June 29, 2009
CALLING A SPADE A SPADE:
REVIEW: of The Pure Society: From Darwin to Hitler by André Pichot: Benjamin Noys discovers the modern mutations of eugenics (Nenjamin Noys, The New Humanist)
What do the Catholic Church, Anglo-Saxon liberalism and Russian Lysenkoism (the doctrine of acquired characteristics) have in common? The correct answer, one might hope, is that they have all been intellectually discredited. Unfortunately, as André Pichot's book makes clear, the answer is also that they were the only significant sources of opposition to eugenics in the period of its heyday between 1907 and 1945. [...]Pichot controversially suggests that the taboo on recognising the widespread belief in eugenics has served to minimise and disguise the links between contemporary biology and eugenic and racist themes. Biology has a recurrent tendency to make such incursions into social policy. Darwin's own models of struggle, selection and cooperation, borrowed heavily from the existing sociological models of his time - notably Malthus, Adam Smith and Hobbes - and once these models had been biologised by Darwin they were easily exported back into the social sciences. Pichot suggests that whenever genetics runs into scientific problems it becomes more strident concerning its sociological and political claims.
In a bracing passage Pichot singles out Richard Dawkins and his thesis of the "selfish gene" - in which human beings are reduced to being mere carriers of a genetic inheritance. He argues that this "genetic mysticism" echoes the promotion by Nazi biological thinking of the priority of the racial community over the individual. Although suggestive, and useful in indicating the dubious political implications of Dawkins's genetic reductionism, the argument comes close to guilt by association, and more teasing out of this claimed continuity is necessary to make the charges stick.
In light of the current celebration of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's Origin of the Species, Pichot's work is a salutary warning. As he notes, the malignant ideologies of eugenics have not disappeared, but are now privatised with the pressure of the market, the media and medicine encouraging us to breed our own "perfect" offspring. The key question The Pure Society poses is how we can defend human beings against being reduced to mere raw material, or animals fit for breeding, without relying on the usual religious models of the sacred inviolability of human life.
The answer, of course, is: No.