Product Description

In the second decade of the twentieth century, an idea became all too fashionable among those who feel it is their right to set social trends. Wealthy families took it on as a pet cause, generously bankrolling its research. The New York Times praised it as a wonderful "new science." Scientists, such as the brilliant plant biologist, Luther Burbank, praised it unashamedly. Educators as prominent as Charles Elliot, President of Harvard University, promoted it as a solution to social ills. America's public schools did their part. In the 1920s, almost three-fourths of high school social science textbooks taught its principles. Not to be outdone, judges and physicians called for those principles to be enshrined into law. Congress agree, passing the 1924 immigration law to exclude from American shores the people of Eastern and Southern Europe that the idea branded as inferior. In 1927, the U. S. Supreme Court joined the chorus, ruling by a lopsided vote of 8 to 1 that the sterilization of unwilling men and women was constitutional.

That idea was eugenics and in the English-speaking world it had virtually no critics among the "chattering classes." When he wrote this book, Chesterton stood virtually alone against the intellectual world of his day. Yet to his eternal credit, he showed no sign of being intimidated by the prestige of his foes. On the contrary, he thunders against eugenics, ranking it one of the great evils of modern society. And, in perhaps one of the most chillingly accurate prophecies of the century, he warns that the ideas that eugenics had unleashed were likely to bear bitter fruit in another nation. That nation was Germany, the "very land of scientific culture from which the ideal of a Superman had come." In fact, the very group that Nazism tried to exterminate, Eastern European Jews, and the group it targeted for later extermination, the Slavs, were two of those whose biological unfitness eugenists sought so eagerly to confirm.

What are sometimes called the "excesses" of Nazism drove the open advocacy of eugenics underground. But there's little evidence that the elements of society who once trumpeted the idea have changed their mind. Dr. Alan Guttmacher provides a good example. The fact that he had been Vice-President of the American Eugenics Association was no hindrance to his assuming the Presidency of Planned Parenthood­World Population in 1962. And his seedy past did not keep Congress from providing millions of dollars in federal funds to Planned Parenthood. Nor did it stop the Supreme Court from carrying out the central item in Dr. Guttmacher's political agenda‹legalized abortion. Many of those who now admit that eugenics was evil have trouble explaining why so few of its advocates were every exposed and why so many are still honored.

As the title suggests, eugenics is not the only evil that Chesterton blasts. Socialism gets some brilliantly worded broadsides and Chesterton, in complete fairness, does not spare capitalism. He also attacks the scientifically justified regimentation that others call the "health police." The same rationalizations that justified eugenics, he notes, can also be used to deprive a working man of his beer or any man of his pipe. Although it was first published in 1922, there's a startling relevance to what Chesterton had to say about mettlesome bureaucrats who deprive life of its little pleasures and freedoms. His tale about an unfortunate man fired because "his old cherry-briar" "might set the water-works on fire" is priceless.

That tale illustrates Chesterton's brilliant use of humor, a knack his foes were quick to realize. In their review of his book, Birth Control News griped, "His tendency is reactionary, and as he succeeds in making most people laugh, his influence in the wrong direction is considerable. Eugenics Review was even blunter. "The only interest in this book," they said, "is pathological. It is a revelation of the ineptitude to which ignorance and blind prejudice may reduce an intelligent man."

History has been far kinder to Chesterton than to his critics. It's now generally agree that eugenics was born of evolution and the "ignorance and blind prejudice" of social elites. But never forget that Chesterton was the first to say so, condemning what many of his peers praised.

The completely new edition of Chesterton's classic includes almost fifty pages from the writings of Chesterton's opponents. They illustrate just how accurate his attacks on eugenists were. For researchers, it also includes a detailed, 13-page index.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #212811 in Books
• Published on: 2000-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 179 pages

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Eugenics
"There exists to-day a scheme of action, a school thought, as collective and unmistakable as any of those by whose grouping alone we can make any outline of history. . . . I know that it numbers many disciples whose intentions are entirely innocent and humane; and who would be sincerely astonished at my describing it as I do. But that is only because evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin. . . . But Eugenics itself does exist for those who have sense enough to see that ideas exist; and Eugenics itself, in large quantities or small, coming quickly or coming slowly, urged from good motives or bad, applied to a thousand people or applied to three, Eugenics itself is a thing no more to be bargained about than poisoning."

Institutionalizing the Unfit
"I will call it the Feeble-Minded Bill, both for brevity and because the description is strictly accurate. It is, quite simply and literally, a Bill for incarcerating as madmen those whom no doctor will consent to call mad. It is enough if some doctor or other may happen to call them weak-minded."

Forced sterilization
"Indeed one Eugenist, Mr. A. H. Huth, actually had a sense of humour, and admitted this. He thinks a great deal of good could be done with a surgical knife, if we would only turn him loose with one. And this may be true. A great deal of good could be done with a loaded revolver, in the hands of a judicious student of human nature."

The Tyranny of Science
"The thing that really is trying to tyrannise through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statutes, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen‹that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics."

Eugenic Motives
"There is no reason in Eugenics, but there is plenty of motive. Its supporters are highly vague about its theory, but they will be painfully practical about its practice. And while I reiterate that many of its more eloquent agents are probably quite innocent instruments, there are some, even among Eugenists, who by this time know what they are doing."

The Poor Man and his Child
"There is one human thing left it is much harder to take from him. Debased by him and his betters, it is still something brought out of Eden, where God made him a demigod: it does not depend on money and but little on time. He can create in his own image. The terrible truth is in the heart of a hundred legends and mysteries. As Jupiter could be hidden from all-devouring Time, as the Christ Child could be hidden from Herod‹so the child unborn is still hidden from the omniscient oppressor. He who lives not yet, he and he alone is left; and they seek his life to take it away."

The Rich Begin To Fear the Poor
"So at least it seemed, doubtless in a great degree subconsciously, to the man who had wagered all his wealth on the usefulness of the poor to the rich and the dependence of the rich on the poor. The time came at last when the rather reckless breeding in the abyss below ceased to be a supply, and began to be something like a wastage; ceased to be something like keeping foxhounds, and began alarmingly to resemble a necessity of shooting foxes."

Scientific Regimentation
"That is the problem, and that is why there is now no protection against Eugenic or any other experiments. If the men who took away beer as an unlawful pleasure had paused for a moment to define the lawful pleasures, there might be a different situation. If the men who had denied one liberty had taken the opportunity to affirm other liberties, there might be some defence for them. But it never occurs to them to admit any liberties at all. It never so much as crosses their minds. Hence the excuse for the last oppression will always serve as well for the next oppression; and to that tyranny there can be no end."

Socialism
"In short, people decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad. All that official discipline, about which the Socialists themselves were in doubt or at least on the defensive, was taken over bodily by the Capitalists. They have now added all the bureaucratic tyrannies of a Socialist state to the old plutocratic tyrannies of a Capitalist State."

The Working Classes
"The working classes have no reserves of property with which to defend their relics of religion. They have no religion with which to sanctify and dignify their property. Above all, they are under the enormous disadvantage of being right without knowing it. They hold their sound principles as if they were sullen prejudices. They almost secrete their small property as if it were stolen property. Often a poor woman will tell a magistrate that she sticks to her husband, with the defiant and desperate air of a wanton resolved to run away from her husband. Often she will cry as hopelessly, and as it were helplessly, when deprived of her child as if she were a child deprived of her doll."

Customer Reviews

A brilliant and chilling warning
This masterpiece gravely addresses the dangers of scientism and genocide while still maintaining Chesterton's trademark wit and humor. Not only did Chesterton predict the Holocaust years before it happened, but he also provided a blueprint as to how such inhumanity could have been prevented. This book both promotes enlightenment and sparks controversy.

The Evils of the Scientifically Managed State.
In the book _Eugenics and Other Evils_, Roman Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton takes on the eugenists and their immoral and unethical program for human breeding. At the time, eugenists (among both the Social Darwinist "Right" and the Socialist Left) proposed various methods for interfering with human breeding to promote a social agenda and impact the human population. One form of eugenics, referred to as "positive eugenics", sought to increase the birthrate of the "fit" (mainly the upper, educated classes) through incentive programs. Another form of eugenics, referred to as "negative eugenics", sought to decrease the birthrate of the "unfit" (mainly the lower classes, the "mentally feeble", and chronically ill populations) through birth control (or even more diabolical means, later on, such as abortion or euthanasia). Chesterton takes on both forms of eugenics as well as the "birth controllers", both of whom planned on limiting the rights of those deemed "mentally feeble" to procreate, and shows through a series of paradoxes exactly how immoral, unethical, and downright mean their program is. Chesterton's condemnations of this program are consistent with his Roman Catholic beliefs and the condemnation of both eugenics and birth control by subsequent popes. It is for this reason that many involved in the birth control movement came to label Chesterton as a "deeply reactionary man" who stood in the way of progress. In his book _The Servile State_, Chesterton's friend and fellow writer Hilaire Belloc notes how society is progressing in a direction towards servility, in which more and more will work for less and less, collectively losing their liberties. Belloc contrasted this state of affairs to the current capitalist state (run according to the principles of competition and greed, amounting to plutocracy) and that state dreamed up by socialist reformers (calling for the elimination of property rights, and thus a complete suppression of liberty), both of which Belloc regarded as immoral and un-Christian. As an alternative, Belloc proposed a "distributivist state" which would allow for mass ownership of private property and the means of production, while curtailing the evils of monopoly capitalism run amok. Like Belloc, Chesterton too advocates a distributivist state, championing property while at the same time pointing to the excesses of monopoly capitalism and plutocracy-oligarchy. In addition, Chesterton notes that while the "servile state" is upon us, so is the "eugenic state" in which the right to marriage and procreation will be limited by the elite controllers within the state. Chesterton points out how diabolical and grossly unfair this situation is, with plenty of recourse to his usual writing style and witticism. As Chesterton notes, within the current state of affairs, those among the lower classes and the poor do not stand a chance, their rights to property being denied them (contrary to the situation that existed within the Middle Ages, where a serf could at least maintain a right to property), and are often imprisoned unfairly or abused by the system. Chesterton sees within the eugenics movement another form of abuse (particularly of the poor and those deemed "feeble minded"). Indeed, much of this book is spent critiquing various legislative actions taken against the so called "feeble minded", which Chesterton shows to be a term without meaning, being used merely as a slur against certain unpopular and not well liked individuals among the lower classes. To explain the rise of eugenics Chesterton examines the social Darwinist views of the capitalist class. As Chesterton notes, many of those in the highest class have swung full spectrum from the Socialist Left to the extreme "Right" as they accumulate wealth and advance plutocracy. In America, robber barons such as Rockefeller notoriously funded the eugenics movement, in an attempt to further his power and as Chesterton cynically notes to provide workers for his business. Indeed, the documented evidence against Rockefeller's involvement in such immoralities is enormous and certainly merits additional study. While many of those who supported eugenics (and especially birth control) consisted of those among the Socialist Left, Chesterton notes that these individuals remain largely dupes to their elite controllers, as well as radical feminists who fail to understand the true virtues of womanhood. Certainly these radical feminists (almost entirely composed of women from the upper classes, coincidentally) do not represent the vast majority of the female race, who are certainly not opposed to motherhood, whether or not they personally desire to become mothers themselves. These sorts of observations of Chesterton would prove especially prescient, especially in light of the events that were to come during the Second World War (as well as the evils of the Soviet state bureaucracy) and the modern day legalization of abortion and proliferation of birth control methods. While eugenists maintain that they are champions of the poor or of the unborn child, as Chesterton shows they are merely evil individuals among the elite classes whose sole interest is limiting the growth of "undesirable" elements within society, or alarmist Malthusians. This essay of Chesterton reveals him as a champion of liberty and individualism against the encroaching influence of a maleficent state, under the control of elite plutocrats, as well as a compassionate individual who truly cares for the human person. The book ends with a series of compiled pieces from various eugenics journals and birth control writers, noting their diabolical features as well as their arrogant criticism of Chesterton and Belloc.

A Great Book: In reply to John Wright's Review
This negative review of Eugenics and Other Evils and its attack on Chesterton is all wrong. Chesterton understood "political economy" and other sterilizing Benthamite ideas all too well. Capitalism is ultimately anti-God, anti-Christian and evil, just as evil as atheistic Communism/Socialism. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc both advocated a distributivistic economy with private property, small owners and less wage workers. (Cheap labor, i.e., illegal and legal Mexican immigrants, does keep wages down and increases the proportion of the dispossesed in society. Why are all the high skilled computer jobs going overseas? Are we all going to be wage workers at Wal Mart?) Chesterton understood that the usury that enables massive growth is also ultimately dehumanizing for larger and larger segments of the population. Mad science and technology represented in part by Eugenics and today's human genome project (both originiating in the US at the Cold Spring Harbor lab. Hitler modeled his eugenics program after laws on the books in the Southern US prior to WWII) is rigourously controlled from top down to potentially serve the elite at the expense of you and me. History truly is a struggle against good and evil. Bentham and the elites of his day understood this and spent a lot of time devising clever ways the privileged few could keep an eye on the rest of us. Bentham's scientific Panopticon is implemented throughout society today (unconstitutional "temporary" federal income tax, licenses for everything, national id cards, color coded security risks, security cameras, smart shopping cards, rising prison populations, three-strikes laws, KNOWING OUR DNA/GENETIC MAKEUP) and defended by the likes of the anti-Chesterton's of this world. I have a feeling many libertarians deep down understand this but their hatred of humanity and self leads them to a hatred of God and prevents them from joining the good fight.