? Well, can I go back and say where the ideas came from originally, which was Malthus?

Yeah, sorry, I missed Malthus, you're right, yes. Because a lot of this comes from Malthus. Malthus is a reclusive clergyman living with his father in the time of the French Revolution. His father was a friend of Rousseau's

very much progressive sort of character, very optimistic. But Malthus became very pessimistic because he said there was the iron rule of nature that population art stripped resources. That was in 1798. That was right. And this was essay on population.

This was going to happen for human beings just as it happened to plants and animals. and so on. And so the only way to stop it were the four horsemen of the apocalypse would ride in and war and famine and disease and so on would wipe out the excess. So, very, very stark.

And in fact, it's Malthus who also introduces the idea that it's bad to help the poor. So he's against the poor law. And he's a monk. Rather unchristian, rather unchristian. He's against the poor law because he says it's counterproductive. because if you help the poor, they'll just breed more, you see.

So encourage them to marry early and have more children. So don't do that. He has this wonderful image of a picnic. We're all sitting around at picnic, and some starving people come along, and our charitable instinct is to give them food. But no, we must restrain ourselves. For the higher charitable view, that it's better that they starve. So this idea, Malthus's idea, is crucial for Spence.

It's crucial for Darwin. Darwin says he really gets the idea of natural selection through reading Malthus. So these ideas feed in very earlier. Nietzsche has this wonderful comment that Darwinism in England has a hanging over it the stench of poor people suffering. So that's very much part of... What did you actually mean by that?

It stopped it being as sharp as it should be. No, Nietzsche was really in favour of helping the poor. He didn't like this particular idea of the Darwin. So it then goes forward. It was Huxley who really tells Darwin that he should read Spencer. And Darwin reads Spencer, and he's not terrifically impressed because it's all too vague and deductive and theoretical and so on. But Huxley persuades him to use this phrase,

the struggle for survival instead of natural selection. So he begins to introduce it. Well, it doesn't work as well. He's worried about the metaphorical implications, so on. But he buys into it. Huxley is more impressed by Spencer because Huxley is more a man of ideas and he likes arguing.

He goes to the Athenaeim a lot and has these arguments with Spencer. There's a wonderful scene in which Spencer's talking to a group of people and he says, you know, once I thought I'd be a writer, I wrote a tragedy. And Haxley said, I know what it's about.

It's about a deduction killed by a nasty fact. Can we come back, Greg Raddy, to something I just whipped over about the influence of Spencer's ideas and the ideas of social Darwinism in America on the way, basically on business and commerce? Well, Spencer had an enormous readership in the United States

and it was very diverse. It included everyone from backwards, autodidacts, all the way up to university presidents. There were critics as well. William James was famously sniffy about Spencer. But the critics all felt that they had confront Spencer, especially the synthetic philosophy, which he began publishing from 1860 onwards. Among the admirers there were some of the great industrial robber barons of the era.

Can you encapsulate what they were admiring? Well, John D. Rockefeller was one of them. I should say people admire different things about it, but the great robber barons did seem to admire the way that capitalism came out looking natural and for the good. So Rockefeller gave a Sunday school sermon in which he said that the growth of a large business is an instance of the survival of the fittest and we ought not to lament as evil

the wreckage that accrues around the business because this law is a law of nature and the law of God. Now the question comes... So they've got nature and God and business. Nature God business, the American way all lined up together, baseball hovering. And the question arises, is what difference did this make?

It's tempting to put together pronouncements like Rockefellers with the perception of the U.S. at this moment as this kind of capitalist imperialist free-for-all. And to suppose that thanks to Spencer's influence, America around 1900 was a kind of showcase for social Darwinism. And some people at the time saw it like that. The Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, in writing his dissent in a Supreme Court case

where the Supreme Court threw out a law regulating the hours for working men. Holm said in his dissent that the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which was used to throw out this law, does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's social statics, the book in which Spencer first set out this libertarian philosophy. So that was seen at the time. That said nowadays historians tend to be skeptical about whether you really can connect the dots

between Spencer's writing, the people who read him, and the things happening politically in the, United States at that moment. They also point out that the phrase social Darwinism, first gains currency at this moment, but exclusively among critics of the position, no one who actually backs this capitalist conquest view describes themselves as a social Darwinian. The idea, Charlotte Slay, were not just among anthropologists and philosophers, but as

referred businessmen, but also novelists and intellectuals were taking it up. Can you bring that into the argument? H.G. Wells was probably the writer who most seriously grappled with the notions of evolution as they pertained to human beings, human societies. There had been others who were interested in fate, heredity, Hardy's the obvious example there, but to really take it on on that kind of social level, to write a drama or a plot that has a real social element, that's probably Wells. And the most famous and obvious text in which he did that was the time machine, whereas, you remember, the time traveller goes into the future, and he finds illustrated rather horribly some of the things that Spencer had warned about either implicitly or directly. In particular, one of the things that Spencer warned about was that if there was no struggle, then there could be

no progress. You need to be in a situation where you need to struggle over difficult circumstances in order to sort of bootstrap yourself up technologically. When the time traveller gets to the future, he finds that everything's lovely, everything's beautiful, no one has to struggle anymore. Indeed, he stumbles across a science museum where all these great technologies are covered in dust. It's a metaphor. And he finds that the human species has diverged into two species. The upper classes have become the Eloy, who are these incredibly effete, fairy-like creatures. Actually, that's a moment to pause on in relation to our discussion,

because we've talked about social Darwinism and the threat of the poor and the underclass, but social Darwinism was very much a middle-class philosophy, and the upper classes came in for it as well, came in for discussion, came in for criticism, that they were no longer struggling, that they were too imbred, that they lost their role. Right, they'd lost their role, exactly. So there's that element. But then the underclass, us have also developed into this horrible subterranean species, the moorlocks, who work the machines

that are necessary for the Eloy. And they're locked in this hideous compact of mutual parasitism, where the Morlocks enable the Eloy to subsist, but they eat them as well. So, but Wells is seeing society, his own society is projecting into the future to exaggerate, but to emphasize what his own society is now looking like, as he is. is it? He's very cagey about it, yes, whether it's a direct satire on how things are or just a sort of, I think it's just a working it through. Let's just think about this. It's a tool for thinking, I think. Can we take, Adam Cooper, can I come back to you? Can we take one specific area? It might seem very small. But there was a lot of talk about, look, horses get better by breeding, cows get better by breeding.

Why can't we? And so that brings us to marriage, or at least, sexual intercourse. Now, Darwin's view on that, we'll start with that and then the view of others. Yes, this was actually increasingly Darwin's obsessive interest in this whole programme, partly because he was worried about the prevalence of

first cousin marriage among the Darwin Wedgwoods and the sickness of some of the children and so on. But he said, look, animal breeders very careful about breeding the best, but human beings behave just like like wild animals. They just mate on the basis of completely ridiculous criteria. And so the consequence is that the race is being pulled down. The race isn't developing as it should. And his first cousin, Francis Galton, gets very excited by this and develops this and says,

well, we should have a policy for encouraging marriage between people who are, who are going to produce a new elite. And the reason that this is necessary is that the aristocracy has been ruined by the process of natural selection. The reason they've ruined is the aristocrats only choose wives who are beautiful and or rich and don't worry about their fecundity,

which is absolutely crucial. And they're also paralyzed by primogeniture so that is bound to, to be some complete duffer somewhere along the line or somebody who can't produce and so the aristocracy fades out so we have to produce a new kind of aristocracy which is fittest for the present

society and that is of course the natural geniuses the natural elite and we must give we must produce a marriage policy for them so he wanted a marriage policy for them Greg Vagic his cousin Francis

Galton took it further didn't he because he wanted two policies he wanted what Adam said. He wanted to encourage the marriage of what he saw, the clever people to the clever people, but also reduce if not tried to abolish the marriage of more or less all the other people to the very poor, disabled,

unable people. I think you're struggling for words here, aren't you? But try to stop them breeding at all. That's right. And he was quite influential, Francis Galton. This is the late 19th century. Very much so. And it's Galton who coins the word that we still use for this notion

of improving the human stock through selective breeding, which is eugenics. It's a word that he introduces in 1883, but he had by that time been advocating it since the mid-1860s. And he thought that there could be a great galaxy of genius if only we gave a 20th of the attention that we give to our horses and cattle to breeding ourselves. And he saw the two forms that you just outlined, which come to be called positive eugenics, which is encouraging the innately superior to breed with each other and to breed copiously, and negative eugenics, which is to discourage the rest, the inferior, from breeding at all, if possible. So he sets all of this out initially in two articles published in 1865 called

Hereditary Talent and Character. At that point, he was best known as an African explorer. and a bit of a meteorologist. But what turned him in this new direction was, first of all, he said, an interest in the mental peculiarities of the races that he'd encountered in Africa, wondering about what it is that they pass on from parents to offspring. But also the reading of his cousin's book, The Origin of Species, which he felt was kind of emancipatory intellectually. And he got excited both about natural selection,

but also what Darwin had to say in the book about artificial selection, what happens on the farm, the way that stock breeders selectively breed from their best. And so in these articles, he sets out, first of all, to document that greatness is inborn, that great men tend to cluster within families. Secondly, it's a call for the rest of us to begin systematically to improve the human stock through these selective efforts, through strategic marriages. And thirdly, he reflects on the urgency.

of something like this right now. Not least because civilization has an unfortunate tendency, he says, to diminish the vigor with which natural selection operates with hospitals, asylums, and morbidic tendencies are accumulating. Charlotte Slay, we're approaching a time at the end of the 1930th century,

and the women's movement is getting strongly in a way. Now, Darwin was quite clear that women were different from men, and I don't know whether they have. actually used the word inferior. I haven't got the stuff with me at the moment. But they were below that, can you talk about his view of women in the society that was taken from his work to be the great society that Greg's been talking about, i.e. breeding among the elite. In some ways, the more revolutionary of Darwin's, uh, over was the descent of man,

which introduced a second mechanism for evolution to occur. The first one, of course, natural selection, which we see in the origin of species. But in the descent of man, he introduces sexual selection, whereby, generally, in most species, the female selects the male according to the kind of beauty, you know, think about birds and birds of paradise and that kind of thing. And that was quite exciting, I think, for some women. And again, H.G. Wells is a good place to start thinking about this. He wrote a novel in 1909 called Anne Veronica, which is about a very young woman

who runs away from home. She's going to be married off to a solicitor or something like that that she doesn't want. So she runs away from home. And what do you do when you run away from home in the Edwardian period? You go to Imperial College and study biology. What else would you want to do with your time? And so she studies

biology and she learns about the body and it's pretty clear that she's reading the descent of man and that she's not only she's awakening to her own body and her own feelings, but she's understanding that these have a higher biological purpose. Well, as it happens, there's a very sexy lab demonstrator just on hand that she can fall in love with and run away with.

And so her feelings, her desires for personal liberation, including sexual liberation, are vindicated by eugenics. And it's a curious story because it very closely follows the real light of, story of Marie Stopes, who of course was a eugenicist as well as a well-known feminist. So I wonder enough this is feeding into women's rights, although in other areas it might be seen as a dangerous development. Well, that's right. There were other feminist writers who took completely the opposite stance on that.

Charlotte Haldane, who was the wife of the great biologist JBS Haldane, wrote a dystopia in which everything was William Morris and Great, except the women were living. limited to reproduction within it. We've talked about business in America and Rukkah, and how whether or not it influenced to the extent, and we've talked about women to certain extent. What about its influence on politics, Adam, Anika? And what about its influence on race,

which was coming in, which was always around, I'm goodness sake coming, what a stupid thing to say. What about its influence on ideas about race? Well Darwin is actually very ambiguous about race. So in the first edition of the Descent of Man, he says racial differences are adaptations to different climatic and local conditions, but they don't necessarily have any effect on intelligence.

He quotes the three Tierra del Fuegoans who are on the Beagle with him, and he says, He's only just as intelligent as anybody else or some Negroes in Brazil he meets and he says it's just as intelligent as people. But in the 1870s and 1880s, when the racial theories become more established in Europe,

Darwin swings more to increasingly, although this is always there partly in the background, he swings more to a racial theory of difference, higher races and lower races. Why did you do that? It's difficult to me. know why it happened, but it was very much in the air, and he joins the consensus. Although, I mean, he was still, for example, violently anti-slavery. So he's torn, as on many things, as many of us.

But Darwin is also torn, but he buys into racial theories later in his life much more than he did earlier. And of course, racial theory is the, you know, the sort of idiot's guide to biology for most people. It's a simple guide to why people are the way they are. And so the fact that Darwin gives it some respectability in the late 19th century is very important. And more than a little worrying. Charlotte's like, can you tell us how the ideas of eugenics reached a wider public, which they did and began to be taken as, this is the way forward, began to be allied with.

progress and betterment in a, you know. For all these different reasons, then, people were interested and excited to try and get the ideas of eugenics more widely adopted by individuals in their marriage choices and their childbearing choices, but also by the government in its social direction. In 1907, the Eugenics Education Society was founded and did what it said on the tin, it aimed to educate people about these principles and make sure that they, thought about them in their married lives. It was particularly successful. They also aimed to influence the government. They failed to have any sterilisation policies enacted. They wanted a

policy that would make it advantageous financially for wealthier families to have more children, but the Liberal Government of the day actually did the reverse of that and gave tax breaks to less wealthy families, as we would say now. Their only success, if you want to call such an unpleasant thing, a success, was to have a lot of people categorised and institutionalised as morally or mentally defective in some way. And this takes us to the big impact it had. It had impact all over the world.

Big impact in America, as you've said, Greg, but also big impact in Germany. It became particularly influential social Darwinism. We're already getting ideas of sterilisation coming in, before the First World War, and then it continues after, in some countries that we think will of now, up to the 1960s. So can you just describe how well it wedged into Germany in the 20s? Well, in Germany, eugenics was known by that name.

It was also known as racial hygiene. And the term racial there was initially kind of indeterminate between the German race and the human race. Along with that, the people attracted to eugenics initially were from all over the spectrum, which was true as well wherever eugenics took off. So there were people who were on the left and were eugenicists. There were people who were on the right, race supremacists. After the First World War and the chaos, the social chaos and the economic chaos and political chaos,

the supremacists gradually got the upper hand. Even so, by the point that Hitler got to power in 1933, German eugenicists looked on in envy at what Americans were able to do, because only in America, compared with Germany, was compulsory sterilization on the books in many nations. In many states. In a number of states. With the coming to power of Hitler in 1933,

the German eugenicists rapidly made up for lost time. They established a compulsory sterilization program, which vastly exceeded anything done anywhere else. They established a breeding program between, racially pure women and the SS, and things escalated from there through to euthanasia and genocide. Are we saying that this action

that the German took, as the Americans are taking with sterilization, and I think the Swedes did very Scandinavians did, and quite out for a long time, are we saying that this came out of the ideas that we've been talking about, Darwinism, social Darwinism, eugenics? Well, there's certainly a straight line, whether it's the only necessary development

or the only possible development, of course, is something to argue about, and I think Darwin would have been, frankly, horrified by these developments, although Galton would have been, I think, rather, you know, felt perhaps a bit rough, but, you know, on the whole right,

going in the right direction. But we go, we go, we've, the ideas have now gone straight into politics, haven't they? Yes. So we've talked about business, we've talked about literature, Charlotte and so about walls

and one or two others, but we're right in politics, the ideas have come into the middle of, in the first half of the 20th century, there they are. Yes. And they go into politics, as you've been saying, right to left, so right across the spectrum. And the idea, I mean, the basic shaping idea in which they all share

is that if we understand the rules of evolution, the laws of evolution, we can have policies which foster them and certainly avoid policies that are going to hinder the forces of progress. It just depends which direction you think the progress is going. which are the particular forces that you're looking at, and whether it's the race or the individual or the nation,

what is the unit that you're going, or the social class, what is the unit that you're going to improve? But it's terrifically comforting for political philosophers and political thinkers to believe that there is inscribed there in nature the policies that should merely be explained to people and then put into practice. And then it reaches it to apocalyptic apotheosis in the camps.

Well, I think there's another apotheosis, which is communism. I think that you can really look at a lot of the communist regimes as also expressions of a different model of social Darwinism. I said that Spencer was the most popular philosophy in China until World War II, until the revolution. And you can argue that the Marxists really give a version of Spencer. slightly different theory of history. Marx is an admirer of Darwin. Marx is a great admirer of Darwin. Darwin, not so much an admirer of Marx. And Marx also admirer of Spencer. And in Highgate Cemetery,

the grave of Marx, this dreadful East European mausoleum, is next to the grave of Herbert Spencer. And so the locals all call it Marx and Spencer. And almost finally, Shalers, it got into popular culture, didn't it? Can you just give us one or two instances, or maybe one instance of that? Yeah, in the 1930s, a new generation of science fiction writers really took the coming race wars as read. But others were more in step with later biologists who took eugenics in a much more innocuous sense of improving the stock through education, nutrition and whatever. Brave New World is poised right between those two accounts of eugenics, I think. and it reads like a very horrible dystopia now but I think it's easy to forget

how tempting that might have seemed in the depths of the Great Depression to have a system where you had enough food to eat, warm cinemas to go to. And the brave new world was a hoxley again. Another hoxley, yes. These germlines of genius plague us ironically. So the iron is really great.

A crete. Hereditary genius. Well, thank you all very much. There are many more editions of In Our Time and just visit our In Our Time website to download the list of those programmes. Next week we'll be talking about the history of the eye and the theories of vision from Plato onwards.

So there we are. Thanks for listening. There are many more radio for arts and discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com. www.uk slash radio four.