Jul 6, 2015 04:53 PM
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1575451.ece
EXCERPTS: [...] H . G. Wells only makes an appearance towards the end of "Political Descent". But no one in the book more fully justifies the pun in Piers Hale’s title, or his claim that the Victorian debate on Darwinism and politics should be understood through two of its subsidiary questions. One was whether or not to believe in a “struggle for existence”, born of the chronic overpopulation that the Revd Thomas Robert Malthus described in his "Essay on the Principle of Population" (1798). It was Charles Darwin who brought Malthus’s principle squarely into debates over evolution. On Darwin’s theory of natural selection, nature is in perpetual Malthusian crisis, with survival a matter of the smallest inborn differences which, by chance, make some individuals that little bit better adapted to their environments. Because Malthus had offered his Essay as a conservative rebuke to the utopian thinkers of his day, Malthusian doctrine had been controversial from the first. The politics of Malthusianism became, through Darwin’s "On the Origin of Species" (1859), part of the politics of evolution.
The other question concerned the kind of inheritance known as “Lamarckian”, after the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, though it was neither original nor very important to him. Under Lamarckian inheritance, improvements made or impairments suffered owing to a changing environment during an individual’s lifetime are passed on to their offspring. Darwin accepted Lamarckian inheritance, seeing it as sometimes bringing about changes in conjunction with natural selection, and sometimes as acting independently of it. But the period after Darwin’s death in 1882 saw a new polarization. To be Lamarckian was increasingly to uphold not merely the reality of the inheritance of acquired characters but the rapidity of Lamarckian as against Darwinian evolution, and also to stress the uplifting nature of a process driven by the activity of the organism. To be Darwinian increasingly included expressing serious doubts about Lamarckian inheritance, together with the insistence that some are born to win and some to lose, with progress coming but slowly, and degeneration an ever-present threat.
Over the course of the 1890s, the young Wells – then just making his name as a jobbing science journalist and fiction writer in London – became a committed Malthusian and anti-Lamarckian. It was his immersion in socialist London from the late 1880s onwards, however, that made those choices seem decisive.
[...] The placing of Wells in [...] socialist-Darwinian London illuminates [...] In another sense, though, Wells presents something of a problem for Hale’s thesis. "Political Descent" purports to document the continuation into the second half of the nineteenth century of the radical, Lamarckian, anti-Malthusian polemics that, according to Adrian Desmond in "The Politics of Evolution" (1989), characterized the first half of the century. Where a reader of Desmond might assume those polemics to have expired with the triumph of capitalism-friendly Darwinism, Hale shows, to the contrary, how they took on new life within Darwinism. Consider, for example, the following passage, quoted by Hale from Justice, the newspaper of the Marx-inspired Social Democratic Federation, in 1888: “Every discovery in Science, every invention of mankind, has been seized upon by the bourgeoisie to delude and exploit the proletariat . . . . In a like manner the bourgeoisie accept the teachings of Malthus and pervert those of Darwin to bolster up the tottering fabric of society today, and they steal from the armoury of the evolutionist weapons which they use in their own defence.”
[...] The best parts of "Political Descent" add up to a revelatory group portrait of socialist-Darwinian London of the 1880s and 90s. But they occupy just three of the book’s seven long chapters. The other chapters, concentrating on Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Huxley and Kropotkin, will strike anyone familiar with earlier historical writing on them as mostly going over old ground, though with some striking omissions and unpersuasive emphases. Hale is a sympathetic guide to Kropotkin’s Darwinian exegetics, of which he produced a fair amount, all of it rooting mutual-aid Darwinism in Darwin’s own work.
[...] As a scientific-political programme, the deliberate breeding of better humans or, as it came to be known, “eugenics” – another period neologism, introduced by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton in 1883 – never recovered from its association with the Nazi death camps. Until then, however, it had enjoyed broad appeal across the political spectrum. In Britain, members of the Malthusian Left who gathered in the Fabian Society, including Shaw, Wells, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, were among the earliest supporters. Their preferred means for bringing about a eugenic future was education.
The historical lesson many have drawn is that eugenics, however well intentioned, is inevitably coercive and ultimately murderous. But that is not the only possible lesson, and maybe not the best one. In 1996, after a year spent with the Human Genome Project at the behest of the US Library of Congress, the philosopher Philip Kitcher published a remarkable book, "The Lives To Come", arguing that, whether we like it or not, the genetic technologies now available make eugenics inescapable, so the choice we face is about the kind of eugenics we have. In Kitcher’s view, the Nazis showed in extremis what not to do, while the Fabians offer more positive inspiration. Better, Kitcher suggests, to teach young people how to think through the social consequences of their reproductive choices, in a society committed to realizing human potential to the full, than to collude with the present regime of “laissez-faire eugenics”, in which those with enough money can buy whatever genetic improvements they can afford, and the rest can fend for themselves....
EXCERPTS: [...] H . G. Wells only makes an appearance towards the end of "Political Descent". But no one in the book more fully justifies the pun in Piers Hale’s title, or his claim that the Victorian debate on Darwinism and politics should be understood through two of its subsidiary questions. One was whether or not to believe in a “struggle for existence”, born of the chronic overpopulation that the Revd Thomas Robert Malthus described in his "Essay on the Principle of Population" (1798). It was Charles Darwin who brought Malthus’s principle squarely into debates over evolution. On Darwin’s theory of natural selection, nature is in perpetual Malthusian crisis, with survival a matter of the smallest inborn differences which, by chance, make some individuals that little bit better adapted to their environments. Because Malthus had offered his Essay as a conservative rebuke to the utopian thinkers of his day, Malthusian doctrine had been controversial from the first. The politics of Malthusianism became, through Darwin’s "On the Origin of Species" (1859), part of the politics of evolution.
The other question concerned the kind of inheritance known as “Lamarckian”, after the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, though it was neither original nor very important to him. Under Lamarckian inheritance, improvements made or impairments suffered owing to a changing environment during an individual’s lifetime are passed on to their offspring. Darwin accepted Lamarckian inheritance, seeing it as sometimes bringing about changes in conjunction with natural selection, and sometimes as acting independently of it. But the period after Darwin’s death in 1882 saw a new polarization. To be Lamarckian was increasingly to uphold not merely the reality of the inheritance of acquired characters but the rapidity of Lamarckian as against Darwinian evolution, and also to stress the uplifting nature of a process driven by the activity of the organism. To be Darwinian increasingly included expressing serious doubts about Lamarckian inheritance, together with the insistence that some are born to win and some to lose, with progress coming but slowly, and degeneration an ever-present threat.
Over the course of the 1890s, the young Wells – then just making his name as a jobbing science journalist and fiction writer in London – became a committed Malthusian and anti-Lamarckian. It was his immersion in socialist London from the late 1880s onwards, however, that made those choices seem decisive.
[...] The placing of Wells in [...] socialist-Darwinian London illuminates [...] In another sense, though, Wells presents something of a problem for Hale’s thesis. "Political Descent" purports to document the continuation into the second half of the nineteenth century of the radical, Lamarckian, anti-Malthusian polemics that, according to Adrian Desmond in "The Politics of Evolution" (1989), characterized the first half of the century. Where a reader of Desmond might assume those polemics to have expired with the triumph of capitalism-friendly Darwinism, Hale shows, to the contrary, how they took on new life within Darwinism. Consider, for example, the following passage, quoted by Hale from Justice, the newspaper of the Marx-inspired Social Democratic Federation, in 1888: “Every discovery in Science, every invention of mankind, has been seized upon by the bourgeoisie to delude and exploit the proletariat . . . . In a like manner the bourgeoisie accept the teachings of Malthus and pervert those of Darwin to bolster up the tottering fabric of society today, and they steal from the armoury of the evolutionist weapons which they use in their own defence.”
[...] The best parts of "Political Descent" add up to a revelatory group portrait of socialist-Darwinian London of the 1880s and 90s. But they occupy just three of the book’s seven long chapters. The other chapters, concentrating on Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Huxley and Kropotkin, will strike anyone familiar with earlier historical writing on them as mostly going over old ground, though with some striking omissions and unpersuasive emphases. Hale is a sympathetic guide to Kropotkin’s Darwinian exegetics, of which he produced a fair amount, all of it rooting mutual-aid Darwinism in Darwin’s own work.
[...] As a scientific-political programme, the deliberate breeding of better humans or, as it came to be known, “eugenics” – another period neologism, introduced by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton in 1883 – never recovered from its association with the Nazi death camps. Until then, however, it had enjoyed broad appeal across the political spectrum. In Britain, members of the Malthusian Left who gathered in the Fabian Society, including Shaw, Wells, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, were among the earliest supporters. Their preferred means for bringing about a eugenic future was education.
The historical lesson many have drawn is that eugenics, however well intentioned, is inevitably coercive and ultimately murderous. But that is not the only possible lesson, and maybe not the best one. In 1996, after a year spent with the Human Genome Project at the behest of the US Library of Congress, the philosopher Philip Kitcher published a remarkable book, "The Lives To Come", arguing that, whether we like it or not, the genetic technologies now available make eugenics inescapable, so the choice we face is about the kind of eugenics we have. In Kitcher’s view, the Nazis showed in extremis what not to do, while the Fabians offer more positive inspiration. Better, Kitcher suggests, to teach young people how to think through the social consequences of their reproductive choices, in a society committed to realizing human potential to the full, than to collude with the present regime of “laissez-faire eugenics”, in which those with enough money can buy whatever genetic improvements they can afford, and the rest can fend for themselves....