Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britian, by Dan Stone
Introduction
“My contention is that in Britain the ideas existed without the movement, even before the rise of fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany. Historians are correct to note that fascism was squeezed out of the political process in the interwar period. But I also argue that this outcome was by no means as inevitable as the Whiggish historiography suggests, especially in the context of the radical right before 1914. The manifold, radical ideas that feed fascism— whether or not they subsequently guide it in power is not here the question—existed in abundance in Britain, especially in the Edwardian cultural sphere, as I demonstrate below. British fascism failed not because it was an imitative movement, but because mainstream conservatism did not need to co-opt its ideas in order to remain in power.”
“Intellectuals, it seems, were especially prone to fascism’s seductions. This is not therefore a book about fascism per se, but about streams or tendencies in the history of ideas that, when combined, could have helped produce a fully fledged native fascism… I will instead talk of the ‘extremes of Englishness’ for, as well as suggesting radicalism, this term indicates the existence of an indigenous tradition of modern illiberalism.”
“…they all rested on an analysis of society which saw it as somehow in decline, and hence in need of rescue.”
Oscar Levy
“On the one hand, then, Levy shies away from arguments that proceed from the belief that modern Europe can only be rescued from degeneration by the creation of racial homogeneity through eugenic measures, arguing instead for a kind of pre-nationalist aristocratic vision of a pan-European ruling caste; on the other hand he accepts Nietzsche’s claim, primarily expounded in the Genealogy of Morals, that the people who have led Europe to the moral abyss which has sought equality at the expense of health, vigour and achievement are the Jews.”
“This remarkable piece of writing is easy to dismiss simply as Jewish self hatred. Yet although Levy was certainly so deeply immersed in the current beliefs about Jews and Judaism that he accepted too readily many of the prevailing stereotypes, there was nevertheless a good reason for his approach. His Nietzschean critique of civilisation took as its starting point an attack on a value system supposedly introduced by the Jews, and continued by Christianity in both its religious and post-religious (modern, revolutionary) manifestations. Beginning with a sweeping claim that chimes in exactly with what Pitt- Rivers had already said to him over lunch, Levy wrote:
There is scarcely an event in modern Europe that cannot be traced back to the Jews… all latter-day ideas and movements have originally sprung from a Jewish source, for the simple reason, that the Semitic idea has finally conquered and entirely subdued this only apparently irreligious universe of ours. It has conquered it through Christianity, which of course, as Disraeli pointed out long ago, is nothing but ‘Judaism for the people’.
He then goes on, summarising Pitt-Rivers’s argument, to assert that this history-of-ideas approach means that the author of the pamphlet can in no way be regarded as a vulgar antisemite. Since Levy believes that a certain type of antisemitism ‘does the Jews more justice than any blind philo-semitism… that merely sentimental “Let-them-all-come-Liberalism”, which is nothing but the Semitic Ideology over again’, he has no qualms about naming himself an antisemite: ‘If you are an anti-Semite, I, the Semite, am an anti- Semite too, and a much more fervent one than even you are… We have erred, my friend, we have most grievously erred’.
In what, then, have the Jews erred? Levy accepts all of Pitt-Rivers’s allegations: the Jews, whether consciously or not, have been the principal agents of economic and political misery in the world, through their dealings in international finance and their actions in promoting democracy and revolution; Bolshevism, as the bearer of an originally Jewish ideal of equality for the masses, was successful because it was opposed only by democracy, itself a product of the same forces. This argument, however, leads Levy into the realms of conspiracy theory, where he sounds more like Nesta Webster— the modern English originator of such theories— or Lady Birdwood— her latter- day successor–– than Nietzsche. Seeing nothing but the play of ideas in history, he asserts that ‘There is a direct line from Savonarola to Luther, and from Luther to Robespierre, and from Robespierre to Lenin’. Thus Bolshevism ‘is a religion and a faith’.”
“He never gave up, however, his search for a suitable refutation to communism.”
In the above quotations, we see the lines of thought, far more common than one often acknowledges, which converge around the refutation of the commmunist movement; racial theory, social darwinism, anti-democratic politics, and the apologia of imperialism.
Anthony Mario Ludovici: A ‘Light-Weight Superman’
“While it would be overstating the case to claim that Ludovici’s writings were widely influential, he was well known as a public figure, whose ideas, particularly early on in his career, acquired some intellectual currency. But the Whiggish view of history which still dominates interpretations of British fascism— that its failure was a result of the inherent strength of British parliamentary institutions – means that he has long been ignored. Ludovici’s idiosyncratic blend of Förster-Nietzscheanism, Lamarckianism, social Darwinism, anti- semitism, anti-feminism, monarchism and aristocratic conservatism was, however, not as ridiculous to Edwardian minds as it is to ours today; it is easy to dismiss Ludovici as a crank, and therefore miss the fact that many of his ideas chimed in with those being espoused by people on the left as well as on the right certainly before 1914, and even until 1939. I argue that reminding ourselves of the existence of men such as Ludovici – who was not as marginal as might at first appear – can help in dispelling the complacency which still surrounds the historiography of British fascism.”
“The most concentrated outpouring of Ludovici’s works occurred, however, during the 1920s and 1930s, when he was a member of the English Mistery. Here he found the perfect forum for expounding his theories of degeneration, birth control and race-breeding. The group is usually characterised as part of the ‘muck and mysticism’ side of the British right, which indeed it was, with its stress on rural values, the link between blood and soil, and service to the monarch.”
“Behind all these topics, on which he wrote widely, lay a theory of degeneration.”
“The political implications of the belief in the dangers of cross-breeding were clear to Ludovici: all forms of progressive thought were the cries of the weak hoping to assert themselves in the face of the degeneration of the strong.”
“Since the mid-nineteenth century, zoologists and anthropologists had justified the mass-murder of ‘native’ people by theories of progress and degeneration. Hitler was to apply the same logic when the principles of colonial rule were applied to the European continent. For the argument that fascism partly represents a type of ‘colonialism come home’, Ludovici’s pamphlet is important evidence, for here we find an explicit recommendation that genocide (dressed up, as it always was, as scientific necessity) could be applied to the populations of the metropole. Perhaps one of the reasons for the successes of German and Italian fascism as opposed to British or French is connected to the failed colonial policies of the former countries.” — an extremely pertinent line of thought.
“The large number of strands that went into making up this ideology, from Lamarckianism, eugenicism and antisemitism, to anti-feminism, aristocratic revivalism, monarchism and ruralism, suggest the difficulty in pinning down the boundaries between the radical right and the mainstream in the Edwardian period. There is little to choose from between a Ludovici and a Willoughby de Broke on essential points.”
Nietzsche and Eugenics
“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.”
“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.”
Ideas which are part of the fabric of European intellectual history.
Conclusion
“This is why racists such as Charles Murray, co-author of the infamous book The Bell Curve, are once again getting a hearing, even among supposedly centre-left politicians. Even the language being used is not so different from a century ago: ‘underclass’ instead of ‘the unfit’, ‘recidivists’ instead of ‘incorrigible criminals’, ‘handicapped’ instead of ‘human waste’. Once again, we are witnessing the rise to prominence of biological determinism, where every social problem is explicable via reference to genes, and there is a tendency to overlook the fact that it is real people, not abstracts, that suffer as a result of this reductionist way of thinking.”
“Take, for example, the debate over The Bell Curve. While the thrust of criticism was against the methodology and findings of Murray and Herrnstein’s book, many commentators took it for granted that IQ testing per se was an acceptable practice. Just like the anti-racist scientists of the 1930s who still believed that investigating racial difference was a meaningful task, so today many scientists argue against explicit racism but maintain that innate differences in intelligence might exist and, theoretically at least, can be dispassionately measured.”
“Furthermore, there were scientists who responded to The Bell Curve in a way that supported Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman’s claim that the book ‘gives a sophisticated voice to a repressed and illiberal sentiment: a belief that ruinous divisions in society are sanctioned by nature itself’. In other words, the ideas that motivated the eugenicists 100 years ago are still with us. There are those who cannot accept that racial differences are more chimerical than real, and that only a complex interplay of genetics and culture, that is, heritability tout court and not heritability reduced to genes, might be the basis of human heredity and evolution. And this despite the long dominance of Boasian culturalist assumptions in anthropology: ‘Eugenics should, therefore, not be allowed to deceive us into the belief that we should try to raise a race of supermen…’”
“Richard Lynn, for example, one of the most notorious evolutionary psychologists, unproblematically accepted the conclusions of The Bell Curve in his review of it for The Times. He wrote that ‘The brutal truth is that many of the chronic unemployed are mentally incapable of learning the skills increasingly required in advanced industrial economies’; that ‘The threat to social cohesion posed by the underclass is exacerbated by racial division’ because the lower IQ of blacks than whites (amply documented by Murray and Herrnstein) means that ‘There are therefore many more blacks in the low IQ range being sucked into the underclass’; and that ‘There is one thing the underclass is good at, and that is producing children… The underclass has more children than the rest of society. This is another reason why it will expand in numbers and become increasingly troublesome.’ All of the old tropes of eugenics are here: the differential birth-rate, the innate inability of the poor to care for themselves, the threat of racial pollution, the replacement of an aristocracy of land and wealth by an aristocracy of intelligence, and the threat posed to that social elite by the underclass. Lynn could have been writing 100 years ago; one wonders whether he would then also have proposed sterilising criminals and the ‘feeble-minded’ and breeding supermen. In 1903 Karl Pearson, having proven a correlation between the inheritance of mental and moral and physical characters, concluded that ‘education is of small service, unless it be applied to an intelligent race of men’, and worried that ‘we are ceasing as a nation to breed intelligence as we did fifty to a hundred years ago. The mentally better stock in the nation is not reproducing itself at the same rate as it did of old; the less able, and the less energetic, are more fertile than the better stocks.’”
“Most importantly, today’s shift is one not of substance, but of language. Where once it was acceptable to talk of the ‘under-man’ or the ‘sub-man’, now it is acceptable – and not just among evolutionary psychologists – to talk of the ‘underclass’. Even the liberal mainstream, to the extent that such a thing is left, devotes its sympathy to the ‘underclass’, thereby stigmatising even as they seek to help. And while even the most utopian of geneticists no longer talk of breeding supermen, they do talk of the elimination of the underclass, through medicine and pre-natal examination rather than the ‘lethal chamber’. The cocktail of Nietzsche, race, and eugenics is no longer a social and cultural lubricant, yet we still suffer from its deleterious effects: our eyes are bleary, and in our weariness it remains easier to blame the genes of individuals and groups for their social dispossession rather than to question the structures that make up divisive societies.”
See the Class Letters site for a chapter long excerpt on “The ‘Lethal Chamber’ in Eugenic Thought’”.