The new eugenics
For the last day or so, among the most emailed articles on the New York Times website was a feature in Science Times about a new book by Gregory Clarke called A Farewell to Alms. It’s a terrifying article, not because reports on something scary (we get stories like that all the time nowadays) but because the article itself espouses what I see as a new eugenics. I should say that I haven’t read Clarke’s book, only Nicholas Wade’s article. I thus don’t know whether the article’s egregiousness comes from Clarke or Wade. But either the Times has given a major article to a book that’s full of nonsense, or its reporter so misinterpreted the book as to reduce it to nonsense. I’m not sure which is worse.
Clarke wanted to answer a trendy question: Why did industrialization happen when and where it did? To answer it, he examined early modern English probate records in order to figure out who the industrializers were. He found that, counterintuitively, the rich people had more surviving children than did poor people, thus the population of industrial(-izing) England was largely made up of the descendants of the elite, not (as one might think) of the poor. I have some methodological questions about this argument. I’m not certain, but it seems unlikely that people who die without an estate would have probate records. And of course the poor were likely to die without any estate. So from the start, the entire study seems flawed to me. That said, it seems likely that in his book, Clarke addresses this concern, or at least explains better his methodology and discusses who in England got a paper record of their estate and family, and who didn’t. I wouldn’t necessarily expect this level of detail in a newspaper article, so I’ll give Wade and Clarke a pass on this one.
But the problems keep coming. They claim that these elites carried with them middle-class values that were important to industrialization. Whoop! There’s problem number two! How did the elites who peopled England carry middle-class values? Is he (whichever “he” we’re talking about) really claiming that English aristocrats and the rising bourgeoisie shared the same values? That the pre-industrial elite had the same culture as the industrial middle class? Because if I’ve read this right, this may be the most radical claim in economic history since Marx. But don’t take my word for it. Have either of these men ever read any novel by Charles Dickens? Hell: have they ever watched a Masterpiece Theater adaptation of a novel by Charles Dickens? They’re all about the conflict of values of the 19th century elite and the rising bourgeoisie.
Then Wade enumerates the supposed middle-class values that these elites carried with them, and here’s where we get a doozy of a third problem. No paraphrase can do it justice. Here’s the man himself: “The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save…” This is an absurd characterization on its face. “Long working hours” are a middle-class value? That would very much surprise the working-class which has always and forever worked long, grueling hours, just to put food on the table. I guess the reason that the American labor movement spent 73 years fighting–and sometimes dying–for the eight hour day must be because they didn’t have that the middle-class value of “long working hours.” As I say, workers have had to work long hours simply to afford food and shelter, and so the claim that thrift is somehow a middle-class value is equally farcical. It’s not that workers weren’t thrifty, it’s that unlike the middle class and rich, they had no surplus income to save. Indeed, as both Bettina Bradury (in a Canadian context) and Jeanne Boydston (in the American context) have demonstrated, thrift was perhaps the defining value of the historical working class. Actually, I think I can’t say that, because probably hard work and long working hours has been an equally defining feature of working-class existence. And finally, there’s the nonsense idea of nonviolence as a middle-class value. Against this claim, there’s the larger point that we’ve defined violence so as to exclude the structural violence of the police state (the fist of the bourgeoisie, as Trotsky reminds us) and of industrial accidents, not to mention imperialism. But to dispense with that larger question, what about fascism, an inherently middle-class set of ideologies that was not only based on violence (as indeed is capitalism) but which proudly embraced it? How can anyone claim, with a straight face, that the middle class is inherently nonviolent?
But none of this is the worst part. That comes when the mechanism Clarke (or maybe Wade) claims that these supposedly middle-class values are genetic. They do so without explaining what the mechanism for this would be–is there a long-hours-working gene that produces a long-hours-working protein? Surely someone who claims a genetic root to behavior like working long hours or saving money or valuing literacy has an obligation to at least speculate about the mechanism by which such activities could possibly have biological, as opposed to cultural, roots. Worse–and hence my claims of eugenics–is what this suggests. Back before the defeat of the Nazis throughly discredited this idea, we used to call it the “Teutonic germ”–the supposedly biological ability of Teutonic people like Anglo-Saxons and Germans to govern themselves and create strong economies. Eugenics, of course, not only drove programs to exterminate inferior races; eugenicists also intended to improve the white race by selecting for such good traits as intelligence (read literacy), order (read nonviolence), hard work (read long working hours), and thrift (read willingness to save). This is the eugenics that Progressives like Margaret Sanger embraced.
I don’t meant to claim that Clarke or Wade are suggesting a specific policy of eugenics. But this sort of sloppy, unthinking evolutionary psychology creates–no, is–the intellectual justification for such a policy. If economic development and industrialization are good, and they were created by these middle-class genetic characteristics, it is not at all a far jump to claim that we should get rid of (either through murder or through restrictive immigration policies or through forced sterilization) those who do not have these characteristics. And since these values have been defined as “middle-class,” this means getting rid of people with working-class values.
In The Great Gatsby, one of the ways the reader knows that Tom Buchanan is a jackass is that he speaks approvingly of Marshall Grant’s Passing of the Great Race. F. Scott Fitzgerald knew in 1925 that thinking people should not tolerate such nonsense. In 2007, the New York Times should know it too.
-jacob
