CHAPTER THREE: Nietzsche and Eugenics
To Sir Francis Galton belongs the honour of founding the Science of Eugenics. To Friedrich Nietzsche belongs the honour of founding the Religion of Eugenics ... Both aim at a Superman, not a Napoleonic individual, but an ideal of a race of supermen, as superior to the present mankind -- many of whom, alas! have not even completed the stage of transition from animal to man -- as man is superior to the worm.
-- Maximilian Mugge, 'Eugenics and the Superman', Eugenics Review, 1.3, 1909, p. 191.
Nietzsche is the spiritual father and forerunner of the Eugenists.
-- Charles Sarolea, German Problems and Personalities, 1917, p. 92.
'The old tablets of morality are broken, and the new ones are only half-written.' With these words Alexander Tille ended his book, Von Darwin bis Nietzsche (1895), ushering in a process, which still continues, of making use of Nietzsche both to diagnose a modern condition of godlessness, and to find something to fill the gap left by God's death. It would probably be true to say that the new tablets of the law are still only half written, if they are even that much written (and perhaps postmodernism means accepting, even celebrating that fact), but in the first decades of the twentieth century interpretations of Nietzsche combined with the new science of eugenics to form a potent attempt to formulate a new code of morals. Why this combination came about, how it was articulated, and what were its results, are the subjects of this chapter.
In his book on Nietzsche, for the second edition of which Oscar Levy wrote a glowing preface, George Chatterton-Hill, the Geneva-based sociologist, wrote of Nietzsche's masters and slaves as constituting two separate races. Chatterton-Hill tried hard to clarify this claim:
By this division, Nietzsche does not mean arbitrarily to divide the human species into two anthropological races. His meaning is that, given an infinite number of races, or of 'ethnies', which is the term preferred by the anthroposociological school, those races may, alike from the physical and mental point of view, be roughly divided into a superior and inferior race.
The slaves, Chatterton-Hill believed, were degenerates, while the masters represented an aristocracy, Indeed, the essence of Nietzsche's thought was to be found, according to Chatterton-Hill, in aristocracy: 'aristocracy of sentiment, of taste, of thought. As an aristocrat he glorifies the Over-Man, supreme type of aristocracy; as an aristocrat he has a supreme contempt for the masses ...' [1] With these words, Chatterton-Hill typified early interpretations of Nietzsche. Such interpretations accorded well with widespread theories of social degeneration that arose in the Edwardian period in the face of the rise of organised labour, urbanisation, technologisation, imperial decline and feminism.
But Chatterton-Hill was not just a scholar of Nietzsche. He also wrote about heredity, in particular about the importance of selection in social life. Like many scholars of the time, he believed that the laws of selection in 'organic life' could be transferred to the social realm: 'If we are able to appreciate the omnipotence of Naturzuchtung in the life of organisms,' he wrote, 'we shall be able, also, to appreciate the action of the same Naturzuchtung in the life of societies.' Understanding these laws, Chatterton-Hill went on to show, meant discouraging hybridity between the races, since it 'usually brings indubitable racial degeneracy in its train'. Most importantly, these laws, since they were those of nature, taught one to be sanguine in the face of the disappearance of 'inferior' races: 'it is not only non-human species which become the victims of elimination through human agency; the lower races of mankind give way before the evolution of the superior races'. Savages, he noted in a spirit of fairness, were not biologically degenerate, they were simply unable to compete with the achievements of more civilised peoples. There was nothing to be done about this natural outcome of social (as opposed to physical) evolution, and so one had had to accept that 'The more progressive white races fatally exterminate the less progressive black races, whose lands they till and render fertile, thereby destroying the conditions under which alone these hunting or pastoral peoples can exist.' The lesson to be learned from these investigations was that 'it is always conflict that decides the fates of races, as of individuals' and that 'selection is uninterruptedly active in eliminating all the waste products of organic activity'. [2] This view sat easily with Chatterton-Hill's understanding of Nietzsche, simply transferring (a certain reading of) the theory of the Ubermensch from the national sphere to the international, or the empire.
Scholars have noted before the connection between eugenics and the teachings of Nietzsche. I am not concerned with the long-standing, heated debate about whether or not Nietzsche was a forerunner of Nazi racial politics, [3] but with the links that existed between interpretations of Nietzsche and the eugenics movement in Britain in the early years of the twentieth century. These links have been noted, but never studied in detail. In the first two chapters of this book, I have shown them in the Nietzsche movement's major figures of Oscar Levy and Anthony M. Ludovici; in this chapter, I will paint a broader picture. Since Robert Bannister included a chapter on 'The Nietzsche Vogue' among American social Darwinists in his book. of 1979, there have been no systematic studies of the interaction between Nietzschean thought and eugenics, even though this relationship is obvious, in terms of influence and personnel, and revealing of cultural currents in the early twentieth century. Bannister claims that most Darwinists dissociated themselves from Nietzsche, whom they considered too extreme. [4] This is so, for the examples he chooses; but there are many others, especially ,among the eugenics movement, where the connection is not only admitted, but celebrated (again, whether or not this is a correct reading of Nietzsche is not my main concern). This difference was probably a consequence of the eugenicists' diagnosis of an unchanging, genetic threat to society, whereas the degeneration theorists believed that environmental reform could alleviate the problem. [5]
For example, Pauline Mazumdar, in a book about the Eugenics Society in Britain, points cut the similarities between Nietzsche's philosophy and the theories of eugenics that were often detected by British commentators. Beginning with a reference by R. A. Fisher to Zarathustra in a talk delivered to the Cambridge Society on 12 October 1913, Mazumdar goes on to note the interest of people such as Havelock Ellis, Maximilian Mugge and George Chatterton-Hill in both strands of thought. She also notes that the Eugenics Society's official line on Nietzsche, if such can be said to exist, was one of caution. [6]
Nietzsche himself scorned Darwinism, but still must have been aware of the Darwinian construction that could easily be placed on his philosophy, especially the idea of the superman, with its accompanying vocabulary of aristocracies, hardness and exuberant violence. Indeed, this was the. inflection that Nietzsche's writings were given by his early exegetes, Just as today interpreters find in Nietzsche the beginnings of theories of pluralism, liberalism, feminism, cyborg theory or postmodern identities, so the theorists of the start of the twentieth century saw in Nietzsche the greatest expositor of the concerns of the day. In Britain these concerns were largely responses to new social and political developments: increasing urbanisation, working-class organisation, feminism, the loss of world economic superiority and the desire to maintain the empire; in general, the threat to old governing elites. To a certain constituency, Nietzsche seemed to offer both an explanation for the emergence of this threat, and a remedy. Eugenics, grounded as it was in scientific research, appeared to confirm empirically what Nietzsche had grasped philosophically.
Nietzscheans
Having asserted the existence of connections between the Nietzsche and eugenics movements, the best way to examine it is through considering what the exponents of these two movements actually said. I will begin with the Nietzscheans, since the fact that they appealed to eugenics is perhaps less surprising than that many eugenicists also appealed to Nietzschean-sounding ideas, even if not always explicitly to Nietzsche by name. The distinction in this chapter, it should be noted, between Nietzscheans and eugenicists is somewhat arbitrary, as is not surprising given that I am seeking to establish their profound interconnection. Indeed, in several cases, for example those of Maximilian Mugge and Havelock Ellis, it is not possible to place them more squarely in one camp than the other. Nevertheless, on the basis of their writings' main themes, I have endeavoured to divide them up in a way which is not too unjust.
The first thing that needs to be noted when thinking about the Nietzscheans is that, although Nietzscheanism was an avant-garde movement in the first decade or so of the twentieth century, its exponents were by no means intellectual or social outcasts. Indeed, support for Nietzsche was something of a social glue in 'progressive' intellectual circles. It held together, for example, the friendship of Ludovici and Levy longer than this might otherwise have endured; and it lent credibility to an emerging modernism which perceived itself to be fighting against an entrenched decadence in the artistic and literary world. Nietzschean concepts and terms would be bandied around by George Bernard Shaw and W.B. Yeats, T.E. Hulme and Wyndham Lewis, as if the mere invocation of them was sufficient to send the Georgians and the pastoralists running.
There were many more Nietzscheans than just the formidable duo of Levy and Ludovici, however, even if few clung so tenaciously to Nietzsche as did these two. Chatterton-Hill has already been cited. And while few were so obviously connected to eugenics as Ludovici, a friend of C. P. Blacker, the first postwar Honorary Secretary of the Eugenics Society [7] and an exponent of extreme forms of negative eugenics and prenatal selection, many readily employed a vocabulary familiar to those with eugenicist concerns.
Take, for example, the case of Paul Cohn, one of Oscar Levy's proteges, in an article for the New Age in 1913. It is the end of the piece that is interesting, for Cohn suddenly launches from a fairly sober tone into one of those flights of hyperbole that so often characterise early writings on Nietzsche, whether pro or contra:
Only Nietzscheanism can lead us out of this impasse. A sound system of eugenics will prevail, free alike from that false 'humanitarianism' which is more devastating to the race than all the Tartar invasions, and from the false eugenist theories that preserve the wrong persons. Science, instead of bolstering up an outworn ethical system, will be harnessed to the service of the Superman. Thus Nietzsche's true leaders, the men of strong and beautiful bodies, wills and intellects, will be developed. [8]
Much early work on Nietzsche saw him in this social Darwinist-eugenicist light, in which the laws of biology could be applied to social, cultural and psychological life. More importantly, most interpreters looked on this scientific determinism not as a ,way of benefiting everybody but as a way of redefining or even realising afresh sp1i:ial hierarchies. Eugenics was 'progressive' in the sense that it challenged established orthodoxies -- the possibility of environmental reform, for example -- but reactionary in that it was primarily employed to justify class and race prejudices, in which in the struggle for existence it was genetically predetermined who was going to come off best. Of course, there was in such thinking a paradox: if the 'best' were hereditarily determined, why was there such fear of social pathology, that is, of degeneration? Here the argument about 'civilisation' and 'humanitarianism', which had supposedly distorted the 'natural' order of things, came into play. Its introduction did not, however, deal with the claim that psychological life -- and hence moral life -- was also subject to biological laws. If this were indeed the case, from where did the humanitarian sentiment come? The argument was circular: the weak were so successful because their effete ethic had become influential. The implausibility of this position notwithstanding, most cultural critics, certainly most Nietzschean critics, asserted it openly. In terms of the sociology of knowledge, here is a fine case study of the way in which normative or popular prejudice informs science.
A good example is that of Thomas Common (1850-1919). Common was one of the first people in Britain to write on Nietzsche, abandoning his earlier intention to enter the church in order to do so. He arranged with Henry and Co. of London to publish an English edition of Nietzsche's major works, under the editorship of Alexander Tille, two volumes of which appeared in 1896 before the publishing house went bankrupt. He also published (sporadically) the Nietzschean journal Notes for Good Europeans (1903-1916), as well as, in 1901, a selection from Nietzsche's works, and he contributed regularly to the first English Nietzschean journal The Eagle and the Serpent (1898-1903), edited by J. B. Barnhill and Malfew Seklew. [9]
In these writings Common interpreted Nietzsche, ''The New Outlook', in the light of Darwin:
From the standpoint of all Darwinian philosophy of history, we now regard Christianity as an artful device for enabling inferior human beings to maintain themselves in the struggle for existence, a device analogous to, and serving the same purpose as, the ink of the cuttlefish, the venom of the snake, the stench of the skunk, the various forms of mimicry, &c.
Since Christianity was the prop of the weak, a new society would do away with it in favour of the strong:
Not a social democracy, but a social aristocracy -- in the true sense of the term -- in which intelligent and honest 'working men' will have their positions elevated, while unworthy characters may be degraded perhaps to the level of serfs or slaves, will be evolved in future, if the better class of men are wise enough to take advantage of their superiority, and thus maintain the excellency and prevent the degeneracy of the human race. [10]
Common reiterated this position at every opportunity. There was clearly a sense, detectable simply in the stridency of the tone, that connecting Darwin and Nietzsche was the height of avant-garde sophistication. The mention of the two names in one breath was enough to signal that one had overcome the cloying bourgeois sentiments of the age and had acquired the tools with which to build something new: 'The theory of evolution points the way to the very opposite of democracy, to an aristocracy in the true sense, if the human race is to progress and be at its best ... It must, however, be a social aristocracy, not an individualistic aristocracy, as Professor Karl Pearson has pointed out in his "Ethic of Freethought".' [11]
Appealing to Karl Pearson indicates the extent to which Common was willing to throw in his lot with the eugenicists. This attitude he summed up thus: 'It is not inappropriate to say that if Darwin be regarded as the Copernicus of moral and social science, Nietzsche is the Newton thereof.' Nietzsche, Common believed, had explained the laws by which morals evolved, just as Darwin had explained the laws of biological evolution (even though he could not explain the mechanism by which the process operated). [12]
Common shared this interpretation with Alexander Tille (1866-1912), the editor of the Nietzsche translations that were originally intended to extend to Nietzsche's complete works. Tille had lectured on Nietzsche at the Glasgow Goethe Society in 1894, and subsequently as a lecturer in German at Glasgow University in 1899. In his book Urn Darwin his Nietzsche (1895) and his introductions to the two published volumes of the works, Tille developed the argument that Nietzsche's thought represented a progression of Darwin's. Until he was forced to resign his lectureship at Glasgow on account of being openly pro-Boer, Tille was probably the leading light of the British Nietzsche movement, a movement which before the arrival of Levy was based (despite the title of Thatcher's book) mainly in Scotland. [13]
Tille saw Nietzsche as an 'evolutionary ethical utilitarian'. Indeed, he believed, talking of Thus Spake Zarathustra, that 'With this book of Nietzsche's, Darwin's great and dominant theory of evolution is for the first time related clearly and unclouded by reigning ethical notions to contemporary mankind and to the future development of mankind.' [14] Baldly stated, Nietzsche confirmed what Darwin's theory of evolution implied: that men are not all born equal (p. 21). As a consequence, socialist and humanist theories based on the opposite, Rousseauesque assumption that all men are born equal must be overthrown in favour of one that will secure the future of the race by following the laws of evolution, in which the healthy and strong promote an upwards development, and the ill and weak disappear (pp. 22; 235). Socialist leaders such as August Bebel who try to base their utopian ideals on readings of Darwin are misguided, for they have failed to see that Darwinism is an aristocratic principle: 'it is based on the "selection of the best'" (p. 164), the Ubermensch, 'that born hero, who through his physiological aptitude stands beyond good and evil, and knows only the difference between good and bad' (p. 220). According to Tille, Nietzsche understands perfectly well 'how a species [Art] in the Darwinian sense emerges, and on this knowledge he bases his theory of the breeding of an aristocratic race' (p. 221).
This book, one of the clearest statements of the linkage between Darwin and Nietzsche, was never translated, and hence presumably had few readers in Britain (although in Glasgow and Edinburgh, where a number of the early Nietzscheans were based, there was a significant German expatriate community, and people interested in the latest in German culture). Tille reiterated his claims in the introductions to the two volumes of the works that appeared in 1896, Thus Spake Zarathustra (which he published in the face of advice that it would be better read after Nietzsche's early works) and The Case of Wagner.
In the former, Tille stressed the debt Nietzsche owed to Darwin. But he accredited his importance to the fact that Nietzsche put Darwin's scientific theory on an ethical footing: 'it is Nietzsche's undeniable merit to have led this new moral ideal to a complete victory'. [15] In the latter Tille devoted more space to explicating the importance of Darwin, especially in the light of neo-Lamarckian heresies being spread abroad by those unable to accept Darwin's teaching of the selection of the fit. Once, Tille argues, one recognises that 'a severe struggle for existence rages everywhere, and that all higher development is due to the effects of that struggle', one must accept that man's moral judgement is not the measure of the universe; rather nature and its laws govern, or should govern, man: 'Why should we not look at him as a being above all physiological, and measure first of all the value of his art, civilisation, and religion by their effect upon his species, by the standard of physiology?' An all-pervasive sense of physiology is what, Tille claims, characterises the four works of Nietzsche in volume XI. [16]
Tille and Common, as the progenitors of British Nietzschean thought, set the tone for others to follow. And follow they did, to the extent that linking Nietzsche with Darwin became such a stock trope of early Nietzsche studies that anyone who cavilled at the linkage was considered somewhat controversial.
One vociferous member of the Nietzsche movement, a close associate of Levy and Ludovici, was J. M. Kennedy, the orientalist scholar. In his book The Quintessence of Nietzsche (1909), Kennedy employed all the language of social Darwinism in order to explicate Nietzsche as a 'philosopher of intellectual and physical aristocracy'. [17] Nietzsche, Kennedy explained, believed in the need for an aristocratic 'caste' or 'race' (p. 64), and was therefore the most valuable thinker in the major battle of the age: the fight against degeneracy.
What were the roots of this degeneracy? Kennedy is not entirely clear on this, but he is sure about how it was encouraged. Like Levy and Ludovici (and Nietzsche), he blames the spread of Christianity: 'Christianity denies life ... As the crowd of slavish degenerates greatly outnumbered the aristocratic few, it is not: to be wondered at that the new faith spread like a prairie fire' (p. 65). The bulk of Kennedy's book is then devoted to defending this 'new manly ideal' (p. 317) of aristocratic scorn for the weak in mind and body.
Strikingly, this proposed aristocracy is not to arise solely on its own merits, but on the basis of the elimination of those who stand in its way. Indeed, the sine qua non of Kennedy's aristocracy is the oppression of just about everyone else:
The essential thing in a good and healthy aristocracy is that it should not regard itself as a function either of the kingship or the commonwealth, but as the significance and highest justification thereof -- that it should therefore accept with a good conscience the sacrifice of a legion of individuals, who, for its sake, must be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments. (p. 325)
And he goes on to advocate, for the remainder, a life of drudgery in the service of their masters:
Instead of the lowest classes in society receiving wages and keeping up their pseudo-independence, they must be trained to submit themselves as property. They will certainly be no worse off than slaves were in ancient communities; and in most cases they will be better off than they now are. (p. 347)
It would of course have been possible for Kennedy to advocate such views, which were, after all, only an extreme version of the ideas of the conservative revivalism of the period, and leave it at that. Indeed, this is what he did in a later book on Tory Democracy (1911), though even here not without appealing to Nietzsche's demolition of romanticism and his philosophical justification for an aristocratic revivalism based on the laws of race. [18] But in 1909 he sought to bolster his views by giving them a grounding in science. In particular he appealed to a concept of uneven evolution which linked his Nietzschean views with those of Darwin:
A close study of our biological evolution from the ape to man furnishes the best refutation of the ridiculous claims put forward by Democrats and Socialists. It would be childish to think that we had all evolved equally, that no man had ever advanced a step in front of his neighbour. On this point the very evidence of our own senses would satisfy anyone but the most rabid demagogue: men are not equal; equal rights are an absurdity. (p. 347)
Many thinkers, and not just in Britain, deduced human inequality from the writings of Nietzsche and Darwin. In Germany one of the main exponents of this viewpoint was the social anthropologist Otto Ammon, whose books on natural selection were written with the expressed aim of refuting the claims of German Social Democrats. [19] Whether Nietzsche and Darwin were saying the same thing was rarely the subject of inquiry, just as whether what they were saying really justified a hierarchical vision of society rarely came up for discussion. Rather, since their interpreters began with a vision of such a society, they did not spend much time on probing beneath the surface of either Darwin's or Nietzsche's writings to check if they really were advocates of slavery and rigid social stratification or not.
The attack on Christianity was part of this general vision of an organic, hierarchical society. The proponents of such a society, of course, never considered that they might be any other than part of the aristocracy, even if they included a few modest claims about their unworthiness in the face of the Ubermensch. A case in point is that of the French philosopher Henri Lichtenberger. I include him in this study because his book on Nietzsche, originally published in French in 1898, was, in J. M. Kennedy's English translation, quite influential, largely thanks to the high esteem in which it was held by Havelock Ellis and Charles Sarolea. [20]
Lichtenberger repeats almost word for word the mantra of anti-Christianity: 'the religion of pity, like Christianity, for example, tends to protect the existence of degenerates . . . The religion of pity carries with it the extreme, evil consequence of prolonging a number of useless lives which are really condemned by the law of selection.' [21] The appeal to 'the law of selection' makes Lichtenberger's position instantly recognisable. Darwin is again brought into the service of a Nietzschean cause; a vulgar notion of genetics is appealed to as supporting evidence for a rather clumsy reading of Nietzsche:
There are unfortunates whom it is inhuman to relieve. There are degenerates whose death should not be delayed ... The earth must not be a lazar-house inhabited by the sick and discouraged, or else the healthy man will perish from disgust and pity. To spare future generations the depressing sight of misery and ugliness, let us kill all those who are ripe for death, let us have the courage not to retain those among us who are falling, but let us push them so that they may fall even more quickly. (pp. 178-79)
We have become accustomed to associating such statements with the history of Nazism. But Nazism was a part of a longer history of ideas, a history which embraced a great variety of thinkers from the beginning of the nineteenth century. This is not to say that people such as Lichtenberger can be considered to be Nazis; rather, it means that Nazism did not come from nowhere, that the potential for violence exists across Europe -- not just in Germany -- and that dreams of purification, cleansing, health and the aesthetic modelling of human beings are common and old ones. [22]
Lichtenberger was clearly not alone in his view that a social theory could be derived from a conflation of Nietzsche and Darwin. Another typically vociferous proponent of such a combination was Ferdinand Schiller, the Oxford philosopher, who penned a number of studies on eugenics. On the question of the reception of the Nietzschean idea of strength, for example, Schiller explicitly recommended that 'we should here correct Nietzsche by a wider, more scientific and Darwinian notion of "strength"'. What this means becomes immediately apparent when Schiller turns to the problem of decadence, and how civilisation itself is sapping the strength of the healthy. Schiller argues that Nietzsche
sometimes tries to show that the moral qualities he dislikes -- humanity, pity, sympathy, etc. -- are not truly the sources of social strength they are taken to be, or that they have been fostered to a pitch that renders them biologically dangerous. They may in short be phenomena of 'decadence', the extensive existence of which throughout civilisation Nietzsche boldly proclaims.
As a result, Schiller advises finding a scientific basis for the theories of Nietzsche; this he locates in eugenics:
... eugenics is becoming a subject of sober scientific research, and we already know a good deal more than we are putting into practice ... We also know that Nietzsche's preference for an aristocracy is biologically justified, because progress everywhere depends on the few who are capable of creating novelties ... men are unequal in all sorts of ways and ... to try to reduce their abilities to the same level may be fatal to the human race. [23]
Many thinkers therefore saw the theories of evolution and the survival of the fittest, as understood by the eugenicists, as significant not on their own, but in combination with the philosophy of Nietzsche. Even those who appealed to Nietzsche not as proponents of a new aristocracy but purely on anti-religious grounds employed a 'hard' Darwinian language to back up their claims. For example, at a talk to the Birmingham Rationalist Association in November 1909, one Arthur Knapp gave a talk about Nietzsche which aimed to show how the 'fiery philosopher' had applied the principles of evolution to morals. Knapp argued, in order to justify his attack on Christianity, that Nietzsche had shown how that religion was contrary to moral evolution:
Given an earth and living creatures, those individuals or species who have no desire for life will probably die off. Given the desire for life, then, as soon as men gather together in tribes, those actions which make for the preservation of the tribe will be good, and those which tend to destroy it will be bad. So far so good; but neither Spencer, nor Darwin, nor Huxley, explained whence Christian ethics came, for precisely those men who would be bad for the tribe (the poor in spirit, sickly and impotent) Christianity calls good. It remained for Nietzsche to explain Christianity in accordance with the Darwinian theory. [24]
Nevertheless, some thinkers disputed the claims made by the Nietzscheans that eugenics supported their position. They did so, however, not because they disagreed with the congruence of the two strands of thought, but because they thought that eugenics predated Nietzsche, that is, they wanted only to reverse the story of the ideas' provenance. The best example of this claim occurs in the writings of Maximilian Mugge, one of the thinkers whose interests very clearly embraced both Nietzsche's philosophy and eugenics. In the first volume of the Eugenics Review (1909), the organ of the newly founded Eugenics Education Society, Mugge published a paper on the idea of the superman as it related to eugenics, and in the same year he authored an influential book on Nietzsche's philosophy. Another followed several years later.
In all three of these publications Mugge came out strongly in favour of Nietzsche. He sought, however, to set the record straight on the relative novelty of eugenics by pointing out that Galton began publishing his research on heredity in 1865, long before Nietzsche's star began to shine.
In the preface to the second edition of his first book, Mugge thanked Galton, 'the great founder of the science of Eugenics'. He noted that it was his 'duty to point out that the term "precursor" applied to Nietzsche with respect to Galton in the first edition is untenable' and cited a passage from Galton's Memories of My Life to show why. [25] This ascription of originality, if not influence, is worth bearing in mind when one considers Mugge's comments on Nietzsche, which dearly place him in a post-Darwinian framework. Indeed, Mugge sees the possibility of improving on Nietzsche's ideas by applying to them the lessons of eugenics:
The higher-men must work towards the Superman, who will be a hero and a genius, uniting in himself all the partial excellences of former heroes -- he will be a strong and perfect man, both in body and soul. With this conception Nietzsche may be considered as an ally of Galton, his Superman is a poetic dream of the latter's Eugenics. (pp. 5-6)
This claim does not mean, though, that Nietzsche and Darwin are synonymous: 'To call Nietzsche a Darwinian moralist is an approximate classification only. On the other hand, it is foolish to say, as some Nietzscheans do, that he was not under the sway of Darwin's doctrines. He himself underestimated the influence of Darwin upon him ...' (p. 301). This claim -- that Nietzsche was influenced by Darwin more than he knew -- is what allows Mugge to bring the two thinkers together. First, he appeals to biology, which 'will plant a protective hedge of laws against all that is weakening mankind' (p. 305). Then he shows how recent developments in biology unite Nietzsche with Darwin, through the discoveries of his nephew, Galton:
The great contemporary of Nietzsche with his theory of the Superman is Francis Galton with his Eugenics. He defines it as the science which deals with those social agencies that influence, mentally or physically, the racial qualities of future generations ... In Galton's Eugenics, founded upon the idea of evolution, and the assumption that the human will is in some small measure capable of guiding the course of evolution, we see a scientific realisation of Nietzsche's dreams. Health, energy, ability, manliness and courteous disposition -- some of the qualities Galton requires -- are the best stepping-stones, if not towards the Superman, at any rate towards a Superior race. (p. 365)
In other words, while Nietzsche's goal of the superman was laudable, Galton's work forced a reassessment of it: 'Nietzsche overestimated the force of heredity ... Now though Galton's Law has some inconsistencies through its neglect of social evolution, it still proves the impossibility of methodically breeding the Superman' (p. 367). Even so, what Mugge did here was make the idea of race-breeding sound more respectable by using Galton -- the sober man of science -- as a way of tempering Nietzsche, thus actually lending his ideas more credibility. What Nietzsche and Darwin ultimately had in common, then, as eugenics revealed, was a shared emphasis on the value and desirability of conscious selection in breeding:
Nietzsche has shown us the way in his condemnation of the weak. Heredity will not bring about the Superman, nor retard the 'downward' path, but Selection may do so .... Selection is the only thing we can somehow control, since we do not know the secret ways followed by Nature when transferring qualities. (p. 369)
The issue of consciousness in selection was in fact the thing that Nietzsche believed differentiated his idea of evolution from Darwin's. Nietzsche thought that the ideas of 'natural selection' and the 'survival of the fittest' were too random to be relied on, if one was interested in human progress. For otherwise 'the fittest' could easily be the herd, whose safety in numbers secures their propagation. In fact, Mugge was perspicacious in recognising so early on in the history of Darwinism that Nietzsche's ideas are actually closer to Darwin's than he (Nietzsche) thought, and that the Darwin that Nietzsche attacked was more a popularly received Darwin than the ideas of Darwin himself. Mugge's view, that Nietzsche and Darwin were actually rather close, is one that has been recently confirmed. [26]
Other thinkers were less certain as to the nature of the Superman, and devoted their efforts to this question. One such was A.R. Orage, editor of the New Age, a man with interests ranging from guild socialism to Nietzscheanism to mysticism (and who eventually abandoned his British links to become a follower of Gourdieff and Ouspensky). In the Edwardian years he became one of the leading authorities on Nietzsche, not only because he gave Levy and Ludovici platforms from which to air their views in his journal (to the chagrin of his socialist friends and their conservative ones), but because he published two small but influential books on Nietzsche himself.
As Orage expressed it in his book Friedrich Nietzsche: The Dionysian Spirit of the Age (1906), 'the problem is, in Nietzsche's words, to determine what type of man we are to cultivate, to will, as the more valuable, the more worthy of life, and certain of the future, here upon the earth'. [27] This question was potentially such a difficult one for the simple reason that 'evolution is by no means identical with progress. Thus the Superman, if he is to appear at all, must be willed -- in plain English, must be bred' (pp. 69-70). Once the idea of consciously breeding a race of supermen has been conceived, therefore, the problems set in. Who is to determine what sort of man should be bred? And who is to determine whether the characteristics of the superman chosen by his breeders are really the correct ones? Who, in other words, will guard the guardians?
Having raised the question of the control of conscious breeding, a question which is again of relevance today in the context of genetic engineering, Orage actually solved it rather rapidly. He was in no doubt that it would be easy to find among the living examples of especially creative and gifted people who could be trusted with the progress of humankind:
Individually and in a few cases it may be true that noble minds accompany diseased bodies, but the rule is obviously the reverse. Were it not so, the whole of our hygiene, education, even our reason itself, must prove pure delusion. (p. 76)
In a later book, Nietszche in Outline and Aphorism (1907), Orage expanded on this view:
... only peculiarly endowed peoples and individuals are capable of creating, that is, lending to things new and high values. The mass of people accept valuations already created by the few. It is the few alone who give new significance to things. [28]
Orage, for all his interest in socialism, had no difficulty in proclaiming the need for an 'aristocratic caste' (p. 165) which would be responsible for the development of the superman, and in whose hands power, 'The one element that determines value' (p. 166), would be invested. Like William Inge, Dean of St. Paul's, and leading luminary of the Eugenics Society, Orage believed that Nietzsche 'had in mind the eugenic man who was to lead the world'. [29]
That such a view was widely accepted can be seen in the fact that even Havelock Ellis, held to be one of the most progressive thinkers of the period, and a promoter of the 'new science of sexology, was in agreement. In one of the earliest, and finest, essays on Nietzsche, Ellis took on the champions of the theory of the 'master-morality', claiming that although this was the one idea to which most Nietzsche-proponents inevitably gravitated, it was not the most representative of Nietzsche's thought, but an expression of Nietzsche's 'third period', the 'period of uncontrolled aberrations'. [30] Nevertheless, Ellis, himself one of the most celebrated of all the eugenicists, sympathised with the position that the philosophy of the 'master-morality' tied in with the new science of race and eugenics:
Nietzsche ingeniously connected his slave-morality with the accepted fact that for many centuries the large, fair-haired aristocratic race has been dying out in Europe, and the older down-trodden race -- short, dark, and broad-headed -- has been slowly gaining predominance ... The day has now come for the man who is able to rule himself, and who will be tolerant to others not out of his weakness, but out of his strength; to him nothing is forbidden, for he has passed beyond goodness and beyond wickedness. (p. 67)
Although in this essay Ellis claimed that statements such as these were merely explications without comment of Nietzsche's ideas (p. 67), his writings elsewhere make it plain that, while he was too liberal a thinker to make the same appeals to enslavement or aristocracy of a Mugge or a Kennedy, he too basically felt that the most pressing concern of the day was the necessity of race-regeneration. As he put it, 'The higher task is now ours of the regeneration of the race, or, if we wish to express that betterment less questionably, the aggeneration of the race.' [31] In this light, Ellis's interest in Nietzsche must be seen as more than a coincidence.
Ellis vociferously attacked those who advocated the so-called 'catastrophic theory of nature' in which violence, revolution and war are held as natural, even necessary; [32] Ludovici, though Ellis does not name him, is, with his Violence, Sacrifice and War (1933) an archetypal representative of this theory. But Ellis did hold many views which accorded well with the Nietzschean eugenicists. On Christianity, for example, Ellis saw no need to hold his fire, in his essay 'The Control of Population':
It is one of the unfortunate results of Christianity among us to-day -- amid other results more fortunate -- that we were led to reject infanticide, and that we still feel compelled to our own pain and trouble, to the injury of the race, and to the misery of the victims of our supposed 'humanitarianism,' to keep alive even the most hopelessly maimed and defective of new-born infants. We know in the back of our minds that we do it out of a quaint superstition. So timid a race have we grown, so meekly crushed by the dead hands of a tradition that for us has ceased to have any meaning, that our 'humanitarianism' is now a ghastly spectre! We suffer the fate we deserve. [33]
Ellis may have tried to find a middle-way eugenics between Christianity and the violence of a Ludovici -- 'I have faith that some day, in whatever poignant shape, the truth will come to Man that life is an art, and that in art there is no place either for violence or for sentimentality' (p. 170) -- but the image of him that still prevails as a progressive libertarian would certainly benefit from careful questioning.
In the same volume of essays from which 'The Control of Population' comes, Ellis ended with a chapter entitled 'Eugenics and the Future'. In this piece, Ellis argued that 'We must never imagine that eugenics alone can cure the ills of humanity' (p. 180). Furthermore, he went on firmly to dissociate eugenics from any sort of racism:
Even apart from the important fact that there is probably not a single person of really pure race to be found anywhere, the eugenist, as such, is not concerned to decide which is the best race, nor even to assume that any race is better, taken all round, than any other race. The eugenist, whether the dark-skinned eugenist or the white-skinned, is not called upon to make any decision in the matter. He is simply called upon to improve the stock of the race within which he belongs. (pp. 191-92)
Yet Ellis continued to accept that within Europe there were three main races, the Mediterranean, the Nordic and the Baltic, as well as the Alpine race as 'a wedge driven in between these two from the East' (p. 193). And he believed that the task of eugenics was a negative one of eliminating bad stocks through sterilisation (pp. 178, 181). This belief, coupled with his assertion that 'Eugenics, properly understood, has nothing whatever to do with these [racial) squabbles. It accepts the race of a human stock, or its blend of races; it desires that the stock shall produce the finest results of which it may be capable' (p. 196), means that Ellis, combining a certain libertarian streak with a resistance to racism and a desire to improve the human race, may have been closer to the views of Nietzsche than were the more obviously 'Nietzschean' eugenicists who called for the production of 'supermen'.
Eugenicists
This discussion of Ellis has taken us from the camp of the Nietzscheans into that of the eugenicists. Not all of the thinkers whom I examine in this section were explicitly interested in Nietzsche; nevertheless, many of their ideas share a certain ideational space with the Nietzscheans. This space, I contend, went beyond the mere coincidence of concepts with the same name ('superman', 'aristocracy', 'breeding', 'taste') but was part of a wider re-evaluation of society's fundamentals. Of course, there were some thinkers with feet in both camps. As well as Nietzscheans who shared a vocabulary of selection and struggle with eugenicists, and eugenicists who borrowed Nietzschean concepts such as superman, there were a number of writers who combined both approaches, of whom the most obvious and best-known are George Bernard Shaw and Havelock Ellis. Ellis, as we have seen, was responsible for one of the very first pieces of writing on Nietzsche in English (1898), and certainly one of the most influential (though it was overshadowed by the appearance in translation in 1895 of Max Nordau's Degeneration, a book that turned many readers against Nietzsche). As I have also noted above, Ellis is better known as an advocate of eugenics and as one of the pioneers of British sexology. His interest in the two areas of study is no coincidence.
By contrast with Ellis, Shaw was the exception to the Darwin-Nietzsche nexus. According to Thatcher, 'Shaw saw in Nietzsche an opponent and not an ally of Darwinism.' [34] Shaw's objection to Darwin was that his 'natural selection' was too automatic a process, in which almost everything was to be left to chance. Hence the situation could arise where the 'fittest' would not necessarily be those one wanted to survive on grounds of beauty, morality or other valued characteristics. That did not mean, however, that Shaw was therefore anti-Nietzsche. Man and Superman paints a thoroughly Nietzschean picture of the need for conscious selection in breeding in order to produce the superman, although in Shaw this was with the aim of accelerating the onset of socialism, whereas in Nietzsche it was with the aim of overcoming European nihilism, of which socialism was an important expression. On account of Shaw's socialism, Levy, Ludovici and their circle rejected his Nietzscheanism tout court, seeing Shaw's superman as a laughably emasculated beast. [35] Even so, Shaw's attitude to Darwin was to a large extent shared by Ludovici, [36] and both men held outspoken views on the need for stringent eugenic measures, even if, in Shaw's case at least, these views were delivered with somewhat mischievous intentions.
But Shaw and Ellis were only the tip of a Nietzschean iceberg in the world of eugenics. Irrespective of different writers' attitudes towards Darwinism, there was no lack of readiness to set up connections between Nietzsche and eugenics. Shaw's objection to Darwin, that is, the essential randomness of 'selection' if left to 'nature', was shared by many eugenicists, whose interest in selection they would admit owed much to the discoveries of Darwin, though his work, they averred, they were now busily bettering. And Nietzsche was one of the means of going beyond Darwin, along with a host of more strictly 'scientific' means (statistical methods, developments in genetics, and so on).
An excellent example of this link is to be found in the early days of the Eugenics Review, in a short discussion piece submitted to the journal by one Claude Mullins. It is worth quoting at length as a general illustration of the appeal of Nietzsche to eugenicists, as well as an indication of the extent to which eugenicists were ready to let Nietzsche's teachings overthrow the ones with which they had grown up, in particular Christian ones:
The charge is often brought against Eugenists that their principles are in opposition to the teachings of Christianity. And I think it must be admitted that consistent Eugenists must find themselves out of sympathy with much of the work that is to-day carried on in the name of the Christian religion. They must quarrel with many of those whose lives are devoted to carrying into practice what is dictated to them by their conception of Christian duty. Much of modern religious and social work is unconsciously increasing the gravity of the problems with which future generations will have to deal. Short-sighted charity, state and private, is doing great harm in so far as it encourages the reproduction of the unfit, and there are many who believe that the exhortation 'Be fruitful and multiply' must in a Christian country be held to apply to all sorts and conditions of men, regardless of economic or Eugenic stability. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, to find many Eugenists dissociating themselves from this code of public morals which they believe to be inspired by the Christian religion. Consciously or unconsciously they are forced to the position of Nietzsche, to whom Christianity seemed as a glorification and encouragement of the unfit among the human kind ... The ideal set by Nietzsche was beyond doubt a Eugenic ideal.