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| H. G. Wells (1866-1946) |
During the first half of the twentieth century many
prominent figures promoted the ideology of eugenics. H. G. Wells, best known
for futuristic novels such as
The Time
Machine and
The War of the Worlds, provides
a good example of how the various trends in contemporary thought, many already
discussed in this series, could prepare the mind for the acceptance of
eugenics.
H. G. Wells was born in Bromley in Kent on 21
st September
1866. He was educated at the Normal School
of Science, at South
Kensington, by Thomas Huxley, the influential disciple of Charles
Darwin. In early adulthood Wells rejected Christianity and, like
Sir Francis Galton, embraced Darwinism almost as a substitute religion. Later in life Wells
was to write that Darwinism had brought many of his generation to ‘the
realisation that life is a conflict between superior and inferior types’.
He
believed that the salvation of the human race lay in scientific progress which
would ultimately give mankind the tools to establish a rationally ordered utopia
that Wells called the ‘New
Republic’.
Wells set out a detailed prediction of the future in his
1902 work
Anticipations. In this book
he professed disgust at the prevailing ‘really very horrible morality’ that led
‘benevolent persons’ to try to help large families that could not support
themselves. He wrote that ‘from the point of view of social physiology’ such
families appear a ‘horrible and criminal thing.’
Like
Sir Francis Galton he believed that the ‘quality’ of the human race was
declining; ‘the average of humanity’ he wrote ‘has positively fallen.’
For those who are seen ‘increasing and multiplying through sheer incontinence
and stupidity, the men of the New
Republic will have little
pity and less benevolence.’
Wells’ views on population control owe much to
Thomas Malthus whom he described as ‘one of those cardinal figures in intellectual history’.
He
considered that ‘probably no more shattering book than the
Essay on
Population has ever been, or ever will be, written.’
It
made ‘as clear as daylight that all forms of social reconstruction… must be
either futile or insincere or both, until the problems of human increase were
manfully faced.’
He
suggests that Malthus influenced the development of Darwin’s theory of evolution and awakened
‘that train of thought that found expression and demonstration at last in the
theory of natural selection.’
To
Wells it had ‘become apparent that whole masses of human population are, as a
whole, inferior in their claim upon the future’.
In common with many other population controllers Wells
considered that it was the uneducated and impoverished majority that was the
problem and his own social class that was the solution. Wells believed that a
future utopia would have to be ruled by a well educated, scientifically
literate population. What, he asks, was the future of ‘those swarms of black,
and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new
needs of efficiency?’ ‘Well’, he declared
‘the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take it they will
have to go. The whole tenor and meaning of the world, as I see it, is that they
have to go. So far as they fail to develop… it is their portion to die out and
disappear.’
In the ‘New Republic’, ‘the ethical system which will
dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of
what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity—beautiful and strong
bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge—and to check
the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls,
of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of
men.’
Wells prophesied that ‘the method that must in some cases
still be called in… is death…the merciful obliteration of weak and silly and
pointless things’.
With
great foresight he also predicted modern attitudes towards euthanasia and
assisted suicide, writing that in the future men ‘will naturally regard the
modest suicide of the incurably melancholy, or diseased or helpless persons as
a high and courageous act of duty rather than a crime.’
He asserted that ‘this euthanasia of the weak and sensual, is possible. On the
principles that will probably animate the predominant classes of the new time,
it will be permissible, and I have little or no doubt that in the future it
will be planned and achieved.’
When we read such predictions we can only come to the
conclusion that in our own times we are witnessing the systematic
implementation of theories that have existed in a highly developed form for
more than a century. It is important for us to possess a clear understanding of
the intellectual roots of the crisis in which we find ourselves. In Wells, and
many of his contemporaries, we see firstly a Darwinism which reduces man to the
status of an animal and places the weak in perpetual competition against the
strong. Secondly we can identify a Malthusianism which identifies new human
life as a threat to the already born and which tranforms the majority of the
population into the source not of national health but of social disorder.
Finally, we see a conviction that the history of mankind is necessarily an
evolution to a more perfect state, and that this will be achieved largely
through scientific progress. These three factors combined with the general loss
of a moral framework in our post-Christian age have brought us to our current
predicament where nearly six hundred unborn children are killed every day in
this country alone and where the elderly and disabled are increasingly treated
as a burden to be eliminated rather than persons whose dignity requires loving
care.
H. G. Wells died on 13th August 1946 despairing
at the future of mankind. He had lived to see many of the policies of the ‘New Republic’
actually applied by the National Socialists in Germany. Ideological principles in
which he had so long trusted had in fact brought his own civilisation to the
brink of destruction. In his last work Mind at the End of its Tether, he declared his conviction that the human
race had now played out its purpose and would soon come to an end.
Our world of
self-delusion…will perish amidst its evasions and fatuities. It is like a
convoy lost in darkness on an unknown rocky coast, with quarrelling pirates in
the chartroom and savages clambering up the sides of the ships to plunder and
do evil as the whim may take them…And this, its last expiring thrust, is to
demonstrate that the door closes upon us for evermore.
There is no way out or round or through.
H. G. Wells' final lesson to us is that the culture of death
will end in despair.
