H G Wells

[Sargeant_Fox]

A lot of his fiction was against empire and large scale industries. He liked to be seen as liberal-minded. But he was a racist and a snob. Some of his writing reflects that, but he was prolific and produced a lot of original work.

Years ago I read a brilliant book by a British philosopher, Mary Midgley's Beast and Man (1967). I was startled to learn that although the Martians bite the dust in the novel, they actually represented Wells' ideal of a super-evolved mankind: enormous heads on trolleys, pure intellect, no emotions, using their superior technology without remorse to wipe out the insignificant lower lifeforms without bothering to establish contact. It was an eugenic utopia.

It hasn't altered at all my enjoyment of his stories, but stuff like this is fun to know.

 

[Extollager]

Years ago I read a brilliant book by a British philosopher, Mary Midgley's Beast and Man (1967). I was startled to learn that although the Martians bite the dust in the novel, they actually represented Wells' ideal of a super-evolved mankind: enormous heads on trolleys, pure intellect, no emotions, using their superior technology without remorse to wipe out the insignificant lower lifeforms without bothering to establish contact. It was an eugenic utopia.

It hasn't altered at all my enjoyment of his stories, but stuff like this is fun to know.

Eugenics captivated the progressive/left authors and intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. From the first installment in my Inklings Century series (starts with the April 2024 issue, out in a month) for the Tolkien newsletter Beyond Bree:

Some readers will be surprised by the enthusiasm for eugenics exhibited by respectable public figures such as Dean Inge (“almost certainly the best-known churchman of his generation,” Overy 106), John Maynard Keynes (who in addition to his economics work was a confirmed supporter of the Cambridge Eugenics Society), and future prime minister Neville Chamberlain. The United States’ Margaret Sanger and the United Kingdom’s Marie Stopes campaigned in England for “birth control” as a means to reduce the numbers of the “unfit” masses. (When Stopes’s son married a woman who wore glasses, “she cut him out of her will and refused to go to the wedding,” so anxious was she about “race suicide” -- Overy 99) G. K. Chesterton debated with eugenics advocate G. B. Shaw, and wrote Eugenics and Other Evils (1922). Chesterton was a favorite author of Tolkien and Lewis, and Williams wrote for G. K.’s Weekly and corresponded with Chesterton.

Morgoth, Sauron, and Saruman were selective breeders of armies. Morgoth was responsible for the Orcs. These foul creatures supplied the bulk of Sauron’s fighting forces in a strategy dependent on sheer overwhelming numbers. Saruman bred a “superior race” of Orcs, his Uruk-hai, which seems to have been his solution to the problem of a convincing army although he evidently could not feed enormous quantities of Orcs as Sauron could. Sauron’s “eugenic” (dysgenic?) efforts resulted in a “superior race” of trolls able to tolerate sunlight.

----I have a photocopy of the pamphlet in which authors took a stand on the Spanish Civil War. It would be fascinating to have a comparable list of authors lining up on the matter of National Eugenics. I've been reading the 1932 Reader's Guide to Everyman's Library, with long introduction by editor Ernest Rhys. It's interesting to see his complacent remark about the series' inclusion of a book by Galton that was influential in the National Eugenics campaign.

One wonders why this topic isn't explored more -- who was for it, who spoke out against it. The obvious reason is that too many people who are heroes today were involved with it, but that seems too simple.

I believe that some of the authors who are castigated (e.g. by S. T. Joshi) for being "anti-science" were largely influenced in their remarks on "science" by the horror of the eugenics ideal.

 

[BAYLOR]

Eugenics captivated the progressive/left authors and intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. From the first installment in my Inklings Century series (starts with the April 2024 issue, out in a month) for the Tolkien newsletter Beyond Bree:

Some readers will be surprised by the enthusiasm for eugenics exhibited by respectable public figures such as Dean Inge (“almost certainly the best-known churchman of his generation,” Overy 106), John Maynard Keynes (who in addition to his economics work was a confirmed supporter of the Cambridge Eugenics Society), and future prime minister Neville Chamberlain. The United States’ Margaret Sanger and the United Kingdom’s Marie Stopes campaigned in England for “birth control” as a means to reduce the numbers of the “unfit” masses. (When Stopes’s son married a woman who wore glasses, “she cut him out of her will and refused to go to the wedding,” so anxious was she about “race suicide” -- Overy 99) G. K. Chesterton debated with eugenics advocate G. B. Shaw, and wrote Eugenics and Other Evils (1922). Chesterton was a favorite author of Tolkien and Lewis, and Williams wrote for G. K.’s Weekly and corresponded with Chesterton.

Morgoth, Sauron, and Saruman were selective breeders of armies. Morgoth was responsible for the Orcs. These foul creatures supplied the bulk of Sauron’s fighting forces in a strategy dependent on sheer overwhelming numbers. Saruman bred a “superior race” of Orcs, his Uruk-hai, which seems to have been his solution to the problem of a convincing army although he evidently could not feed enormous quantities of Orcs as Sauron could. Sauron’s “eugenic” (dysgenic?) efforts resulted in a “superior race” of trolls able to tolerate sunlight.

----I have a photocopy of the pamphlet in which authors took a stand on the Spanish Civil War. It would be fascinating to have a comparable list of authors lining up on the matter of National Eugenics. I've been reading the 1932 Reader's Guide to Everyman's Library, with long introduction by editor Ernest Rhys. It's interesting to see his complacent remark about the series' inclusion of a book by Galton that was influential in the National Eugenics campaign.

One wonders why this topic isn't explored more -- who was for it, who spoke out against it. The obvious reason is that too many people who are heroes today were involved with it, but that seems too simple.

I believe that some of the authors who are castigated (e.g. by S. T. Joshi) for being "anti-science" were largely influenced in their remarks on "science" by the horror of the eugenics ideal.

Chief Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was in favor of Eugenics . He presided over a case pertaining to Buck vs Bell 1927 , one of the most infamous cases in Supreme Court History.

 

[Randy M.]

I have the impression that eugenics is central to some popular fiction of the last decade or so. The only title that comes to mind is The Children on the Hill by Jennifer McMahon, but I'm pretty sure there are other books as well.

 

[Toby Frost]

Pre-WW2 "progressive" thought, especially that of richer people, was a weird mish-mash of the genuinely progressive and the downright cranky. If I remember rightly, Jack London had some really weird beliefs as well. I'm pretty certain that at one point Stalin was dreaming of creating an army of huge trained apes. Working-class leftism tended to be more of the "fair pay and unions" variety. And there was an obsession among Russia-leaning leftists with industrialisation, seemingly for its own sake.

Personally, I've always thought that Sauron's society - regular army (uruks), elite army (uruk-hai) and secret police (Nazgul/the Eye) translated pretty exactly to what Hitler was trying to create. But all dictatorships are pretty similar and probably settle down into the same basic shape.

 

[Sargeant_Fox]

I believe that some of the authors who are castigated (e.g. by S. T. Joshi) for being "anti-science" were largely influenced in their remarks on "science" by the horror of the eugenics ideal.

Where does Joshi castigate anti-science writers? I love anti-science writers! I need to read his critiques.

 

[Extollager]

Oh, he snipes at Machen in his introduction to the Autobiographical Writings volume, for example, sounding a bit schoolmarmish, like "Children, now when you read this, be sure and remember that we know better," etc etc. Elsewhere too, but that comes to mind right off.

 

[Sargeant_Fox]

Oh, he snipes at Machen in his introduction to the Autobiographical Writings volume, for example, sounding a bit schoolmarmish, like "Children, now when you read this, be sure and remember that we know better," etc etc. Elsewhere too, but that comes to mind right off.

That's funny, last month I did buy the Autobiographical Writings. I'll check it later.

It's predictable Joshi would follow in the footsteps of his idol, Lovecraft the scientific materialist; it was the fashionable thing to be in the 1920s: Howie was so desperate to fit in; he was as banal in his worldview as he was extraordinary in his fiction. A perfect embodiment of Flaubert's teaching: "Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work."

I suppose that being too busy editing anthologies has kept Mr. Joshi out of the thriving, riveting debate in the Humanities about scientism (and not science per se) that has been raging for 300 years now. To say that Machen is anti-science is like saying that a horde of respected artists, philosophers and thinkers like Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Novalis, Yeats, Whitehead, Mary Midgley, Owen Barfield, Roger Scruton, Iain McGilchrist, Rupert Sheldrake, Kathleen Raine, Wendell Berry, and Brian Keeble are anti-science because they've raised fine arguments about where our blind devotion to "science as salvation" is leading us mentally, politically, economically, and environmentally.

 

[Extollager]

I fear Joshi would dismiss them all as self-fuddlers.

You've listed a number of my intellectual heroes there, Sargeant. In fact there are only a couple I haven't delved into a bit at least, Midgley and McGilchrist. Well, I read the first hundred pages of The Master and His Emissary years ago and was so excited about it as a witness against the prevalent notions in my academic milieu, that, as I recall, I bought copies for three colleagues. None of whom read the book, I imagine, nor have I persisted with it (or with its 2-volume sequel).

I know an essay by Midgley in The Guardian (I think) some years ago impressed me tremendously. Speaking of that paper -- here's something Sheldrake mentioned:

Where are you?

"There's a young student at this university," neurologist Professor John Lorber of Sheffield University told Science magazine in December 1980, "who has an IQ of 126, has gained a first-class honours degree in mathematics, and is socially completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually no brain."

www.theguardian.com

Not to "drop names," but I had a little correspondence with Barfield before his death. Saving the Appearances seems to me to have maybe the best of McGilchrist but not in tiny tiny print -- at my age I just can't read my copy of MHE without discomfort.

Gotta reread What Coleridge Thought sometime.