When Resolute Men Stood Against Wishful Men

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

At the Beginning There Was Darkness

“Eugenics is the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage” – Francis Galton, 1904 (qtd. in Chesterton, p. 14).

The origins of Eugenics are deeply rooted or subtly covered in the evolutionary theory of Darwin, who tried to immediately go a step further (outside the orbit of his observations and conclusions on birds) to propose that the workings of nature, together with its incomprehensible for the human mind complexities, to naturally design human species could be actually substituted, or even corrected, by people themselves. A predetermined outcome for the next generation became possible, and it only would take some time before the perfect individual was designed by humans alone. The time when human species could fully control -- fully to the extent human minds were naturally designed to think -- their destinies was just at the corner.

Although Darwin was only an observer of birds on an island, a place where nature’s presence was unquestionable and influence unrestricted, he seemed to quickly forget, overpowered by his ambition, the ultimate power and presence of Nature in any form of life on earth and thus decided to disregard nature as the only creator of human life on earth. Natural selection immediately lost its intrinsic meaning -- nature’s superiority alone to form different kinds of species -- and became a tool in the hands of a few who twisted the meaning and propagated it as highly dependable on human decisions and actions. If people are merely a single outcome of the natural selection process, this does not mean that they are and will know, have, and thus control the inputs to this intricate process. However, the real danger for Darwin to extend and conduct his experiment, although later in his life he did refuse to call himself an eugenist, was the protection a democratic country offered its citizens: “But it is quite certain that no existing democratic government would go as far as we Eugenists think right in the direction of limiting the liberty of the subject for the sake of the racial qualities of future generations” – Leonard Darwin, Cambridge University Eugenics Society, 1912 (qtd. in Chesterton, p. 13).

Nature never decided to limit the inborn power, depth, and breadth of actions of the birds Darwin observed, but he, together with other famous eugenists, was too eager to disregard the example of nature and decided that to compel a whole nation to accept the new experiment, which was believed to bring down the Paradise on earth, he needed a new law; moral standards; and different human perceptions of reality. Since the new movement was taking tangible form and quite an extreme deterministic purpose, although vague in perspective, eugenists needed two things for it to be successful and not emerge stillborn: first, a fair tale and, second, listeners to swallow it. However, it turned out that not the people were the problem to come along but the fair tale: it was fairer than fair to believe since it lacked a solid and well-practiced base to be sustained in its form of abstraction and lack of clear perspective. Eugenists were walking on an unknown path; a path of experiment that did not have a clear beginning to have a positive end.

Evolution vs. Eugenics:

How Ms. Pride, walking in its condescending gait, became a wish; how a wish became a science; and how this science, in order to survive the attack of critics, became a religion.