▶︎ 0:00 Now we're going to come to part of the heart of the course. We're going to look at the rise of this scientific discourse of degeneration, what we call degeneration theory. But I want to make a little point here. The course is called the Biology of Evil. Now, of course, a lot of the scientific people that we'll be looking at actually didn't like to use the term evil.
▶︎ 0:22 For instance, later on, we're going to look at the famous Italian criminologist, Cesare Lombroso. He would not have been happy with the notion of evil. Why? Because it's a moral religious notion, and people in the 19th century, where science was the model of knowledge, eschewed. They wanted to avoid this framework of religiosity of this moral religious background. So, they wouldn't be too happy talking about evil.
▶︎ 0:49 Why do I do it? Because when they talk about degenerates, for example, when they use medical notions of degeneracy, which is what we're going to do next, they basically thought that degeneracy is something that ought not to exist. It's that normative element. So, think about what is normatively essential to evil. What is normatively essential to evil is it is that which ought not to exist. And inasmuch as these writers treated the degenerates as those that ought not to exist, they've just got a secularized notion of evil.
▶︎ 1:22 So, I've always been open in this course to the objection, "Oh, well, the very people you talk about didn't want to use the word 'evil.'" For instance, Charles Darwin wouldn't have been happy using it. But nevertheless, they were talking about that which ought not to exist. So, for me, it's just a secularization of the notion of evil.
▶︎ 1:38 I'm going to give you some background of some of the key figures of degeneration theory. Darwin will be the one name you know, of course, the father of modern evolutionary theory, but I'm going to talk about others, who are very, very important.
▶︎ 1:52 We'll start with Charles Pinel, who wrote, I'll just say it in English rather than say it in French, A Treatise on Insanity, which started talking about mental illness, mental problems as an illness. Before, mental illness was seen as maybe possession of the devil or something like that, or possession by spirits. But he was the first. He's often considered one of the fathers of modern psychiatry.
▶︎ 2:20 This book of his, on mental insanity, Treatise on Insanity of 1806, was treating insanity as a medical condition, and he wanted to explain it in psychological terms rather than spiritual, religious terms.
▶︎ 2:34 The next figure I want to mention is Benedict Morel. He's very, very famous because he wrote this book in 1857 called Treatise on the Physical, Intellectual, and Moral Degeneration of the Human Species and the Causes That Produce These Various Maladies. This was done in 1857, and if you read any books on degeneration theory, Morel is seen as the father of degeneration theory. He was mainly dealing with people we, well, what he called cretinism, today, we'd call them people with cerebral palsy. And he, following Pinel, was trying to just explain it not in religious spiritual terms, but in medical terms.
▶︎ 3:19 He was actually a director of an asylum near the French town of Rouen, which had a very big industrial segment to that town with a lot of urban poor. And he actually said, these cerebral palsy children he was dealing with, mainly children, was due to some kind of degeneration, which he put down to hereditary and environmental factors. He actually gained notoriety, this is a bit of aside, because he wrote a very famous report, I think, yes, it was in 1857, on a very famous case. There was this chap called de Ruzia who had committed all these kind of thefts, mainly thefts from churches of religious objects, and when in prison, this de Ruzia character started showing symptoms of mental illness and madness.
▶︎ 4:10 And when asked his age, he'd say crazy things, like he was asked his age, he'd reply, "245 francs, 35 centimeters, 124 carriages to go, 35 million. I was not rich, I only had that." So, he gave these totally insane answers. The reason I want to do this is because I want you to look at what Morel said about him, because Morel said he was faking. He said, this is what he said, and he said de Ruzia is faking madness to get out of being sent to prison or kept in prison.
▶︎ 4:42 "In their most extravagant wanderings, their most furious deliria, the insane do not confuse what even logic carried to its furthest consequence cannot possibly confuse. There is no insane person who does not have the idea of cause, the idea of substance, and the idea of being. Ask the most delirious patient his age, and he might answer 6,000 years or six months. There are some who will answer that they have no age, because they think they are dead. But even the most incoherent person will not respond to a question regarding his age, as de Ruzia did with 245 francs, 35 centimeters. The reason for this is simple. The insane, in that he remains a member of the human family, stands not beyond the laws which rule human thinking, the very thought itself which misleads him can only be thought in certain determined factors."
▶︎ 5:37 And what I want to show here is this is a reference to certain Kantian ideas that humans, by their very nature, have to think in terms of cause, have to think in terms of effect, have to think in terms of substance, et cetera. And these Kantian ideas had a big, big influence in the 19th century world, and really, these became like an ideal and a norm, that it's a norm of a rational being to think in these terminologies.
▶︎ 6:10 And then we're going to see how this got applied to degenerates, who were seen as somehow removed from this normal discourse. I should add also that it becomes characterized that this normal discourse, to think in these normal rational categories, as Kant would call them, were seen as more the province of men than of women. But we'll come more onto that later.
▶︎ 6:35 In his treatise on degeneration, the one from 1857 that really started the whole rhetoric of degeneration, he attributed cretinism, what we'd call cerebral palsy, to hereditary factors, what he called certain organic disposition, and environment and social factors, including slums and alcoholism. He was actually a fervent Catholic. He was not a Darwinist. And he believed that species were fixed in a certain way. We'll find out how subsequent writers were more, let's say, not so stringent in this idea of fixed species.
▶︎ 7:12 But what he did believe is he believed in the progress of degeneration from family to family. So he'd say these various factors such as environment or alcoholism, substance abuse we would say today, they would lead to a disturbance of the blood, or sometimes they talked, he didn't, but others of his ilk did, talked about plasma. They didn't have the notion of gene. And that would be passed on from generation to generation. So he started this fear that this degenerate element could be passed on to future generations.
▶︎ 7:46 One more thing I need to introduce before we come to Darwin, because Darwin is an absolutely seminal figure in the talk on degeneration, is the notion of atavism or sometimes called reversion. This was very popularized by the Italian we're gonna come to later on, Cesare Lombroso. But the idea is that it's possible, and Darwin believed this, for certain members of our species to revert to an earlier form of the species. Well, that's very closely related to degeneration.
▶︎ 8:19 In fact, atavism was typically seen as a corollary of the notion of degeneration, and it was seen particularly in terms of something very famously publicized by the German philosopher, scientist Haeckel. Haeckel said very famously, "Ontogeny is a recapitulation of phylogeny." That is, he says, "The history of the fetus is a recapitulation of the history of the race." Or in other words, ontogeny is a recapitulation of phylogeny. He said, quote, "It may be more fully stated as follows, the series of forms through which the individual organism passes during its development from the ovum to the complete body structure is a brief condensed repetition of the long series of forms, which ancestors of this said organism had."
▶︎ 9:09 So the idea is that, in each fetus is recapitulated the full development of mankind. And this feeds into this notion of atavism. What if there are certain fetuses who don't develop the whole way, who represent a regression, an atavistic regression to an earlier stage? So this notion of the possibility of atavism was introduced into the scientific and medical world in the mid-19th century through people like Morel, through people like Haeckel, and also through Darwin.
▶︎ 9:42 Another and very important figure totally forgotten today is Carl Vogt, who Darwin quotes approvingly. Carl Vogt in 1864 published, I'll say it in English, Lectures on Man. And he actually claimed that different races are descended from different species of apes. What's really important for Vogt is that he used all this data about crania, heads basically, measurements of heads of skulls, and he made various claims, for instance, about various races.
▶︎ 10:19 Normally when I'm teaching this, I have this list of races, Europeans at the top, Americans, blah, blah, blah. Then it's American Indians and down the bottom, there's Australian Aboriginals is the lowest in terms of cranial size. And then I tell the class, "Well, you're being taught by an Australian." Me, I'm from Australia. That aside, anyhow, what Vogt did is he introduced this idea that skull size is relevant to intelligence. And he did all this measuring stuff.
▶︎ 10:51 This progressed well into the 20th century. In fact, famously in my old university, Yale, there were people in the 20th century who were taking skull size measurements of students to correlate various data that they thought was probative in various ways. So the interesting thing about Vogt is, yes, he did all these measurements of skulls and compared skulls of different races and made various hierarchies. And you can imagine exactly what they are, as I say, Blacks, American Indians and Australian Aboriginals are down the bottom, White Europeans are at the top.
▶︎ 11:22 But he also made the same observation about women. So he was giving a biological account of difference. And here I'll quote from him, he quotes another scientist called Wechsler. He says, "Wechsler justly observes that the skulls of man and woman are to be separated as if they
▶︎ 11:41 belonged to two different species. And they differ in their proportions more than many typical or race skulls." So he's saying there's a fundamental biological difference between men and women, such that they belong, they could be said to belong to different species. Remember I said earlier, the notion of species was not that clear in the 19th century as it is today.
▶︎ 12:04 And here, and I think you'll have an echo of this from the previous lecture, "We may therefore say that the type of the female skull approaches in many respects that of the infant." "And still in greater degree that of the lower races." So there's this kind of identification of women as not fully developed men. Think back to Aristotle. Women basically are at the same level of infants. They haven't done the full development.
▶︎ 12:32 And then he draws a moral conclusion. He says, this is, again, Carl Vogt, who was very influential and very positively cited by Darwin. He's an extremely respected scientist of his day. "In respect of morals, a woman is a conservator of old customs and usages, of traditions, legends, and religions." In other words, she belongs to the world of superstition. "So that in the material world, she preserves primitive forms, atavism, but slowly, and only slowly yields to the influence of civilization."
▶︎ 13:05 And a last quotation from Vogt, Carl Vogt. "In the same manner, woman preserves in the formation of the head, the earliest stage from which the race or tribe has developed." In other words, a woman is an example of atavism, of regression to the primitive state, "or into which it has relapsed. Hence, then is partly explained the fact that the inequality of the sexes increases with the progress of civilization." And I'll leave out the last part of the quote.
▶︎ 13:35 So here, we get this biological examination of crania, of head sizes, of skulls, and giving a biological explanation of why women represent a primitive stage of development. And so here you see a very big emphasis on a biological account of difference. Now we're gonna come to Darwin.
▶︎ 13:57 Now look, why is Darwin really important. I don't want you to go away and say Darwin was a degenerationist. That is totally unfair to him for reasons I will come to. But Darwin combined with the work of Morel and this fear of reversion, the fear of atavism, this fear of degeneracy, it was like a bloody powder keg. It was like an explosion.
▶︎ 14:21 Because Darwin with his evolutionary theory says we're not seeing the unfolding of God's given plan. We're not seeing the unfolding of Descartes' natural light, of Kant's reason. We are a series of accidents, and we are formed by our environments. There's no natural definite progress to be had that is guaranteed progress, as it is in the Christian worldview, or as it is in the Kantian view or the view of the light of reason spreading out. We are the products of our environments, and certain environments can actually select in a negative way. At least that's how a lot of people develop Darwin.
▶︎ 15:02 And so as evolution view, theory became more popular and we thought less and less that there's a teleological, that there's a plan being developed, the plan of abstract reason, God's plan or whatever, that there are accidents that form us. Well, if the right accidents or the wrong accidents comes, couldn't we revert? Couldn't we go back to a primitive stage? And that worry becomes pathological at a certain point.
▶︎ 15:28 Darwin's famous work is The Origin of the Species, but the book we'll really be referring to is, he wrote a second book called The Descent of Man. When he originally did his theory of evolution, he was very careful not to talk about humans because he realized how damn controversial it'll be. But in The Descent of Man, he tries to extend his theories to human. And he actually favorably cites Vogt, this one I told you about, about the craniology in page one, and then he says of Haeckel, the one who said ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that is the development of the individual recapitulates the development of the species, he says of his book, "If this work had appeared before my essay had been written, I should never have completed it. Almost all the conclusions at which I have arrived, I find confirmed in this naturalist."
▶︎ 16:21 So just, what I'm trying to, for you to clock is that the people I've been talking about were not some crazy scientists who were not appreciated in the time, they were totally mainstream. So on page 37 of Descent of Man, Darwin starts talking about this notion of reversion. He says, I quote, "Certain structures regular occurring in the lower members of the group to which man belongs occasionally make their reappearance in him, though not in the normal human embryo." So he's saying it's possible for certain, in certain cases of the embryo that it reverts to a more primitive type.
▶︎ 16:58 This is gonna start introducing this worry by people who take some of Darwin's ideas and run with them, that maybe the environment is degraded. Remember, Morel talked about pollution very early on. He said degrading by industrial environments is doing something to us at a basic biological level, and maybe that means we're going to revert to a more primitive state. And here, I'll quote again from Darwin, from Descent of Man. "But the principle of reversion, by which a long lost structure is called back into existent, might serve as a guide for full development, even after the lapse of an enormous interval of time."
▶︎ 17:34 So you see the worry. The worry is that if the environment is degraded in some way or for whatever reason, we might revert to a more primitive state. Remember when we were going back to the first lecture, I said Aristotle may have thought of females as incomplete males, as somehow inferior. He never exhibited the worry of us becoming female. But here you see the worry of us reverting in various ways, bit from Darwin's Descent of Man.
▶︎ 18:07 This is from a section on the development of the intellectual and moral faculties. And there he claims that intellectual and moral faculties are a product of inheritance, vary, and variations tend to be inherited. Here's the worry, that if there's a change, if there's a moral degradation, it can be inherited to the next generation.
▶︎ 18:28 Remember, that was the worry about these degenerates that Morel had, that they will produce degenerate children. One thing I should say about Darwin, that anyone who works on evolutionary theory knows this, Darwin was not a complete Darwinian. What I mean by that is that one of the biggest theories that was around before Darwin was Lamarckism. A key to the modern notion of Darwinism, with one little exception, is that inherited characteristics aren't passed on. Whereas Lamarck, this biologist who was writing much earlier than Darwin, thought inherited characteristics could be. That is, you could not have a characteristic in your biology, you could develop it, and then it would be passed onto your children.
▶︎ 19:13 Like the famous cases, giraffe was only such and such a size, but he stretched to get the higher leaves, lengthened his neck, and then his children would have it. Well, current Darwinism doesn't like that notion of the inheritance of what they called acquired characteristics. A new characteristic comes because of a mutation at the cellular level, and then if it's the right kind of mutation with the right cellular dominance, then it will be passed onto subsequent generation. But Darwin himself had a fair amount of Lamarckism.
▶︎ 19:45 I should add that Lamarckism is also making a reappearance in modern biology because of the work of Richard Dawkins, because he talks about memes. Now a meme is something acquired. It can be an idea like a catchy pop song. And he says that can infect, being passed on by education from generation to generation. So Darwin's ideas of acquired characteristics being passed on is making a reappearance. But what Dawkins doesn't say is that biologically acquired characteristics, like stretching your neck, could be passed on. But there was this worry about what does and doesn't get passed on.
▶︎ 20:25 Darwin did think that, said, "It's highly probable that with mankind, intellectual faculties have been mainly and gradually perfected through natural selection." So environment has developed us in our intellectual faculties. Now I'm going to read this passage. It's often referred to as the purple passage in Darwin's Descent of Man, and it's often quo-. People who are interested in tarring Darwin say, "Oh, and he was a degenerationist too." Some people have even suggested the canceling of Darwin. I don't think that's right, but this is the passage, and I want you to listen to it carefully.
▶︎ 21:01 "With savages, the weakened body or mind are soon eliminated, and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick. We institute poor laws, and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formally have succumbed to smallpox. Thus, the weak members of the civilized societies propagate their kind."
▶︎ 21:45 Key passage, "No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care or care wrongly directed leads to the degeneration of a domestic race. But excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."
▶︎ 22:13 It's a very, very strong passage, and you can see the fear it has. It says, "Oh, we modern people with our social laws, with our trying to help the worst off, we're letting them breed, and pretty soon they will swamp the race." And this got taken up a hell of a lot by his cousin.
▶︎ 22:33 His cousin was a man called Galton, who actually coined the word eugenics. Eugenics is about getting the best to breed and trying to suppress the worst from breeding. And eugenics is fueled by this notion that as mankind progresses, the worst get to reproduce themselves at a greater rate than the best, and eventually they'll swamp out the best. He wrote a very famous book called Hereditary Genius, and this is from Galton's book, Hereditary Genius. He was Darwin's first cousin.
▶︎ 23:08 This is from Galton: "Consequently, as it is easy, notwithstanding those limitations to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running or of doing anything else, so would it be quite practical to produce a highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations. I shall show that the social agencies of an ordinary character, whose influence are little suspected, are at this moment working towards the degeneration of human nature, and that others are working towards its improvement."
▶︎ 23:45 So Galton is this very famous British father of the modern science of eugenics, and he was very interested in trying to get Parliament to pass laws to discourage basically poor people, I have to say, from breeding, so-called morally inferior people, and trying to get middle class, morally superior people to breed, because he was saying, and part of this fear in the 19th century is Victorian England, when the middle and upper classes are seeing the working poor and thinking, "They're proliferating like rabbits, and they are going to swamp us." But there was a worry that we are all going to be swamped by degenerates.
▶︎ 24:21 So the second last paragraph of Descent of Man, and here you can really see the influence of his cousin Galton, recapitulates this worry about degeneration. This is from Darwin, Descent of Man: "The advancement of the welfare of mankind is a most intricate problem. All ought to refrain from marriage who cannot avoid abject poverty for their children, for poverty is not only a great evil." Funny that he uses that religious moral term. "But tends to its own increase by leading to recklessness in marriage. On the other hand, as Mr. Galton has remarked, if the prudent avoid marriage while the reckless marry, the inferior members tend to supplant they will tend to supplant the better members of society."
▶︎ 25:05 So here's the worry, that they degenerate breed like flies, whereas the middle class, as we might think of them, are more careful. They will be swamped. So you might think Darwin himself was a kind of eugenicist and that he was really propagating this theory of degeneration with its intendant politics of suppression of the working class, suppression of so-called degenerates, suppression of the alleged inferiors. And it is true that a lot of Darwin's children and grandchildren became heavily involved in the British eugenics movement that was started by Galton, where they were trying to influence Parliament to actually discourage certain people from having children and encourage others. And also, they were interested in isolating people who were seen as, for instance, so-called moral imbeciles, who were meant to be put aside so that they couldn't breed and lead to the degeneration of the race.
▶︎ 26:06 But there is a key point that marks Darwin off from all of the degenerationists. And that is, Darwin laid an incredible emphasis on the importance of compassion. Now all the degenerationists were really, really suspicious of compassion. Why? Because if you're compassionate, then you're going to say, "Well, we should care for those worse off than us. We should try to improve them." And Darwin was always in favor of compassion.
▶︎ 26:37 So even though he had made this degenerationist noise, he didn't do the crucial step, which so many people who were involved in the eugenics movement and involved in the rhetoric of degeneration did. They said, "We need to kill our compassion because it's our compassion that allows us to tolerate the worst dogs, the worst horses," in that previous quote. "We wouldn't let the worst horses or the worst dogs breed, but we're letting that happen with humans." But it was Darwin, because Darwin always emphasized compassion, that he can't be really seen as a degenerationist.
▶︎ 27:10 And there's actually a passage, which I don't seem to have the quotation here for, where he actually said that if we were to try to dampen the natural human tendency towards compassion, while that could have some good effects, in the end it would have more ill effects than good. Sorry, I don't have the passage available. Maybe it'll come at the end of the lectures.
▶︎ 27:31 Darwin obviously influenced a lot of people, mainly through the theory of evolution, but these passages of his, the purple passage, where he talks about what happens if the worst members of the race breed and breed at largely greater rates than the best members. And so a lot of people ran with this. There were newspaper articles of this, especially in Britain, about the coming degeneration of the race. There were lots of treaties written on it, one, a very famous one by Lancaster. I'm surprised I don't have the quote here. It also had a huge influence in the US.
▶︎ 28:06 Generally in this course I try not to talk about the US. It's mainly Europeans. But very famously, in 1924, this is very relevant to America, they passed the Johnson-Reed Act, which served severely to restrict the immigration of certain races, basically Eastern and Southern Europeans and Jews. They didn't want them, because they said, "These people are of an inferior stock. They come in. They'll breed. They'll have more children, and they'll lead to the degeneration."
▶︎ 28:35 There's a very famous eugenicist, very influenced by Galton, Henry Laughlin, who's one of the most influential eugenicists of the 20th century. Very interesting, and a lot of people don't know this. Laughlin wrote what was called the Model Eugenics Law, which allowed for the sterilization of so-called undesirables, and it was adopted by 32 states. And it's very interesting that when Hitler came into power in Germany in 1932, one of the first things he did is he did certain laws to stop certain people from breeding, people with cerebral palsy, handicapped people, people who were blind, people who had certain diseases, et cetera.
▶︎ 29:18 Why could he do the law straightaway? Because he had Laughlin's model law. It had already been translated in Germany. The thing about the model law is because it was made, each state could adopt it, and it had slots where you could slot in the peculiarities of your states. He just put in the peculiarities of German, and hey, he had an instant law that led to the sterilizations of thousands.
▶︎ 29:40 And this is part of Laughlin's testimony, and Laughlin was very important for the instituting of this law, the so-called Johnson-Reed Immigration Law, which tried to, it basically encouraged immigrants from the good countries, as Trump calls them, Norway, the Scandinavian ones, and discouraged immigration from Southern Europe and from Jews. He said, "We, in this country, have been so imbued with the idea of democracy, or the equality of all men," good Enlightenment ideas, "that we have left out of consideration the matter of blood, or natural inborn hereditary mental and moral differences. No man who breeds pedigreed plants and animals can afford to neglect this thing, as you know. But in adding to our human breeding stock by immigration, this is what we do. We keep out fairly well the individual feeble-minded immigrant, but because we have ignored inborn quality when the next generation arrives. The children of immigrants make a very poor showing by being relatively very numerous in this particular type of degeneracy."
▶︎ 30:47 So what Laughlin was always, he was already warning there that we're letting in all these strange, southern Mediterranean people, we're letting in these Jews, and it's going to destroy the American race. I should add, again, it's more the American experience,
▶︎ 31:02 But it had a big effect on Europe. There's a chap who's forgotten now, he's very patrician, lived in New York, Madison Grant, and he wrote a book called The Passing of the Great Race. And Madison Grant, very imbued in the literature of degeneracy and eugenics, writing in the early, I think Passing of the Great Race was in the 1920s. He wrote it, and he said there, he divided Europe into three areas.
▶︎ 31:29 There's the Alpine, sorry, there's a northern region, basically the Scandinavian countries, Denmark and Northern Germany. They're number one. Then there are the alpine people. That's Southern Germany, Austria, Switzerland, et cetera. They're pretty good. And then there are the Mediterranean people. They're the lowest of the lows.
▶︎ 31:51 And he, in The Passing of the Great Race, he said originally he claimed America was more populated by these northern types, but now in the early 20th century, we're letting in these people from Southern Europe, these people from the Mediterranean, and it's leading to a degeneration of the race in America. Now, the interesting thing is that I won't tell the full story, but the punchline without, I'll leave some of the humorous parts out. The punchline is that Hitler read this book and he called it his Bible. He even wrote to Madison Grant saying how important this book is.
▶︎ 32:30 So a lot of people don't know that the idea of eugenics traveled through Galton, partially through Darwin, to America, to people like Madison Grant and Hugh Laughlin, and then on to Germany. America was there first, and in fact, America had some of the most earliest sterilization laws, but I might come to that later.
▶︎ 32:49 I'm going to quote one more to show how these Darwinist, eugenicist ideas came to dominate, and this is from Theodore Roosevelt, written in 1913. "I agree with you..." He's talking to Charles Davenport, who was Laughlin's mentor and employer. "If you mean, I suppose, as you do, that society is no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind. It is really extraordinary that our people refuse to apply to human beings such elementary knowledge as every successful farmer is obliged to apply to his own stock breeding. Any groups of farmers who permitted their best stock not to breed and let all increase come from the worst stock would be treated as fit inmates for an asylum."
▶︎ 33:39 You see, the absolute echoing of what Darwin said. You see how influential the ideas are.
▶︎ 33:46 And I'll go back to Darwin. I want to talk about his fear of the possibility of reversion, and here's a passage which really reflects it, where he talks about if we don't take measures to, quote, "Prevent the reckless, the vicious, and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will retrograde as too often occurred in history of the world. We must remember that progress is no invariable rule. It is very difficult to say why one civilized nation rises, becomes more powerful, and spreads more widely than another, or why the same nation progresses more quickly at one time than another. We can only say that it depends on an increase in the actual number of the population, on the number of men endowed with high intellectual and moral facilities, as well as their standard of excellence."
▶︎ 34:42 So what you see there is, and remember, this is counter the enlightenment rhetoric of people like Kant and Descartes. They always thought that reason is something that becomes further and further as a light cone spreads and takes in more of us. Darwin raises this possibility saying progress is not inevitable. That is the chief influence, you might say, of Darwin in the 20th century. Obviously there's a theory of evolution, but one of his chief influences to put into play the possibility that progress is not guaranteed, that it is not inevitable.
▶︎ 35:17 And as this becomes diffused in literature, in psychology, in the press, there's a worry that maybe we're not progressing, maybe we're going backwards, maybe we're entering a time of atavism. As I said, Darwin himself in the end was optimistic, but he introduced this possibility that others won with.
▶︎ 35:37 I want to make a couple more points before I finish, and one is that Darwin also participated in this rhetoric about females somehow being in various ways inferior. Again, his misogyny, just like he wasn't an out and out degenerate, he was not an out and out misogynist, but he gave voice to elements that others took and ran in an extremely misogynistic fashion. He said, quote, again, this is from Descent of Man, "Male and female children resemble each other closely, like the young of so many other animals, in which the adult sexes differ widely. They likewise resemble the mature female much more closely than the mature male."
▶︎ 36:26 So this is a repetition of the idea that the female is, in some sense, atavistic. She represents an earlier stage of development. She represents the child. "The female, however, ultimately assumes certain distinctive characters, and in the formation of her skull is said to be intermediate between the child and the man." So again, he's giving a biological account. He was very influenced by that chap I mentioned before, Karl Vogt. He did all these cranial measurements, and these cranial measurements were meant to prove that men have a larger brain capacity than women.
▶︎ 37:00 So Darwin also fed into this idea that there's a biological basis whereby women are somehow, they're in between men and children. And Darwin also thought that the mental powers of men were greater than those of women. And I'll quote again, "The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man's attaining to a higher eminence in whatever he takes up than can woman, whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music, history, science, and philosophy, with half a dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison. We may infer from the law of deviation from averages, so well illustrated by Mr. Galton in his work, Hereditary Genius, that if men are capable of a decided preeminence over woman in many subjects, the average of mental power in man must be above that of women."
▶︎ 38:02 So I now want
▶︎ 38:03 To go back to Darwin's optimistic voice, because I don't want people walking out of here thinking, "Oh, Darwin was a degenerationist." He actually claimed that women should be trained as much as possibly was for women's education so that they can reach, and I quote, "the same standards of men." So he at least implies that's a possibility. And he says, and I'll quote literally from his text, "In order that woman should reach the same standard as man, she ought, when nearly adult, to be trained to energy and perseverance and to have her reason and imagination exercised to the highest point. And then she would probably transmit these qualities chiefly to her adult daughters." He's got Darwinism wrong about transmission, but what I want to say is this optimistic notion that women can be elevated to the so-called heights of man.
▶︎ 38:51 But he nevertheless expresses those swamping fears he's had. Like his cousin Galton, he had the fear that the poor or the degenerate will overwhelm the betters. And so he says, "All women, however, could not thus be raised unless during many generations those who excelled in the above robust virtues were married and produced offspring in larger numbers than other women." Meaning probably working-class women.
▶︎ 39:15 So I'll finish with saying a little bit about Darwin's optimism. He's clearly a key cause in degeneration theory. He got popularized, the cartoons of apes and then humans, and then cartoons showing apes, humans, and the next development going back to the apes is a very common trope in the 19th century. So Darwin says we're the result of a series of accidents, we're the result of a series of environments that select, and the wrong environments might select for the wrong types. Poor laws might select so that some of the worst off, worst, alleged worst of us get to reproduce. Charity, social ideas might make sure that those who are morally inferior or intellectually inferior produce at greater rates. And I obviously had in mind middle-class people.
▶︎ 40:03 Yes, he had those worries, and he fueled those worries among others. But here is his optimistic note, again, from the same book, The Descent of Man. "It is a more cheerful and true view that progress has been much more general than retrogression, that man has arisen though by slow and interrupted steps from a lowly condition to the highest standard yet, as yet attained by him in morals, knowledge, and religion." So basically, Darwin himself still had optimistic enlightenment ideas. He thought man was progressing, but he introduced the possibility of retrogression. And a lot of thinkers in the 19th century became worried about this.
▶︎ 40:46 Darwin, like the very famous British philosopher, Hume, gave a huge value to the notion of compassion. And he said, "We should not try to make the compassion in us subside." What Galton and the eugenicists had said, "You need to get, we need to get over compassion." And I'll just quote a bit of it. "Nor could we check our sympathy if so urged by hard reason..." Hard reason being his cousin, Galton. "...without deterioration of the noblest part of our nature."
▶︎ 41:23 So what Galton and other eugenicists are saying, "We have to stop being so compassionate. We have to stop providing sustenance for the poor. We have to think about, do we want to do vaccinations? Don't we want the unhealthy members to maybe die off before they reproduce our kind?" Darwin was against checking sympathy. He said, "If we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit with a certain great and present evil. Hence, we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind."
▶︎ 42:00 So Darwin ultimately comes on the side of compassion. He's not with his cousin, Galton, saying, "We should be interfering to stop these degenerates from breeding." But his son, his grandson, his great-grandson, they all became members of Galton's Eugenics Society, and they were very, very interested in trying to interfere in society to stop the so-called degenerates from breeding and to increase the breeding of the better, so-called better elements of society. So, as I say, Darwin is a major
▶︎ 42:33 impetus for the rhetoric of degeneration that we're next going to look at in a few other scientists. We're going to look at the Italian criminologist, Cesare Lombroso. We're going to look at a man called Max Nordau. Unheard of today, but Max Nordau, I think it was in 1905, wrote a book called Degen, maybe it was 1895, wrote a book literally called Degeneration, and that was the apex of the literature.
▶︎ 43:00 And in his day, Nordau was actually more read and more famous than Freud. Of course, Freud is not that famous in the 21st century. In the 20th century, Freud was a superstar. Early 20th century, Nordau was a bigger superstar than Freud.
▶︎ 43:17 And Nordau really wrote this book, it's a scream, warning of the effects of degeneration. And it had effect on a lot of eugenicists and a lot of people in the 20th century who wanted to intervene on racial matters, on matters of who would immigrate and who couldn't immigrate, et cetera. And we'll be doing him in the next lecture.