When Civilizations Go Mad

G.K. Chesterton's critique of eugenics has a hauntingly familiar feel.

One lazy summer more than a century ago, G.K. Chesterton was writing a book about a particular madness that had been sweeping the world: a madness wholly embraced by the great scientific minds and progressive activists of the age. Celebrities and literary types were caught up in the enthusiasm and the newspapers wouldn’t shut up about it: it was the big new thing.

The madness was eugenics.

In Chesterton’s own words:

It was a time when this theme was the topic of the hour; when eugenic babies (not visibly very distinguishable from other babies) sprawled all over the illustrated papers; when the evolutionary fancy of Nietzsche was the new cry among the intellectuals; and when Mr. Bernard Shaw and others were considering the idea that to breed a man like a cart–horse was the true way to attain that higher civilisation, of intellectual magnanimity and sympathetic insight, which may be found in cart–horses.

The book Chesterton was writing was called Eugenics and Other Evils, and he never got around to finishing it: its last chapter, the ninth, is entitled “A Very Short Chapter.”

After describing (with appropriate awe) some of the countless wonders being achieved by eugenics across England as he wrote, he abruptly announces his intention to stop writing the book:

It would be vain to record any of the thousand testimonies to (eugenics’) triumph. In the nature of things, this should be the longest chapter in the book, or rather the beginning of another book. It should record, in numberless examples, the triumphant popularisation of Eugenics in England. But as a matter of fact this is not the first chapter but the last. And this must be a very short chapter, because the whole of this story was cut short. A very curious thing happened. England went to war.

It was the summer of 1914.

This would in itself have been a sufficiently irritating interruption in the… early establishment of Eugenics. But a far more dreadful and disconcerting fact must be noted. With whom, alas, did England go to war? England went to war with the Superman in his native home. She went to war with that very land of scientific culture from which the very ideal of a Superman had come. She went to war with the whole of Dr. Steinmetz, and presumably with at least half of Dr. Karl Pearson. She gave battle to the birthplace of nine-tenths of the professors who were the prophets of the new hope of humanity. In a few weeks the very name of a professor was a matter for hissing and low plebeian mirth. The very name of Nietzsche, who had held up this hope of something superhuman to humanity, was laughed at for all the world as if he had been touched with lunacy. A new mood came upon the whole people; a mood of marching, of spontaneous soldierly vigilance and democratic discipline, moving to the faint tune of bugles far away. Men began to talk strangely of old and common things, of the counties of England, of its quiet landscapes, of motherhood and the half-buried religion of the race. Death shone on the land like a new daylight, making all things vivid and visibly dear. And in the presence of this awful actuality it seemed, somehow or other, as if even Mr. Bolce and the Eugenic baby were things unaccountably far-away and almost, if one may say so, funny.

That’s an echo of something I quoted from Thucydides in a recent post: “in depriving them of the power of easily satisfying their daily wants, (war) brings most people’s minds down to the level of their actual circumstances.”

Chesterton’s unfinished book, offering a clear-eyed view of an outbreak of civilization madness—interrupted by a still larger and more destructive civilizational madness—is just as relevant today as it was in 1914. Our political leaders, our esteemed scientists, our journalists, our literati, and our celebrities are all possessed with a kind of mania for a set of ideas that ought to have been laughed out of existence the moment they first materialized.

I doubt you need an example, but I happen to have one right here—it’s what got me thinking about all this.

A friend of mine who’s apparently a glutton for punishment subscribes to California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s weekly newsletter. Over the weekend she sent me a screenshot of one of its headlines because it was funny: “Putting an End to Harmful Conversation Therapy.”

The teaser text below the headline made it clear that Rob Bonta was addressing conversion therapy, so the headline was obviously just a typo or a rogue autocorrection, but the teaser text also made it clear that the Attorney General of America’s most populous state is out of his mind.

Not only is conversion therapy a serious threat to the lives and health of LGBTQ people, it’s also completely ineffective. Being gay or transgender is not a “disorder” that can or needs to be “cured.” I stand with my fellow attorneys general in full support of Colorado and other states’ conversion therapy bans, which are crucial to protecting our kids and our most vulnerable residents.

There’s some sleight of hand going on there.

First, Bonta is mixing transgenderism with homosexuality, illustrating by example what a disastrous mistake it was for the LGB “community” of people with particular sexual desires to let the Ts into their club. Let’s take a moment to review the alphabet.

L is for Lesbians, women who are sexually attracted to other women.

G is for gays, men who are sexually attracted to other men.

B is for bi-sexuals, men and women who are sexually attracted to men and women.

Do you sense the emergence of a pattern?

T is for transsexuals, men who think they’re women and women who think they’re men.

We can dispense with Chesterton and Socrates here and go straight to Sesame Street: one of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn’t belong.

That thing is the T. “Transsexual” is not a sexual preference or orientation, but the belief that one is something other than what one is.

(Jeff Jeffries cuts to the heart of this in a routine that makes most of the same points I’m about to, but with a lot more humor and much racier language.)

It is very clearly a disorder.

I’m not saying transsexuals are bad people: I’m saying transsexuals are suffering people.

We’ve made a civilizational mistake in describing people as being the things they merely do. It’s not unreasonable to do so, but neither is it accurate. It’s just a mental shortcut. Take a man who works in a bakery and bakes bread, rolls, muffins, and pastries ten hours a day: we call him a baker. This woman over here, she sells fish from a barrow out in the market every morning: we call her a fishmonger. This guy likes having sex only with other guys: we call him gay.

Yes and no to all of it: our baker is just a man who works as a baker. Our fishmonger is just a woman who sells fish. Our homosexual is just a man who is sexually interested only in other men. That’s not what or who they are. Any one of them could also “be” a saxophonist, a weightlifter, or an astronaut.

This isn’t pedantry. It’s not philosophy. It’s clarity.

After all, who ever looked at a baby and declared, “What a lovely hat shop clerk!” or “Congratulations, it’s a violinist!”

It’s a boy or a girl or someone afflicted with biological anomalies. There’s no other category. Sex isn’t assigned, it’s observed. Babies don’t have identities: they have needs and appetites.

In recent decades the medical establishment has tried to address the “mental shortcut” issue within their own sphere by rewording their terminology. For example, “people with diabetes” instead of “diabetics.” This is humane, and categorically no different than doing away with “bakers” in favor of “people who bake,” or “bakery employees.”

We’re lazy in language, so we all fall back on the old shortcuts anyway, but it’s sometimes necessary to remind ourselves that that’s all these are: shortcuts.

Identity politics has taken advantage of this apparently hard-wired mental shortcut by converting it into an almost theological set of principles that’s every bit as perverse and destructive as those of the old eugenicists: whether I’m a white man or a person who’s white is beside the point, from their perspective: I am my whiteness.

They don’t seem to realize how racist this is. Certainly it’s true that my skin is “white,” but to presume that communicates anything about the meat and bones and organs and tissues and tendons bundled up within that skin is stone cold old-school racism.

And yet they insist upon a certain elasticity: persons evincing the moral failings they associate with whiteness may be accused of being dark-skinned white supremacists.

Which only shows what vile racists they are: they believe whiteness to be such an intrinsically demonic force that non-whites can be possessed by it.

That is, instead of saying, “this is a bad characteristic that can be found in people of all skin colors,” they say, “this bad characteristic is a white thing, but it’s so powerful it can infect non-white people.”

Their logic is breathtaking in its absurdity. Here’s Ana Navarro of The View, talking just about a week ago (excerpted from the article linked above, and with my emphasis):

We all have to remember that the head of the Proud Boys. His name is Enrique Tarrio. The Proud Boys is a white nationalist group. Look, being Hispanic or being black does not, or being anything does not make you immune from being racist, from being radicalized, from being a white supremacist, from being evil, from being homicidal. And we are seeing it over and over again. There are people who, they don’t see themselves as what they are.

Being Hispanic (an ethnicity) or black (a skin color) doesn’t make you immune from being evil; but if you are Hispanic or black and evil, it’s only because you’ve lost touch with your authentic color or ethnicity.

That’s the No True Scotsman fallacy on steroids, is what that is.

“The Proud Boys are a white supremacist organization.”

“They’re run by a Hispanic guy.”

“Then he’s not really Hispanic.”

The Attorney General of California lumped transgenderism in with homosexuality in order to be able to say it was not a disorder.

Denmark was the first country on the face of the earth to remove gender dysmorphia from its list of mental illnesses. That was in 2017, a mere six years ago. In other words, back in the primitive era before the iPhone 8, everyone in the world recognized gender dysmorphia as a mental illness.

The snowball has only continued to roll. The American Psychiatric Association still classifies gender dysmorphia as a treatable disorder.

But it notes:

Gender identity is also different from sexual orientation. Sexual orientation refers to the types of people towards which one is sexually attracted. As with people who are cisgender (people whose sex assigned at birth aligns with their gender identity), people who are transgender have a diverse range of sexual orientations.

(“Assigned,” say the scientists.)

The APA thereby draws a bright red line between sexual orientation and transgenderism—a line that California’s Attorney General seeks to erase—but it doesn’t appear to be any less opposed than Bonta to “conversion therapy:”

Support for people with gender dysphoria may include open-ended exploration of their feelings and experiences of gender identity and expression, without the therapist having any pre-defined gender identity or expression outcome defined as preferable to another. Psychological attempts to force a transgender person to be cisgender (sometimes referred to as gender identity conversion efforts or so-called “gender identity conversion therapy”) are considered unethical and have been linked to adverse mental health outcomes.

This sentence I emphasized is remarkable. It’s calling the effort to get someone with gender dysphoria to come to terms with the reality of what they are “conversion.”

Conversion from what to what?

It’s unethical to tell a boy he’s a boy, or a girl she’s a girl?

The very same giants of law and science who think it’s “conversion therapy” to tell girls they’re not boys blithely euphemize radical mastectomies and chemical castration as “gender affirming care.”

Chesteron:

Most Eugenists are Euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of translating the one into the other, however obviously they mean the same thing. Say to them “The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females”; say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them “Murder your mother,” and they sit up quite suddenly. Yet the two sentences, in cold logic, are exactly the same.

None of this is intended to be unsympathetic to people who suffer from gender dysmorphia. It’s a horrible affliction. But it’s madness for science and law to join forces and proclaim that the mentally ill are correct in their delusions—that because you hate your male body and “feel like a woman” then all the world must join in the charade of pretending you are in fact a woman.

This may be a step up from the eugencists, who would have simply discarded the gender dysmorphic as undesirable and neutered them out of the human race.

But surely our leading psychiatrists can’t be wrong, can they? Why, it’s their job to be right about these very things! Just ask Britain’s Royal College of Psychiatrists:

Some key figures in early twentieth century British psychiatry were amongst the first to be receptive to eugenics. They added medical credibility to the by then widely popular view that so-called “mentally deficient” people were “useless”, and that society needed to be protected from them.

In fact, psychiatrists embraced eugenics as a scientific, efficient, and forward-looking way of dealing with modern society’s many problems such as poverty, criminality, and prostitution. All were viewed through the frame of a perceived increase in the number of people they described as “feeble-minded”. These individuals who were frequently held to be a burden on the resources of the state.

British psychiatrists such as George Shuttleworth, Alfred Tredgold, Bernard Hollander, Frederick Mott, James Crichton-Brown, D. K. Henderson, and C. P. Blacker, to name but a few notable examples, complained that modern society, with all its technological and medical advances, was allowing too many individuals with “hereditary defects” to reproduce.

Indeed.

And let’s not forget what’s often cited as the worst Supreme Court decision of all time, Buck v. Bell (1927), in which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., wrote that “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The eugenicists had their day in court and won: the 14th amendment’s Equal Protection clause did not entitle the “feeble-minded” to reproduce.

And so back to Chesterton on eugenics:

The modern world is insane, not so much because it admits the abnormal as because it cannot recover the normal.

Just so.

Our scientists, politicians, jurists, and journalists are once again taking us on a Nantucket sleighride of moral hysteria.

Let’s hope we don’t have to wait for death to shine on the land like a new daylight, making all things vivid and visibly dear, before we can recover the normal.