Positive Changes

Making Bail Laws More Reasonable

We have commented in recent weeks on small changes the New Zealand government is making for the better.  Most of these have focused on welfare beneficiaries, with authorities being more comprehensively demanding of beneficiaries that they find a job, lest their benefits get reduced.  Authorities are working in a more co-ordinated fashion to the same end.  It is making an impact upon beneficiary culture: the message, “you have to get a job” is sinking in.

Another incremental change has just been made–this time to bail laws.  It is going to be much harder for serious offenders to get bail. 

Bail has always been a bad idea made necessary because of overcrowding in remand prisons and because the justice system moves at a glacial pace.  The prospect of having an accused sit in jail for over two years waiting for a trial, at which he or she is subsequently found non-guilty is a manifest injustice.  Hence the device of letting accused folk out on bail to await trial.  “Innocent until proven guilty” is a fundamental principle of justice, after all.  But that application of that principle to criminals awaiting trial has been applied in such a way as to increase crime in New Zealand.
  The standing presumption of the old law was that the accused had a right to bail; not to be granted bail required special circumstances and thus a high standard of proof on the part of the Crown.

Now the law has been amended to make a distinction between people accused of murder or those who are repeat offenders, on the one hand, and those who are before the courts for lesser crimes or have limited criminal records.  Not only that, the burden of proof to be granted bail moves from the Crown to the accused.  The latter must convince a judge that he or she will not re-offend if they are allowed out on bail, pending a trial. The NZ Herald reports:

The bill would require that a person on a murder charge or repeat violence, drugs or sex charges would have to persuade a judge that the community would be safe if they were released.  Under present law, the Crown must show why defendants should be locked up.

The Bill passed by a large margin (102-19)–with the National and Labour parties combining in a rare display of cross party support.  Full marks to the opposition Labour Party.

There is a caveat to be made, however.  Whilst the new law changes the presumption from bail to no-bail, with the burden of proof put upon the accused to justify bail, rather than the Crown proving that it should not be granted, liberal judges are likely to continue their bias on behalf of the accused.  We will have judges granting bail because they found the accused’s promise they would comb their hair neatly every morning sufficiently compelling evidence that they would not re-offend whilst at large.   

Judges need to be named and shamed in this matter.  Since the law now presumes bail will not be granted for serious offenders, when it is so granted and the offender commits more crimes, the bail decisions of judges–together with their subsequent outcomes–need to be published, or at least made subject to on-going judicial review by a panel of higher judges after the effect.  Judges with a patterned history of granting bail should be required to pay restitution to any victims of crimes committed whilst the bailee was out.  Watch the liberal principles wither faster than new shoots in a hoar frost. 

Finally, we note that the Bill was opposed by the Greens, the Maori Party, and Mana.  The Maori Party and Mana are flat out racist in their approach to such issues.  They argue to their perpetual shame that since Maori are very much over-repesented in the criminal sector, any measure to make the consequences of offending greater must be opposed because it is anti-Maori.  In so doing they unintentionally support the argument that race is determinative of behaviour.  They add their support to the Darwinians who believed in the mid-nineteenth and for most of the twentieth centuries (and to this day) that some races are naturally less evolved and more primitive.  The Mana and Maori parties, thus, ironically concede to racist constructs.  Shame on them.  In acting so stupidly they actually give evidential warrant to Darwinian idiocy.

As for the Greens they ground their opposition to the new anti-bail law in abstract principles of perceived justice. 

Opponents argued that people would be locked up for longer on the presumption that they would offend again in future – a breach of the Bill of Rights Act.

The presumption of guilt in a judicial system is a dangerous thing.  But the Greens have taken this important principle and stripped it away from the concrete particulars, turning it into an abstraction–which is even more dangerous.  Let’s take their logic seriously for a moment.  The Greens argue that we should never lock people up on the presumption that they will offend again in the future.  On that ground, no-one should ever be in prison.  To incarcerate a criminal assumes in part that he or she will like offend again in the future.  Under the Greens idiocy, a convicted murderer must–by some strange reading of the Bill of Rights–be presumed to be a non-repeat offender, so why keep them in prison at all.  The convicted murderer or rapist is no more likely to offend again than any citizen, right?

The Greens have no understanding of the human condition, no understanding of morality, of human sin, of deadened human consciences, or of depravity.  These things simply do not exist in the Greenist world view.  Their view of humanity is entirely mechanical and deterministic: change the circumstances of lives from the outside and all evil acts will evaporate and cease to exist.  This abstract mechanistic view of human life and society is not just childishly simplistic, it is self-defeating and contradictory  It  would mean that Greenist views and opinions and actions are likewise determined by circumstances.  Give each Green a million dollars and they would start to think and act very differently.  Their principles are like their policies: up for sale. The Greens can be bought off. Simony becomes them.

Sloppy, Vacuous Darwinists

Uneasy Atheists

The following article appeared in the New Statesman.  The primer reads:  “To hardline atheists, it is now unreasonable and “dramatically peculiar” to argue that religion is not altogether evil. How did such intolerance become acceptable to rational minds?”  How indeed?

Bryan Appelyard reflects upon the strange Islamic-like fundamentalism of the neo-atheists, whom he charges with having all the behaviours of a tyrannical sect.  [For our part, we love these militant neo-atheists.  They are perfect poster-boys for what happens when men deny God and try to mean it. They are thus “useful idiots”, to employ Lenin’s phrase, because they offer many teaching moments.
  The neo-atheists are “evangelical”: they  want to make other people believe their doctrines, because if not, those people will remain in evil and are evil.  Hence the intolerance and tyranny.  Remember, atheists have only one means to hand: human power and influence. 

To forge ahead militant neo-atheists, therefore, have only one course available if they are to take their own world view seriously.  They must exercise force over others–browbeating, cursing, mocking–and, given half a chance, they would use the oppression of  the state as well.  Has not Dawkins called for children to be removed from the homes of Believing parents to prevent their harm?  “Ve vill make you free.” And he believes himself perfectly reasonable and sanguine in seriously advancing the idea. 

It turns out that the fiercest attacks of the neo-atheists are reserved for their fifth-column: atheists who are not as serious as they are about the non-existence of the Living God.  Eerie shades of Islam, where the harshest penalties are reserved for apostates who do not treat Allah with sufficient respect. These things appear pretty obvious, yet Appelyard and his colleagues remain puzzled. Ed.]

Two atheists – John Gray and Alain de Botton – and two agnostics – Nassim Nicholas Taleb and I – meet for dinner at a Greek restaurant in Bayswater, London. The talk is genial, friendly and then, suddenly, intense when neo-atheism comes up. Three of us, including both atheists, have suffered abuse at the hands of this cult. Only Taleb seems to have escaped unscathed and this, we conclude, must be because he can do maths and people are afraid of maths.

De Botton is the most recent and, consequently, the most shocked victim. He has just produced a book, Religion for Atheists: a Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion, mildly suggesting that atheists like himself have much to learn from religion and that, in fact, religion is too important to be left to believers. He has also proposed an atheists’ temple, a place where non-believers can partake of the consolations of silence and meditation.

This has been enough to bring the full force of a neo-atheist fatwa crashing down on his head. The temple idea in particular made them reach for their best books of curses.

“I am rolling my eyes so hard that it hurts,” wrote the American biologist and neo-atheist blogger P Z Myers. “You may take a moment to retch. I hope you have buckets handy.” Myers has a vivid but limited prose palette.

There have been threats of violence. De Botton has been told he will be beaten up and his guts taken out of him. One email simply said, “You have betrayed Atheism. Go over to the other side and die.”

De Botton finds it bewildering, the unexpected appearance in the culture of a tyrannical sect, content to whip up a mob mentality. “To say something along the lines of ‘I’m an atheist; I think religions are not all bad’ has become a dramatically peculiar thing to say and if you do say it on the internet you will get savage messages calling you a fascist, an idiot or a fool. This is a very odd moment in our culture. Why has this happened?”

First, a definition. By “neo-atheism”, I mean a tripartite belief system founded on the conviction that science provides the only road to truth and that all religions are deluded, irrational and destructive.

Atheism is just one-third of this exotic ideological cocktail. Secularism, the political wing of the movement, is another third. Neo-atheists often assume that the two are the same thing; in fact, atheism is a metaphysical position and secularism is a view of how society should be organised. So a Christian can easily be a secularist – indeed, even Christ was being one when he said, “Render unto Caesar” – and an atheist can be anti-secularist if he happens to believe that religious views should be taken into account. But, in some muddled way, the two ideas have been combined by the cultists.

The third leg of neo-atheism is Darwinism, the AK-47 of neo-atheist shock troops. Alone among scientists, and perhaps because of the enormous influence of Richard Dawkins, Darwin has been embraced as the final conclusive proof not only that God does not exist but also that religion as a whole is a uniquely dangerous threat to scientific rationality.

“There is this strange supposition,” says the American philosopher Jerry Fodor, “that if you’re a Darwinian you have to be an atheist. In my case, I’m an anti-Darwinian and I’m an atheist. But people are so incoherent on these issues that it’s hard for me to figure out what is driving them.”

The neo-atheist cause has been gathering strength for roughly two decades and recently exploded into very public view. Sayeeda Warsi, co-chairman of the Conservative Party, was in the headlines for making a speech at the Vatican warning of the dangers of secular fundamentalism, which aims to prevent religions from having a public voice or role. Warsi, a Muslim, subdivides propagators of this anti-religious impulse into two categories. First, there are the well-meaning liberal elite, who want to suppress religion in order not to cause offence to anybody. Second, there is the “perverse kind of secular” believer, who wants to “wipe religion from the public sphere” on principle.

“Why,” she asks me, “are the followers of reason so unreasonable?”

As Warsi was on her way to catch her flight to Rome she heard Dawkins, the supreme prophet of neo-atheism, on Radio 4’s Today programme. He was attempting to celebrate a survey that proved, at least to his satisfaction, that supposedly Christian Britain was a fraud. People who said they were Christians did not go to church and knew little of the faith. Giles Fraser, a priest of the Church of England, then challenged Dawkins to give the full title of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Falling into confusion, he failed. Fraser’s point was that Dawkins was therefore, by his own criterion, not a Darwinian. Becoming even more confused, Dawkins exclaimed in his response: “Oh, God!”

“Immediately he was out of control, he said, ‘Oh, God!'” Warsi recalls, “so even the most self-confessed secular fundamentalist at this moment of need needed to turn to the Almighty. It kind of defeats his own argument that only people who go to church have a faith.”

De Botton finds Dawkins a psychologically troubling figure.

“He has taken a very strange position. He’s unusual, in that he came from an elite British Anglican family with all its privileges and then he had this extraordinary career, and now he stands at the head of what can really be called a cult . . . I think what happened was that he has been frightened by the militancy of religious people he has met on his travels and it has driven him to the other side.

“It smacks of a sort of psychological collapse in him, a collapse in those resources of maturity that would keep someone on an even keel. There is what psychoanalysts would call a deep rigidity in him.”  I ask Fraser what he thinks are the roots of this ideological rigidity among the neo-atheists. “It coincides with post-9/11,” he says. “The enemy is Islam for them. That was true about [Christopher] Hitchens in an obvious way and Dawkins said something like ‘it was the most evil religion in the world’.

“With Hitchens, it was bound up with liberal interventionism. It is also clearly an Americanisation. It has come over from their culture wars . . . People are pissed off with Dawkins because there is a feeling that we don’t do that over here.” . . . .

After the September 2001 attacks, all the dams of reticence burst and neo-atheism became a full-blooded ideology, informed by books such as Dawkins’s The God Delusion, Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and Christoper Hitchens’s God Is Not Great.

These authors became known as the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism. It was no accident that their books appeared not just after the 9/11 attacks, but also at a time of neo-Darwinian triumphalism. The Human Genome Project, combined with the popularisation of the latest Darwinian thinking, was presented as an announcement that science had cracked the problem of human life. Furthermore, the rise of evolutionary psychology – an analysis of human behaviour based on the tracing of evolved traits – seemed to suggest that the human mind, too, would soon succumb to the logic of neo-atheism.

It was in the midst of this that Fodor and the cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini published What Darwin Got Wrong, a highly sophisticated analysis of Darwinian thought which concluded that the theory of natural selection could not be stated coherently. All hell broke loose. Such was the abuse that Fodor vowed never to read a blog again. Myers the provocateur announced that he had no intention of reading the book but spent 3,000 words trashing it anyway, a remarkably frank statement of intellectual tyranny.

Fodor now chuckles at the memory. “I said we should write back saying we had no intention of reading his review but we thought it was all wrong anyway.”  For him, evolutionary psychology plays a large part in this mindset with its loathing of religion. “I think the story is that we are supposed to understand why there is religion on Darwinian grounds without having to raise the question as to whether it’s true. But these are just fabricated stories. If you found something with two heads and a horn in the middle you could cook up some story from evolution saying it was just dandy to have two heads with a horn in the middle. It’s just sloppy thinking.”

Ultimately, the problem with militant neo-atheism is that it represents a profound category error. Explaining religion – or, indeed, the human experience – in scientific terms is futile. “It would be as bizarre as to launch a scientific investigation into the truth of Anna Karenina or love,” de Botton says. “It’s a symptom of the misplaced confidence of science . . . It’s a kind of category error. It’s a fatally wrong question and the more you ask it, the more you come up with bizarre and odd answers.”

The project is also curiously pointless. A couple of years ago I hired a car at Los Angeles Airport. The radio was tuned to a religious station. Too terrified to attempt simultaneously to change the channel and drive on the I-405, the scariest road in the world, in a strange car, I heard to my astonishment that Christopher Hitchens was the next guest on a Christian chat show.

In his finest fruity tones and deploying $100 words, Hitchens took the poor presenter apart. Then he was asked if this would be a better world if we disposed of all religions. “No,” he replied. I almost crashed the car.

The answer demonstrates the futility of the neo-atheist project. Religion is not going to go away. It is a natural and legitimate response to the human condition, to human consciousness and to human ignorance. One of the most striking things revealed by the progress of science has been the revelation of how little we know and how easily what we do know can be overthrown. Furthermore, as Hitchens in effect acknowledged and as the neo-atheists demonstrate by their ideological rigidity and savagery, absence of religion does not guarantee that the demonic side of our natures will be eliminated. People should have learned this from the catastrophic failed atheist project of communism, but too many didn’t.

Happily, the backlash against neo-atheism has begun, inspired by the cult’s own intolerance. In the Christmas issue of this magazine, Dawkins interviewed Hitchens. Halfway through, Dawkins asked: “Do you ever worry that if we win and, so to speak, destroy Christianity, that vacuum would be filled by Islam?” At dinner at the restaurant in Bayswater we all laughed at this, but our laughter was uneasy. The history of attempts to destroy religion is littered with the corpses of believers and unbelievers alike. There are many roads to truth, but cultish intolerance is not one of them.

bryanappleyard.com.
Follow him on Twitter: @BryanAppleyard

>Darwinist Self-Deception

>Round and Round in Self-Serving Circles

Darwinism rapidly evolved into a cosmology, which is a theory of everything. A theory that explains everything that exists can never be falsified. Its successive iterations (social Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, neo-neo-Darwinism) simply illustrate the religious, non-scientific nature of the Darwinian cosmology. The version of evolutionism is changing all the time: what changes not is the cosmology itself–that matter is ultimate and is randomly auto-existent. When scientific experimentation and evidence calls into question the currently prevailing version of evolution, the version adapts and changes like a wax nose. What never changes is the underlying, framing cosmology. The reason is that the cosmology is religious in nature and that science always conforms to the religious paradigm in which it operates.

Reading Darwinists is tiresome because with a straight face they claim a scientific foundation, on the one hand, whilst qualifiying, bending, re-interpreting, reshaping, redefining, and adapting so that everything fits their deeper truth-commitment, their cosmology, on the other. But the fit is always incomplete and prejudiced. Scientific scepticism is readily supplanted by a willing credulity. The bubbles keep escaping.  What this shows is that to the Darwinist mind, the cosmology is far, far more important than the science. The latter is the garb of hypocritical self-respectability, not substance.

Take the following quotation as an illustration of the point:

Evolutionary thinking is particularly useful in illuminating our view of childhood in the realm of facultative adaptation—a sort of “if then” proposition built into our genes. Evolution and genes sometimes say, This is how it must always be, but often they say, If in such-and-such an environment, respond with this adaptation, but if in this other, very different context, respond with that one. Sometimes the consequences are dire for children. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, of McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, have shown that abuse and neglect, up to and including killing children, are almost 100 times more likely in households with an adult male who is not genetically related to the child. Nothing, I think, could make it clearer that evolutionary explanations must be kept completely separate from moral and legal judgments. Yet this well-established fact about violence committed against children, independent of socioeconomic status and shown across national boundaries, should lead us to a new ways of thinking about abuse prevention. They can be subtle, not draconian, but they should recognize the facts.
(Melvin Konner, How Childhood Has Evolved, The Chronicle Review. (Emphasis, ours)

Observe the self-deceitful, sleight-of-hand. “Evolutionary explanations must be kept completely separate from moral and legal judgments” . . . And the question is, Why? Genetic “evidence” shows that a certain kind of person is predisposed to murder the children in his household. Surely, “scientific” rigorous evolutionary theory would say that this is entirely appropriate and consistent with the theory. But no. Moral and legal judgments must suddenly intrude, and reject the murder of children. Why? Ah, well, even broader cosmological arguments kick in and claim that moral and legal constructs, whilst not embedded in genes, are also part of the gradual evolution of the species to higher plains. Really. And the scientific evidence for that is . . .?

But, further, the inescapable reality is that when Konner and evolutionists talk about moral and legal judgements that would, in this case, be inveighed against a foster parent killing a non-genetically descended child, there can be no fundamental absolute moral or ethical or legal condemnation of such an act from within the Darwinian cosmology. There is only the reality of conflict upon which evolutionary processes proceed. The murderous parent is (presumably) protecting his genetic strain. In this case the criminal justice system is the challenger. In order to proceed higher, combat must take place. If the erstwhile criminal succeeds and gets off scot free, he has advanced the race (or at least his particular genetic strain) and called into question the validity of the current moral and legal code, which would have been proved impotent and weak in this case. Surely. Thus, the evolutionist who appeals to the “higher superiority” of legal and moral codes which must be set against the genetic codes, is simply and comprehensively begging the question. In a universe where matter is ultimate and is randomly auto-existent, the notion of a “higher superiority” of anything is egregious question begging.

Legal and moral codes exist, which, according to the Darwinian cosmology, means that they, too, have to be the product of evolutionary development. But if they are successfully broken and overcome, that too is a development, a step forward, a progression. Darwinian evolution is not uniform and linear. Within the evolutionary process there are many blind alleys. For the evolutionist, today’s moral and legal codes may be (and probably are) one of them. No evolutionist can gainsay without being guilty of duplicitous special pleading.

So, the insistence that “evolutionary explanations must be kept completely separate from moral and legal judgments” is an egregious deceit in the light of Darwinian cosmology. To pretend otherwise is contemptible sophistry. You cannot have it both ways. Ah, we long for the good-old-days when Darwinists were more honest and self-respecting. But as for scientific objectivity, it long ago self-defenestrated in favour of an irrational, internally contradictory religion.

>The Twilight Years, Part V

>We’re Eugenicists and We’re Here to Help

The fear for the future that gripped Britain in the two decades after World War One rested not just on economic misdiagnoses. There was also a prevailing concern over miscegenation and genetic deformation. So argues Richard Overy in his book, The Twilight Years.http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=067002113X&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Professional and leading historians were telling the public that societies inevitably decline and that Britain had reached its high point and now decline was certain. Things would go from bad to worse from this point, the public were told and they believed it. Economists agreed, arguing that capitalism was so internally contradictory that it would grow to incompetence and collapse. Moreover, it was fundamentally immoral. No civilisation could be sustained upon such unethical and immoral foundations. But things might be assuaged if the worst excesses and contradictions could be offset by bureaucratic planning. The Soviet Union was held up as the way forward.

But a further problem was “sickness” in the racial body of the nation. Consider Julian Huxley’s diagnosis of the threat, written in 1930:

What are we going to do? Every defective man, woman and child is a burden. Every defective is an extra body for the nation to feed and clothe, but produces little or nothing in return. Every defective needs care, and immobilises a certain quantum of energy and goodwill which could otherwise be put to constructive ends. Every defective is an emotional burden—a sorrow to someone, and in himself, a creature doomed, when unassisted, to live an incomplete and sub-human existence. Not only that, but if their numbers continue to increase, the burden . . . will gradually drag us down. Cited in Richard Overy, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars (New York: Viking/Penguin, 2009), p.93.

The “sickness” with which society was afflicted consisted of sub-standard people having too many (defective) children, which were a burden upon society, bringing about its inevitable collapse. This “world-view” of course was Malthusian: population will always run ahead of food supply, until war, death, disease or famine kills off sufficient people to bring things into equilibrium. This was the diagnosis. The solution: control the reproduction of defectives through “birth control”.

One of the earliest advocates in Britain of birth control was Marie Stopes. Overy takes up the narrative:

In May 1921 Marie Stopes organized a public meeting on constructive birth control at the Queen’s Hall in London . . . . She had been advised that she might find the hall almost empty, but on the night, according to a sceptical eye-witness, there was no “trickle of ill-dressed fanatics” but a packed crowd of “quite normal-looking people”. After a lengthy organ recital, Marie Stopes, resplendent in a shining white dress, took the stage to berate the audience about the perils and expense of allowing “wastrels” to breed. The record of the meeting indicates applause at every opportunity. The only people who should become parents, she insisted, were those who could “add individuals of value to the race”. In her final remarks of the evening she told the audience that if race selection were successful they would look at their grandchildren and “think almost that the gods had descended to walk upon the earth”. . . . (Overy p. 96)

The notion of the improvement of the race was the foundation upon which the birth-control movement was built.

In our day, this kind of rhetoric grates horribly–at least to many. But in the Inter-War years in Britain it did not. Why the difference? Firstly, the greater superiority of the Englishman was a commonly held view at the time. Britain was an imperial race, therefore superior: it could maintain its Empire only by maintaining its racial purity. Breeding superior progeny was seen as a key essential to maintain the glory of the Empire: without it, Britain would inevitably decline.

The problem was famously encapsulated by David Lloyd George, the first post-war prime minister, when he warned an audience that it was not possible to run an A1 empire with a C3 population. These alphabetic categories were used by the army to label the physical qualities of recruits. . . . Sir James Barr, onetime president of the British Medical Association, testily observed that “while the virility of the nation was carrying on he war, the derelicts were carrying on the race. Overy, p. 97-8

Secondly, the increasingly popular social Darwinism of the age naturally led to an assessment of the human race which would break society up into categories of superiors and inferiors, not by virtue of bearing authority to rule or to be obeyed, but by virtue of genetics. It was an easy step, once you had accepted the Darwinistic world-view, as almost all intellectuals and public protagonists had, to be able to suggest with the utmost sweet reasonableness that across the human race was a spectrum of inferior through to superior genetic models. The survival of the race depended upon breeding out the inferiors, and increasing the fecundity of those with superior genetic makeup. Stopes openly argued (without recrimination or reaction) that “race suicide” would result from “excessive breeding of inferior stock”.

Such sentiments are a blasphemous anathema to modern pagans. Why? Largely, we suspect, because of the loathing with which the eugenics movement in Nazi Germany is now held (at least officially). Ideas do have consequences: the consequences as evident in Nazi Germany are too terrible and horrible now to contemplate. It is now politely ignored and put under the carpet that eugenics was every bit as alive and fashionable in Britain as it was in pre-War Germany. It has, in the post-World War II West, forced eugenics into operating beneath the radar screen. Eugenics is still widely practised in the West, but not necessarily as a government programme or promotion. It has been reframed into a “personal choice”. Tests are now routinely done on unborn children to ascertain whether they have disease or defection. When tests prove positive parents are invited/encouraged to kill the unborn child.

Throughout the twentieth century, eugenics was practised in the United States as well, as traced by Edwin Black in, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003; Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004). As Michael Gerson points out in The Washington Post, Black recounts

efforts by distinguished scientists, academics, industrialists, health officials and jurists through much of the 20th century to “direct human evolution” by waging war against people with developmental and physical disabilities.

Black points out that early last century, the American Breeders Association — supported by generous grants from Andrew Carnegie — created a committee to study “the best practical means for cutting off the defective germ-plasm of the American population.” The panel included doctors, economists and attorneys from Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the University of Chicago.

Black continues: “During a number of subsequent conferences, they carefully debated the ‘problem of cutting off the supply of defectives,’ and systemically plotted a bold campaign of ‘purging the blood of the American people of the handicapping and deteriorating influences of these anti-social classes.’ Ten groups were eventually identified as ‘socially unfit’ and targeted for ‘elimination.’” Among those groups, according to Black, were the “feebleminded,” epileptics, the “insane,” the “deformed” and the “deaf.”

Eugenic sterilizations did not end in the United States until the 1970s, endorsed by a decision of the Supreme Court. Citizens with Down syndrome and other genetic challenges are increasingly rare in America, because of prenatal testing and abortion. And as such genetic perfection is pursued, those who lack it are subjected to increased prejudice.

Accordingly, Social Darwinism has been “reworked” and “re-morphed” in the modern generation. Now it is fashionable, once again, to believe that there are superiors and inferiors in the human race. But those of superior genetic stock are those who have reached a stage of enlightenment where they paternalistically and condescendingly believe in equal human rights for all; the invitation to all lesser un-enlightened mortals is to develop and evolve to higher states of being, which are essentially ideological and cerebral. Abortion is framed as a “woman’s right to choose” or a “woman’s right over her own body”: the propaganda frames abortion as an act of a truly enlightened superior being. The invitation to inferior humans is to persuade them that they need not, in fact, remain inferior, but that they too can become truly enlightened. Naturalistic Darwinism morphed into social Darwinism, which has once again morphed into ideological Darwinism. But throughout the Darwinistic world-view, inconsistency and hypocrisy notwithstanding, remains firmly predominant.

But we digress. Returning to Britain in the Inter-War years, the idea of inferior breeding and poor genetic structures fitting seamlessly and neatly into the pessimism of the age in Britain in the twenties and thirties. The warning of a potential biological crisis was credible, given the general pessimism. Moreover, it buttressed the prevailing prejudices by appearing to give them a rational, scientific foundation. As soon as appeals to “science” could be made, the credibility and believability of the pessimistic outlook went up by several degrees. And it went both ways: the prevailing pessimistic outlook in turn made the claims of the eugenics movement appear well reasoned and well founded. For example, in the 1930’s Leonard Darwin, fourth son of Charles, warned that

without biological correction Western civilization was destined to suffer the same slow decay that had been the lot ‘of every great civilization.’ . . . the problem lay in the inherited quality of the race, which, Darwin argued, had a natural tendency to decline as long as the ‘less efficient strata’ reproduced faster than the biologically inefficient. (Overy, p. 101)

Eugenics was the new advance in biological science which would prevent the inevitable decline occurring.

Eugenics became widely popular in academic and intellectual circles in the Inter-War period. The inevitable tendency was for “science” to overstate the influence of Nature (as contrasted with Nurture) so that it became seriously entertained that almost all social problems could be put down to defective Nature: alcoholism, syphilis, feeble-mindedness, crime, prostitution, delinquency were all understood to be due to an inherited predisposition and reflective of sub-standard genetics. (About the only vestige of this view which has survived to linger on in the modern world is the idea that homosexuality is a predisposed genetic condition. But, of course, this has also been parsed through the filters of ideological Darwinism, so that homosexuality, although a genetic defect, has been declared to be a human right.)

As eugenicists debated appropriate policies which would apply their science to the betterment and purification of the race, the inevitable question became where to draw the line. Unsurprisingly, it was suggested that about half the population was below average! But within this deficient half, there was believed to be a smaller sub-set which, if allowed to continue unchecked, threatened the entire race with genetic degeneration. And, it was observed repeatedly, the least genetically worthy were always breeding faster, having larger and larger families than, well, superior folk.

In the 1930’s, eugenicists left no doubt about what needed to be done to preserve the race.

The language routinely used to describe biological intervention was uncompromising–‘elimination’ of the unfit, ‘festering sores’ to be cut out, a ‘diseased constitution’ to be medically repaired. . . . Cleansing the race left few options that did not involve severe levels of medical or social intervention. [It reduced to] two possibilities. The first was the ‘lethal chamber’, the second sterilization.” (Overy p. 115)

The lethal chamber was rejected as lacking sufficient public support. But compulsory sterilization was another matter.

There were few, if any, eugenicists who did not accept that sterilization, whether compulsory or voluntary, was the one remaining panacea capable to addressing the seriousness of their case for racial decline, and they worked throughout the inter-war years to persuade the government to set in place firm procedures for a national programme of sterilization targeted as the biologically and socially undesirable. (Overy p.117)

Now, it is important to remember that this was not some fringe maniacal group; eugenicists were mainstream, leading figures, intellectuals, and opinion leaders.

The ranks of self-confessed eugenists were swollen in the 1920’s with a panoply of distinguished public figures in every field: the economist J.M. Keynes, who helped set up the Cambridge Eugenics Society before 1914 and remained a life-long supporter; the sexologist Havelock Ellis, who wrote pioneering books on sex before 1914; the zoologist Julian Huxley, grandson of Darwin’s chief disciple Thomas Huxley and an early science celebrity; the psychologist Cyril Burt, pioneer of intelligence testing of schoolchildren and, as a result, a convinced hereditarian; the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, whose Man and Superman played on eugenics themes; William Inge, Dean of St Paul’s, almost certainly the best-known churchman of his generation, who wanted and ideal British population of only 20 million, all with ‘certificates of bodily and mental fitness’; and so on. Eugenic concern in the inter-war years was no longer the province of people the public might have regarded as enthusiastic cranks. (Overy, p. 106)

So, civilization was declining. Eugenicists argued it was substantially due to inferior, defective classes breeding far too promiscuously. The bad were multiplying; the superior were being overrun. Society would inevitably decline. Their analysis had the imprimatur of “science”, and therefore it was seen as objective, credible, certain, and infallible. And, as we have seen recently, never get between a scientist and the limelight—unless one’s life insurance is up to date. Overy’s concluding paragraphs are reminiscent of our own recent experiences, this time to do with climate:

A great many biologists wanted to believe that they could explain crisis in convincing ways, and their science seemed self-evidently appropriate to the morbid contemplation of decay and regeneration. Biological explanations had about them the unmistakable stamp of progress, rooted as they were in programmes of scientific research and statistical assessment that were demonstrably at the cutting edge of their subjects. Identifying crisis and cure gave scientists a sense of social purpose and a high public profile even if it meant presenting complex and uncertain elements of their science in vulgar form in order to be understood”–and we may add, in order to make elements of the science appear more definite and certain. (Overy, p. 134)

We have seen how academic experts framed beliefs and expectations of impending long term decline in Great Britain during the Inter-War years. Their consensus view was taken up and reflected back in the media and in most sections of society during that period. We have argued that this polarity of unbridled optimism, followed by deep and abiding pessimism is an inevitable pathology of the religion of secular humanism becoming ascendant in a culture.

Initially the notion that man is the centre of the universe and lord of all he surveys proves wonderfully liberating and uplifting. However, man is far too puny to sustain the weight of deity. Soon his failures and phobias and imperfections intrude to the dashing of hopes and the defenestration of optimism. A deep gloom settles over the culture. The bi-polar mood swings are manifest most clearly within the Academy which had early championed the secular idolatry of rationalistic humanism.

This bi-polar pattern of extreme optimism, followed by much longer periods of apocalyptic alarmism and general despair continues unabated in our day. So has the eugenics movement. It has now morphed into strident promotion and militant practise of abortion to preserve the superiority of “enlightened” people–that is, those who have evolved to the point where they understand that an individual’s rights and personal convenience trump anyone sufficiently powerless to defend or protect or assert or speak up for themselves. Death to them. Thus, the fittest survive. We have to do this to save ourselves, to become authentic, higher, self-actualised beings.