OK, One Last Thing Since I Found This This Morning

A righteous man regards the life of his animal, the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel
Proverbs 12:10 (NKJV)

It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
Charles Darwin: The Descent of Man

In her great and effectively suppressed book, Mother Country, Marilynne Robinson provided a description that anyone who wades into the cross currents of double-speak of elite, authorized, respectable British social thought should know.  She presents it as a party among the wealthy, powerful and respected in the sort of great house as presented in BBC-PBS costume drama.  It is so spot on that I'd suggest you read the whole thing - that passage, which I posted here, before and the entire essay if you're lucky enough to find a copy of it. The two parts of the description that are most relevant to my point here are set in blue, 

. . . The evenings would perhaps have begun to weigh, if someone had not suggested a game called Philanthropy.  The rules of the game are very simple.  One must justify things as they are by attacking things as they are.  It is a philosophic game, perfectly suited to showing off a fine wit.  It has even the thrill of risk, since it invites subversive ideas.  But the point is always, of course, to achieve a resolution that will bring the argument right back where it began.

This is only to say that their reflections on the subject accumulate rather than develop,  in the manner characteristic of rationalizations.  Their disputations produce a welter of harmonious contradiction,  the sort of thing that happens when any argument is welcome that will prop a valued conclusion.  So the centuries pass.

I would recommend keeping that in mind whenever you read British social thought, whether philosophical or scientific, or social-scientific, or socialist.  When it's the Brits, make that especially when it calls itself "socialism".  

So, having given that warning, I'll give you a link to a fascinating piece I found after I wrote the first piece this morning,  in which the eminent American philosopher C. S. Pierce made a critique of The Grammar of Science, a book by Karl Pearson, published in Popular Science Monthly,  January 1901.  One can only think wistfully of a time when Popular Science was informed by someone such as C. S. Pierce instead of the dumbed down philosophizing of the likes of Sagan and his successors and their even more degraded pop-culture fellow ersatz authorities, such as who pass as natural philosophers in the age of TV and social media. 

A long series of posts could be made just on the problems with Pearson's presentation of science that Pierce presents, about how much of what Pearson said, and which is commonly said by scientists, and could as well be said about those who popularize science and, in my understanding of it, could pretty well apply to at least half of the presentation of the theory of natural selection, especially that which Darwin and his successors claimed about its applicability to the human species.  

Cutting to the chase, the American philosopher noted that Pearson started out by contradicting the very structure of scientific theory in just that way and I would say that natural selection - as the invention of Charles Darwin and as universally adopted - has that contradiction built into its identification of whatever allows the survival and reproduction of individuals who become the parents of new species, what, despite the sometimes made denials, it inevitably presents that as a "good".  In fact, the overall theory presents survival as a good, not merely as a truth. 

An introductory chapter of ethical content sounds the dominant note of the book. The author opens with the declaration that our conduct ought to be regulated by the Darwinian theory. Since that theory is an attempt to show how natural causes tend to impart to stocks of animals and plants characters which, in the long run, promote reproduction and thus insure the continuance of those stocks, it would seem that making Darwinism the guide of conduct ought to mean that the continuance of the race is to be taken as the summum bonum, and 'Multiplicamini' as the epitome of the moral law. Professor Pearson, however, understands the matter a little differently, expressing himself thus: "The sole reason [for encouraging] any form of human activity . . . lies in this: [its] existence tends to promote the welfare of human society, to increase social happiness, or to strengthen social stability. In the spirit of the age we are bound to question the value of science; to ask in what way it increases the happiness of mankind or promotes social efficiency."

The second of these two statements omits the phrase, 'the welfare of human society,' which conveys no definite meaning; and we may, therefore, regard it as a mere diluent, adding nothing to the essence of what is laid down. Strict adhesion to Darwinian principles would preclude the admission of the 'happiness of mankind' as an ultimate aim. For on those principles everything is directed to the continuance of the stock, and the individual is utterly of no account, except in so far as he is an agent of reproduction. Now there is no other happiness of mankind than the happiness of individual men. We must, therefore, regard this clause as logically deleterious to the purity of the doctrine. As to 'social stability,' we all know very well what ideas this phrase is intended to convey to English apprehensions; and it must be admitted that Darwinism, generalized in due measure, may apply to English society the same principles that Darwin applied to breeds. A family in which the standards of that society are not traditional will go under and die out, and thus 'social stability' tends to be maintained.

But against the doctrine that social stability is the sole justification of scientific research, whether this doctrine be adulterated or not with the utilitarian clause, I have to object, first, that it is historically false, in that it does not accord with the predominant sentiment of scientific men; second, that it is bad ethics; and, third, that its propagation would retard the progress of science.

Professor Pearson does not, indeed, pretend that that which effectually animates the labors of scientific men is any desire 'to strengthen social stability.' Such a proposition would be too grotesque. Yet if it was his business, in treating of the grammar of science, to set forth the legitimate motive to research—as he has deemed it to be—it was certainly also his business, especially in view of the splendid successes of science, to show what has, in fact, moved such men. They have, at all events, not been inspired by a wish either to 'support social stability' or, in the main, to increase the sum of men's pleasures. The man of science has received a deep impression of the majesty of truth, as that to which, sooner or later, every knee must bow. He has further found that his own mind is sufficiently akin to that truth, to enable him, on condition of submissive observation, to interpret it in some measure. As he gradually becomes better and better acquainted with the character of cosmical truth, and learns that human reason is its issue and can be brought step by step into accord with it, he conceives a passion for its fuller revelation. He is keenly aware of his own ignorance, and knows that personally he can make but small steps in discovery. Yet, small as they are, he deems them precious; and he hopes that by conscientiously pursuing the methods of science he may erect a foundation upon which his successors may climb higher. This, for him, is what makes life worth living and what makes the human race worth perpetuation. The very being of law, general truth, reason—call it what you will—consists in its expressing itself in a cosmos and in intellects which reflect it, and in doing this progressively; and that which makes progressive creation worth doing—so the researcher comes to feel—is precisely the reason, the law, the general truth for the sake of which it takes place.

Such, I believe, as a matter of fact, is the motive which effectually works in the man of science. That granted, we have next to inquire which motive is the more rational, the one just described or that which Professor Pearson recommends. The ethical text-books offer us classifications of human motives. But for our present purpose it will suffice to pass in rapid review some of the more prominent ethical classes of motives.

I would point out that it is clear that Pearson's idea of the "welfare of human society" included the antisemtic exclusion of Russian and Polish Jews, assigning them everything from inferior intelligence to "dirtiness", it led him to consider the survival of infants and mothers through Caeserian section a biological evil, it led to him, agreeing with the later-to-be Nazi Alfred Ploetz, that the deaths of many  infants in their first year would be a boon to the surviving infants of two and three years old - something that is not only irrational but an absurdly but repeatedly made power attributed to natural selection.  It was the kind of double-speak, two-step that the proposed application of natural selection in social, political, legal, military, eugenic and genocidal policy starts and finishes in.  And that started with Darwin, himself. 

Those who prescribe the deaths of those they consider "unfit" because they pose a biological danger to the "fit" seem to like to talk themselves out of facing the nature of what they are doing, from the scientist who will never get their hands dirty to Darwinian mass murderers such as SS-Mann Heinrich Hesse 

One of the Jewish people killed by me was a Jewish woman aged between twenty and thirty, I cannot remember exactly. She was a beautiful woman. I was glad to be able to shoot her so that she did not fall into the hands of the Untersturmführer. But please don’t take that to mean that I enjoyed it. I said to the Jewess when I brought her from the cellar that the Untersturmführer wanted to speak to her, or something to that effect. My only thought was that if I had to do something I should cause the person as little pain as possible. I did not want the Jewess to suffer fear of death. I then made her come out of the cellar. She went in front of me. On the way to the grave or graves, which had already been dug, I suddenly shot her from behind.

But I'm just giving this to you for the links so you can read Robinson and Pierce.  

As to the accusation that I'm "being provocative,"  oh, mercy me, lands sake! a political blogger being provocative, what is the world coming to? 

I will note that my question that led to me finding this, what Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. took from his reading of Popular Science,  would not seem to include the points that C. S. Pierce made here but we can't know which side of this he'd have claimed to believe. 

Update:  I find it hard to let go of the trail once I'm on it, I'm finding that one of the sources of Oliver Wendell Holmes jr.'s eugenics must have been none other than his own father, the 2nd tier, 19th century American poet and man of letters, Oliver Wendell Holmes sr. who was very taken with Darwin, Huxley and, especially, Galton. As would be expected of a man of an American family that could claim the kind of distinction that traditional wealth claims for itself that Galton and Darwin claimed for theirs, he loved the idea of not only inherited genius but the idea that getting rid of the other sort was worth considering.  No, make that more than just considering.  And, if you didn't know it,  Jr. was not shy about letting people know he thought his daddy was an old, romantic softie. 

Update 2:  What an asshole!

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.—A.B. 1829, M.D. ’36, LL.D. ’80, dean of Harvard Medical School, acclaimed writer, and father of the future Supreme Court justice—was one of the first American intellectuals to espouse eugenics. Holmes, whose ancestors had been at Harvard since John Oliver entered with the class of 1680, had been writing about human breeding even before Galton. He had coined the phrase “Boston Brahmin” in an 1861 book in which he described his social class as a physical and mental elite, identifiable by its noble “physiognomy” and “aptitude for learning,” which he insisted were “congenital and hereditary.”

I'll break in, having lived in New England my entire life, not that far North of Boston, I've seen more of the Boston Brahmin types, a lot of them are plug ugly and not a few of them were friggin' idiots of the kind that even Charles Darwin - in a passage asserting their biological innocuousness as compared to the poor - called "useless drones." 


Holmes believed eugenic principles could be used to address the nation’s social problems. In an 1875 article in The Atlantic Monthly, he gave Galton an early embrace, and argued that his ideas could help to explain the roots of criminal behavior. “If genius and talent are inherited, as Mr. Galton has so conclusively shown,” Holmes wrote, “why should not deep-rooted moral defects…show themselves…in the descendants of moral monsters?”

Update 3:  I'm wading through a long article by Holmes sr. who I have to say, is the most tedious writer I've read since I waded through many numbers of the Anthropological Review in search of an article as part of my research.   This is going to take a while.