Armed with its twisted philosophy of history and mystical sensibility, the very idea of eugenics can be seen as radically conservative or downright reactionary. Its most mundane form appears in statements that “Western civilization” or “Western values” are in decline or under threat. Emerging fears of immigration or miscegenation reflect beliefs that racial “purity” has been spoiled by intercultural proximity and tolerance, and “inferior” people will come to outnumber those “superior.” Modernity, too, is accused of fostering moral, mental, and physical degeneracy, even disability, among the population—“atavisms,” seemingly negated traits reappearing in present forms, have been allowed to flourish. Eugenics becomes framed as a restorative program that would return humanity, as well as the earth, to a “healthier” past form, thought to be closer to nature, as in the extreme mythical models of the Aryan, Hyperborean, or Indo-European. Racial purity is considered more “natural” and “primal,” yet it equally represents the condition for a better future, giving it a teleological character as a “return to origin.” The tendency toward domination in eugenics postulates human development is out of control and must be reigned in, thus the historic eugenics movements have conveyed the need for a certain distorted “hygiene.”
At the same time, eugenics is also marked by an ambiguous progressive tendency. With the aim of ushering in a new age of human wellbeing, eugenicists see their project as actualizing the most rational form of humankind, which has so far been impeded by past “degenerate” forms. Degeneracy is not linked to modernity per se but appears in it vestigially, as atavisms. In contrast to the element of eugenics that sees an historical degradation into mad chaos, the progressive element recognizes that human development has bestowed us the ability, the freedom, to more closely and consciously guide or direct our own evolution.
In the conclusion of his 1883 Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, Francis Galton, who first put forward the term eugenics, writes of a “new moral duty” arisen from “a greater sense of moral freedom, responsibility, and opportunity.”1 Galton suggests that we are usually instructed by ruling regimes to be obedient and self-abasing, to be passive subordinates, to rely only on what is given, and he argues for viewing the human person instead as a “freeman,” who is less a “subject of a despotic government”—by definition, a rather libertarian position. Humankind, however small it may be in the grand scale of the cosmos, has inherited an immeasurable history and legacy. As Galton sees it, we exist in a circumstance that grants great possibility for us to play a part in further developing the order of the universe, to express ourselves in it as it in turn affects us, and we might recognize ourselves as members of a vast “cosmic republic.” In fact, Galton explains, “Man has already furthered evolution very considerably, half unconsciously, and for his own personal advantages, but he has not yet risen to the conviction that it is his religious duty to do so deliberately and systematically.”2 Toward improving the human condition, Galton’s eugenics is principled on faith in human knowledge, conscience, and sympathy. This strikingly parallels Murray Bookchin’s discussion of the human constitution to intervene with purpose in the natural world, informed by an ever-developing yet still not actualized self-consciousness. The emergence of a “free nature” is contingent upon a fully conscious, active, and meaningful intervention in natural evolution.3
It is on the issue of fostering such a conscious, deliberate course of evolution that the notable eugenicist Havelock Ellis, famous for his pioneering scientific research on human sexuality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, faced some difficulty in reconciling his eugenics thinking. While Ellis despicably, albeit not unexpectedly, condemns the “feeble-minded” and “defective” classes of people, he remains committed to a progressive eugenics dependent on the application and advancement of human agency. In practical terms, he believes the “unfit” must voluntarily opt to be sterilized—it cannot be compulsory.4 Not so unlike opponents of eugenics as such, Ellis expresses horror and complete repudiation of forced sterilization in a 1909 article for The Eugenics Review:
It is probable that many persons have been prejudiced against sterilisation, as I also have, by the reckless and violent manner in which the method of effecting it has been advocated, occasionally in England, and often in the United States. Persons who claimed to speak with authority, have clamoured for its adoption, sometimes even in its most brutal forms, not as a voluntary adopted method of social hygiene but as a barbarous punishment to be inflicted for the purpose of inspiring terror in others, and sometimes to be applied to persons whose acts were not really anti-social at all. I am still convinced that we were entirely justified in brushing aside such proposals without serious consideration. They are not in the line of our progress.5
Ellis was centrally involved in debates within eugenics organizations, exemplifying the variety of ethical positions present in what many now see as a monolithic movement. He also understands forms of “degeneracy” such as criminal activity to have social roots—“perhaps every social problem,” he concludes, “will be found not to stand alone, but to be made up of fibres that extend to every part of our social life.”6 Ellis even looks upon socialism, as he describes it, rather favorably, pointing to “mutual help” as the root of a “Socialist ideal.”7 It is, in fact, the “communistic practice of mutual helpfulness” among the poor, Ellis explains, that mitigates conditions of stress and suffering, reducing criminal behavior.8 This does not negate Ellis’s ultimate capitulation to sterilization as an end through imposed seclusion and pressure, in reality a kind of coercion, however much he claims the decision is still “voluntary.” Nor is he off the hook for his approval of a racialist “criminal anthropology” or his plentiful other frankly backward beliefs. But owing to his firmness on the matter of agency, we find in him a clear tension between the legacies of freedom and domination described by Bookchin.
Agency in the concept of eugenics appears also in the thought of Ernst Haeckel, the German Darwnist who coined the term ecology, taking the form of a “right to die.” In The Wonders of Life, first published in 1904, Haeckel writes of the absurdity of artificially keeping people with incurable chronic illness and disability alive for the benefit of no one, not even themselves.9 He speaks from a genuine place of solicitude, highlighting the continued, intense suffering inflicted upon the incurable and their loved ones when they are forced to remain alive against their will. A life of such diminished quality that leaves one in sorrow becomes an “evil,” from which one demands “redemption.”10 Checking this “right to die” with an authoritative commission of medical experts to be sure the person is sound and certain in their decision, Haeckel argues those suffering immensely, such as from cancer, be allowed the kindness of a voluntary death by their own “deliberate wish.”11 Whereas Ellis demands individual agency inform reproductive sterilization, Haeckel takes a more radical turn in placing individual agency at the helm of one’s very life, or death.
Haeckel pits voluntary euthanasia against what he calls a “traditional dogma,” mainly referring to Christian doctrine, which holds that “man is bound under all circumstances to maintain and prolong life.”12 We find such thinking at least as far back as the early 5th century in the writings of Saint Augustine, who decries suicide as murder of the innocent self.13 “Self-slaughter” is permitted under no circumstances, however much our compassion might excuse those who seek to escape their suffering. At the same time, Augustine believes life is a condemnation, “if a state full of so much grievous misery can be called a life.”14 Life is meant to be a realm of sin and suffering, where one must pay through “toil, sorrow and fear”—indeed, Augustine believes life is a punishment designed to discipline humankind.15 An expression of individual agency, here in the case of voluntary suicide, is defiance of God, of the natural (or supernatural) order of things. Augustine would have us “do our time” to achieve eventual salvation. From this, the “pacifistic” Christian doctrine posits it is better to be alive in misery, in a condition of fundamental sinfulness and woe, than to not be alive at all.
Refusing to accept a worldly life of dejection and desolation, Haeckel challenges the “traditional” morality that sees nonbeing as more terrible than being as such, instead striving for the not-yet-being of a just life. In Bookchin’s terms, this appears as the distinction between the real and actual, the existential “brute facts” versus the speculative what-could-be and what-should-be.16 Haeckel’s eugenics thinking leads him to find no sanctity in mere life, in any and all conditions of being, which would include the ugliest and most oppressive—he seeks to create a life in which all human beings are emancipated, freed from social restrictions. Death, too, he clearly understands to be a liberation from both biology and the social formations that hold the biologically defective as prisoners in their own bodies. It is here that Haeckel errs, for while his mission has merit, he places more emphasis on an individualized solution than a social one. Certainly, a person should have the right to opt out of life, but cannot the conditions of that life be improved, to reduce or eliminate the suffering caused by social inadequacies?
Any racialist or ableist insistence upon the need to diminish the population of certain people is superfluous to the key idea of agency in eugenics thinking. Indeed, it can easily be argued that its critical and compelling principles were syncretized with antithetical imperial ideology in the same moment those admirable values were defined. To be sure, Galton, Ellis, Haeckel, and other eugenicists are, without doubt, disgraceful for their derision of the dispossessed and disabled, and in the end, the bulk of their work hails the Western European as the most superior “race”—illustrating how the eugenics movement strives only for a superficial improvement of humankind.
When we think of the history of eugenics, we tend to view it in reductive terms as a history of the Right. We often fail to see it as a sweeping set of sentiments that pervades a broader range of positions, including many found on the Left, attributable to its progressive dimension. At the same time, we might also fail to see the legacy of eugenics in social ecology and its prehistory—the whole of its precursory scientific and revolutionary movements—in any substantial way. In social ecology, those principles of eugenics which oppose contradiction and promote human agency appear again, seeking to do away with the “atavisms” of hierarchy and domination that impede the potential for a “free nature” of harmony, complementarity, and unity in diversity. Social ecology’s position in a complicated legacy is most clearly illustrated in Bookchin’s discussion of reality and the irrational:
Reality is not simply what we experience: there is a sense in which the rational has its own reality. Thus, there are existing realities that are irrational and unrealized realities that are rational. A society that fails to actualize its potentialities for human happiness and progress is “real” enough in the sense that it exists, but it is less than truly social. It is incomplete and distorted insofar as it merely persists, and hence it is irrational. It is less than what it should be socially, just as a defective animal is less than what it should be biologically. Although it is “real” in an existential sense, it is unfulfilled and hence “unreal” in terms of its potentialities.17
When Bookchin writes of the irrationality in a “defective animal,” one can hear the echo of eugenics rhetoric. The defective, the deformed, the degenerated—these describe life-forms whose rational potentialities have not been fulfilled. In a concrete understanding, the “defective animal” is a disabled animal. They may be disabled from physically maintaining their own subsistence on an individual level, and they may be disabled from directly contributing to the securing of material needs within a mutualistic community. Bookchin here does not mean to condemn disabled persons, but as his statement is itself a lingering “atavism” of past eugenics thinking, he leaves open the potential for his project to be compromised insofar as this “atavism” has not been rationally developed. Yet we need not abandon our plight against irrationality—we can learn to better articulate what is meant.
“Defectiveness,” in the form of biological disability, should inform our rationality. To the progressive eugenicist, striving to qualitatively improve humankind and actualize the most rational, not-yet-existent human form, disability belongs to the past, or the past-to-come—the existence of disabled people is an atavism, a social ailment yet to be corrected. But it is precisely this “atavism” that could inform how we organize and design a society with consideration of disability.
In the introductory pages of his Mutual Aid, Peter Kropotkin takes great issue with Charles Darwin, who inveighs against the maintenance of the “weak in mind and body” in modern civilization.18 Darwin, in fact, regrets our noblest faculty of sympathy—that which, he argues, develops our morality—for its extension to the disabled:
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised 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 every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. 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 any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.19
By keeping the disabled alive, they are allowed to propagate, pollute, and burden Darwin’s beloved Victorian society. Furious with this Malthusian preference for abandoning the disabled to favor a “superior” race of people, Kropotkin castigates Darwin for contradicting his own work,
As if thousands of weak-bodied and infirm poets, scientists, inventors, and reformers, together with other thousands of so-called “fools” and “weak-minded enthusiasts,” were not the most precious weapons used by humanity in its struggle for existence by intellectual and moral arms, which Darwin himself emphasized in those same chapters of Descent of Man.20
Kropotkin here cements a foundation for us to rethink disability, defectiveness, or atavism. Indeed, the “defective” members of society are a potential boon to humankind, wherein the weak are our greatest strength. In his own criticism of the eugenics movement, the anthropologist Franz Boas even suggested “defectiveness” might simply be an expression of variability among the population.21 The emergence of “defectiveness” is nothing more than life doing what it does best—growth, variation, intensification.22 In the natural sciences, atavistic traits are taken as evidence for evolution, standing as both biotic mutations and representations of previous developmental history. But in the “intellectual and moral” realm, the disabled, defective, or atavistic elements provide us a difference of perspective. Unique perspectives yield insights that the rest of the population may not be able to grasp so easily, thus the “defective” play a critical role in developing our understanding of the whole of life, reality, or truth.
While Kropotkin stresses the role of the disabled in natural evolution, Bookchin begins to theorize disability as the very basis for society. Throughout his writings, Bookchin speculates that gerontocracy, the rule by the old, is the most original and widespread form of hierarchy, with even patriarchy being a later, modified version of the “ascendancy of the elders.”23 Important for us is that, in Bookchin’s discussions of age groups, the aged are a disabled class:
Physically, the old people of a community were the most infirm, dependent, and often the most vulnerable members of the group in periods of difficulty. It was they who were expected to give up their lives in times of want that threatened the existence of a community. Hence, they were its most insecure members—psychologically as well as physically.24
Bookchin notes that the old can perform certain sedentary functions like childcare, crafting, and teaching—reproductive labor—but he believes these would not necessarily be indispensable to the community in times of struggle and scarcity.25 This especially precarious position, one of intensified dependency, gives the elders of a community reason to develop institutional roles for themselves, of actualizing and maintaining a society rather than a mere community, firmly establishing second nature and their security with it. Of course, in its early appearance, gerontocracy may not have been so rigid, still featuring an “egalitarian dimension” in which all members of a society move up the social strata as they age.26
If the rule by the old is the first form of hierarchy, as Bookchin speculates, it would also implicitly be rule by the disabled. The great potential of institutionalization—really, the making of second nature—is its providing security and agency for those most vulnerable to the realm of necessity. To give fuller definition to Bookchin’s speculative gerontocratic formation, we can see that the old may be hailed by virtue of their age, but it is not their age that generates the need for their social position—it is their worsening biological disability that demands they be more concertedly cared for and celebrated by their community. Institutionalization—the formation of society, transcending first nature into second nature—is thus developed for the sake of the disabled. Indeed, in securing social agency, institutions free the biologically disabled.
But at the moment, we are all subject to disability by the ruling classes. Our world has effectively been designed to disable people, to make us suffer, to strip us of our agency. In a post-scarcity society, disability, as we understand it, is predominantly social. A wheelchair-user is not thrust back into the realm of necessity merely because they can’t walk—they are condemned to a life of scarcity within second nature by a society that affords them little to no consideration. To put it succinctly, it is a social question of building steps versus building ramps. Grappling with medical bureaucracy alone can be more painful than any physical ailment. Meager social welfare is granted only if one resolves to live in treacherous poverty, not that one would have a choice. In the midst of epidemics, the disabled are surrounded by a community indifferent to their existence. Here, the violence of a “neutralism” appears most prevalently—its course of action is to profess no position, to let “nature” determine the fate of life, to claim total tolerance without bias. It is a philosophy of existential equality, disregarding any need for social equity. To take the “neutral” stance is to ignore differences in individual needs, ultimately leaving people to suffer and die without the specific aid they require.
Bookchin’s gerontocracy hypothesis poses the emergence of institutions, of society, as specifically meant to provide security and agency for the biologically disabled, even if originally only certain types of disability. This is given justification by the knowledge held by elders, the experience and wisdom they can impart to younger generations, developing into an intellectual class.27 But sticking with the egalitarian spirit of early institutionalization, we could broaden the scope of who is provided security and agency and for what social value. Even if second nature comes into being by way of institutionalizing care for the disabled, the gerontocracy model only pictures this as pertains to the aged, not necessarily disabled youth.
Thinking on Kropotkin’s point, which does not address age in the defense of the disabled, we can examine how they further evolve human intellect and morality. The most physically or psychologically disabled people yet serve human progress through experience in the most basic sense, not accumulated per se but as knowledge gained by perspective. In accordance with Boas, disability presents a variation of lived experience, therefore a society that cares for the disabled of any age preserves difference of perspective, recognizing the value of such difference for comprehending the whole of life. Indeed, “defectiveness” is a lens through which one can observe and understand the world, often in ways others cannot. The “irrational,” yielded subjectivity in persons, helps us to better know and actualize the rational.
We do not want to simply turn back the clock to a prior age, insisting upon the virtue of irrational forms, nor should we strive for people to be “deformed” or disabled. Of course, in time, we all become physiologically disabled as we age, some sooner than later, and it can unfold in degrees rather than overnight. Following the eugenicists, we certainly must overcome and do away with disability, fostering a healthier humankind. We should, however, “eliminate” disability in its social sense. By considering and respecting them, fulfilling their needs, and yielding them social agency we “eliminate” the disabled by freeing them from the realm of necessity and scarcity. A society built with disability in mind—easing the lives of the disabled as well as environmentally preventing the onset of avoidable physiological disability—diminishes the distinction of ability and disability in the civic, political, and cultural spheres, no matter if the distinction remains as a purely biological fact. Physical (and cognitive) disability need not be social disability, and in the securing of agency for all, we may yet fulfill the best aspirations of eugenics.
- Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London, J. M. Dent & Sons, 1907; Project Gutenberg, March 1, 2004). https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11562/pg11562-images.html.
- ibid.
- Murray Bookchin, “A Philosophical Naturalism,” in The Philosophy of Social Ecology (Chico, AK Press, 2022) 1–27 (24–26).
- Havelock Ellis, “The Sterilisation of the Unfit,” The Eugenics Review (Vol. 1, No. 3, 1909) 203–206 (205).
- ibid.
- Havelock Ellis, The Criminal (New York, Scribner & Welford, 1890; Project Gutenberg, December 24, 2013) 302. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44500/44500-h/44500-h.htm.
- Havelock Ellis, The Task of Social Hygiene (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1916; Project Gutenberg, July 17, 2007) 384–385. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/22090/22090-h/22090-h.htm#FNanchor_112.
- Ellis 1890, 299.
- Ernst Haeckel, The Wonders of Life (London, Watts & Co, 1904) 122.
- ibid 123.
- ibid.
- ibid 122.
- Saint Augustine, City of God (London, Penguin, 2003) 27.
- ibid 1065.
- ibid 1065–1066.
- Bookchin, “A Philosophical Naturalism,” 2022, 18–20.
- Bookchin, “A Philosophical Naturalism,” 2022, 16–17.
- Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution (Oakland, PM Press, 2021) 31.
- Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, in The Origin of Species & The Descent of Man (New York, Modern Library) 387–924 (501).
- Kropotkin 2021, 31.
- Franz Boas, “Eugenics,” The Scientific Monthly (Vol. 3, No. 5, 1916) 471–478 (474).
- The point made by Boas suggests the eugenic elimination of “defectiveness” would be an elimination of human variation. For discussion on the threat of human extinction in eugenics’ depletion of genetic diversity, see Joseph Madison, “Individualized Medicine as Racial Eugenics: A Critical Appraisal,” Harbinger (Vol. 4, Issue 2, 2022). https://harbinger-journal.com/issue-2/individualized-medicine-as-racial-eugenics/.
- Murray Bookchin, Remaking Society (Chico, AK Press, 2023) 48–49.
- ibid 47/
- Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (Oakland, AK Press, 2005) 151.
- Bookchin 2023, 48–49.
- ibid 71.