THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

It is hard to overstate the degree to which eugenics captured the imagination of the medical and scientific communities in the early 20th century. Anthropologist Francis Galton, who coined the term -- from the Greek for "good birth" -- argued that scientific techniques for breeding healthier animals should be applied to human beings. Those considered to be "degenerates," "imbeciles," or "feebleminded" would be targeted. Anticipating public opposition, Galton told scientific gatherings that eugenics "must be introduced into the national conscience like a new religion." Premier scientific organizations, such as the American Museum of Natural History, and institutions such as Harvard and Princeton, preached the eugenics gospel: They held conferences, published papers, provided research funding, and advocated for sterilization laws.

To many thinkers in the West, the catastrophe of the First World War, in addition to the problems of poverty, crime, and social breakdown, suggested a sickness in the racial stock. Book titles help tell the story: Social Decay and Degeneration; The Need for Eugenic Reform; Racial Decay; Sterilization of the Unfit; and The Twilight of the White Races. The American Eugenics Society, founded in 1922 -- the same year Chesterton published Eugenics and Other Evils -- was supported by Nobel Prize-winning scientists whose stated objective was to sterilize a tenth of the U.S. population.

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The Supreme Court paved the way. Justice Holmes, a political progressive and eugenics advocate, wrote the 1927 Court opinion in Buck v. Bell, an 8-1 ruling upholding Virginia's sterilization laws. He summed up the court's philosophy thus: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Within a decade, laws mandating sterilization of those considered a threat to the gene pool -- alcoholics, criminals, undesirable immigrants, African Americans -- were passed in 32 states. Eventually, at least 70,000 people were forcibly sterilized, from California to New York.

As a Christian philosopher, Chesterton acknowledged the historic problem of churches' enlisting the secular state to enforce religious doctrine. But he turned the issue around by accusing scientific elites of repeating the errors of the Inquisition:

The thing that really is trying to tyrannize 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 is really 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.

Under the eugenics vision, society's most vulnerable would not find compassion and aid; they would find the surgeon's knife. As Chesterton quipped, there would be no sympathy for the character of Tiny Tim, the crippled boy of the Cratchit family in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. "The Eugenicist, for all I know, would regard the mere existence of Tiny Tim as a sufficient reason for massacring the whole family of Cratchit."

These facts are worth recalling in light of the debate set off by the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Margaret Sanger trumpeted the eugenic features of birth control and found support from the nation's leading eugenicists. As she put it in a speech at the 1921 International Eugenics Congress in New York: "The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the overfertility of the mentally and physically defective."

At the heart of the eugenics movement, Chesterton believed, was an utterly materialistic view of the human person: man as laboratory rat. "Materialism is really our established Church," he wrote, "for the Government will really help it to persecute its heretics."

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