Eugenics, War, and Stupid Stuff

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This paper, "The Eugenic and Social Influence of the War" by Prof. J.A. Lindsay, published in The Eugenics Review in October 1918, ends with the words that I will begin this post with:

"There is some soul of goodness in things evil,

Would men observingly distil it out"

It is a paper that seems a logical extension of something from somewhere, and some of the points are common sensical--but the it is published in this eugenics thing, which pretty much dooms it to eugenics and itself. The qualities of some of his opinions are sometimes of lofty incredulity:

"The loss of life in war is  a question not only of quantity, but of quality."

"War, for obvious reasons, tends to depress the birth rate."

"A remarkable and unexpected result of the war has been a decided decline in the rate of suicide."

"A very unexpected feature of war-time has been the decline of insanity."

"Perhaps the most fundamental gain from the war will be interest in education, and the larger measure of attention devoted to it."

Somehow here at the end of a war in which since 100 million people were killed or wounded Prof Lindsay seems to have written a piece on that great conflict without being somewhat cognizant of the human value of such loss.

And that, as they say, is that.

Full text is located here, at the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

G.K. Chesterton,. Eugenics and Other Evils, here.

 

Comments

[Jeff Donlan]

A decline in suicide! Enough to make one's heart sink. Thank goodness for the likes of Mr. Chesterton. The problem is that would-be eugenicists are unembarrassible. But then, neither am I for using such a word.

[John F. Ptak]

I didn't intend to beat these people up. Its just that I found a stack of this journalin the warehouse and picked one out and opened it, and this is what I found. And it is amazing--but less so because so much of that issue is similar, and so many of the other issues are similar to this one...it would be easy to dismiss this nowadays as old and bad and crackpotty, but it wasn't, and were not not far removed from this stuff in the way we measure time. I think it is good to remember it from time to time.

"Unembarrassable" is a good word. It might be a great word. I wonder how this idea translates from other languages.